Paragominas, Brasil

I’m less than two hundred miles from Belém and still waiting for the terrain to flatten to a coastal plane.  It has been a roller coaster the past three days with one punishing eight and nine per cent climb of a half mile or more after another.  My legs are stronger than they were in the earlier part of the travels when such was my diet for hundreds of miles, but it still saps the energy and reduces my mileage to less than seventy miles a day.  

If the terrain weren’t so demanding, I’d be in Belem by now, but since the heat hasn’t been a factor, it’s not of too much concern.  I had hoped to be across the Amazon and on my way up the coast to the Guianas by January 1, when I presumed the heat would be escalating.  It may still, but I’m still grateful for every day I’m not roasting and totally preoccupied craving shade and cold water.


I have entered a region where there are vast expanses where the junglish terrain has been eliminated and replaced by agriculture that is struggling to prosper.  The brown, scraggly vegetation gives a look of desolation, especially where it bridges upon the lush original vegetation.

Even though there have only been brief spurts of intense heat, I relish every cold water dispenser I come upon.  They are truly a national treasure.  Some gas stations even provide ice cubes alongside their reservoirs of ice cold water.  Hotels and restaurants and shops often have mini-versions of the large thirty-to-fifty gallon tanks of the service station ice water.  

It’s as if the Brasilian constitution mandates that all are entitled to ice cold water.  Every sip of such water is such a deep pleasure, it could easily appease whatever unrest might be festering in the masses.  It is the ultimate opiate in the hotter climes.  When one can count on ice water when it’s hot, what more could one want?

There haven’t been any of the rest areas on the highway with cold water that came along every thirty miles or so up to Brasilia.  They were an unnecessary luxury with the abundance of service stations, but I did appreciate the easy comfort they provided, being able to sit in an air conditioned shelter charging my iPad and doing a little reading and writing.

I’ve been extending my eating stops a little longer than usual, unable to put down the book I’m reading, “The River of Doubt” from 2005 by Candice Millard, on Teddy Roosevelt’s Amazonian adventure in 1913 a year after he failed to win a third term as President running on the Bull Moose ticket.  He was drawn to South America as his son Kermit was working there.  He’d been to Africa a couple of times on hunting trips, but never to South America.  

He and his son joined up with a Brasilian military officer who had extensively explored the Amazon.  He proposed they make a descent of a major river that was a tributary of the Amazon that had not been mapped, a river known as the River of Doubt.  Roosevelt thought that was a splendid idea.  It took a month simply to reach the river with teams of mules and oxen hauling their gear.  

There were more than twenty people in the group, including a doctor and porters and a naturalist.  Roosevelt dismissed a catholic priest from the US who helped organize the expedition when he demanded that he be carried across the plain on a chair held by four of the porters.  That left just one other American on the trip, the naturalist, along with the two Roosevelts.

From the very start of their way down the river, they had serious doubts if they would survive its many rapids and the indigenous people who’d had little contact with the outside world.  It took as many as three or four days to portage around some of the rapids.  They only managed 68 miles in their first month.  They knew it could be six hundred miles or more before they reached the Amazon.  

There was extreme doubt their food would last, especially since they weren’t very successful finding much along the way.  They has to severely ration it, with Roosevelt losing fifty-five pounds.  They continually had to jettison items they were carrying.  Several of their dugout canoes were destroyed in the rapids, forcing them to take days to carve out new ones.

One of their members died in an early rapid and another was murdered by very unstable porter who had been stealing food.  Roosevelt suffered a severe gash to his leg.  It became infected and he was so incapacitated that he was ready to consume a vial of poison he had brought in the event he became a burden to the mission and endangered the survival of the rest of its members.  His son would not allow it, saying he would carry him out dead or alive, even though he was greatly weakened by malaria.

I knew he survived and the crew got down the river, but the book was so spell-binding with one life-or death challenge after another I couldn’t just read one chapter at a time.   The unrelenting rapids were even worse than the unrelenting hills that have been my lot, with both of us wondering when they would come to an end.  At least I haven’t had to walk up any of the hills, though I have wished at times that I had a lower gear. 

They were feasted upon by all manner of bugs, including ants.  Certain trees had up to forty different ant colonies inhabiting them that they had to be careful not to disturb.  Roosevelt avoided a lethal snake bite when it’s fangs couldn’t penetrate his leather boot. 

Roosevelt received a hero’s welcome when he arrived back in New York.  Mapping the river was such a significant event that the river was renamed for Roosevelt.  The first two missions that attempted to repeat his trip ended in failure.  Both he and his son wrote books about the adventure, as did the Brasilian co-leader and the American naturalist George Cherrie. 

Roosevelt wasn’t the only prominent American environmentalist drawn to the Amazon in his later life.  John Muir made the Amazon his last major journey as well, two years before Roosevelt.  He was drawn to it to see the ancient araucaria trees.  A couple books have been published on his visit by the Sierra Club, one by Laurel Bemis in 1993, “John Muir in the Amazon Basin,” and another by Michael Branchi in 2001, “John Muir’s Last Journey.” They are not available as ebooks so they’ll have to wait until my return.

I only hope this isn’t my last journey.