6.30ishpm, Tuesday May 23, Amazon camp .... in the jungle

I am sitting on a broken cane-weave chair overlooking the Siapa River, an island of trees directly in front of me, a cloudy sky going a washed-out watery light blue and tinging a black cloud orangey-pink above me.


writing at sunset


Andreas, one of our two travelling mates, just brought me an enormous green wrinkly twisted seed pod filled with big yellow seeds embedded in a white moist fluff that looks like bread. The seeds taste like heaven, sweet and flowery.

My three fellow travellers and I and our two guides took a four- hour boat ride to get here, with another hour dedicated to playing in a waterfall.


off to play in the falls of the Orinoco

Andreas is a malaria researcher on exchange in Merida from Germany for his medical degree. Our other companion is an Italian photographer who does not speak much English. Both are handsome, Andreas with bright shiny dark brown eyes, the photographer with a gentle demeanor and full head of grey hair.

The four of us left this morning from Puerto Ayacucho in a Jeep, with the tour booker, a colleague of his and our native guide. We stopped to clamber up a rock mound and look over the forest and then continued to the port, a parking lot town in a military zone. On the way we passed little towns and missions, with houses of mud brick, painted concrete, or thatch, with tin or palm-thatched rooves. The concrete houses resemble Australia's public toilets, with their multi-square ventilation grates in place of windows. MS explained that missions are literally on a mission. It is not necessarily to produce something, but could be to house women or children or achieve 100% literacy. In return for the mission, residents get medical care.

On our river journey down the Orinoco and Sipapo rivers we passed many cleared spaces and a few native villages - hardly the heart of the Amazon.

It is almost perfect here, in this cleared jungle space with the light sounds of bugs and frogs and other chirping, whistling things, the gently rippling water reflecting the trees and the sky, the mud brick and leaf-weave round huts of the camp, a lagoon down a path from which emerge the trees of the forest, one masquerading as a telephone pole right in the centre of my view. I saw a tiny green snake rear up its body and a pineapple growing. I've never seen a pineapple growing before - so cute, emerging in the centre of a sprig of ground palm.


cute, cute, cute

The only things marring the scene are the occasional sounds of boat motors and the mosquitoes and bugs, but they aren't too bad yet. Now I can smell dinner cooking.

Just before arriving at the camp we stopped at a native village to get supplies. Hot and dusty, five little children graced us with their picturesque presence. An older little girl in a sundress held two younger children with each hand and a little boy in underwear and a blue and yellow beanie ran ahead, smiling back at us flirtatiously.

Ah-Ah-ah-ah-Uh-uh-oh-Ah, as Tarzan so eloquently says. I am in the Amazon! I wonder how many people dream of travelling the Orinoco because of Enya?

The Orinoco and Sipapo rivers are considerably wider than the river in Canaima and the forest different, as promised, but also a bit flooded from rain. There are hills and the occasional tepui in the distance - one of which we are going to hike tomorrow - but it is not as green and mountainous as Canaima, no forested walls in front of us. Beautiful, with the expected occasional stand of palms and spurt of ferns in the tall long trees and clinging vines.