Manaus day 2: Jungle survival day

Today we took a hike in the jungle to learn survival skills if we ever got lost. We learned which roots were poisonous (good for blow dart tips), how to drink water from cut liana vines, the need to use vines to make something to sleep off the ground (to avoid the ants), practiced weaving palm fronds, and even how to eat some larvae that live inside a palm’s nut. Wandering through a maze of verdant green while doing this, my main takeaway was that I don’t ever want to get lost in the jungle. Honestly, other than upstream of Manaus on a tributary of a tributary, I had no idea where we were. 

Our host and captain cuts a type of coconut open with a machete for us to eat the contents

gag reflex kicking in while attempting to consume live larva

drinking from liana vines

palm frond weaving--an art, not a survival skill

On our way back to the lodge, we stopped at a dock so we could go for a quick swim in the river to cool off. The water wasn’t that much cooler, but it still felt nice. Lunch at the lodge was another type of fish and rice with fruit, etc. before spending the afternoon napping and relaxing.

group swim

Towards sunset, we headed out again to a different part of the river to fish for piranhas. The boat stopped near some mangroves and the guide handed us bamboo poles with bits of raw chicken to attach to the hook. Lowering my line into the dark water, I quickly felt a gentle tug but there was no fish when I yanked it back up. This occurred several times until the meat was gone. I learned they’re nibblers and pretty fast at it, too. When I finally did catch one, it was mostly bone with nasty teeth! We easily used more meat than we caught in this endeavor, but the one question I never got answered was how the piranhas knew to swarm in that part of the river, but not in the part where we’d been swimming earlier.  Mildly disconcerting, but we were safe so they clearly knew what they were doing. Going back to the Rio Negro and safely away from the piranhas, we docked on an island with a white sandy beach to enjoy swimming a bit more before it got dark. The swim ended with a rain shower, and we learned how effective the rain tarps are for keeping the inside of the boat dry.

showing off my catch

That night, we were treated to two types of local wildlife. The first was going out in the boat to spot caimans. Being out in the pitch black and shining our spotter light from the boat into the brush, searching for a reflecting pair of eyes, brought back memories of when we did that on the front lawn as kids, pretending the neighborhood cats were lions. Thankfully the bigger ones were at a distance, and the little one we got to hold was…little--also probably a little stunned by the lights.

Max with a caiman

The other species were some local fisherman, who’d paid to stay on the lodge’s porch overnight and were a little too obvious in their (failed) attempts to impress the ladies in our group with their strutting around in their vibrant underwear after enjoying too many beers. Instead, we enjoyed some hearty rounds of Uno with a young couple from Russia.