Endangered pink river dolphins in a quiet tributary of the Rio Negro – including an incredibly rare shot of one having a pee.
I followed his stare – and there, right in front of us, was a dolphin. Roughly the same size as Stephen and as pink as an embarrassed teenager’s blush, it was hanging vertically in the water and staring straight back.
Within minutes, we were being pushed and shoved and bumped by five or six different dolphins. They would suddenly appear between our legs, under our arms, over our shoulders or right in front of us peering inquisitively into our masks. They pushed and shoved one another, too, in their boisterous efforts to get a closer look at these strange beings from the land of loud shirts and baseball caps.
Photography was almost impossible – the dolphins were either too close, touching me or prodding the lens with their beaks, or they were whizzing around too far away and barely visible in the murk.
But watching them at such close range gave us a unique fish-eye view. Their eyes were tiny (though they can see reasonably well both under water and above the surface), and, like many dolphins, their long mouths were angled upwards in the shape of a permanent smile. This is an expression that cannot be changed – they continue to ‘smile’ when they are unhappy, in intense pain, and even when they are dead.
The proper way to tell a river dolphin’s mood, by the way, is to look at its bulging forehead (known in the scientific world as the melon). This changes shape like the forehead of an Ood from the Ood-Sphere, in Dr Who, and can appear swollen and globular or shrunken and lumpy. Frustratingly, no one has yet deciphered the code (perhaps not surprising, given that male zoologists can barely fathom the changing moods of female zoologists, and vice versa, let alone those of pink river dolphins).
They also have the most peculiar chubby cheeks, making them look like guilty children with their mouths full. In fact, they are so chubby they hamper the dolphins’ downward vision and, bizarrely, may explain why botos frequently swim upside down – it’s probably a simple adaptation to help them see better.
It’s easy to understand why such unlikely-looking animals are steeped in myth and legend. According to one particularly imaginative myth, perpetrated by early missionaries, the dolphins come out at night and turn into handsome young men, complete with black top hats and Edwardian waistcoats; they then ravish young village girls and impregnate them before returning to the river at first light. It was an inspired way of explaining the sudden appearance of pink babies in the local Indian population.
Best of all, legend has it that pink river dolphins are charged with protecting the very animals we had come to the Amazon to see. Apparently, if you really want to see a manatee you must first make peace with the dolphins.
So far so good.
It was all well and good for the early explorers, who had months or even years to get from A to B, and no pressing engagements back home. But we were on a tight BBC schedule. Stephen had to get back to the UK in time for multitudinous TV recordings and I had to be on several different continents for multitudinous other reasons. Sadly, we didn’t have months to spare.
So we did what most people do under the circumstances. We hitched a ride on a missionary floatplane.
Missionary pilot Captain Wilson Kannerberg did the usual pre-flight checks, bowed his head in prayer, leaned back on a seat cover made of wooden beads normally used by Greek taxi drivers, and reached for the throttle.
Stephen was watching from the back and had that look on his face men get when their girlfriends start winding up tough guys in public. Not scared exactly, but wishing he were somewhere else. Wisely, he chose to ignore the religious mutterings from the cockpit and buried himself in a Portuguese–English dictionary, purchased at the airport. He had nearly two hours to learn Portuguese from scratch. Given that he already spoke French, German, Dutch and Spanish, and had a strong grounding in Latin and Greek, I was mildly shocked that he didn’t speak Portuguese already. But he was remedying the situation fast and I felt sure he’d be fluent by the time we arrived. I speak English and American.
On a wing and a prayer, we flew 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Manaus and began searching for a converted wooden ferryboat called the Cassiquiari. After a few theatrical swoops and turns over the jungle canopy, we found it tucked away in Arauazinho Creek, a tributary of the Rio Aripuanã, and thanked the Lord when Captain Wilson successfully landed with a splash and aplomb right alongside our home for the next few days.
‘Have I told you about my flatulence?’ asked Stephen, as we gathered our belongings and clambered down onto the plane’s gargantuan float. He’d heard a malicious rumour that we would have to share a cabin. ‘Or that I’m a pyromaniac? And did I mention my stabbing obsession?’
We were greeted by the boat’s skipper, Miguel Rocha, along with the guarantee of two entirely separate cabins. Such was Stephen’s cheering response, Miguel might have announced the end of income tax for one and all.
Missionary pilot Captain Wilson landing on a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon with a splash and aplomb.
There was, however, no power in Stephen’s private cabin. And that meant no power for his Apple Mac.
‘Right, that’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re going back.’
‘Never mind,’ I replied consolingly, trying not to laugh. ‘It’ll be alright.’
He looked a little wide-eyed and panicky as he tried to force his laptop plug into a cracked and rusty once-was-a-plug-socket hole in the cabin wall. ‘There’s no never mind about it. I cannot go four days without power.’
I left the cabin, in mock despair.
‘You may well despair, but not as much as I do.’
Miguel was a gentle, calm man in his late-60s. Born in the forest, but brought up in the city, he was one of nineteen brothers and sisters. His grandfather crossed the Atlantic from Portugal in the 1880s and his grandmother was a native Indian. This made him a caboclo, one of the so-called ‘forgotten people’ of the Amazon – mixed-race descendants of European settlers and Amerindians. The caboclos get none of the rights of the indigenous forest-dwellers and are ignored by government and aid agencies, and Miguel was leading their fight for recognition.
He’d been exploring the Amazon Basin professionally since 1981 and knew a thing or two about life in the jungle.
Two men in a boat – searching for one of the rarest and most elusive animals on earth.
We had a long, relaxing lunch on the rear deck, poring over an Amazon-sized map of the forest and planning our mini-expedition. By the time we’d finished we had convinced ourselves that our chances of finding a manatee were actually quite good.
Then