Amazon Vision of Paradise

"To the man who rides for long through wildlands comes the eventual desire for a city... Finally, he arrives at Isidra.                                         By Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

 

I dreamed for long of taking part in an Amazonian jungle trip, in order to embroiling into this huge fascinating rainforest, never minding if it would be a dangerous, uncomfortable, or too hot adventure for a Southeastern Brazilian, as I, born in São Paulo, an ugly megalopolis 3.000 Km away from the Amazon Basin, but also part of this same huge country. Never minding whether high prices, surely calculated to aim rich foreign tourists' pockets, would have to be paid.

After examining different travel schedules, thus spending many joyful hours looking at amazing maps, finally I chose and reserved ten days in a jungle lodge.

Three hours on a Boeing 737 led us to Manaus, the state capital, where after a 2 days stop, an urban bus took us heading to the city fluvial harbor, where we took a ferry for crossing the huge meeting waters of Negro and Solimões rivers.

On the opposite riverbank a microbus was waiting us to begin a four hour last road trip, which would to penetrate deep into that wonderfully dense jungle.

Our two couples group was delivered then at a tiny igarape cove with harbored canoes, on one of these a stalwart Native Brazilian would drive us through many narrow canals to our destination,  telling us fascinating tales about caimans and piranhas devouring human flesh, as well as on so many wild dotted jaguars (onças), and so on.

After fourty minutes enjoying that amazing path on canoe, a few huts hanging on treetops at river bank emerged on sight, the Juma Lodge, whose whole facility comprised no more than a dozen bungalow.

What a dreaming adventure! That little hotel was virtually destroyed the year before during a massive Amazon Basin flood, so remaining closed for the previous 12 months before our arrival. Phoenix out of the ashes, those exuberant images evoked us the infinite power of Nature manifest through its cycles of annihilation and rebirth.

The exuberant Amazon rainforest wakes up the urge to fight for a World Green Revolution even in people still alien to the coming dire consequences from the catastrophic ongoing Nature's devastation on Earth. A Green Revolution being the only way to save mankind as well as all our fragile planet's still surviving species.

On the second day breakfast was served in a cafeteria whose circular building design mimics yanomami huts, despite such ethnic indigenous group living only near the Venezuelan border, far 800 Km from the Juma river. What a thrill! By no means that lodge was situated on Yanomami land.

Yanomami's mores put them among the most distant ethnic group from contemporary civilization, allowing them behaviors, which bring them to a central place in the interest of anthropologic studies. Well, why have Juma lodge's founders inspired its huts in those so distant from there Indians? Could that mean an attempt to induce wild instinctive phantasies in hosts' minds, like free love, naturist orgies and so on?

What a hot thoughts the rainforest warm weather was then evoking me!

By divine gift, no TV or radio broadcasting signals were available there. I must confess here my lifelong hatred for TV, as well as for any kind of information avalanche! Neither cell nor conventional phone calls could bother anyone there. Even my kindle reader didn't work... Well, for myself, a frustrated megalopolis dweller, gagged for decades by this hellish São Paulo's concrete floor desert , ten days without any contact with the trash and trinkets which belong to this pathetic,  consumerist civilization, increasingly devoid of any meaning, seemed a glimpse into Paradise.

Finally I had a chance, amid the Tropical Jungle, away from everything and every boring people to feel free from our polluted, ugly contemporary civilization. Exactly as it happened within my dreams, daydreams, fantasies and writings throughout my whole life.

Soon after breakfast, tasting a delicious cupuaçu juice and looking at that wide river surrounded by its so dense forest, these ideas kept coming to my mind:

- "Not everything is lost! There is still time and places to authentically enjoy our true, deep selves. Melancholic Lars von Trier is fortunately mistaken: it is not true that nowadays every human act cannot be but repetition of someone else's choices, nor it is factual that we all live under continuous Big Brother style surveillance.

George Orwell -- another grumpy genius -- was wrong too, that 1984's dictator will never dominate the Earth".

- I hadn't travelled alone but rather together with a gorgeous partner, and yet or perhaps even because of this, I quickly noticed two pretty teen sisters nearing me, one being about 16 the other about 18 y o. And 'what a mighty boobs' they had, as uses to say my friend Enzo when facing in similar exuberant sight!

Soon caught their unequivocal glance to this hot, deep looking gorgeous, fortysomething guy, also known as myself.

Oh sure, both sisters were looking at me! The eighteen girl maybe was advancing even a further step in my direction in order to... I got really excited, curious and almost euphoric while pondering:

"This place is definitely a paradise! Perhaps even a Yanomami style orgy is ready to begin here and now".

Here in this dense forest, my long awaited and so frequently fancied orgy will come through, with a lot of thirsty females getting horny for taking just a look at my bulky male package, which by the way is still clothed.

Exactly at the pitch of my strong erotic thoughts, which included perhaps asking a third gorgeous female, a German tourist's partner, to come to my incipient party, the busty girl uttered:

"Hi Sir, you are Wagner's father, aren't you? Henrique Wagner's who studied at Santa Cruz School and now attends Social Sciences at USP? We have studied together at high school Santa Cruz, and now I attend the Institute of Chemistry at the same University of São Paulo."

Awkward, true? My 'super-male' extravagancies supposed by me very well shielded there, perhaps even armored against Big Brother's melancholy civilization, died off so quickly and so easily.

I was daydreaming my fake anonymity could be kept at least till vacations' end, as remaining free for a little while from the huge number of imprisoning bonds to global society. I dreamed like an alone boy, to the point of almost repeating Sartre's silly boldness when saying: "Moi? Non, je n'ai pas de surmoi !" ["Me? No, I don’t have a super ego!"]

 

"The city enclosed the dreamer as young, at Isidra he arrives at advanced age. Desires are already memories".

Invisible Cities, free translation.

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Clicking below you'll access 'Isidra', as narrated by Marco Polo to the Mongol emperor. How about a look at it, perhaps a quick glance before sunset?

Desires and Memory 2