But there’s rain and there’s RAIN! I have rain at home, in Bristol. Rather a lot, as it happens. To be fair, it doesn’t rain all the time (the week before I left it had rained only twice – once for three days and once for four days), but I’ve always been convinced that I live in the rainiest corner of Britain, if not the entire known universe.
Until, that is, I checked the figures. Bristol doesn’t even register on the scale. My garden receives less than a quarter as much rain in a typical year as the Amazon (not the whole of the Amazon – just an area the same size as my garden).
But the biggest difference is that the Amazon has more professional rain. My garden gets a seemingly endless grey drizzle that starts around the beginning of January and continues through to the latter part of December. Meanwhile, the Amazon gets a heartfelt torrential downpour once or twice a day, complete with unforgettable displays of lightning and ear-splitting thunder, and that’s that. The daily ritual opening of the heavens would make Steven Spielberg’s special effects department glow with pride, but here’s the point: there’s plenty of time in between for everyone to go outside and do things without an umbrella.
Rain stopped play while we were filming at least once every day, typically between midday and 2pm, making an excellent excuse to break for lunch. Sometimes it rained at other times, too, making an excellent excuse to break for caipirinhas or a snooze. The prognosis was unlikely to improve for several months, until the end of the rainy season, but we were always optimistic and never quite got the hang of this new daily routine.
It was like spending a couple of hours every day in a power-jet shower.
We watched the rain lashing against the side of the Cassiquiari, pouring off the blue tarpaulin roof, running across the deck in torrents and visibly swelling the creek. Then it was time for a nap. There were hammocks hanging from the rafters and I picked a bright red one, crawled inside and fell into a deep sleep.
There’s a technique to sleeping in hammocks: you don’t lie in them straight, as in holiday brochures or dreamy advertisements for tropical drinks. You lie in them diagonally. That way it’s possible to lie completely flat and, over the years, you don’t end up with a permanently bowed back and forever curled up like a frightened armadillo.
I woke with a start to find the entire crew standing around me, filming.
‘Welcome to my world,’ muttered Stephen in his very rich, very warm, very English, best TV voice.
Stephen, meanwhile, had been counting mobile phones. He owns 121 altogether, at the last count, but was disappointed to discover that he had only six of them with him in the Amazon. Not a single one had reception. I made a mental note to buy him a satellite phone for his next birthday.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, and we were able to embark on our mission (I suppose we could have started earlier but we didn’t want to get wet).
Before searching for manatees we had to find Ivano, our fixer for the rest of the trip. Sure enough, as promised, he was ready and waiting for us in a delightful little settlement carved into a particularly wild and remote corner of jungle. Called Arauazinho, after the creek, and with just five families forming a population of fewer than thirty people, this teeny homestead of stilted wooden houses was too small to be called a village.
I liked Ivano immensely. Short enough to stand at the table during mealtimes, as bald as a baby manatee and never without a mischievous grin, he had the habit of addressing everyone he met as if he wanted to marry their daughter. He made the perfect fixer – a man who, if he wanted to, could persuade Prince Charles to eat genetically modified crops.
He was utterly obsessed with what he claimed to be a new, smaller species of manatee, which he’d already named the dwarf manatee. It’s found only in Arauazinho Creek, apparently, and he wouldn’t talk about anything else.
We’d offer him a beer and he’d say something like ‘Why don’t they call the beer “Dwarf Manatee Beer” instead of “Brahma Beer”?’ We’d invite him to join us for dinner on the boat and, quick as a flash, he’d say ‘We could watch my video of dwarf manatees while we’re eating.’
The Dutchman had been studying wildlife in the Amazon for decades, partly because he liked animals and partly because he was on the run. When we briefly managed to change the subject from dwarf manatees, with the help of a large jug of caipirinha, he told us hair-raising stories of warrants for his arrest issued by both the Brazilian and Dutch governments. He never satisfactorily explained exactly what he was supposed to have done, but it sounded serious.
We’ll call him Hairy van Pit-bull, just in case (speaking in monotone isn’t bad enough to justify a long spell in a Brazilian jail – and he claimed to be innocent of all the other, unspecified charges).
Travelling deeper and deeper into the flooded forest.
In theory, I suppose, he could be right and there may indeed be such a thing as a dwarf manatee. After all, there are pygmy blue whales, lesser white-toothed shrews and dwarf caiman. But Hairy was one of those people who could have sworn blind that our names were Mark and Stephen and we wouldn’t have believed him. To make matters worse, his best evidence seemed to consist of a blurry home video of a vaguely diminutive manatee (most likely a youngster) lasting no more than a few fleeting seconds. It was pretty iffy, to say the least.
He was clearly a bright man. He was fluent in even more languages than Stephen (Dutch, English, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and taki-taki – the mother tongue of the Creoles, once spoken by African slaves working on plantations in Suriname) and was the author of scientific papers on everything from wild pigs to a lost cousin of the Brazil-nut tree. But something was clearly amiss.
I wondered if it might be possible to be an unbearable bore in one language, but an exceptionally witty and enlightening raconteur in another. Perhaps, if we had made the effort to learn taki-taki, we’d have seen him in an entirely different light?
Naturally, both Stephen and I did the diplomatic soft-shoe shuffle and oozed as much politeness as we could muster. Despite our frustration, we couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. His whole world revolved around persuading the rest of the world that dwarf manatees are real. We even agreed to a 20-kilometre (12-mile) wild-goose chase, up the infamous clearwater creek, to search for his little hobbyhorses.
It would only take 15 minutes to reach them, he assured us. Half a day later we decided to go back and return to the mother ship, leaving Hairy to sulk and us to revel in the brief period of heavenly peace.
We said our goodbyes, politely but not too enthusiastically, and climbed back on board the Cassiquiari with renewed joie de vivre.
I asked Ivano about his own encounters with more customary, proper-sized manatees. He laughed.
‘I love manatees,’ he said. ‘They taste better than beef.’
He admitted that he hadn’t actually seen a manatee in the wild, and launched into a happy few minutes reminiscing about eating manatee meat as a child. He could barely stop licking his lips as he described its tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture and the unique, slightly almond-flavoured taste.
Arauazinho village – home to Francisco, his wife Ennis, their seven smiley children and innumerable chickens and goats.
I’d heard about almond-tasting sea cows before. The Amazonian manatee has a long-lost relative, called