I am writing this from the middle deck of the good ship, 11th of May. A strange name perhaps, but Brazil is filled with dates whose significance seems to have been lost through time. For three days we have been slowly cutting up the Amazon, eating away at the 800 kilometres that separate Belem from the city of Santarem. And most of this time has been spent in a hammock.
Life in a hammock is a cross between speed dating and a trade fair. People look at your wares – your hammock, your bags, your clothing and the knot you tie to affix your hammock. You are judged according to all of these things. We scored high on bags, but low on knots. And as soon as your hammock is up you start to scout. Who is next to me? Are they drunk? Will they vomit on my face in the night? Are they hiding a screaming child in that fold? Will they mind when I fart? All of these things require snap judgements and have far reaching consequences. These people will be within inches of you for the next 72 hours. If they have stashed a pet cockerel in their pillow and you fail to notice, there go your lazy mornings.
Our bed fellows were a motley bunch of strangers who ebbed and flowed like the waters of the river. But four central characters have entertained and tormented us in equal measure:
The man from God. Raul was 84. He was travelling all the way up the river to Peru, to have heart surgery. He was a missionary with a hatred of alcohol and an addiction to cards. Every night he would join us on the top deck to shuffle and watch as we whiled the night away. He was also fond of punching us in the kidneys from his hammock, strung below ours. He was a kindly soul, with a lot of strength left in his arms.
Edwan and Valeria. Edwan wanted to be in the French foreign legion. But he faces a problem. He is currently banned from French Guiane for ten years after being caught people smuggling. So he is biding his time. Doing a bit of street fighting and selling perfume. After three days he offered us a couple of sample bottles of Amazon Spice and a promise that he could help us out if we ever got in trouble. Valeria was 14 years his junior and the greenest eyes of anybody I have met. Edwan said it was because her mother was black. I wasn’t going to argue.
The devil child. We do not know his name. And we don’t want to. 72 hours is just long enough for a sweet looking child to fall off the cherubic pedestal, plummet through the ranks of tolerability and crash into the barrier of Satanism. He shouted in our ears, ripped our books from our hands and pulled earphones from our heads. Bored, under-stimulated, difficult home, we came up with a list of excuses. We wanted to believe them. But perhaps he was just evil.
The golden family – a photographer’s dream. Beautiful children, patient parents, and nowhere for them to run when we turned our cameras on. They slept quietly at night, played peacefully during the day, and when we turned our lenses to them they smiled their perfectly symmetrical smiles and opened their wide eyes a little bit wider.
And so it was for 72 hours. We laughed, sighed, took sleeping tablets and ate the same meal (rice, beans, spaghetti and beef) eight times in a row. As an experience it ranks up their with container ship travel as a fantastic way to see the world and meet new people. As a way of life, it loses points on lack of personal space and chronic constipation. This will hopefully be our last long boat journey until we get to Columbia, where we have to somehow find a way of crossing into Central America without passing through Costa Rica (our car has been banned due to it being right hand drive). Thoughts on a postcard please.
