Here’s the thing about piranhas. They are smaller than you might anticipate, if your expectations were formed by horror movies.
But they are also really mean-looking: rows of teeth, sullen lower lip jutting out, steely gaze.
So when, after an hour spent dangling a bamboo pole into the Amazon River, my eight-year-old son, Darragh, finally pulled up his rod to reveal a shiny silver fish with jaws working furiously, he shrieked.
(It’s possible that I also shrieked. And his father. Definitely his sister.)
Darragh lurched around, trying to keep the fish away from him, causing the piranha to swing out, arc back and proceed to soundly thwack our pal Elliott, age 4, on the side of the head.
More shrieking ensued. The fish fell to the bottom of the boat. We all jerked up our feet. Nixon Alvarado, the unflappable guide from Tariri Amazon Lodge who was supervising this gringo clown show, scooped up the fish and put it in a bucket.
Elliott was unharmed and bemused. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. Indeed.
Every day of our trip to Tariri had moments like this – many of them – where we were sharply reminded that we were Really Somewhere Else. Far from home. In a totally new environment where we did not have a clue.
That sensation seems increasingly rare these days – and it often feels that one must trek to the true ends of the Earth to obtain it. At Tariri, you can marvel at another world, experience something you never imagined, be awed by the surroundings and then flake out in a hammock with a cold beer until someone rings the bell for the scrumptious three-course dinner. It was Amazon Lite, in a sense, since we did not travel upriver for three weeks – in a dugout canoe, eating only berries and bugs – but it was still unquestionably the Amazon, and it was magical.
Tariri is a family-run lodge on the Rio Negro, near where the two main tributaries join to form the Amazon River. You get there by flying to Manaus, the sprawling city that was carved into the rain forest by Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, and these days is the hub for the frenetic resource extraction that the current government continues apace. From Manaus, it’s a 90-minute drive to the shore of a river – where Alvarado pulled up a boat and invited us to wade out and clamber aboard. We took off down a narrow inlet, impenetrable forest on either side, as he steered through a bewildering maze of channels.
After a few minutes, he asked me casually in Portuguese, “Was it raining in Manaus?” Yes, I replied. He nodded. A minute later he said, “Did you bring rain coats?” I said we had. Another minute. “You should probably get them out.”
About 10 seconds later, the skies turned black and unleashed a downpour the likes of which I have never seen. We scurried into our rain gear and put up huge umbrellas, but we were instantly, totally drenched. The seven of us – my family and my best friend’s, visiting from Canada – huddled together in the boat. We could not hear a word anyone said over the deluge. We soon gave up trying to talk, and just laughed.
The skies cleared just as we arrived at Tariri – a collection of thatched cottages, with a few big ones in the centre, built on platforms on high stilts (testament to how much the water level shifts through the year). We squelched our way up the dock, where Fabiola Carrazzone was waiting to meet us with the first of a dozen exotic fruit juices we would sample that week. Oh, and monkeys.
If you are a parent and you want to take a holiday in which you will never, not once, be called upon to entertain your children, search for the key words “orphan baby monkeys.” Tariri fosters such primates, and was home to four when we visited, including three-month-old Yuquinha, who was fed milk in a tiny bottle and rocked in a tiny monkey hammock and lived only to be cuddled. My kids had at least one monkey wrapped around their necks or cradled in their arms for the duration of our stay, and wept copious amounts of tears when it came time to leave, trying to settle little Yuquinha back in her hammock as she held out imploring furry arms.
The Carrazzone-Alvarado family wants to give its visitors a sense of real life in their community. Some activities are purely for the entertainment of visitors, such as the piranha fishing, but others offer a window into the lives of ribeirinhos, or river-dwellers. One morning, Germano Alvarado took a boatload of us to the nearest “town” – Acajatuba, population 100 – where kids arrive by school-boat from an hour away to attend the four-room school. A health clinic is staffed by a bemused Cuban doctor, one of the thousands imported by the Brazilian government in a controversial program to staff the remote areas to which its own doctors won’t go. Patients come from hours away.
We also visited a small farm producing manioc, where the family showed us the complex process to turn the knobby root into the staple food – including the crucial bit where you soak out the lethal amount of cyanide. The granny of the family quietly turned out tapioca pancakes on a giant stone pan, and my children ate them as fast as she could flip.
Another morning, Germano Alvarado led us on a hike into the forest. Just five minutes away from the lodge and I could not have told you which direction we had come from or where the trail was: All I could see were interlocking layers of damp, shiny green, layered above us in all directions. Alvarado used his machete to nick a rubber tree and show us the thick white sap that trickled out – the treasure that fuelled the settlement of the Amazon 100 years ago, and exacted a horrible price from his people.
Next he scratched a chicle tree, and we all took a chomp on the gum that emerged – the original source of Chiclets. He paused near a huge, ridged trunk and whacked it repeatedly with the machete – sending a hollow echoey boom through the forest. “Telephone tree,” he said – and explained how indigenous people communicate over distances of up to 500 metres with different signals. He picked up a nut – a “koko” nut – and showed how worms grow inside with the fruit. Indigenous people use them like protein bars on long trips, he told us, and three a day will keep you alive. He passed one around, wriggling on a leaf. Only my partner, Meril, was game to try. He slurped it up, bit down, then spat out the skin – and reported it tasted like mild coconut.
We walked on – another downpour briefly turned the forest dark as night – and then Alvarado stopped suddenly and pointed at a log. “Snake,” he said. We all froze. “Not poisonous, though, right?” someone said with hopeful confidence. Alvarado replied casually, “Actually, that’s the second-most-deadly snake in South America.” The snake in question was small, coiled up no bigger than a salad plate, checkered brown, sleeping on a fallen log and invisible against the bark to all of us visitors. We gave it a wide berth and proceeded with substantially more trepidation.
One night we went caiman-hunting. The black caiman grows to six metres, and has been hunted down to limited numbers; the smaller white one is also growing scarce. Of course, we were not looking to kill and eat anything – just to see the creature in its natural environment. We set out by boat just after sunset, picking up a young indigenous man – Manuel Beju, the local caiman whisperer – after about half an hour. We puttered down a channel, and then turned into another narrower one, until the thick, moist darkness fell and we were all ducking to avoid the vines and branches overhead. Beju shone a light to the left and right, and we all gave a gasp when suddenly something loomed out of the dark – a fisherman, in a canoe weighed down to just above the water line, pulling in nets. He slipped silently past us.
After about 15 minutes, Beju suddenly jumped off the boat, which seemed exciting – perhaps he’d spotted a caiman – and also ridiculous – perhaps he’d spotted a caiman! He plucked an 18-inch specimen from the shallows and brought it back, showing us its teeth and how to tell gender. We all got to touch it – soft and warm – and he told us how caimans lay eggs but the mothers stay around to raise their young. Then he jumped back into the water to return it to its home – just as all of us in the boat suddenly thought, “But what about mama?”
The week went on like this. One morning I found a tarantula, grey and furry and the size of a Pringle, in my shoe. (More shrieking.) One peaceful afternoon I was lolling in the hammock when a monkey suddenly clamped two tiny-but-terrifyingly-human hands on the edge, rocked me violently back and forth, vaulted onto my belly, and bit a hole out of the last page of my book. We motored out to a family that lived on a floating barge, where we swam off their front steps and watched a pod of pink Amazonian dolphins, with long pointy snouts and humped backs, appear to snatch a treat of fish from their hands.
At Tariri, we swam a great deal in the same clear, brown water where we fished piranhas and looked for caimans. Our hosts said it was safe; their kids were swimming. We just tried not to think about it.
Tariri will take you to spend the night in the jungle, sleeping in an indigenous hammock and eating super-local, if you want an even more immersive experience. Mosquitoes are minimal, due to the acidity of the river. If you’re fond of plumbing, though, the cottages are simple but airy, with ensuite bathrooms, and hammocks on the veranda. Tariri hosts about 20 guests at any given time, and meals are communal, which is the sort of thing that usually irritates me but somehow this all felt convivial – perhaps because everyone was having the same extraordinary experience. Carrazzone uses as many local ingredients as she can, and creates unusual stews and soufflés that are both tasty and full of new experiences.
Piranhas, just so you know, are extremely bony, but they make good soup. Assuming you can keep your cool when one latches onto your fishing line.
Packages at Tariri Amazon Lodge start at three days and two nights. Packages include local airport transfers, accommodation, meals, tours and a bilingual guide. For more information, visit taririamazonlodge.com.br.