Amazon Rain Forest aka: Amazon Rainforest

I want to take the rain forest back to some of its sources, and visit the Tepui. That valley full of ancient plateaus, each with its own unique varieties of flora and fauna. The land that time forgot. They’ve even got legends of dinos in there.

Also want to make it upstream to lake Titicaca, the place where the reed boats of ancient Egypt are used regularly. These guys must be descendants of ancient Egyptian colonies.

I’d like to go see the section of land I’ve dontated to help protect :)

A girl can always dream..

Ahh I want to go here NOW! Ever since I had to do a project on the Amazon tropical rainforest (in the 4th grade), I had always wished to come here. Well, hopefully…someday I will.

It is so sad that man has to destroy everything untouched and beautiful. All in the name of progress. Do they not understand {or care} that there are some things that can not be replaced?

photo by ‘Lukas Vermeer’

We are in the rain forest on the edge of the Amazon River, standing on a hill overlooking a school called Poraque Caira (or something that sounds like that), which we were told means ‘Port of the Electric Eel’, but I think they only told us that to scare us because the words for electric eel are something different in Portugese. A boy from the mission is giving Laurie and me a grand tour and he has brought us up to the hill to show us the view: the mission school down below and, beyond that, the Amazon River spread out almost as far as our eye can see. We are 1,000 miles inland - almost to Rio Negro and Manaus - and here the Amazon is eight miles wide. He wants to take us into the jungle to show us the big tree and the brick factory. He points casually over his shoulder to the path we will follow. My eyes trace the direction of his thumb, but all I can see is a solid line of trees.

He shoves through them and we follow.

There does seem to be some sort of path here and it plunges straight downhill and then back up again. Yet another surprise of the jungle: it is not flat the way I thought it would be, but hilly, the ground undulating up and away from the river. And savage. This is not some uncharted territory; there is a school here and people going down these paths frequently, but the plants and trees and vines do not give ground easily. Leave a path dormant for a day and the plants will already encroach and reclaim.

There are sounds here that we have never heard before. Only in movies. Only in our dreams.

We continue to follow and we finally come to the big tree. It is a kapok tree and we discover it was named with a kind of wry understatement: a family of four could hollow out this tree and live comfortably in its depths.

I have always wanted to experience the sites, the sounds of the rainforest. Also I hope that my tourism dollars will do a little bit to help preserve the ecosystem – although it’s equally important to leave no mark.

I want to see lush beautiful plants and animals that I’ve never seen before