By Australian journalist Philip Luker

The Colombian Air Force plane that took me with crates of beer, two dancing girls and condoms for a hundred bored and lonely soldiers in Leticia, on the borders of Colombia, Brazil and Peru, did so because Brazil once invaded Colombia.

Ever since, soldiers had been stationed there in case Brazil tried to do it again. It hasn’t.

I photographed the little boy looking at my Amazon ferryboat—far more humble that the tourist ships that now go up and down the river—soon after my two-propeller plane had arrived in Leticia.

Colombian dancing girls did high kicks

That night I was invited, along with the cheering soldiers, to see the girls perform dressed not in bikinis but in old-fashioned two-piece swimsuits–Brazil is socially conservative.

Visualise the show: The girls doing high kicks to the sound of a long-playing musical-comedy record and cheers from the troops and me

The officers had arranged to be entertained by the girls afterwards.
Leticia had a dirt main street, a few shops selling nothing much at all and a row of wooden houses with thatched rooves.

Life is still the same in some smaller Amazon villages. Siesta lasts from noon to 4pm.

Boats going down the Amazon

Now, Leticia is a busy port for many luxury tourist boats going and down the river, but when I was there, only one boat did this and it had no timetable.

I asked local people when the next boat would arrive. The reply was always, “No se, senor” (Don’t know, senor). “Quizas manana” (Maybe tomorrow).

Colombian law prevented the boat from coming to Leticia, only as far as the next village down the river in Brazil, Tabatinga.

So I pleaded with a boy living next door to my pension to tell me as soon as he heard it had arrived at Tabatinga.

One sleepy afternoon he woke me from my siesta (there was nothing else to do) and said, “Zee boat come, senor”.

Amazon trip in third class

The boy paddled me in his canoe down the river to Tabatinga and I boarded the ferryboat, asked for the captain and how much was a trip in Third Class.

He quietly led me to the open deck, where local people had strung-up hammocks.

I asked the captain about First Class. He showed me a good four-birth cabin with the luxury of sheets on each bed. Zee cost? Ten American dollars, including three meals a day for the week-long trip to Manaus, half way down the Amazon. Naturally I agreed.

Amazon boat had no refrigeration

The boat had no refrigeration but as soon as I saw two cows in a small pen on the deck and turtles and monkeys in other pens, I guessed they were to feed us.

As we churned our way slowly down the Amazon, I felt sorry for the monkeys I was probably eating in the dining room.

American society dollar-structured

The only other passengers who spoke English were two American teachers.

One significant thing they said was that although both were graduates and full-time high school teachers, many other Americans would not consider them successful because they were paid fair but not large salaries, so much was (and is) American society dollar-structured.

At each riverside village, the boat tied up at a rickety wharf or at the riverbank and local people brought cooked food and live monkeys in cages to sell to the third-class passengers, who had to provide their own food. Again, I felt sorry for the monkeys.

Villagers used Amazon as a toilet

At one village on stilts in the swampy river bank, an American church missionary called John told me the villagers were lethargic, infected with worms because they and their cattle used the river as a toilet.

So he’d urged them to always boil river water before drinking it. “They did boil the water when I was watching them, but as soon as I stopped doing so, they went back to drinking unboiled water,” he said.

Even then, logging and cattle-raising companies were raiding the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest forest and home to ten per cent of all animal and plant species.

John said: “The cattle and timber raiders are spreading diseases such as influenza among the remaining tribal Indians, who have fled further into the jungle because they feel threatened.”

Amazon tribes remain isolated

Native people in 350 different tribes comprise nine per cent of the Amazon’s 125,000 people and most of the tribes remain isolated.

Many scientists blame increasing deforestation on Brazil’s aggressive, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army officer.

Three-quarters of Amazon rainforest loss has been in Brazil, which since 1960 has offered incentives for farmers to clear forest to raise cattle.

People in villages like John’s live in wooden, thatched houses on stilts to avoid the river in the rainy season, when it expands up to 38 km wide. They grow vegetables, fruit and corn and hunt and fish.

They have little chance of education or health care but in recent years Amazon villages in Brazil are visited by a health-services boat every few weeks and many villages receive lessons via generator-powered television sets, which also give them news and entertainment.

John told me the most dangerous Amazon animal is the Anaconda, a semi-aquatic snake that squeezes its prey—sometimes humans–to death like a cobra.

Piranha fish have a dreadful reputation for stripping animals to the bone and eating them alive but rarely attack humans.

I didn’t test this by having an Amazon swim, one other reason being that the river is full of leeches.

Brazilian spider the world’s most venomous

Other Amazon creatures are not any prettier. You can touch a Poison Dart Frog and get a shot of enough poison to kill you; the Amazon Giant Centipede, with legs 30 centimetres long, can overpower and kill lizards, snakes, frogs and birds; the Brazilian Wandering Spider is the world’s most venomous spider; then there are black Caiman crocodiles and elusive Jaguars.

The Amazon was named by a Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana, who in 1541 was the first European to sail down it from one end to the other, on his way encountering female warriors like the Amazons of Greek legend, which is why he named the river Amazon.

Huge Amazon rainforest lost

It is the world’s largest river by volume of water and holds one-fifth of all the water on the earth’s surface. It has 3,000 fish species, the world’s largest number.

Ninety billion tons of carbon are stored in Amazon rainforests, the world’s largest. But 750,000 square kilometres of rainforest have been destroyed for logging, mining or cattle-raising.

The only city on the Amazon is Manaus, which has a remarkable opera house called Teatro Amazonas, built in 1896 during the Amazon rubber boom—before plastics were discovered.

Ships that exported rubber to Europe brought back art works, bricks and 36,000 ceramic tiles, used to build the opera house.

The days have gone from when a rubber baron gave his horse Champagne to drink but Teatro Amazonas is still the home of the Amazonas Opera Festival and Amazonas Philharmonic Orchestra.

Manaus now a tax-free city

Manaus started to recover from the rubber slump in about 1950 and became a tax-free city for manufacturing.

Currently two million people live there, a sharp contrast with the sleepy town I visited.