Not once, strangely, did we talk about potential dangers. The jungle is full of bottom-emptying and life-threatening hazards. Yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, tetanus, rabies, giardiasis, cholera, typhoid, Chagas’ disease, bilharzia, dengue fever, several strains of malaria and leishmaniasis immediately come to mind. The Amazon is the perfect place to go if you’d like to increase the odds of dying from something you’ve never even heard of.
In fact, if the Amazon were in Britain, the Health and Safety Executive wouldn’t allow it at all.
Most exciting, among all the potential hazards, you could be killed by an animal that hasn’t yet been named by science: perhaps a rare species of poison-dart frog, a chigger that no one has had the time (or bothered) to investigate, a well-camouflaged spider, or a particularly secretive venomous snake.
Stephen ready for anything in his expeditionary gear.
A welcoming face in the Amazon.
By the way, if you want to be cleverer than almost everyone else on the planet (even so-called ‘experts’ who write about these things) here’s an interesting fact. Dangerous snakes are not poisonous. They are venomous, and there’s a big difference. For something to be poisonous it has to be ingested (or, in some cases, touched). An animal that is venomous, on the other hand, actually injects its poison with a bite or sting. Try to bring it up in casual conversation – everyone will be amazed.
While we’re on the subject of potential misadventures, perhaps worst of all (certainly commonest of all) is traveller’s diarrhoea, especially if you’re on the move every day, staying hundreds of kilometres from the nearest loo, and filming. The trots, the runs, dysentery, gastroenteritis or Montezuma’s revenge are all part and parcel of travelling (Stephen’s philosophy, quite rightly, is that travel boils down to laundry and bowels). You simply have to choose whether to go for amoebic dysentery or bacterial dysentery, and the ghastly concoction of microbes lurking in virtually everything you eat or drink will take care of the rest.
In reality, of course, these things sound much worse from afar. There’s probably more chance of getting deep-vein thrombosis on the cramped long-haul flights from London to São Paulo and on to Manaus than of being struck down by a deadly disease or bitten by an animal that’s venomous not poisonous.
Aerial view of part of the largest nonstop expanse of pure, unremitting nature on earth.
What we hadn’t anticipated was something the Health and Safety Executive would probably have warned us about, had we bothered to ask, and that’s the risk of slipping on a wet wooden boardwalk in the dark at 5am. But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Whether or not jungles keep you awake at night, overwhelmed with awe and wonder, you’d have to be a lump of rock not to be impressed by the Amazon Basin. If you’re like most people, and it occupies a murky, something-to-do-with-jungles place in the back of your mind, you deserve a good slap for failing to grasp the sheer scale and splendour of the largest nonstop expanse of pure, unremitting nature on earth.
I would say it defies description, but then I’d have to delete the last paragraph.
Larger than the whole of western Europe, and draining half the total landmass of South America, it bombards you with sensory overload at every turn. Compared with lesser parts of the world, even its palms look palmier and its rain feels considerably wetter.
But there’s more. This vast territory of trees and water is home to something like one in ten of all known species of plant and animal. Counting them can be tricky and time-consuming, even for people who like to do such things, so we can only guess at total numbers. But here’s a recent list: 427 mammal species, 1,294 birds, 378 reptiles, 3,000 fish and 40,000 plants. I don’t know anyone who’s even tried to count the insect species, so let’s just say that there are more than you can shake a stick at. Millions of them.
Now, the bad news is that all these figures are wrong. New species are being found in the Amazon almost daily, so by the time you read this they’ll be completely out of date. But the good news is that, if you can tell a waxy-tailed planthopper from a South American palm weevil, or a kissing bug from a peanut-headed bug, you could take a couple of weeks off work, set up camp in a quiet corner of the rainforest, and discover a whole assortment of species entirely new to science.
You could name them, too, though you’d have to be drunk. Judging by the names dreamed up by many experts, one can only assume there is a serious drinking problem among the world’s zoologists: I have little doubt that whoever came up with no-eyed big-eyed wolf spider, dik-dik, bongo, blob fish, burnt-neck eremomela or Bounty Islands shag had more than one celebratory drink to toast their great discoveries.
A friend of mine once named a new species of sea slug after his wife; she didn’t like it.
A great potoo – who comes up with these names?
Alternatively, you could take a proper sabbatical and go in search of something really newsworthy. Vast areas of the Amazon remain as unexplored as in the days of the early adventurers, so you could set off to find the warring women who apparently fight like the Amazons of Greek mythology or the tribe reputed to have their feet facing the wrong way to deceive trackers.
The last thing you’d expect to stumble upon in the Amazon is a large city. But, sure enough, plonked in the middle of this natural unexplored treasure trove is just that: a city of 1.7 million people in northern Brazil, called Manaus.
Manaus is where our adventure really began.
Our challenge was to find one of the least-known and most outlandish animals on the planet. We were going in search of an Amazonian manatee, the first endangered species on our list.
We were looking for the smallest and hardest to find. Found only in the Amazon Basin, from the river mouth to the upper reaches of calm water tributaries in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana and Peru, the Amazonian manatee is shy and retiring and likes to keep itself to itself.
With a wonderfully carefree rotund body, predominantly black skin the texture of vinyl, a bright pink belly and diamond-shaped tail, a cleft lip, a unique sixth sense, a reputation for farting more than