Myriciaria jabuticaba Berg

Sloth

Last Saturday I received a busload of passengers from a cruise ship moored in Alter do Chão, some 33 kilometers from Santarém. As the bus came to a halt at the entrance to the Bosque, I heard the sounds of a guide speaking over a load speaker system, but at a higher pitch than normal. Suddenly, Nelis, the English speaking guide, jumped off the bus with his 16 passengers and they all headed across the road, a route never taken on our tours. From a distance I saw everyone looking up into the trees. "Hum, monkeys", I thought. As it turned out, Nelis had spotted a sloth, right from the bus. Some of the woodsmen took the animal from the tree and brought it over to the reception center, as seen in the image. A beautiful sloth. Look at those nails!

Hugging beetles, continued

"I can't get any closer. And that darned photographer won't give us any privacy."

Road to Bosque is open, continued

Sr. Jaci's red farm tractor has been a blessing in getting the road to Bosque Santa Lúcia open again. That blade on the front is perfect for spreading out dirt and also for the construction of drainage ditches. Right after we left him here, five truckloads of gravel (clay with some rock) was dumped at this site. When we returned from the Bosque, Jaci was already spreading the material over that section of the road. I should add that all this hard work, and some expense taken on by a few of us, is very makeshift. To do the road construction right, it will require a lot of heavy equipment. That's where the mayor's transportation department will come in, we hope. As I mentioned, the change in local politics may make this possible.

Tours to Bosque canceled

The ground-operator for the Royal Princess and the Pacific Princess has canceled all tours to Bosque Santa Lúcia until such time safe access can be assured to passengers signing up for the ecological tour. I knew it was coming. Over the last few months I've had to cancel most of my own private tours to the Bosque because of road conditions. I tried everything to get the mayor's office to respond to the need for road maintenance, but to no avail. I still find it unbelievable that I wasn't successful in at least getting past that mud hole I refer to as Lake Maria. I talked with the secretary of tourism. Nada! I talked with his superior. Nada. I talked with a lot of other people too, including the secretary of planning for the municipality, who is "the man". He promised me that he would open up the road, but .... nada. I even wrote a nasty article in one of the major news pieces of Santarém. Nada! Our Bosque Santa Lúcia is on the edge of the city. Imagine what it's like out in the boonies. I'll be keeping everyone updated via this blog. I hope to see some of you there. Smile.

It's a long way

On BR-163, alias Santarém-Cuiabá Highway, there's an official road sign showing distances from the army base all the way to Porto Alegre, more than 5,000 kilometers away. It's not an easy place to stop, so I decided to do one of my own in the peace and quiet of Bosque Santa Lúcia. Last week I took advantage of Cleuson's good lettering ability to do it. For a guy who hasn't much more than primary education, he has a great hand for doing things like this. Poço Branco is the name of the village where the Bosque is located. The literal translation is "white well", referring to the whitish color of the water in the old indigenous waterhole. BR-163 refers to the aforementioned federal highway. Cuiabá is the next major city, located in Mato Grosso, nearly 2,000 kilometers down the road. Only 100 kilometers are paved in Pará. After getting to Mato Grosso, there's more asphalt.

Bosque walkways, continued

Another view of the walkway on the eastern side of the reception center. Eventually, I'd like to build another one from where the cruise ship buses park to this one. During the height of the rainy season, the trail gets to be a soupy mess after 40 or more visitors hike over it. But that construction will have to wait for another season. For the time being, we'll concentrate on building some small steps going down to the ancient creek bed. That trail is showing signs of erosion and besides, it can get quite slippery.

Santarém - the Rivers

Now another image of Santarém and the rivers, the Amazon and the Tapajós. That's the Tapajós River flowing past the city and that's the Amazon far out there where you see a difference of color. They're probably not much difference than back in 1542, when the first European, Francisco Orellana, made his way down the Amazon returning to Spain. Visitors often comment on the lack of traffic on the rivers. As you can see, there's not one one ship, not one barge, not one riverboat out there on two of the largest rivers in the world.

Santarém - Riverboat Town

The ship loading up with soybeans didn't need a lot of line for tying up to the Cargill pier because the grain elevators are built far out into the waters of the Tapajós River. Ships simply nudge up against the elevator pier to receive giant spouts, which fill up a ship in short order.

Lira Maia

My friend and neighbor at Bosque Santa Lúcia is Joaquim Lira Maia. As my readers may have deduced from previous posts, he's my neighbor because his land borders on the northern part of the Bosque. He's my friend because I've known him and his family since arriving in Santarém in 1979. They're from Cipoal, which is located on BR-163, the federal highway that connects Santarém to Cuiabá in the State of Mato Grosso. When I arrived that year, Maia was finishing up his university studies in Belém at the School of Agronomy. I got to know his family because I was working in public health and Cipoal had been selected as one of the first communities to participate in the "barefoot doctors" program, more appropriately called "atendente de saúde pública". The community selected Maia's sister, Fátima, as the person to be trained. She wasn't more than a kid at that time, finishing up her high school studies in Santarém because there wasn't one in Cipoal. The commute wasn't an easy task because not one inch of the highway was paved. It was Maia's other sister, Mariquinha, who told me about a farm down a road on the other side of the highway that was up for sale. I checked it out one day, liked what I saw and we bought it, to be paid for over the next six months. That was the beginning of what is Bosque Santa Lúcia today. Maia's parents and his many siblings lived a few hundred meters off the highway in in a small mud and wattle house. They were agriculture people in the best sense of the word. Everyone worked the land in a slash and burn fashion, including Maia. His nickname was "jato", which means jet. So called because he suffered a childhood paralysis that left him with a one leg that dragged behind the other. But that didn't slow him down. He moved about like a jet. He was also bestowed with high intelligence and a gift for speech, which eventually got him in politics. I don't remember all the offices he's held over the years, but I know that he was secretary of agriculture for this state of Pará, at least one term. He was also congressman for this state, maybe two terms. He was elected mayor of Santarém and the municipality for two terms and he's now a national congressman from Pará. As you can see from the attached picture, he's still a young man. As a rural extension agent said at a community meeting I attended in Cipoal, "no small stuff for a kid, who was out in the field hoeing corn and beans not long ago." I consider Lira Maia a friend too because I used to spend a lot of time with his mother and father when I first came to Santarém. They both smoked homemade pipes and I had been a pipe smoker for many years. We traded pipes, we traded tobacco and drank a lot of homegrown coffee in that little house with mud walls and a dirt floor. I never got to know Maia the way I got to know the rest of the family, but to this day we're invited to occasional family type affairs. He's always treated us with friendship and respect. It is an overstatement to say that politicians have their fans and enemies ... and certainly Maia is no different. There are people who hate him and what he stands for in his stance for development of the Amazon. He was the key figure in bringing soy and mechanized agriculture to the region. There people who will never forgive him for that deed. The world of politics seems to mandate that you kick the shit out of your opponents in any way you can. The higher up on the totem pole, the more you get kicked. Law of the jungle! I'm basically an environmentalist, but I believe in a rational management of development. In an interview with a BBC reporter from Vietnam a few days ago, I talked about that in great length. In another post, I'll present those views. Right now I'd like to get back to my tropical biodiversity of flora and fauna at Bosque Santa Lucia.

Death in the forest, continued

A closer view of our predator getting ready to dine on the grasshopper that I scared into its web. This isn't a common spider here. It's the second one I've seen.

Wetness prevails

I might complain about the lack of access to local destinations because of the seasonal rains, but I'll never bitch about the wetness. The more rain, the better, as far as I'm concerned. It's the lack of rain during our long dry seasons that worries me most. I figure that the Amazon will survive quite well with excessive rains, but the lack of wetness could destroy our environment. Global warming promises to convert tropical forests into tropical savanna in the next few decades, according to all scientific research. Let it rain! Image: The soybean elevators at Cargil lurk over the Tapajós River as though they were giant water birds looking for a fish dinner. The zoom picture was taken from the inside of my car parked at the Santarém Municipal Marketplace - during a tropical downpour.