An Interview With A Wet Explorer Traveling Reluctantly on Amazon Tributaries.

Interviewer (INT): Well, you have just spent seven days traveling in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian tributaries of the upper Amazon basin. What would you say is your first impression?

Wet Explorer Traveling Reluctantly on Amazon Tributaries (WET RAT): It’s really wet.

Int: Anything else?

WET RAT: Probably too much to describe. There is so much input, between the sights and sounds and smells. Lots of smells. It is just a constant overload of the senses.

Int: Lets step back a bit here first. What made you decide to go to the Amazon Rainforest? Aren’t you pretty much a beach guy?

WET RAT: Yes. I am. Definitively. I also love the mountains occasionally, so I talked Tam into going on a really cool hike for a few days up into a volcanic crater in the Andes. She took it in stride and walked uphill for three straight days, so I owed her. We had a friend visiting for a few weeks to travel with us, and they both really wanted to come to the jungle to stare at animals for hours on end.

Int: You didn’t want to do it?

WET RAT: It’s not really my thing so much.

Int: Why not? It sounds like it could be kind of cool.

WET RAT: Yeah, well, I’m not saying it was all bad, but the jungles of the torrid zone are a little, hmmm, I don’t know… “squishy” for my tastes.

Int: I thought you loved the water.

WET RAT: I love salt water. Clear, eighty degree salt water with reefs and waves, and beaches, and, well, you know…

Int: The water in the rivers is not clear?

WET RAT: Haha! Nope. Let’s say the color of a strong cup of coffee or the brown of a good, rich hot cocoa. It just depends on where they are flowing from. They call it black water or white water, but the “white” is decidedly not so. It is just moving a little faster and has less tannins in it than the black stuff. So, yeah, brown. It is basically a really great color for hiding the evil little piranhas and weird giant predatory fish. Oh, and all the huge caimans – you know, alligators – swimming around in there.

Int: But you are in the water with sharks all the time. That seems much worse.

WET RAT: No, for me I understand their behavior and feel a lot safer around them. Caimán are just creepy, lurking in the black water waiting for dinner. They just grab you and pull you under without you ever seeing them. No thank you! Haha!

Int: Let’s talk about the transport really quick here. How did you get there?

WET RAT: Well, we left Quito at 11:30 at night and took a bus up over thirteen thousand feet, then down out of the mountains on winding, rough, landslide-blocked roads for about ten hours. We stopped at a little depot and had breakfast, then drove in a truck for another three hours, to another depot at a port – where they didn’t feed us – then jumped on a boat for about three and a half hours to arrive at the lodge where we would stay the first night. That was about four in the afternoon. So that’s, what? About 16 hours? Overnight. With a few minutes of dozing off for sleep in those “super comfortable” seats in a bus constantly careening around switchback corners above ravines — all while the driver giggles maniacally and listens to music cranked to full volume.

Int: Wow. How was that?

WET RAT: Yeah, about like it sounds… And, at the end, the return trip was the same, in opposite. It was still about sixteen hours, but we started at eight o’clock in the morning, so at least a bit more to be seen.

Int: At least once you were up there you got to hike and paddle canoes, and explore, right?

WET RAT: We thought so…

Int: No?

WET RAT: No. It was all done in a thirty-three foot long, three foot wide canoe. It was powered by a fifty-horsepower outboard, but it was a four-stroke, so at least it was pretty quiet — for a motorized boat. Strangely enough, the driver of our boat had been a “driver” for Pablo Escobar from the ages of eleven to twenty-six. He was the nicest guy, and had a habit of giggling maniacally to himself every time we ran the canoe aground or hit one of the three thousand logs floating in the log-brown river.

Int: That sounds okay. You just canoed around during the day, and stayed at the lodge at night?

WET RAT: Hahahaha! It did not work that way. There were a couple nights at the lodge, a couple nights camping in tents on an elevated platform, and only one night that was pretty rough with the tents in the mud, the rain, the bugs… That part wasn’t too bad, actually. The tough part was the rigid schedule and the guide. We were in the canoe by 6:30 or 7:00 every morning, and would spend anywhere from eight to twelve hours in the canoe. It got pretty tiresome. My ass still feels bruised, and I am pretty amazed that we all didn’t end up with blood clots from all the sitting. We all wanted to get out and hike, but there wasn’t much variance – and none was offered. The guide we ended up with was a bird guy — a bird nerd. I like looking at birds a little bit, but that was all he wanted to look at. He was obsessive. He would stop the canoe and record the sounds of every bird we came across, and sit there and pontificate at us for five or ten minutes while he gazed lovingly at the bird with his powerful binoculars. We were provided some tiny “Dora The Explorer”-looking little binoculars that were pretty useless. Then, when he was done, we would move on to the next bird sighting a few minutes later. I got a bunch of blurry pictures of indistinct bird-like shapes, but the majority of them ended up in the scrap heap when we got back and looked at them.

Int: So…

WET RAT: Yeah, there were a few times we saw large animals splashing around in the water in the distance and asked him take us in that direction, but he never did. He would dismiss it as “Oh, it’s probably just a dolphin”, but we actually wanted to see those dolphins.

INT: Dolphins? In the Amazon?

WET RAT: Yeah, they are really cool. They are either pink or grey river dolphins. They are fun to watch, but a lot less playful than their saltwater cousins. They don’t really jump out of the water. You generally just see the dorsal fin, or their weird faces if you are lucky. But we did have quite a few sightings. There are a supposed to be a lot of big critters there in the Amazon. There are actually a ton of Caiman, which we saw a bunch of. We were excited about the chance to see river otters, and especially manatees, but, sadly, we did not see either of those. I think the guide was the biggest factor in the lack of large animal sightings. He was always busy looking up for birds and ignoring our requests to look at the splashy fun things in the water. Well, unless a bird landed in the water, anyway…

INT: That sounds frustrating.

WET RAT: Yeah, it got that way. I think the worst part was actually that the guide was a misogynistic, chauvinistic, know-it-all. He seemed to resent Tam and our friend River for being intelligent, informed women that had distinct expectations for what they wanted to do on this trip. I was personally exhausted by his constant talking down to us, his lecturing, and his mansplaining everything. It got to the point where I just skipped the last day and a half of the activities, just to avoid him.

INT: What else was there to look at?

WET RAT: Well, there are a bunch of mammals that we were hoping to see. We did see a bunch of different varieties of monkeys and a couple sloths, but again, they were way in the tops of the trees, so not too many great pictures of those. There are a few. We really hoped to see jaguars or tapirs — you know, the funny little pig-looking things with the weird noses — or capybaras and agoutis. No luck on any of those. Oh, but we did see a couple of mice, ha ha.

INT: Any snakes? Or amphibians? Lizards?

WET RAT: Strangely, no lizards. We saw, I think, four different types of snakes. There was an Amazon Tree Boa, and we found a Coral Snake in the jungle on one of the few short hikes we did do. That was cool. We found a baby Fer De Lance on the elevated walkway at the lodge. Very cool. Very poisonous, and right on the wood structure where everyone walked. We did come across two snakes that were swimming across the river in front of the boat, which we suspected were Anacondas — at least we wanted to believe it — but, again, the guide decided not to slow down and have a look. Not sure why. I guess because it was not a bird.

INT: So you did see some cool stuff.

WET RAT: We did, but the frustration of sitting in the canoe for so many hours did not seem like a fair trade for a few moments of excitement. Honestly, I can only stare at birds for so long before my ADD kicks in and I get antsy. And sitting, sitting, sitting, watching the river banks go by. And birds.

INT: How was the weather?

WET RAT: It rained. It was sunny. It was blazing hot. It was freezing.

INT: That’s a bit confusing. Can you explain?

WET RAT: Yeah, sorry. It was kind of like that. It would be sunny for a while and you would be sitting in the boat with no shade, sweating and getting sunburned. For an hour or two. Then it would rain like somebody turned the world upside down and the river was falling on you for a few hours. the wind would blow with the rain, and it would be absolutely freezing. Then repeat, alternating every few hours. It never really settled in to one or the other. Each day was pretty much its own version of the same thing. There was no cover on the boat — I guess so that we could be sure to see straight up and watch all of the fucking birds.

INT: Didn’t you have rain gear?

WET RAT: We did, but they provided these ponchos that were really thick and waterproof. We spent a bunch of hours under those. The water would still find some way in under the arms, or end up on your seat somehow. It just contributed to the continuous case of chafing swamp-ass you would have after just a few hours sitting in the boat.

INT: Chafing swamp-ass?

WET RAT: Yep. Your ass gets wet, then you sit on a damp vinyl cushion for twelve hours… Things start to get a bit rashy back there. Do that for five days in a row. No Bueno.

INT: wha…

WET RAT: Oh, yeah, and there were a couple of those ponchos that smelled bad inside. I mean, like fucking funk, man. The guides didn’t seem to notice, but holy shit. You spend three hours in a tropical downpour sealed up in one of those funky ponchos and you start to question your life choices.

INT: Like going on this trip in the first place?

WET RAT: You know, I thought long and hard about that… Overall, I am glad I did it. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it was a memorable experience. Just not my usual cup of tea. I did take a lot away from the time there. Visually it was pretty stunning. The way the black water acts like a mirror creates these amazing reflections of the landscape. Sure, it got terribly redundant after so many hours, but every now and then we would pull into a new lagoon or the sun would come through the clouds in a certain way that it would just touch your soul. It had its moments.

INT: It sounds pretty cool, in spite of the rest of it.

WET RAT: Yeah, parts of it were incredible. One afternoon the girls went for a walk with the guide. They like to stare at bugs and frogs a lot more than me, so I stayed back at the lodge to write a bit and play guitar (and to avoid having to be lectured at by the guide). Some really adorable monkeys — some type that we hadn’t seen yet — came around and started playing around right in front of me. They would come really close, but if I moved to take a picture or anything they would run back off to the trees. It was kind of a fun game. Stuff like that was cool. The girls missed those, but I did manage to sneak a few pictures for them.

INT: Were they mad?

WET RAT: Not so much. Not until that night when they realized that their hike had gotten both of them covered in hundreds of chiggers, little biting nasty bugs, and they were covered in gnarly little red bites all over their entire torsos and bums. They both looked super miserable, squirming around, trying not to itch.

INT: Yuck. Did you get anything like that?

WET RAT: Not really. I actually think I may have smelled so bad the entire time the bugs wouldn’t come near me. Ha ha! I did have a couple of mosquito bites, and, oh, yeah, we all found a couple of ticks on us. I hate ticks. There were a million bugs though. It is the rainforest after all.

INT: Im not sure I would have thought it was worth it. You really think it was?

WET RAT: I guess I still do. Would I do it again? Hell no. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, right? Yes, the guide was annoying and kind of ruined much of the experience for me, and we sat and rode around in a canoe much more than we got to explore and adventure, but we saw some stuff. So, yeah, I guess I’m glad I did it. I will have the visuals of the sun and clouds on the water, with the reflections of these magnificent trees over that crazy mirror of black water for years to come. I was glad I got to see those river dolphins and snakes and monkeys. I did find my spirit bird. They were the goofiest-looking things in the jungle, but I liked them. The Ecuadorians call them “stinky turkeys”. So, yeah, my spirit bird for sure. No, overall it was an experience: good, bad, tiresome, beautiful, bug-infested, hot, cold, wet, stinky, sticky, entertaining, frustrating, memorable, deplorable, adorable, the list could go on forever.

INT: Wow. What an experience, then. The whole thing sounds so…

WET RAT: Torrid? Haha. Yeah, I guess it was okay.