Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  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?).

  I feel sorry for them (piranhas, not bald people). Their reputation as vicious pack-hunting monsters devouring villains in jungle B-movies is, well, utter nonsense. It’s President Theodore Roosevelt’s fault. He came back from a hunting trip in South America, nearly a century ago, telling tall stories of ‘the most ferocious fish in the world’. Experts quickly latched on to his wild imagination and warned that piranhas made ‘swimming or wading an extremely risky pastime over about half the entire South American continent’. Now that the tabloid press has latched on to the idea, there is no separating fact from fiction.

  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. Whatever wildlife happens to be nearby, these are the kind of people who will be facing the other way and talking about the traffic in London, the weather in Munich or the best place to buy chocolate-chip ice cream in Seattle. I was once on a whale-watching boat in the Pacific, and we were trying to listen to the haunting sounds of a singing humpback whale, but we could barely hear above the incessant babble of indistinguishable people in loud shirts noisily swapping baseball caps to see who had the biggest head.

  They may want the sensation of adventure, without the unpleasantness and inconvenience of adventure itself, but we didn’t. We were on a proper expedition and, as a matter of principle, in a determined effort to appear as professional as possible, resisted the temptation to have our hair done in the beauty salon or watch The Simpsons on satellite television or hide in our air-conditioned rooms to avoid the gruelling heat and humidity of the real jungle outside.

  Admittedly, we failed to resist the temptation to lie in hammocks by the pool, sipping caipirinhas. But no one is perfect. And, to be fair, we occasionally looked up to watch the local squirrel monkeys and white-fronted capuchins and to make the most of high-speed wi-fi on our laptops.

  Besides, we were recovering from New Year’s Eve. We hadn’t drunk too much, unfortunately, but we were struggling to cope with a combination of jet lag and hazy memories of a dark beach on the shores of the Rio Negro s
urrounded by jungle, with a huge bonfire, a firework display to rival the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, a motley collection of biting insects, pink champagne in dainty little glasses, and a blur of singing and dancing.

  After a lot of debate and soul-searching, we managed to convince ourselves that our serious lying-down time was a productive and essential part of the jungle habituation process.

  Eventually, a couple of days and a couple of dozen caipirinhas later, Stephen was almost ready to be released into the wild. We decided to start by getting wet.

  The worst thing about swimming in the Amazon isn’t what you might expect. It’s certainly not crocodile-like caiman, which are large enough to eat the smaller members of a film crew, but rarely do. And it’s not bull sharks, which rather alarmingly leave the open ocean and make their way as much as 3,700 kilometres (2,310 miles) upriver, past Manaus and far beyond.

  Stingrays, admittedly, can be slightly worrying. They lie flat on the river bed, waiting for you to step on them, and then give you an almighty sting that is so excruciatingly painful you have to run, not walk, to the nearest doctor. But if you shuffle your feet in the muddy or sandy shallows, rather than marching like a trooper, they are more likely to get out of your way than get out their secret weapon.

  It’s certainly not piranhas, and it’s not even two-metre (six-foot) long electric eels or anacondas the length of minibuses.

  No, the worst thing about swimming in the Amazon is the tiny candiru fish (pronounced can-dee-roo). Otherwise known as the toothpick fish, vampire fish or (more disturbingly) the willy fish, this is a parasitic freshwater catfish just a few centimetres long.

  Eel-shaped and translucent (so it’s virtually impossible to see underwater) the candiru has a voracious appetite for blood. On a normal day it seeks out unsuspecting larger fish by following the flow of water from their gills. It dives underneath the gill flaps, opens its umbrella-like spines to lock itself in position and draw blood, and then drinks and drinks and drinks. It may consume so much blood that its body visibly expands, like that of a leech. Eventually, the little sponger unhooks its spines and sinks to the bottom of the river to digest its meal.

  If you happen to be swimming in the Amazon, and peeing, the candiru fish will happily follow the flow of your urine back to its source. Before you can whip up your trunks it will swim straight into your penis and inconveniently lodge itself right inside your urethra. The pain, apparently, is spectacular.

  If you are unfortunate enough to be candirued, the best option is to get to a hospital before infection causes shock and death, or your bladder bursts. Failing that (a likely scenario if you happen to be in a remote corner of the Amazon), the next option is to chop off your penis.

  Stephen undergoing an essential part of the jungle habituation process.

  Alternatively, there is a traditional cure that requires the use of two local plants: the juice of the jagua tree or the pulp of the buitach apple. These are supposed to be brewed into a hot tea that apparently dissolves the skeleton of the fish within a couple of hours (a synthetic version of the brew has been used in the past to dissolve kidney stones). Be wary of some survival books that rather unconvincingly suggest you insert the buitach apple into the affected area.

  The main problem with such traditional cures is that, if you’re anything like me, you won’t have a clue a) where to find a jagua tree or a buitach apple, or b) how to know if you actually do. But if you think you’re capable of calmly flicking through a field guide, inevitably written in Portuguese, with a candiru fish and its open umbrella firmly lodged inside your penis, and then organising a nice little campfire to brew a piping-hot cup of tea with your correctly identified traditional plants, then you might just be okay.

  The only good news is that, despite rumours to the contrary, it’s perfectly safe to stand on the riverbank and pee into the Amazon below. A candiru fish cannot, no matter how hard it tries, leap in mid-air and work its way upstream like a salmon.

  I digress. We weren’t about to swim in the Amazon just to see if we could avoid penis penetration by a fish with a spiny umbrella. We wanted to swim with a blushing dolphin.

  The pink river dolphin, or boto, is the kind of animal young children paint at school. A particularly naïve teacher might relegate the exuberant splashes of dazzling pink, the chubby cheeks, the gratuitously long beak crammed with crushing teeth and the gargantuan designer flippers to a wild and fertile young imagination. But pink river dolphins are real – a celebrated Amazonian speciality.

  Their pink colour is caused by blood flowing immediately beneath the skin. It becomes even pinker when they are excited or aroused, and as they get older.

  We found ‘our’ dolphins surprisingly easily (actually, they found us), tucked away in a quiet backwater far from the hubbub of the lodge. They were used to being fed by local villagers and, as soon as they spotted the boat, started leaping about excitedly. And blushing bright pink. They raced one way, then did a handbrake turn and raced back the other way.

  Unlike most other dolphins, which have fused neck vertebrae (enabling them to swim fast and turn without breaking their necks), Amazon river dolphins have flexible necks that can bend remarkably well, as an adaptation for swimming in the flooded forest and weaving between all those submerged roots and trunks.

  Stephen is rarely short of something to say, but for a few moments, admiring the dolphins around the boat, he was speechless. Then his remarkable powers of observation returned.

  ‘They’re unmistakably dolphinous,’ he remarked. ‘If there is such a word.’

  Indeed.

  We squeezed into our smelly, damp wet suits, rinsed out our snorkels, spat in our masks, climbed down the steps of a floating platform anchored in the middle of the river and stepped into the lukewarm waters of the Rio Negro.

  The visibility below the surface was dreadful – less than half a metre (20 inches) – and when I stretched my arm out in front of me I could barely see my fingertips. It was virtually impossible to tell what, if anything, was down there. I glanced across at Stephen, goggle-eyed and smiling as much as he could with a snorkel rammed into his mouth, as he stared into the gloom. The dark, tannin-rich water made this alien underwater world surprisingly red in colour and, for a moment, he looked like an astronaut recently landed on Mars.

  Men overboard – Stephen and Mark about to snorkel with pink river dolphins.

  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.

  Getting around in the Amazon can be time-consuming. It’s not a happy place for efficient people with a sense of urgency and a superlative quartz watch that is guaranteed to lose no more than 0.5 seconds a day (but then if you’re living so close to the edge that your life is thrown into disarray by normal mechanical timepieces that lose more than 0.5 seconds a day, a bit of time in the Amazon would probably do you some good). There are virtually no deadlines or roads in the region and most of the boats seem to take the best part of a manatee’s 60-year lifetime to reach the end of the jetty.