River Dolphins
Tuesday, August 2nd, 20051 August 2005 (Monday) – To Manaus, Brazil
Unbelievable. I had been here on the riverboat for 5 nights now! OK, I had some battles with my cold and the food, but overall, my spirits were up and I remained cheery and smiley. Yes, the spirit of Maqroll had stayed with me.
Depending on where the sun was shining, I would sit on the side with the shade. The riverboat usually hugged closer to one side of the bank. Now, I happened to be facing the bank with the wide expanse of water on its side. I marvelled at how the river surface alternatively changed from a smooth, golden, undulating piece of silk to full of tiny, little ripples and then, back again later. I breathed in the morning air and gazed and gazed. Then, I spotted a hump! Yes, again, the hump! It was going in the opposite direction and my eyes followed it for a while before it disappeared. I was sure of it – it must have been a river dolphin! Wow, what luck!
My faithful companion of this riverboat trip had been Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘The War of the End of the World’, a fictional book but based on a true event in Brazil, very descriptive of a religious uprising that happened in 1897 in Canudos, Bahia and the military attacks against it. As it is about war, the description had been absolutely gory, as Vargas Llosa did not mince his words with the mutilations, the rapes, the wholesale massacres. Each time I came across something revolting, I would grimace and lift my eyes up from the book. And during these moments, I got a chance to gaze at the change in scenery.
Yes, the scenery does change a little. While at first, it had been truly wild jungle with very tall trees and thick foliage, occasionally with a little wooden house or just small pockets of land with some houses, we had started to come across more and more cleared settlements, grazing plots of land for cattle, alternating with forest or swamps. Sometimes, I looked up and the bank would be very far away, a mere thin line in the horizon… other times, before I know it, we would be much closer to the bank where it was possible to see the trees and houses.
And it was during one of these sudden looking up from the book that I spotted a few humps, here and there, and realised that we must have a pod of river dolphins just swimming alongside us! Wow, I looked around me and no one else seemed to be paying attention. Then, they were gone.
Well, they were my memories to keep.
swesn