we depart for Tefé

Ricardo told me to meet him the next afternoon on the boat at Remedios, and that a cab driver would know where that was.  I took this as a sign that Ricardo was not going to be an overly protective guide.  And as he said, the next afternoon my cab driver knew exactly where I wanted to go.

While larger ships docked at the floating steel pier where the ship I had come up on from Belém had docked, local river traffic departed from Escadaria dos Remedios.  I arrived there in the late afternoon to a scene out of a National Geographic special.  A finger of slippery red mud crowded with people and cargo loading and unloading and decks piled with stalks of bananas and a swarm of touts ready to steer the uncertain traveler to the right boat. There were stalls selling miscellaneous small things needful of the traveler and the air laced with cooking smells from food stalls offering up creatures who might just that morning have slithered through the forest or glided through the opaque brown water.  There was a monkey sitting on the counter of a stall and a flock of large, black vultures perched just out of reach, in case their services should be required, and a jumble of one- and two-decked wooden vessels and canoes tethered to the muddy bank and some of which bore somewhere on their side a hand-painted sign advertising their destination and intermediate stops and a probably optimistic time of their departure.

By reading the sign boards I found that the Jean Filho was going to Tefé and went aboard and went up to the passenger deck where I found Ricardo.  He was pleased to see me and I got the impression that I had passed my first test.  I found someone in charge and paid for my passage, which came to about $5 a day, all meals included.

If my trip upriver from Belém aboard the plague ship Rondonia had been sweat and hard biscuits, my trip to Tefé aboard the Jean Filho was utter contentment, the likes of which is seldom given to man.  For two days I lazed in my hammock, watching the jungle glide by.  I read and daydreamed and wrote in my journal.  I ate great helpings of spicy beef and chicken at the communal galley table.  I did not touch money.

There was a curious thing about the boat: I was too big for it.  The space between the deck and the ceiling (or whatever they call them on boats) was too short for me.  The boat was designed for someone about six inches shorter than I am and, at a bare six feet, I am not really tall, at least by gringo standards.  I felt like Alice when she had had a tad too much of growing. It was a strange sensation.  The only place I could stand upright on the boat was at the front end, forward of the superstructure.  The other passengers initially though my constant head-banging was humorous, but eventually they came to sympathize with me and would probably have offered advice on how to be shorter, had they any good ideas.

Our boat was a wooden two-decker, with cargo on the lower deck and passengers above.  Thinking to upgrade our accommodations, I had paid extra for a cabin, though without first looking at one, and found it a dark and stuffy, only about six feet wide with two bunk beds.  I consoled myself that the mosquitoes would eat the people sleeping in hammocks on the open deck first.  The nice lady at the boat office in Belém would probably have said that this boat was even more mais tipica than my last one.   That night I discovered that my bunk bed was also made for someone about six inches shorter than I and my guide in the upper bunk snored, so I took my hammock out on deck and found a much more comfortable place both to sleep and eventually to laze away the trip watching the jungle slide past.  And once away from the shore there were no mosquitoes. 

As our boat left Manaus we passed through waterways that seemed to get narrower and narrower and I was impressed at the ability of our pilot to keep to the channel in the confusion of the high water and then I saw our boat pass over a wire fence line and I realized that we were not on the River at all, but were sailing through someones pasture and Farmer Jones might at any moment appear with a shotgun, but then the boat made a hard left and we found ourselves in a wider channel.

Once established in my hammock, I slept well and was up at six the next morning.  Finding that the boat had no more headroom than it had the evening before, I stretched by leaning out over the railing.

     At breakfast we sat at a long, oilcloth-covered table at the back of the passenger area, next to the tiny ship’s galley.  It was the usual sweet, creamy coffee and dry cracker biscuits, which someone told me were the cheapest in all Brasil.  

The morning was lightly overcast and humid, but with a breeze that made the whole thing pleasant.  I seemed to be the only non-local on board.  Our boat kept close to the north bank to avoid the downstream current, though the water here is full of small back currents and eddies that rocked the boat gently.  In the early morning I saw along a path beside the river a brown boy with a white cloth on his head riding a red bicycle through a green forest and from the front of the boat I could hear someone whistling Bach’s “Sheep may Safely Graze”.  We passed a canoe with a little boy in the back holding a fighting cock, apparently on his way to the next village where there was a party starting and people were shooting firecrackers.  It was Sunday, so I assume it was a saint’s day.  In a jungle clearing, far from any habitation, I saw a volleyball net.

I saw a pair of bright pink dolphins playing in the River.  As the books say, they move differently than the gray ones I had seen earlier: the gray ones rise and dive nose first while the pink ones rise horizontally: I am sure this is vastly important, at least to the dolphins.  I would have thought that sort of thing would be dictated by physics, though perhaps it is how dolphin parents discourage their children from taking up with the wrong sort of marine mammal. 

Later, a pretty lady came over to chat with Ricardo and I and I quickly learn that she has three children by three different men and the priest won’t baptize the children because she wasn’t married to any of the men.  She was also going to Tefé and turned out to know my guide’s wife, which made her practically family, and so by evening she was sharing a bunk with my guide, so it was just as well that I had already set up on the deck.

Our boat puttered along upstream into the night and I joined some passengers standing at the bow to watch the sunset and catch the breeze.  There was a Catholic service playing on the radio and our pilot, his charts apparently of less use in high water, flipped on his searchlight every ten or fifteen seconds to orient himself and watch for floating logs.

The next day was much the same.  We crossed over to the south bank sometime in the night and were running about fifteen yards out.  My guide and the young lady were now cuddled domestically in her hammock out on the deck a few hammocks over from mine while I entertained myself by reading about Indian hunting practices in Alex Shoumatoff’s Rivers Amazon.  Shoumatoff remarks on the tremendous amount of private mental activity that goes on in your head when you travel by yourself to remote parts of the world, which is perhaps my favorite part of travel.  

I hire a new guide

The Boa Vista excursion, for all its frustration, was a worthwhile trip.  Considering the matter realistically, I was not an anthropologist and any visit to the Yanomami would have told me more about my guides than it would about the Indians, and I was prepared to talk with the priests and religious working with the Indians and got something of value out of that.  And I had not actually thought Boa Vista was going to be that much of a trip.  I had thought I would go up to the town, bribe an official, get in a pickup and drive out into the forest and see some Indians in a long house and maybe eat a monkey and that would be it.  I expected neither an adventure nor quite that much time spent unproductively and I expected no peril worse than being hissed at by a snake.  

In contrast, the next leg of my trip, where I hoped to go farther west up the Amazon and then down some tributary, was into country I had read or heard nothing about.  I would be going to small river towns and settlements in the roadless forest that didn’t appear on my map and I would be a stranger amidst Indians and caboclos and who knew what sort who lived along the water or deeper in the jungle where the law’s writ did not run.  I plainly had no business wandering around in those parts by myself and needed a guide. 

And so I met Ricardo.

I do not now remember how I met him, though I am sure it was on someones recommendation as even I know better that to pick up my guide in a riverfront bar.  Like my last dragoman, Ricardo was of mixed English-Guyanese and Indian descent which despite my last experience I still thought to be a recommendation.  He showed me his government-issued ID card with a picture that looked like several million other Brasilians.  “It fell into the river,” he explained.  People in Latin America never seem to drop anything; the thing always seems to fall of its own misadventure.   But he appeared trustworthy enough and exuded the confidence all guides do when you first meet them and we agreed that we would continue up the River to the town of Tefé, where he happened to live, and from there go up the Rio Tefé until I had seen enough trees.  Since I knew nothing of the area, that seemed specific enough for me. 

     After Ricardo left I started to worry.  No one either in Brasil or in the United States knew where I was and I was planning to go off alone into the jungle with someone I did not know in a part of the world where I constantly heard stories of violence and lawlessness and bodies were easy to dispose of.  Was this really a good idea?

This is not the first time I had felt a cold whiff of paranoia down my neck when I was traveling, as I prefer to travel alone and with a vague itinerary and to places where the Law’s hand does not too heavily rest.  But if I have no actual friends in a place, I may still have an imaginary one. 

When I was six or seven years old I had an imaginary friend, a cowboy named Ringo.  When traveling alone in a Latin country, I also sometimes have an imaginary friend, Col. Vargas of the Policía Nacional.  I might take a real name from the newspapers, but Col. Vargas is my old standby.  You do not have to know Col. Vargas to be able to picture him: his crisp uniform and polished boots and reflecting sunglasses, his evil sneer and hearty, shiver-inducing laugh.  He is a man who you well know would leave no stone unturned, or fingernail unextracted, should any harm come to his good friend.

There are times in casual conversation when I might bring up the Colonel’s name.  

     “As I said to my good friend, Col. Vargas . . .”

Of course, there may turn out to be a real Col. Vargas, in which case there may be complications.

     “Oh, no.  A thousand pardons.  I do not speak your language well.  I did not mean to say ‘amigo’.  I meant to say ‘enemigo’.  I am a very great enemy of the despicable Col. Vargas.  Ptuii . . .!  I spit upon him.”

Not wishing to trust myself entirely to the protection of Col. Vargas, I phoned the U.S. Consul in Manaus to check in and see if there was anything I ought to know and whether I ought to be concerned about going off into the jungle with some stranger.

     “Watch out for Indian attacks,” he said.  Then he paused and laughed.  Consular humor.  Another North American too long in a hot climate.

     “No problem.  It’s beautiful country.  Have fun.”

     Undoubtedly a political appointee.

Since it was obviously just going to be me and Col. Vargas, I put everything of value in the hotel safe (it wasn’t really a safe, it was more of a closet behind the front desk, but what are you going to do?) and resolved to complain frequently about how little money I had with me and how my valuables were back in Manaus and generally make sure that my guide understood that I was worth more alive than dead.

I may not find a place for this detail at the end of the trip, but it is too delicious not to tell:  When I passed through Manaus several weeks later I found an article in the local newspaper involving the large number of tourists who had disappeared or been murdered by jungle guides.  The accompanying photograph showed the U.S. Consul looking very serious as he studied a large pile of file folders concerning tourists who had disappeared into the jungle with local guides and never been seen again.

leaving Boa Vista

Getting out of town was seeming increasingly unlikely.   I had spent some of my time in Boa Vista visiting with Catholic priests and lay workers to talk about Indian issues, so I returned to the church offices and wandered into their library.  I may have been in an odd frame of mind, but their books seemed piled like sandbags against the hostile fire of the world.  Or maybe they were just moving the books around.  I was looking for material they had published on the Indian question, though I also noticed a pamphlet about Evelyn Waugh’s visit to Boa Vista with a drawing on the cover of the writer emerging from the jungle in a skirt.  I had an interesting conversation with a lay brother, an Italian who had lived in the country many years and taken a Brasilian wife.  We talked about cultural survival and assimilation.

          I also talked while I was there about the general state of the Catholic Church and about politically active Liberation Theology, which was claimed to address the social reality of the poor, but for which the poor seemed indifferently enthused and there was under way a constant erosion of church attendance as the poor blacks embraced the African religions and poor whites and mixed races embraced evangelical protestantism.  It seemed that the Church’s adoption of political activism might not be speaking to their social reality and I asked one of the priests if this didn’t concern him.  He replied that for 500 years the Church never did any good in Brasil.  And it was true that the Church was not growing in numbers, but it was growing as a conscience.

At length, I heard from my guide that his vehicle would shortly be fixed and so I checked out of my hotel, not because I believed him but because I had resolved that either we actually went somewhere that day or I would take the evening flight back to Manaus.  It was raining outside and in the lobby of the Hotel Euzibio flies were walking over the TV watchers, who ignored them.  

          But alas, our mission must abort, as the car, now reassembled, cannot be started.  And I, a person of tropical patience, finally gave up and told my guide that it was not meant to be and I was going back to Manaus. I paid him 3,000 Cruzados (US$13) for his services to put a dignified end to the thing, though it turned out there was no flight to Manaus that evening and I must return to the hotel for another night.  The nice lady at the desk was happy to see me again so soon and I could have my old room back.

Freed of my guide, I found that Boa Vista was actually a pleasant enough place, or at least easy to get around in on foot.  The rain had stopped and the sun was out and I walked down to a place where I could sit on a balcony in the breeze and look out across the river at sand bars and beaches and forest and fields beneath huge, towering clouds in the eastern sky.  For all the frustration of the trip, I was glad I had come here and, if there was nothing to be accomplished, then I was content with that, and the next evening I flew back to Manaus.

These events took place twenty-five years ago and to judge by what I find on Google Images, almost every place I went has been changed significantly and, in the case of some undeveloped areas, are now essentially beyond recognition.  Much of the world I saw seems no longer to exist.

to buy an envelope

Late one morning in Boa Vista I found that I had written one letter more than I had envelopes and so I set out from my hotel to buy another envelope.

 The lady at the post office had none, but she directed me to the Avenida Jaime Brasil, where, at the Livraria Popular, I could purchase an envelope.

     I found the Livraria Popular with no difficulty, but, it now being noon, the establishment was closed for the two-hour Latin midday break.  Returning after 2:00, I found the establishment open and looking to all intents like a perfectly normal stationery store.

Although it is quite permissible in Latin America to purchase a single envelope I have always felt this to be an imposition, and so I shopped about and selected three postcards and five envelopes.   One can always use a few extra envelopes.  Indeed, if I had bought some extra envelopes earlier I would not be needing one then.

     A very modern-looking young saleslady took my purchase and led me across the  store, where she wrote up my purchase in a book, making an original and one (yellow) copy.  She informed me that my purchase came to 105 Cruzados (approximately 52 cents, US) and, handing me the yellow copy, directed me to a cashier's cage.

I stood at the cashier's cage waiting for the cashier to finish a conversation with a friend.  Personal relationships are very important in Latin America.

     While I was waiting I had an opportunity to read the establishment's Business Permit, issued by the municipal authorities and authorizing the sale of paper goods and office supplies.  It further specified, for each day, the hours between which the establishment could be open.  The permit had cost slightly more than $150; quite reasonable, I thought, for all that permission.

     By this time, her conversation finished, the cashier had received the white copy of my invoice from the sales clerk and, taking my yellow copy, she compared the two and told me that the total amount owed came to 105 Cruzados (approximately 52 cents, US).

     I paid her this amount and she stamped both copies.  She then tore a counterpane from the yellow copy and put it in a box, passing the white original to me and handing the yellow copy, minus its counterpane,  to the lady in the adjoining cage.

     The lady in the adjoining cage had somehow received the three postcards and five envelopes I had picked out.  I was actually rather surprised to see them, as by this time I had forgotten what I was doing in the shop, having become mesmerized by this Kafka-esque rigmarole.

     The lady compared the number on my white invoice with the number on the yellow copy in her possession, and the items listed with the items she had in hand and, determining them to be in agreement, she wrapped the three postcards and five envelopes securely and handed them, together with the white original copy of the invoice, to me.  My papers were then in order and I was free to go.

This was the only instance on my trip when I would encounter this sort of commercial pantomime.  It resembles a procedure I have heard described that was required under the Code Napoleon, so it may have been a relic of some older practice.  I suppose I could have asked, but I was too bemused by the experience.

an afternoon with smugglers

Evelyn Waugh had visited Boa Vista in 1933, coming down from what was then British Guiana, and told the story in his travel book Ninety-two Days.  He described his first encounter with the residents, thus: “The vaqueiros studied us with an air which I came to recognize as characteristic of Boa Vista . . . conveying, as it did, in equal degrees, contempt, suspicion and the suggestion that only listlessness kept them from active insult.”  And later, “[The inhabitants] are naturally homicidal by inclination, and every man, however poor, carries arms; only the universal apathy keeps them from frequent bloodshed . . . The German at the Priory constantly slept with a loaded gun at his bedside and expressed surprise at seeing me go shopping without a revolver.”  It was mainly on the strength of Waugh’s account that I went to Boa Vista and I was not disappointed.

     When Waugh visited the place it was sleepy and retrograde; when I visited it was wild west.  Boa Vista has grown in a few years from a village of 5,000 to a bustling town of over 50,000, fueled by the discovery of gold and diamonds.  In addition to prospectors, the area had attracted landless squatters from the Northeast who are encroaching on the large estates and the substantial Indian lands.  This is in addition to Boa Vista’s traditional industry of smuggling.  If Manaus prices had seemed to be set for Japanese businessmen, Boa Vista prices seemed to be set for successful gold prospectors.

     The Territory of Roraima, the northern-most part of Brasil, is the home of the Yanomami Indians, the largest primitive group in Latin America.  There are perhaps 20,000 Yanomami all told, living in adjoining areas of Brasil, Colombia and Venezuela.  Those living in Brasil number perhaps 9,000.  Their rights to their ancestral lands are allegedly protected by Brasilan law, but the boundaries had never been demarcated and with the urging and support of resident priests the Indians were claiming nine million acres.  Since in other parts of the country squatters are willing to risk death and kill to claim 20 or 30 acres, I asked one of the priests if he thought a claim of 1,000 acres for every man, woman and child was going to be thought reasonable.  He replied that when you are negotiating you have to start by asking for more than you expect to get.

     Old ways are slow to change in Boa Vista.  In the previous year, I was told, at the conclusion of a political dispute between the territorial governor and the mayor of Boa Vista, pistoleiros allegedly in the employ of the governor shot the mayor down in the street in broad daylight.  There were no prosecutions and local folk were said to be more outraged by the style than the substance of the shooting, as most I spoke with agreed that the mayor deserved what he got.

     Proximity to the Guyana and Venezuela borders, currency instability in Brasil and the utter chaos in Guyana’s Marxist economy have fueled an active local smuggling industry.  Most of the players were said to congregate socially at what is called “the Mafia corner,” a short distance up from the river.  They were a colorful bunch, with much gold jewelry.  A number carried large brown paper bags from which they periodically drew thick bundles of banknotes to exchange with other local businessmen also carrying brown paper bags.  They had the contented look of men who did not pay taxes.

     I spent an afternoon waiting for our car to be fixed in the company of a bunch of Guyanese smugglers at Kitty’s Beer Garden.  They were in an expansive mood and telling tales of their exploits.  The only one that had any charm was related by a fellow in a lilting Caribbean accent, thus: “I was going across the border with four kilos of gold bars in my bag and this customs guy comes up and says ‘what you got in that bag, gold bars?’ and I say ‘Yeah,’ and he laughs and goes on.”  I had somehow expected smugglers to have more interesting stories.

I arrive in Boa Vista

I arrive in Boa Vista, in the Territory of Roraima, in the far north of Brasil, at three degrees North Latitude, at six in the morning and am met by my guide George who steers me to the Hotel Euzebio where, for $15, I have a nice, albeit monastic, cell off the lobby.  The air conditioner was set on “high” and the knob removed and there is a single thin sheet on the bed, so that my effective choices were too much air conditioning or none at all.  I suspect the management think they know which I will choose, but they are wrong.

George says he will see me at “midday”.  Not “noon” or “one o’clock”, but “midday”: this is Latin America.  There are flies on the plush furniture in the lobby of the Hotel Euzebio, as well as on the men sitting in them who look like heavies in a Clint Eastwood western.

On the large map of the Territory of Roraima on the wall of the hotel lobby I am struck how indeterminate seem so many portions of the national boundary, wandering with gentle, supple vagueness through mountains, gaining definition only when the line runs between named peaks.  If oil is ever found there I am sure matters will be clarified.

In those days Boa Vista could be reached by land from the rest of Brasil only by a single road coming up from Manaus, unpaved except for the last fifty kilometers and in this season made impassible by high water.  

Boa Vista lies near Guyana, the old British Guiana, and my guide was accompanied by a friend, a former Guyanese of English ancestry who had had to flee the country after taking part in an unsuccessful revolt against the Marxist regime of Forbes Burnham, and who immediately began telling me of the many wrongs and misfortunes which the Comrade Leader had inflicted on the country and the low state to which he had brought it.  I had heard Forbes Burnham was a Marxist and since I had heard nothing of his regime’s successes I assumed there had been none, but the particulars of his story I took at face value as I could not see how whether I believed it or not made any difference, and it is much too late in the day to wonder if a system that cannot perform economic calculation can manage an economy.

My guide explained that there were all sorts of difficulties.  That the barge from Manaus with gasoline had not yet arrived and yesterday he had to wait five hours in line and then could purchase only twenty-six litres and today his car is in the garage with a transmission problem and the Indian agency official who is married to some relative of his and whose permission is needed to visit the Indians, but who he assured me will be satisfied with a $100 “tip”, is somehow unavailable and maybe today I might like to go drinking or maybe get some girls.  Sensing the need to establish a tone in the face of looming chaos, I replied that I would be quite happy to see the art museum or visit the botanical gardens, neither of which as far as I knew did they have in Boa Vista, but he understood what I meant and I heard no more of Bacchanalian tourism.

I was pleased to note that the “tip” for the government agent was still only $100, reassuring me that that part of what he had told me was probably on the up-and-up, at least to the extent that one may speak of a bribe to a government official as being on the up-and-up.

I was coming to realize that I am not viewing Boa Vista constructively.  Here, in one of the poorly-accessible far corners of the Amazon jungle, a place that looked so interesting when I read about it, with untamed Indians and reckless gold miners and pistoleiros in the pay of ruthless land barons it just looks like a poor town someplace in the American South.  It wasn’t at all like Greece or other places I’ve been: there were no booted Cretan shepherds, no hookah-smoking Turks, no ancient crones swathed in black and constantly crossing themselves.  The mud in the street was not ancient mud trod by clanking hoplites and turbaned janissaries or churned under the hooves of Villa’s horsemen: it was just mud.  As I was talking with my guide I remarked on the swarm of mosquitoes around our head: he said you get used to that here.

Later, after seeing the car still in pieces on the floor of the mechanic’s garage, George suggests that we hire a plane to take us into Indian country.  The trip in by plane will cost some non-trivial but not outrageous amount, plus the $100 “tip” to the government agent, though I did notice that the exact amount of the “tip” was becoming more vague, and there was of course his fee, and the package was beginning to add up.  I was losing my interest in Indians.  

     I had diffident feelings about intruding on them in the first place, as I could see no benefit to them from my presence  --  and every visit by an outsider was one more piece of cultural disruption  --  and I suspect as a general matter than I can learn more about them from a good library than from a few hours or days on the ground.  

Perhaps sensing my waning enthusiasm, my hosts return to the deviltry of Forbes Burnham and pithy comments on the state of Brasil: “Everything in Brasil is corrupt. It all goes to the people with money and power. You want something, you go to see the Boss and pay him. Otherwise you stand in line with the poor suckers. In this gas shortage, you go to the politician and he’s got a truck in his back yard.”  I assume this particular example was inspired by his having spent five hours in line the day before to purchase 26 litres of petrol.

We agreed that the following day we will drive to Bonfim for two days of Indians, miners, squatters, pistoleiros and other lawless amusements, though it soon develops that the transmission of the car we were going to take has not yet been put back together so I wait out of the morning rain in an air-conditioned gold-buyer’s office.  There are no customers in the office, but the staff  --  probably because they have no idea who I am or what I am doing there  -- make a show of shuffling papers and try unsuccessfully to look busy and after ten or fifteen minutes someone brings me, unbidden, a cafezinho.

My guide eventually returns with no idea when his vehicle will be repaired, so we drive in his other car to see the Indian agent who is married to some relative of his and of whose corruptibility we may rest assured, but the agent turns out to be away from his office and it is there that we run out of gasoline, even though my guide had obtained twenty-six litres the day before, but by this time I have come to accept that everything in Boa Vista is more complicated than an outsider like myself could possibly understand and I do not bother to ask.  Fortunately, we are within walking distance of what is called the Mafia Corner where Guyanese smugglers relax at Kitty’s beer garden and we can get a bite to eat and hear the local news.   One benefit of being so near the former British colony is that any black person you meet probably speaks English.

The beer garden is on a shady bank with a pleasant view of the river and the jungle on the far side.  And on our side are cats, flies, sleeping dogs, mud and litter and a large truck piled with boxes and sifter screens for miners who sift sand looking for diamonds.  There were a half-dozen black women packed into the small cab of the truck and ten or twelve black men sitting uncomplainingly on top in the rain.  It was an African scene.  The driver appears and the truck will not start and the men on top get down to push and the truck coughs and starts, though each firing of a piston threatens to be its last.  The truck is going to Bonfim, as I allegedly am, and I suspect that it is more likely to get there than I am.

I procure a guide

In the afternoon I went to the Museu do Índio in Manaus, an old-fashioned sort of museum run by the Salesians in a building adjoining their school.  I like old-fashioned museums and think dust and poor lighting is important to the museum experience.  Facts are soon forgotten, but the romance of things lingers.

I was talking with a Salesian brother at the Museum and mentioned that I would like to go north, into the area around Boa Vista to see what I could of the Yanomami Indians, and he offered to arrange for me to meet a guide the next morning at my hotel.  (Nowadays, I would ask no such thing, as Indian tourism has apparently become a degrading spectacle and I would want nothing to do with it, but in those days it was apparently not yet what it has become.)

And the next morning I met George, an English Guyanese who lived in Boa Vista, who assured me the whole thing would be no problem, that the government agent charged with protecting the Indians from the cultural disruption of visits by people such as myself would be happy to help us for a $100 “tip” and we would be able to go anywhere we wanted.

This news was disconcerting, as I was concerned about the cultural disruption of visiting a primitive people and assumed that if I got permission at all it would be so limited that I would be protected from doing any damage, but here I was about to be offered unrestricted access to do who knew what kind of unintentional mischief.  But of course they might always just kill me, as they had a reputation as a violent lot.

We talked in a general way about the situation of the Indians and George was quite negative about their prospects and thought them ill-served by the political priests who were advising them, as well as by FUNAI, the government agency supposedly protecting them.  He said it was good to go now because who knew what the future held, and if I were interested in traditional culture that it was slipping away, that even the anthropologists who had tried to be careful had changed things.

One problem we would have, he said, would be the high water.  It had taken out the one road that connected Boa Vista to Manaus which, among other things, meant that gasoline was running low in the town as it now had to be brought in by barge and there seemed to be some delays, but perhaps that would be cleared up in a day or so.  He was flying back to Boa Vista later that morning and I arranged to follow in the evening.

My cab driver to the airport called himself “Jumbo” and was a fine fellow and we chattered away in that polyglot melange where if we do not know the word in one language you substitute one from a language that you do know and think might mean more or less the same and we got along just fine.  When I mentioned that I had never tasted cachaça, a potent liquor distilled from sugar cane, he stopped at one of those lean-to shacks with a palm thatch roof and a plank bar that we see everywhere along the road where they sell the stuff from large bottles without labels and I bought a round.  

Travelers who have written about cashaça describe it as tasting like paint thinner and I had wondered how they could know this, as I could not imagine that anyone had actually tasted paint thinner, though once I tasted cashaça I had to agree that it did taste like paint thinner, even though I had never tasted paint thinner myself.  I couldn’t finish the thing and gave it to a fellow sitting at the bar who clearly appreciated it more than I did.

Street vendors in Manaus sold large, fantastic and unfriendly-looking knives and I had wondered who bought such things.  It turned out that the fellow I was sharing the cab with had bought one.  The case was of a plastic material, molded into grotesque shapes, combined with bone and leather and fur. The handle was in the shape of a macaw, with a large red plastic eye.  The blade was massive and dangerous-looking.  Conan the Barbarian would have thought it excessive.  My cab mate had paid ten Dollars for it and was quite pleased with his purchase.  I wondered what sort of outfit you would wear it with.