Letter from Manaus (Amazon)

Glasses of Campri and Malibu. Bowls of fish soup followed by Amazonian fish fry. Dishes of Oriental boneless chicken. Sauce and ghee cooked fish, and fish in white sauce with prawns….

Well, well, that’s not the Menu of an Amazonian restaurant, but the list of items which we had the luck to eat over and over and over again in our three memorable days in Manaus, the capital city of Amazonas, and located at the heart of Amazonian region. And, kudos to the Karu Grill Restaurant of the Hotel Tropical Manaus, these items became examples of some unforgettable cuisine for us.

But, that’s not all. We did not go to Manaus just to eat exotic food. That was the bonus.

The real gain was the most enchanting trip of my life: a three hours (extended to five) upstream and three hours downstream journey through the heart of the 3940 miles long Amazon river with hardly the banks on either side being visible when you are in the centre of the river.

Well, no adventure, except going to Mt Everest or to the South Pole, can equal this one on the Amazon. Amazing Amazon mesmerized all of us on board.

The journey started at sharp 6 am on a bright sunny June morning and went on till 11 noon which should have been finished a couple of hours before that. We were shooting on the way and one of the two steamers we were traveling in developed a technical snag for which we waited at the centre of the river and to our glee, indeed.

If you can still see the vague line of huge trees in the forests on your right, the left bank is totally merged with the horizon and it is only the clear slow-paced mass of water on all sides that winks at you.

We went a few hundred metres into the forest, shot a few families therein for the purpose we were there, and visited a makeshift wooden products-and-art gallery made by the folks out there. It was so fascinating to note that even in such interiors far away from the mainstream society and media and culture, simple jungle-folks had their aesthetics right.

Standing amid millions of huge trees and next to a few bamboo and wood houses, our local Brazilian friend recounted the legend of Anaconda, a fictitious serpent character built around myths surrounding the Amazon river and the forest.

On return there was another round of fish, chicken, soup and Malibu waiting for us at the beautiful palace hotel by the beach. In our true Rajasthani style, this was Brazilian royal family’s abode turned into a luxury hotel of today with just two floors and a huge land around resplendent with flowers and greenery, and all leading to the august Amazon flowing by.

As we took the flight back to India via Sao Paolo and London, we met two interesting Brazilian gentlemen.

One is an agricultural scientist, an expert of bio-diesel and a strong votary of the merits of monacinto crops, who gave us an overview of Brazil’s strength of agriculture and water resources. Brazil has the single largest water reservoir of inland water in the world, and Brazil has an agricultural strength equaled by only two other nations, plus the bio-diesel experiment has taken deep-roots in the Brazilian life.

The second gentleman is a professor of History in a university in Brasilia who hates the American way of looking at things and says how different he found Mexico to be from what the American media, literature and images taught him all his life till we had gone to Mexico. This gentleman explained how a large part of Brazilian intelligentsia hates the ‘Yankees’ for their use of the Latin American land and people for ‘trade, sex, beer and natural resources’ exploiting the ‘American’ tag of the Latinos. The ‘Big American Dream’ has been hard-sold by them to the Latinos to make the best business of any and everything.

How I wish the star-struck Indians dreaming of the raining dollars in the God’s own country in the US of A could hear this erudite gentleman who leads the academia in social sciences of a Brazilian University!!

June 18, 2006