Llama for Lunch (27 page)

One of the crew came to tell me that I should eat. He took me down to the dining room, where a uniformed officer collected one of the meal tickets that had been issued to me. Very impressive. Unfortunately the meal was not. It consisted of the same ill-flavoured soup that I’d reluctantly consumed the first night on the previous boat. But it was edible and I ate a large bowl of it. Then I sat waiting hopefully for the next course. When it didn’t arrive, I had another bowl of soup. No problem. I had my bag of apples. I’d survive.

Early in the morning I woke to the sight of the Amazon, a grey river beneath a grey sky divided by a strip of green bank. The phone on the wall beside my bunk rang and I was summoned to breakfast, I think. This repast was a pleasant surprise – pawpaw, rolls and coffee, albeit ghastly pre-sweetened stuff. A few hours later we stopped at a town that boasted a large church commanding the riverbank. It had a big white cross in front of it, a U-shaped building behind it that appeared to be a convent, and a two-storeyed school alongside. Even before we pulled to the wharf to tie up, a huge crowd of people had gathered and were cheering and calling out to us to buy their goods. They boarded the
Santarem
like a swarm of pirates and I bought some really delicious fried banana chips and a big hand of fresh bananas for a dollar.

We pulled out into the stream again. It was wide but I could still see the banks clearly on both sides – unlike on the Yangtse in China, where I saw nothing but water. The river was now brown, its surface bumpy with wavelets that occasionally produced a white cap. Later the waves grew bigger and we rolled with their movement. We were heading downstream and therefore going with the flow and the tide.

Every so often we came in close to the riverbank and, twenty-four hours from Manaus, I could see that the jungle was less dense. I thought it prettier – there were big trees and more variation in the undergrowth and occasional palms or a little house by the water’s edge.

Late in the afternoon we approached a hamlet. This time the church stood high at the rear of the town at the end of a broad avenue. There was a wooden wharf, but our boat tied up to a metal, flat-topped landing barge that was attached to the wharf by a wooden walkway consisting of two broad planks. Across from where the boat was moored squatted the usual boring adobe buildings with flat roofs and open fronts. In a gesture that was meant to be enticing, one was labelled ‘Bar’. On the landing another greeting committee of vendors waited to offer us iced lollies from their fridge boxes, banana chips and other munchies, but none sold drinks. They must have thought that we had drinks aboard. I hadn’t found the ship’s bar open yet, although I’d certainly been looking.

The sellers did a roaring trade. Everybody bought. Everyone also hung over the side munching and throwing their lolly papers and wrappers into the water. To pay you just threw the money down to the landing and your change was thrown back up. I saw a couple of salesmen using an ingenious device to make this operation safer. A long stick had been secured in the neck of a small green plastic bottle with its bottom cut off, and people place their money in this. A great deal of other trading went on. The meat supply for the boat was bought here. I watched six sides of beef dragged aboard over the grubby tyres that edged the wharf as buffers. Then the meat was manhandled onto the dirty deck. This was a marginally better place than its previous position in the sun on the wooden boards of the landing. Fish was also being traded from the boat. One man had come aboard in Manaus with several boxes full. A small boy walked about trying to sell a pretty parrot that perched on his finger. It had a bright yellow head, light green body and darker green wings.

As we arrived at this town a wooden riverboat was leaving. This boat, the
Boa Vinda Viagem
, had left Manaus at the same time as we had. We’d raced it up the river and had been having a contest with it ever since, mostly following behind it, tripping over its wake, a wobbly cream-coloured trail of what looked like chopped up vanilla icecream bubbling on top of the water. Now the
Viagra
pulled out and tootled off as we came in.

We continued on, still sailing close to the riverbank. What I could see was very beautiful. The sun was shining and even though the water was a muddy brown, the verdant foliage was lush and through gaps in the trees I could see green, green grass.

I was sitting on deck watching the sun going down as we pulled to the wharf at the next town and slotted into a space alongside the
Viagra
. After going neck and neck with her all the way from Manaus, now I actually touched her side rails and made contact with the people on her. The gangplank was not lowered at short stops – passengers who wanted to embark or disembark had to sling their goods over the side and jump after them onto the wharf. Customs officers came aboard here and searched my cabin. They looked in my bathroom, under the bunks and studied my passport. I wondered what they imagined I could have hidden under the bed.

On deck this balmy night, absorbing the peace and the damp smell, I watched the bow of the
Viagra
as she took off into the total blackness of the river. All three of her decks were well lit and she made a cheery sight as she slid away into the night, the sound of her engines puttering fainter and fainter.

The captain sat down with me for a while and tried to converse. We managed, but it was pretty garbled. He said he had been on the river for thirty years. He was a nice man with fine, grey-blue eyes in a genial face. It must have been my night to exude pheromones, as later my amiable, fat, little drunk admirer chased me around the deck. He had spotted me soon after we sailed from Manaus and kept trying to renew an imagined friendship. He seemed to be saying that he had seen me in Porto Velho. Waving his ever-present can and spraying me with beer in the process, he would shout, ‘Porto Velho. Porto Velho,’ chortling wildly. This night, he waddled his round face, curly hair and lop-sided grin alongside me at the bar, peered closely into my face, and shouted, ‘Oi!’ It sounded like an accusation. Taken aback, I stared at him. He grinned and, sprinkling me with saliva, said even louder: ‘Oi!’ Suddenly it dawned on me that he was merely saying hello. ‘Oi,’ I replied.

During the night we stopped and, with a great deal of crunching, came alongside a wharf. I could see nothing except a few lights ashore, but from dawn onward there was activity outside and when I got up I discovered that we were at Santarem, the namesake of our boat and a big town that is halfway to Belem. We were docked not in the main part of town but at a wharf in a backwater where the embankment was old and rustic. The riverbank was a wall of soil three metres high fortified by planks held up by posts. On one side of us was a muddy foreshore and on the other a steel landing barge containing a couple of trucks, one of which was off-loading bags of rice and flour. At the end of the wharf a small boy, oblivious to all the action around him, fished with a hand-line.

A pair of housemaids now materialised in my cabin and set to with vigour, vacuuming, emptying the bin, putting cleaner in the loo and spraying the air with smelly stuff. This Herculean task ocupied them all the time I was at breakfast. I had already dubbed one of the cleaners The Voice. I had heard her screaming and shouting ever since I came on board. A formidable lady built like a small tank with grey hair, she was really quite agreeable, but I was heartily sick of the sound of her.

It was hot and humid tied to the wharf at Santarem, in contrast to the lovely coolness out on the river. The sun was still shining, but black clouds hung about and spat rain every now and then. We lunched on the daggy-looking meat that I had witnessed being dragged aboard the day before. Tarted up and disguised as a stew, it was quite tasty, but I knew it, I recognised the rib cages. In the late afternoon we were still waiting to sail. The sinking sun hitting the water turned all the wavelets into flickers of light that danced toward me like tiny stars shimmering across the river in constantly changing formations. Then a small boy, cleaving the water like a dolphin, dived into the middle of that sheet of glittering light and scattered its hypnotic illusion.

We sailed from Santarem into a lovely evening and were fanned by a welcome breeze as soon as we left the wharf. Vendors and visitors packed the landing to wave goodbye. One of the people who had come aboard here was a large bearded gent with an American accent. He saw the book I was reading and asked me if I was English. ‘Wash your mouth,’ I said. ‘I’m Australian.’

James was an interesting chap and I talked to him for quite a while. He said he had lived for twenty-eight years in Germany. We were joined by the young Austrian couple I had met previously in the dining room. James told a story about three young German boys he had encountered recently. These lads, who had been born no more than twenty years ago, had flown to South America with an American airline that shall remain nameless, and were told that they needed to fill out a seven-question document and sign it. This paper related to ‘the war’. In all truth these kids could have said, ‘Which war?’ The first question was, ‘Were you involved in the persecution of the Jews?’ I mean, were you likely to say, ‘Sure I was,’ even if you were? And these boys were not born until thirty years after the event.

Before dark fell we passed over the confluence of the Amazon and the Tapajos, the wide river that joins the Amazon at Santarem seven hundred kilometres from the mouth of the Amazon. The muddy one on the outside was the Amazon and the clean, faintly bluish one on the inside was the Tapajos. Sixty kilometres from Santarem lie the remains of Henry Ford’s Folly, Fordlandia, a plantation and town he built that was supposed to supply him with rubber for his car tyres. Millions of dollars later it failed. Santarem was originally settled by former soldiers of the confederacy after the US civil war and still has families named Higgins and McDonald and such like.

Then we were chugging along pleasantly in the dark, the captain playing his searchlight from one bank to another following the buoy markers. A bag of mandarins I had bought in Santarem proved to be empty of juice and as wooden as the floor. I had been conned by a small boy who had been walking around trying to sell them without success and looking doleful. I was a sucker for these little kids. Diminutive girls of five or six would wander up to me late at night while I was eating at an outdoor cafe in Manaus and want me to buy chewing gum. I would buy – at an inflated price of course, but I always bought. I could usually resist the adults who approached me while eating or walking in the street. They would try to sell a torch, a watch, a clock or some trinket but they didn’t pester. If I said, ‘No, thank you,’ they went away.

We stopped once during the night. I was woken by the three long blasts on the horn. At six in the morning they were repeated and after a short stop we were off again. I was still in bed but through the window I could see that we now seemed to be on a sea – no riverbanks were visible. I was called for breakfast at a time that I considered too early so I didn’t go until I was ready. That was a big mistake. The dining room was shut – there had been a time change in the night.

Out on deck I encountered a howling gale but the river banks had come into view again. The water had white caps and we got up quite a rock and roll on the swell. We passed barges bearing containers on wheels, other riverboats, large, floating clumps of weed and the odd floating log.

I had not seen any sign of habitation for a long time. The jungle here was different too – thicker, and it grew right down to the water’s edge. Later there were many islands in the middle of the river again, all of them tree-covered. Still later we ran even closer to the bank and then I could see that the country was very pretty. Occasionally I spied a small primitive house with a rustic landing nuzzled by a canoe. A couple of times a few houses were huddled together next to a small church. Sitting in a comfortable chair on the shady side of the boat, I put my feet on the rail and watched it all slide by.

At certain places on the river small canoes paddled by young children came out to meet the boat. Watching these flimsy wooden crafts skimmed along the mighty Amazon by tiny tots, I marvelled that they were not afraid. The canoes appeared so fragile and insignificant, a mere speck on the river’s face. Some boys, no more than eight or ten years old, played a game with the boat. They would come alongside and throw a rope at the boat until it caught fast, then climb aboard and try to sell you palm hearts in jars or small live turtles. Some didn’t bring anything, they did it just for fun. After riding on the boat for a while they would leave and I wondered how they would get back home again – they had to paddle upstream against the current.

The last light of the setting sun lay on the river behind the
Santarem
. The water in front of it was already gun-metal grey, but the waves behind had silver-foil crests and gold slopes. The river here was reasonably narrow and we finally passed the
Viagra
. But I cheered too soon. She had slowed down to turn off into a side channel. The cook told me that she was going to another town.

Searching for a cold drink down on the third deck where a snack bar was secreted among the hammocks, I was again bailed up by the boat drunk, my Brazilian admirer. He was smashed again, or still, and I took a while to disentangle myself from him. Still looking for a drink I went up a deck and a small boy took me by the hand and led me into the bar. He put on the lights, fished a Coke out of the fridge and gave it to me. And just then the captain appeared and caught us red-handed. He did not look at all pleased with my delinquent accomplice, but he chatted congenially to me while holding me by the arm– a citizen’s arrest?

Sometime during that night we came across some wild water. The boat gave terrific bumps as it went up, up and then – bang, bang – down again. It was like being on the open sea. By morning, however, we were on more sheltered and calmer waters. The green gloom of the jungle on the river bank was very close and in places there was no bank at all, just submerged jungle, the trees marching right into the water.