Found a way out...

So I have been basically stuck here in Sao Gabriel since I got back from the Jungle. I thought I had reserved a flight for Sunday but apparently I didn´t do something or they didnt do something... not sure anyway all flights were booked yesterday and tomorrow. Only two flights per week. Also the ´fast boat´to Manaus I just found out  is completely booked tomorrow and the next one is Friday. The fast boat takes  24 hours to get there. I managed to book a  room on the slow boat though So I will arrive in Manaus on Thursday and I have booked a flight from Manaus to Rio later on Thursday... so hopefully I will be in Rio before friends arrive on Friday.

This morning like most mornings here I woke up at dawn with the crowing roosters, I walk down to the river front and practice yoga  then take a bath/ go for a swim in the Rio Negro.  Then I  get breakfast. It has been a really nice ritual for me.This morning however someone stole one of my camera´s. It was  my cheaper camera so I am not nearly as upset by that as by the loss of the pictures on the camera. That is a big loss as the internet points here are so slow I havent been able to back up my photo´s and so they are lost.  Fortunately I have been traveling with 3 different cameras and have been switching out the  SD cards so that if one was lost or stolen I wouldnt have lost everything.  Still a bummer though. I am sure I lost somethings that I would have really like to have.

I wrote a short story  about my friend Aiko falling in love with Jee the Dew hunter I wrote about in my last post. It was kind of a fairy tale as if I were to recount the actual facts it would still sound so incredible as to be hard to be believed.  Aiko  who has literally been traveling for years and has been here for the last going on 3 months  met Jee a couple weeks ago and imediately fell for him. Aiko is a beautiful person who  seems perenially happy and as far as I can tell learns languages by almost never stopping speaking. A quality that is sometimes endearing and sometimes trying.  Jee as you might suppose doesnt speak a lot. Elisandro told me that he was  the best hunter of the Dew people and spoke about him in the most reverential way. I quickly also developed a great respect for him.  Unlike  one might suppose Jee is rather petite. He is probably only slightly  more than 5 feet tall and a bit over 100 lbs.  But his 100 or so pounds  are all muscle.  I would never doubt his strenght. He is also very gentle and very graceful. In short he is the antithesis of the American hunter archetype, nevertheless he walks through the jungle as we would a park or a mall. His is able to find food, track any animal and with virtually nothing build a shelter in the jungle, and do it all with an equanimety that a Buddhist monk could envy.  Aiko make her own clothes out of  remnants she finds so in the middle of the jungle Aiko was wearing a  red  yellow and white flower print dress and when she was fishing with Ing in the dougout canoe she was the vison of a Japanese...hmm Geisha would be the wrong word but classically dressed Japanese woman but in the jungle. Such a juxteposition was truly a sight to see.

Jee is sick now. I think he may have malaria. I am afraid Aiko will also have malaria as she is not taking any medication for malaria and I at least was eaten alive in the jungle by mosquitos and any number of other insects. I would be surprised if I haven´t been exposed. But I am taking medication.. That has given me the most vivid dreams. I have written about some of them but have forgotten many of them as well.

I am also working on another story a longer one about someone trying to flee from the world they came from but who found it hard to actually get away... yes semi-autobiographical but only so far as I am using places I have been and things I have seen a  way to  tell a story. The actual story is made up.

A couple more things I have been thinking about regarding the tribal peoples here. Sao Gabriel is about 90 % indigenous however many of them living here have left the tribes they came from. So there is a stark difference between the tribal people who live in the tribes and  those that have moved to ´the city´. I was asking a bit about this this morning, once people move to the city they quickly apparently loose their identification with the tribe of their origin, with the language, the rituals and the customs, the quickly adopt portugese and   a way of living and life goals and values that I imagine anyone reading here would  also identify with. Even in many of the tribal locations  much is being lost quite quickly including things like traditional games. I asked if there were sports they played but  the people who I asked who have been working with them for over 20 years didn´t know of any. They said there were some games but they are being lost as well.

Last night I saw a movie called Samsara, not the one by the director of Baraka but another, beautifully done film  about a buddhist monk who in his late 20´s after spending 3 years 3 months 3 weeks and 3 days in a cave meditating  gave up being a monk because he had been  in the monestary since he was 5 years old and  had only then become aware that he didn´t understand what he was renouncing.  So he left fell in love, got married had a child and lived as a farmer.  about 2/3 of the way through the  film the farmers are forced to go into town so they go from  the mountains into Ladoc, India and it is only then that we the viewer realize that the time setting is in the present time.  Everything depicted was contemporary but what stood out for me here is the way that the traditional way of living there has maintained itself to a great degree while even in quite remote areas of the Amazon Jungle it is quickly being lost.  I think it has to do with the particular ways that colonialism manifested itself including with evangelical catholic and christian churches. My friend Elisandro said something that Franz Fannon  wrote about in Black Skin White Masks, he said that many of the local tribal people want most of all to be white. Of course this is not so much the color of skin perhaps but the power and privilege associated with it.   Aiko was living in the  house that where I met her. The ower of the house is a tall white Australian man named Alex.  Blond hair blue eyes and by virtue of the fact he owns a hostel in Manaus and  the house in Sao Gabriel his is ´rich´. The down stairs family that rents from him expressed some  disbelief that Aiko would fall in love with Jee from the Dew, they saw her and wanted her to get together with  Alex... why wouldnt she want to they asked?  He is rich he owns the house, he is white... why would she want to be with a man who owned nothing and lived in the jungle?

So I think this the last post I will be able to make until I make it to  Rio on Friday. Best to everyone.
Rob