by Peter Fleming

Next week, Linda and I fly off to a Brazilian adventure. We are woefully unprepared for this journey. If you happen to know anything at all about the Amazon between Santarém and Manaos, please do Email me. I know there's a copy of Victory Garden somewhere in Santarém, but of Amazonia I'm shockingly ignorant. What’s the best field guide? What should I eat?

Much of the preparation has involved inoculations and insect repellent and paperwork. For the rest, I have this fine 1933 memoir by Ian Fleming’s big brother.

"Sao Paulo," he writes, "is like Reading, only much farther away.” Fleming’s eye and fancy had been caught by a small advertisement in The Times that sought two extra guns for a sporting expedition that would also inquire into the fate of one Colonel Fawcett who had disappeared in the Brazilian interior in 1925. He happens across a school friend walking near Fleming’s Bloomsbury apartment.

Roger was walking along Gower Street. He had passed the School of Tropical Hygiene. He had passed the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In one minute, in less than one minute, he would have reached the Slade.... so I called across the street: "Roger, come to Brazil."

"What?" said Roger: playing, I dare say, for time.

"You’d better come to Brazil” I said, getting into a car.

“Why?” said Roger cautiously (or perhaps incautiously), also getting into the car. We set down Gower Street: past the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art: past the School of Tropical Hygiene. I talked rapidly. At the end of Gower Street Roger got out.

“I'll let you know for certain on Monday,” he said.

I'm going to be away from the office, and offline, for the next two weeks.

I don't think I've spent two weeks entirely off the net since 1992. But there's not much wifi, I expect, in the Amazon rain forest. So, I've brought pen and paper and watercolor, and hope to do some writing the old fashioned way.

If you need Eastgate stuff, email Eastgate's order desk, or phone +1 617 924 9044.

We left Boston on Friday, spent the evening walking along Miami's South Beach with an astonishing number of Spring Breakers and snacking on Moqueca at SushiSamba, and by evening the next day we were tootling up the Amazon and Santarém was far, far behind.

The four of us were the late-arriving and mysterious Outsiders -- the ten fellow travelers who made up the roster of our jaunt all knew each other and had already negotiated supplies and endured the great bed-linen flap. Nobody was paying much attention to the Fork-tailed Flycatcher sitting on a telephone wire on the pier. I was nonchalant about it. I've seen one before: in 2001, one of these birds flew North for the winter, got mixed up, and landed in Newburyport instead of Brazil. In Boston it's a celebrity; in Santarém, it's just a bird.

The Amazon is like that.

But all that was squared away, and after a brief delay as our Guide's passport formalities were formalized by Authorities eager to see that every T was crossed, we found ourselves in the middle of the immense river, silent when we weren't colliding with stray, unseen logs. (I slept amazingly on the Amazon, not even noticing when great floating logs slammed into the bows a few inches from the bed and roused everyone else on board.)

The night was black, the stars dramatic, the Southern Cross shining above other equatorial horizon. A few cooking fires occasionally flickered on the river bank, and our own search light stabbed out into the river from time to time. At dawn, the river was chocolate brown, rich with the silt of the Andes.

We stopped at the small village of Sao Fernando at the Boca de Valeria at mid-morning. A group of houses, some ramadas, and a school face the river. More houses are found up along the tributary stream that meets the Amazon here.

Linda met a friend who took for her to visit her school. Nick and I encountered a very nice woman who showed us the family compound upstream and her pet toucan; her son Kennedy took us further along and introduced us to fresh cocoa fruit (here they have many more tasty fruits you've never heard of than you would imagine) and a variety of birds. Then he rowed us out to see the lilypads that grow along the river banks — and the wonderful Wattled Jacanas that scoot among them.

We passed many of these villages in the coming days, riverfront stops where a few families cluster around a school or a church. Everything faces the river; the river is really the only road, and the kids seem to learn boat-handling as soon as they can walk.

For hour after hour, we sail upstream and pass settlements — some a scattering of houses, others with paved streets and courthouses and power stations — that literally face the river. People coming and people going, but everyone comes and goes by river. Parintins, too, with 50 or 100,000 people, sits on an island; when the town fills up with visitors for the Boi-Bumbá festival, everyone comes and goes by boat.

Still, as we passed upstream lots of people stopped to watch us.

The great conflict in the Amazon is simply that it's home to a lot of people, and it's also a vast bank of resources that the whole planet needs. The forest is fragile — ironically, the soil of the Amazon is often shallow and easily eroded; take away a few trees and what's left is sand. But it's home, and people need groceries.

It's going to be a terrible mess in the coming years, but in the mean time you can have fun with a few friends and a smooth plank. The kids are growing up inside the planetary bank. Someday, we're going to need to settle up.

It's not just a bank, it's a market, too. From time to time, we'd heave to and pick up some just-caught fish, or some blocks of cheese from a riverfront farm. Again, split loyalties: should ecotourists be eating cheese from ranches in the Amazon, when it's probably not a good idea to encourage chopping down good rainforest to make bad pasture? But then again, it's better to support local people, surely, than to cart in food from far away and visit in a hermetic bubble.

The fish, especially, were terrific.

At night, we rowed out with some guides and swept the river banks with flashlights, looking for eyes staring back at us. Caimans have shiny eyes, and (apparently) you can reach down and grab them while they're blinking.

They're lovely little reptiles. And sloths are absolutely adorable.

We met the sloth the next morning, thanks to a group of young people who rowed out to meet us with some Cute Animals To Show The Tourists. Again, this is doubtful ecotourism, but it's probably better to employ some kids to show us semi-tame animals than to employ the kids to hunt them. Even the little girl with the Caiman was extraordinarily agile at handling her canoe.

You really don't understand sloths at all until you see them up close: they're built a lot like primates but they aren't related. They're related to armadilloes and anteaters, they just wind up with a similar body plan because it makes sense for living in trees. I suppose they look at us as a strange kind of tree that they can try hugging -- because, when you're a sloth, tree hugging is what you do.

The new generation of image-stabilized cameras is extraordinary at some things. Here's a Green-and-rufous Kingfisher, taken offhand from a moving boat.

This is hand-held 1/160sec from a rocking rowboat with an outboard motor, at 12x zoom. I grabbed three "what-the-hell" shots, and two were certainly good enough for bird ID help.

It's not just distant wildlife; here's a tiny drop of latex from a rubber tree. I didn't want to be obnoxious about the camera or crowd the others, so I stood well behind the others and zoomed in: height does have advantages. The problem is that the rainforest is (by definition) not very bright, so this is 12x and 1/40sec.

Not art, but surprisingly good for a run-of-the-mill consumer camera (a Canon S3).

You never know who you'll meet on the trail:

The Amazon meets the great Rio Negro at Manaus.

The Amazon flows quickly and is filled with silt from the Andes. Many of its tributaries are fast, silt-filled rivers, too.

The Rio Negro, like lots of other Amazon tributaries, drains a large basin (and so it's a large river) but it's not a mountain river and it doesn;t have much silt. Because the rainforest soil is poor and thin, plants have a hard time growing: leaf growth is about 50% slower here than in other regions. That’s one reason these energy-rich, nutrition-poor plants have evolved such a potent biochemical vocabulary; when you've got lots of sunlight and need to protect every leaf, it makes sense to synthesize all sorts of toxins and insectides and thorns and anything else that might help. Evenetually, all those leaves fall into the river, which becomes a dark biochemical tea.

When they Amazon and the Rio Negro meet, they run side by side in the same river bed without much mixing for many miles.

At Novo Airão, there's a riverside fish place where you can tie up and feed the pink dolphins that swim in the Rio Negro. You can swim here, too, without too much worrying about pirhanas — because the dolphins find pirhana very tasty indeed.

The dolphins are free to come and go as they like; five or six seemed inclined to play this morning. They like the free fish a lot, and don't mind a few people wandering about. The people don't seem to be much competition for the fish. Occasionally, a dolphin might give you a bump or a little nibble, just to remind you to behave.

Novo Airão has groceries and taxicycles and lots of political signage. And of course it has internet cafés. And there I was, too.

We have photos, too, of Linda swimming with the dolphins, but they're in Awe's camera. Hope they come out!

Here's a fish from the Manaus fish market. It's a fresh-water fish -- a river fish. They catch lots of these. They're big (and delicious) fish.

We had a steak of one of these fish, baked on a bed of herbs and banana (or plaintain?) and basted with stock. It has the sweetness of monkfish and the texture of New England cod.

Apparently, these are frugivores: they make a living from finding fruits that fall into the river! Mangos, papayas, cocoa. Lots of fruits — here's a sign from the Manaus market.

Every morning on the river, it seemed, we had a different new fruit juice for breakfast, and later celebrated yet another amazing bit of wildlife with ever more exotic mimosas. There are lots more fish as well.

The market is right at the riverfront, on a busy road lined with tiny stalls selling boat passage up and down the river. It's exactly the way Peter Fleming describes it: boats coming, boats leaving (Sai Hoje!) but nobody knowing exactly when.

Whether in Novo Airão or Manaus or even in Belem, the street in Brazil has a distinctive color and energy that is very different from the streets of North America or Europe or Asia. This seems true on a quiet corner of isolated Novo Airão

or the docks of Manaus

At Belem, we had lunch at Lá Em Casa, Paulo Martins' famed headquarters for the cuisine of Para. (Thanks to Bryan Sadowski for the tip: do have I terrific readers or what?!) I had a lovely crab soup, rich with peppery greens, followed by an inspired cordilheira of seven kinds of Amazon fish, each prepared distinctly, on two lovely plates. The highlight was probably a lovely stew of a sweet, chewy shrimp steeped in a yellow vinegar citrus broth with electric cress, a lip-numbing spinachy green.

The last night on the river, we'd tied up on a sandbar in midstream and the crew spent a couple of hours offloading chairs and tables and building firepits and assembling incredible, extravagant centerpieces from whatever vegetation came to hand and machete. The cook dug a firepit, cut some brush, and made a wonderful wood grill. Luis the naturalist made capirinhas as we waited and watched the churrasco cook. Huge pork ribs. Several kinds of fish, piraraçu for one, wrapped in foil and herbs. A lovely ham-and-sausage salad. Manioc with everything. And, of course, the last of the champagne.