The stalls were soon piled high with a truly eye-catching collection of weird and wonderful fish of all shapes and sizes. Many looked as if they had just been lowered down from a spaceship recently returned from a galaxy far away.
We found 1.5-metre (5-foot) long red and grey pirarucu – unfriendly-looking, grumpy-old-man-faced fish with creepy little eyes, mouths like World War II landing craft and long, barbed tongues. Among the largest freshwater fish in the world, pirarucu are reputed to leap out of the water and grab small birds from overhanging branches.
Next to them were grouper-like, olive-green tambaqui. Roughly half the length of the pirarucu, these fruit and nut eaters loiter beneath trees in the flooded forest and wait for breakfast, lunch and dinner to fall right into their mouths. They are armed with powerful, crushing teeth like the molars of a sheep to grind down the tougher parts of their food.
Elsewhere in the market there were fish that looked like large silver coins, others resembling the porcelain models used to adorn fancy ornamental ponds, snaky fish with zebra stripes, salamander-like fish with fleshy fins, enormous catfish with whiskers that would make your average moggy purr with pride, and perfectly round spotty stingrays like multicoloured Frisbees.
We even found some long-bodied, big-eyed aruanas, or water monkeys, which specialise in surface-to-air attacks on insects that sit around all day, rather unwisely, on branches above the water.
We saw more species of fish in a couple of hours in the fish market than I’ve seen during a lifetime of wildlife watching in Britain: there is no more graphic insight into the hidden underwater world of the Amazon.
Piranhas were everywhere and, as we watched, several different species were unloaded by the crate-full. My favourite were the red-bellies, which live up to their name with glowing red undersides and caudal fins – they must look like neon signs underwater. If you are partial to a surfeit of tiny throat-stabbing bones in your fish, piranhas make good eating. The locals like them because, despite a complete lack of scientific evidence, they are used as a cure for everything from baldness to a lack of virility (perhaps the two are connected, after all?).
Visiting Manaus fish market is the next best thing to a lifetime of diving in the Amazon (except, of course, all the stars of the show are dead).
The people most at risk are fishermen, as so many local men have discovered for themselves. Their missing fingers are the somewhat predictable result of attempting to remove fishing hooks from inside piranhas’ mouths.
Under the circumstances you’d probably give an almighty bite, too.
The next day we were up at the crack of noon to catch a fast boat to a jungle lodge, just an hour away.
We would have left sooner, but Stephen was busy thrashing about in his hotel room. I went to see if he was okay and found him looking hot and flustered and trying to force a pile of neatly folded clothes into a bright-yellow stuff sack. I watched patiently, for as long as I could stop laughing.
‘You know you don’t fold the clothes,’ I said, ‘you stuff them into a stuff sack. That way they take up less space.’
Stephen gave me a sideways glance, and for a fleeting moment looked a bit cross. It wasn’t like him at all. He muttered something about a smart arse.
Our temporary home for a few days – a comfortable jungle lodge bang in the middle of the flooded forest – giving the sensation of adventure without the unpleasantness and inconvenience of adventure itself.
The many moods of Amazon adventurer and explorer Stephen Fry.
‘Anyway, you don’t need to look neat and tidy,’ I ventured, ‘because we’re on an expedition.’
He glanced at my crumpled shirt, slightly torn trousers and muddy boots. Then he grabbed his pile of clothes, ruffled them up like a tramp rifling through a rubbish bin, and stuffed the tangled mess into the sack.
‘Oh,’ said a slightly embarrassed Stephen, once voted the most intelligent man on television, ‘is that why it’s called a stuff sack?’
Our jungle lodge was a hotchpotch of ramshackle wooden towers and nearly 300 stilted rooms, interlinked by a precarious and rickety eight-kilometre (five-mile) wooden boardwalk. It was like an Amazonian theme park right in the middle of the Amazon. It took the jungle out of the jungle. It made everything seem artificial. Even its own wobbly boardwalk felt like the collapsible bridge at Universal Studios.
According to the official bumph, it was Jacques Cousteau’s idea. I think he may have been suffering from the bends at the time. Anyone who thinks anything so big and brash and out of place is a good thing must have missed some of the lessons.
I guess it was designed for the kind of people who think a naturalist is someone who runs naked through the woods. But for me it doesn’t really count as ‘exploring the Amazon’.
Maybe I’m alone in my aversion. Western lawyers would love the place. Gradually being reclaimed by the surrounding jungle, it had undoubtedly seen better days as its labyrinthine network of walkways and buildings was filled with cracked and creaking floorboards, gaping holes, splintered handrails and a variety of other litigation-inspiring hazards.
And judging by the picture-studded notice board in reception, the lodge was frequently visited by the high and mighty – everyone from Helmut Kohl and the Swedish royals to Jimmy Carter and Bill Gates – and to make such luminaries feel right at home the lodge had not just one, but no fewer than three helipads.
It did have one redeeming feature: its idyllic location, bang in the middle of the flooded forest. This is what the Amazon is all about. The water depth varies greatly throughout the year – reaching a peak in April or May and falling to its lowest level some time in October – thanks to the cycles of snowfall and thaw in the Andes. At the lodge, for instance, the water level can rise and fall by as much as 15 metres (50 feet) in a single year. The impact on the forest and its wildlife is phenomenal.
Nonetheless, intrepid adventurers like us feel out of sorts surrounded by loud and insensitive tourists wearing loud and insensitive shirts and oversized baseball caps.