Posted on June, 28 2006

By Ana Cíntia Guazzelli (with Cláudio Maretti)

Today we started going down the Sucunduri River, in the state of Amazonas. After nearly four days between the sky and the earth, we’re back in the water, just like we did during the first stage of the expedition along the Juruena River. We’re occupying four aluminium canoes, and a wood boat carries the heavy load and our researchers. If everything goes as planned, the day after tomorrow, June 30, we will be in the municipality of Apuí, where the Juruena-Apuí Expedition will end. The expedition started on June 13, in the state of Mato Grosso.

Today our camp was set up on a huge rocky elevation on the edge of the Fortaleza waterfall, in the Sucunduri River. Because we arrived at about 5.30 p.m., we had to be quick in putting up the tents and taking a bath in the river before it was completely dark.

Differently from Juruena, here we do not have any light burners, and so we can admire an even more beautiful, star-studded sky. Some get warm around a small bonfire (the temperature plummets at night). And, as I wait for Zig, I disturb the place’s calm with the dull noise of the generator, which will not be turned off before we send the text and photos for today.

We have German visitors. The Vox TV crew, who will produce a programme on our expedition, are escorting us for this final stage. They are having quite a hard time with bee and black fly bites, in addition to the outright lack of comfort in the camps. Also – poor fellows! –, in their first day of on-site work, they were in the worst site of all, the Sucunduri dome, together with the researchers coordinated by the Amazonas Secretariat for the Environment and Sustainable Development (SDS).

They were far from the river – from the water, that is –, and to make things even worse, the area, because of all the plants around, was teeming with bees and wasps, in addition to the black flies, of course! After one and a half day of work, they were exhausted and yearning to leave that place.

Then they went to Terra Preta, where the infrastructure capabilities were better. They even had a bathroom, if we can call that a bathroom at all – a small wooden, thatched-roof cabin, with a zinc plate for a door and a wooden floor of about 2m x 1m and a rectangular hole right in the middle covering a ditch going down a few meters.

There’s no toilet, but you can use a simple technique: you spread your legs halfway and place both feet on the wood so that the hole is right in the middle. Then you squat and hope you don’t miss the hole.

We’re leaving an area that struck the researchers because of the diversity of its landscapes – very diversified plant formations in short distances, thus making up a mosaic. Each of them has unique characteristics, and the local fauna and flora are often different from those in other regions in the Amazon.

Catching sight of animals is not something common in the Amazon, especially mammals. We were lucky anyway. We did see some tapirs at the Monte Cristo waterfall, and we also saw a white-lipped peccary, a grey woolly monkey (Lagothrix cana), and they did not shy away from Zig Koch’s lenses. The researchers saw other animals.