Bota!…. Bota!!!… yeah sure, pink dolphins. Haha, no more Caiparinhas for you! Maybe the origin of the mermaid myth? No to that idea too. And there they are, these usually completely solitary animals. Not one (the norm), not two (the exception), but today the full show as 8 of these lovely creatures swim and play around and under our canoe. Flesh colored, 8 feet long, weighing in at about 400 pounds, they are as wonderful to watch as their ocean cousins. An evolutionary quirk, they have adapted over the millennia to freshwater living. Here we are more than 1,000 miles from the ocean in a submerged forest being given the full show by these seemingly happy-go-lucky mammals. The original peoples of the Amazon held them in a special place in their own pantheon of spiritual beings and therefore did not hunt or even harass them. I believe they have no predators and therefore, unlike their ocean cousins, have little to fear and a lot of water filled with fish and other delights in which to prosper. While they gave us a great show and we were visited every day that we were on the river, they were not interested in posing. So we have no photos. Several of our fellow boatmates sat for the longest times, camera poised, only to have the dolphins playfully rise to the surface regularly somewhere other than the direction of the cameras. A river of superlatives and extremes. Monster catfish. Piranha. Howler monkeys. Unbelievable flocks of parrots and canaries. Enchanting noises day and night. And silences too silent to be real. Vines from every tree for Tarzan to swing toward Jane….. oops, caught up in it there…. Wrong continent. No tourists or non-natives for days on end. One or two tiny native dugout canoes a day might go by. No airplanes, power lines, city lights, or even rudimentary roads for tens of miles. This is wilderness. The Tucano is one of a kind. Riverboat gambler lines. The only one I could find when “shopping” for a boat; saw no others at all once on the river. At 80 feet, it is large enough to accommodate us and the other 9 passengers plus the crew of 8 quite comfortably. The only boat of any (commercial) kind to go as far up river as we went (approximately 220 km from the last city in the upper Amazon: Manaus). And there will be no more. As a result of government bans on local logging, there is also now a ban on any locally made boat longer than 65 feet. “Tucano” means (surprise) Toucan in the local language. Built 14 years ago to be a “green” travel opportunity specifically for birders and other wildlife-interested people. So the self-selection process also meant that everyone on the boat had almost the same kinds of interests in what to do, when to do it, and honest open ignorance about how to do it. That left the atmosphere clear for everyone to enjoy every moment together. The days are very full. A light knock on our door at 5:20AM (our door is on the top deck right behind the captain’s wheelhouse—just where I asked for), advising us that the canoe would be leaving the Tucano in 30 minutes. And 30 minutes later, in the darkness before the birds have awoken, we are off in the canoe. Enough headstart to be in the rainforest by the time it awakens and the cacophony begins. It starts simply enough, a bird cough here. A wing-flap to loosen up over there. A scream from over there: “It’s too early but I am here, ALIVE!” (meaning, a shout: “I made it through the night”) from the Festive Parrots. Pretty soon, they all have something to say and say it NOW. From the silence broken only by the lapping of water against the hull of the canoe to uproar and (anthropomorphizing here) shouts of “good-morning” and joy in a matter of a few seconds. Howler monkeys chime in and drown out everything in their shouts that make the hair stand on your neck. The first time I heard them (and I had heard them elsewhere) in the Amazon, I thought a jet airliner must be crashing somewhere nearby. 8:30-ish, as things quiet down and the wildlife routine of eating each other settles in, we return to the Tucano for breakfast of local stuff, much of it mystery food that did not appeal much to me. After the stuff has a little time to settle into us, we are back in the canoes at around 10 to “terra firma” as they call it for a rainforest hike on the islands high enough to have some dry land. Each canoe trip and hike contains more education than any two classrooms. The guides are walking encyclopedias, gentle in their delivery, and quiet when quiet is called for. 4:00-ish we’re back in the canoe for local culture—a visit to a local “village” (less than 200 people) or, once, a “city” of perhaps 1,000—where the Tucano was made. The village trip is probably good for every visitor to get a sense of the life without overly romanticizing it or undervaluing it either. Yet, as I said at the time, it felt a bit like a trip to the petting zoo as people snapped away on their cameras at the kids dutifully lined up. Lots of smiles, touches, mumbles (no language in common), then a trip to their little stall of local handicrafts. It felt like it’d be insulting to drop in on them from outer space (the Tucano is the only boat of tourists who (are allowed?) to stop at this village once every few weeks or so) and not pay the entry fee of a few dollars for their homey efforts. Bunny—who has worked with kids this age in poverty ridden villages like this—was more bothered than I about this display. She could see more readily than I the behavioral modification that was evident in the kids. She stood off. Here it is sanctioned, if not outright encouraged, for the kids to marry and have children by the age of 15. That it is succeeding was clear: every young girl I saw had a baby on her hip or on her breast. We comforted ourselves in our own story that these folks have already been coopted into the system—as a little girl of 7 or so passed us by carrying a cellphone near the satellite dish, others played with modern made-in-China plastic toys and the adults had the material goods that inextricably and irrevocably draw them all into the cash economy, debt, and throw-away consumer goods. At least we weren’t in a true subsistence economy with our cash and toys. After dinner, a nighttime trip deep into the rainforest in the canoe. 15-20 feet of water up the trunks of these magnificent trees left spaces between the waterline and the heavy forest canopy for our tiny canoe to venture into this mysterious and unknown (to us) world above the ground level. New sounds. New sights. Eyes looking back at our (one per canoe) flashlight—were they snakes (yes), birds of prey (yes), hungry caiman (yes, but I don’t know how hungry)? What we saw. What we didn’t see—couldn’t see—as we forged into undergrowth, vines, leaves, etc., stirred the imagination. Imagination filled with lifetimes of horror movies isn’t always helpful at these times. On the river in this little canoe, the vastness of the water held special power. Whether moonlit or pouring (warm) rain, the mood constantly changes while you can feel the tempo of what is really going on in these deep waters and deeper forests. The day ends reluctantly with a deep appreciation for this experience and a profound sense of how large, complex, and subtle, and tiny it all is.