On Thursday morning, after breakfast we headed out in the canoe again. This canoe trip was only about 20 minutes long and took us to the head of a very faint trail through the jungle. The variety of vegitation was amazingly vast and my poor poor memory isn«t nearly adequate to the task of remembering all the information Krishna passed on to us. There were several trees whose barks were used for perfumes. There were trees that smelled of clove and trees that smelled of cinnemon. There were spike trees and blossoms that almost looked like birds of paradise. Several trees had medicinal uses: milk of magnesia tree, vic«s vapor rub tree, ferns growing as ground cover that could be used to stop a wound from bleeding. There was a palm tree that I«m pretty sure produces the palms the Catholic church in the USA uses on Palm Sunday. That particular palm grows staight up from the ground and is very hard and compact. Once it reaches a certain height the palm fronds spread out from the top. Krishna demonstrated this by showing us what appeared to be a limbed - it was very hard and smooth - then he gave it a couple of hard, violent shakes and the palm leaves spread out....appeared as if by magic. For the remainder of the trip, Krishna and the canoe driver would use these pond fronds to create beautiful, intricate crowns and origami grasshoppers for us. There were rubber trees and tar trees (which Krishna took a match to so we could see the bark melt into into a black gooey substance that quickly harded as it cooled). Mahogany trees. And huge trees with natural holes in them that were known as telephone trees. Not only are they used as actual telephone poles, but they have a remarkable resonance that echos fairly well though the forest when struck with a heavy stick or the blunt end of a machete. There were nuts that contained worms that apparently tasted like coconut milk (luckily, we never actually found an inhabited nut). And vines that you swing from (just like Tarzan) and vines that were hollow and stored a vast quantiy of water that you could drink from. We heard many birds and a couple of owls, but never saw any - we were all hoping to see a jaguar or a toucan, but weren«t that lucky. After hiking for 2.5 hours, we had circled back to the canoe and pushed off. We spent about 30 minutes at Acajatuba Village then returned to the lodge for lunch. After days and days of travel, hiking for over 2 hours felt absolutely wonderful...despite getting caught in yet another deluge in the canoe just 10 minutes from the relative dryness of the lodge.
Posted by jfer at February 22, 2002 3:34 PM