asakiyume | Entries tagged with leticia

acorn bread

The leftover acorn meal I had in my fridge had gone moldy! Ah well. Fortunately I had acorns left over from last time, so I ground those up, leached them, dried them, and yesterday made a loaf of ... well it's mainly white bread--three cups white flour--but also a cup of acorn meal. So I am going to call it acorn bread, the same way you call a thing banana bread even though it's not mainly bananas.

Behold its majesty!

I still have leftover meal from this batch of acorns, but I will not make the same mistake twice by letting it linger. I intend to make acorn pancakes, or perhaps I'll use it to make some kind of meatballs or fish cakes.

Açaí

Or asaí, as they spell in in Colombia. We in America use the Brazilian (i.e., Portuguese) spelling. In Tikuna it's waira.

Açaí juice (wairachiim) is so beloved in the Amazon. And with reason--it's GREAT. Drink it sweetened, and with fariña, and it's a real pick-me-up:

The Açaí palms are very tall and very skinny. Traditionally, harvesting the berries involves a not-very-heavy person shimmying up the palm with a knife and cutting off the bunches of berries, as in the YouTube short below. (I say traditionally because in some parts of Brazil I think there are now large plantations, and they may have a mechanized way of doing this. But still--I gather--many many people do it the unmechanized way.)

The video specifies Brazil, but it'll be true anywhere that açai grows

My tutor's dad does this. Here's a picture not of her dad but of her boyfriend with a bunch of berries--gives a sense of how big they are:

And the process of making the juice is really labor intensive too. Here's my tutor's mom pounding it. You add water as you go along:

This year the river has really risen high, and in talking about it, my tutor said her dad had been able to go out in canoe and collect the asaí really easily. And I was thinking... wait... you mean the river's risen so high that he's up near the top of the trees? Is that what she's telling me?

I wasn't sure, so I did this picture in MS word (b/c I have no digital drawing tools) and sent it to her and asked, You mean like this?

And she said, "Yes, exactly."

Mind = blown.

Current Music: Max Pizzolante: La gente quiere calle

It's been quite a while since I posted twice in one day, but one of my friends in Leticia sent me these, and they were too good not to share.

UNESCO has conferred the status of intangible cultural heritage on casabe, flatbread made from cassava. It was nominated by several countries of the Caribbean including Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Honduras ... but I remember fondly from Leticia, Colombia. (link.... but I just heard the story on NPR, so later this evening you can go there, too.)

The Ticuna word for casabe is dowü.

Here are some photos of my tutor's mom kindly letting me help with making one. You can make it with grated cassava, which is what I do at home, or with cassava starch (tapioca!), which is what my tutor's family does (and I think it's widespread practice).

... The photos are cropped to preserve privacy, but the woman in pink is my tutor's mom. I'm in orange ;-)

First we strained the starch. The tool used for this is called a cernidor in Spanish, cuechinü in Ticuna.

Then we pressed it onto a hot pan (look at the yummy fish in the foreground!)

And here it is, done!

Current Music: Mattafix: I to you

Only these cats are doing kitten things in the heart of the Amazon. The video was sent to me by my friend and tutor--she said I could share it. The Siamese cat is the mother, Mia. The white kitten is her adoptee, named Squiper. The black one is Luna, and the tabby is Anastasia. Apologies for the blurriness; for some reason it got formatted large-style rather than phone-style.

Watch on YouTube

I spent two days together with my friend and Tikuna tutor this past June. I'm going to post about those days in reverse order.

On the second day, we rented bikes and rode past the airport (the airport in Leticia is adorably small and you can walk from it into town if you want) to the Leticia campus of the National University of Colombia. Wakanomori and I had tried to do that when we were there together two years ago, but the former president of the country had been speaking there and no one was allowed to even bike along the road to campus, let alone visit.

There's a fence around campus, and a gate.

"We can't go in, not without having made an appointment," my friend said. "But we can look at it from out here."

This surprised me, because Wakanomori and I certainly had planned to go on in, and we hadn't seen any indication that we needed to make an appointment ahead of time. But I figured she would know.

"Have you ever been on campus?" I asked.

"Once," she said, "for a school trip. You know, students come from all over Colombia to learn about Amazonas here, to learn about the ecosystem and plants and animals, and to learn about indigenous culture. But people here can hardly ever get accepted."

"That's terrible," I said.

"Yeah."

We admired the grounds through the fence.

A young man was walking by, and seeing us looking, he said, "Do you want to go in? You can, you know."

"Are you sure?" my friend asked.

"Of course--just speak to that man over there."

And the man in question said yes, we could look around campus, walk on the trails, and see the exhibits. "Just don't go into any classes in session," he said.

My assumptions versus my friend's. A brutal reminder of the difference growing up thinking that any and everything is open to you, that you can ask and you'll receive, and growing up thinking that everything is off limits, that nothing (at least in certain spheres) is for you.

But in the end we did get to go in, and it was a delight. There was a display on fishing:

The drawing shows people fishing. In the background is a maloca, a traditional communal house.

on the Leticia campus of the National University of Colombia

How a fishing pole is made

My friend in front of a canoe--the water-ripple-like forms supporting the canoe are actually fish shaped! Water and fish are one.

Then we walked along the trails, and we saw an agouti! (The link below is to a 16-second video that keeps looping, so if you don't spot him right away, you'll have an infinite number of chances, heh.) We saw him trotting through the underbrush, we saw him playing in the water, and one time, after we thought he'd gone away, he crossed the path in front of us!

Agouti!

My friend pointed out his footprints.

It's wonderful to see wildlife so at home on campus. Now if only **people** could be equally at home there.

Current Music: The Battle of Land and Sea: Lady

I love hand-clapping games; they're such a wonderful example of truly folk transmission through the generations.

While I was visiting my friends in Leticia, two of the kids were doing one. The rhyme went

Choco, choco
la, la,
choco, choco
te, te,
choco-la
choco-te
chocolate!

You clapped sometimes with the palms of your hands and sometimes with the backs of your hands--it was great!

When I got back to Medellín, at one point Wakanomori and I passed a line of people waiting for pancakes at a pop-up pancake event. In the line was a girl who was teaching this rhyme to her dad.

Do you have any hand-clapping games you remember doing, or seeing others do, when you were younger?

Current Music: Jacana Jacana: Noiyuma

A trip

Come Saturday, Wakanomori and I are going on a trip to a language school in Medellín, Colombia, to (a) improve our Spanish and (b) visit a new-to-us city in Colombia. And I get to peel off for a very short side trip to Leticia to visit my friends there.

My friend and Ticuna tutor and I had a video conversation today. "It's cold here right now," she told me. "Na buanecü" ["it's cold" in Ticuna.]

"Oh yeah?" I said. "What's the temperature?"

"24 degrees [75 Fahrenheit]"--which is indeed pretty cold, for the Amazon.

Her grandmother was around, so I said hello to her in Ticuna, and she said hello back, and then Francy gave me an on-the-spot Ticuna test by asking, in Ticuna, "What are you doing?" And I was able to dredge up "I'm talking with my friend," and was rewarded by her grandmother laughing and looking surprised, which probably means mainly that I was really butchering the words, but I took also to mean that I was intelligible, YAYYYY.

... anyway, I probably won't be very active here for the next 17 days and change. "And change," because as soon as I come back, I have to head right out to help out a family member. Though at least once I'm back in the states, I can post.

A graphic novel

I came across this climate-fiction graphic novel in my wanders on the interwebs. It's readable online or downloadable here, from the Instituto Humboldt, in Colombia. I haven't started it yet, but I loved this cover art by Guillermo Torres Carreño.

In the year 2100, the planet is an inhospitable place for the humans and other species that still exist. Hidden in the Colombian Caribbean is Aguamarina, an enclave created by the last remnants of Earth's civilizations ....

Do you remember I compared low-ish water in July 2022 with high-ish water in March 2023 for the little tributary that connects Letícia to the Amazon?

( Here the two photos are again, as a reminder )

September is a very low-water month, close to the lowest, if not the lowest. And here's what that same area looks like now:

Barely any water at all. The buildings on the left are the ones that were floating in the other two pictures.

(Photo from this Facebook page.)

I finished my six-page picture book about planting eggs and incubating avocado seeds. Behold! The egg grew into a tree that has eggs on it:

And the avocado seeds that the hen sat on hatched some avocado chicks:

I sent the text and pictures to my friend and Tikuna teacher and said if she wanted to put it into Tikuna, we could create a dual-language book ;-) (And I said she should tell me if I'd messed up the Spanish, which is highly probable.)

The complete PDF is too large for me to send to my guides, let alone my friend, so I will try printing it up here and mailing it--though I'm not sure postal mail will reach anyone. But in any case, they have the pictures and (minimal) text to get a smile out of, and if my friend does put it into Tikuna, I'll add that in and send her the text and pictures again.

Current Music: Rihanna: Umbrella

A kid came up to me in the early evening of my first full day in Leticia as I was going into an eatery. She was skinny, with hair going every which-way and dark patches on her face that might have been bruising or dirt or a birth mark. She said something to me that I didn't quite understand--but I suspected that she was asking for money, so I opened my purse to get out some money.

"No, no," she said. And then something else ending in "sopa" (soup).

"You want me to buy you a soup?" I asked.

She nodded.

So we sat down at a table, and when one of kitchen staff came over, I ordered fish for me and a soup for her--and with my eyes I tried to ask silently for indulgence/forgiveness/understanding because I know that one person's idea of a good deed can cause trouble for other people, but the woman just nodded, like she did understand and wasn't troubled.

I asked the kid how old she was, and she said eighteen. I highly, highly doubt this, not just from her size, but from the way she acted. But maybe she truly was: not getting enough to eat can stunt your growth. Or maybe she had reasons for claiming to be not-a-minor. I asked her what her name was, and she said "Jennifer," pronouncing it like an American. I asked her if she had any brothers or sisters, and she said she had older brothers.

The woman brought out a soup.

"And can I have a soda?" Jennifer asked. So I got her a soda.

"Boy they sure are slow here bringing you your fish!" Jennifer said in a loud voice. The women at the next table, who were wearing uniforms for the Claro mobile phone company, looked over, frowning.

"It's fine. The fish takes time to cook," I said.

"I think they're just SLOW" she said. And then, brightly, "Hey, when it comes, you'll share your rice, won't you?"

"Sure, okay," I said. And I asked the woman from the kitchen if we could have two plates.

Eventually the fish came, and I put half the rice on the second plate.

"And can I have some of the fish, too?" Jennifer asked.

"Okay," I said, and gave her half the fish. This was fine: I couldn't have finished the whole thing anyway.

She ate with food-flying gusto, sometimes shooting rude remarks to the kitchen staff, who replied that she'd better behave herself or they'd call the police, whereupon she offered her thoughts on snitches who call the police.

At other moments she seemed about to fall asleep into the plate, her eyelids half closing. I suspected narcotics rather than exhaustion, and the fact that she put a teeny-tiny twisted plastic bag of something on the table strengthened my suspicion. But she always roused herself.

After she finished eating, her remarks to the staff got more provocative, and they repeated their threats. I felt anxious and sorry--anxious that we were well past wearing out our welcome, sorry for the employees, sorry for the other customers, and extremely sorry for Jennifer and her situation.

"Jennifer, you've had something to eat. Maybe now would be a good time to leave?" --I said this knowing full well that she likely had no place to go to.

"Okay," she said equably, and sauntered out. One of the Claro employees offered her a half-empty bottle of soda, and Jennifer took it.

After she left, I apologized to the Claro women and the kitchen staff, and everyone said no, no, it wasn't a problem at all. I asked the kitchen staff what Jennifer's story was, and they said that her parents were likely drug addicts and that she lived on the streets.

I didn't ask about social services. I know there are some around--I looked, later on. But there are always reasons why, and times when, what's available doesn't help, as I know only too well from how things work here in the United States.

I can imagine Jennifer's story any way I want. I can imagine that she finds her way to people who help her out. That she's able to escape the road that seems mapped out for her. But my imaginings are only that: imaginings. In the end all I actually did for Jennifer was provide one meal.

When we went to the Amazon in July, we took shelter from a downpour at the Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas SINCHI--the Sinchi Amazonic Institute of Scientific Research, "a nonprofit research institute of the Government of Colombia charged with carrying out scientific investigations on matters relating to the Amazon Rainforest, the Amazon River and the Amazon Region of Colombia for its better understanding and protection." There we met Dr. Clara Patricia Peña-Venegas, who gave me a copy of her extremely informative dissertation on cassava.

When I went back in March, I met with Dr. Peña and asked her what new things she was working on.

WELL. She's working on developing biodegradable, sustainable packaging alternatives to plastic for Leticia and the surrounding communities. Plastic trash is a huge problem for Leticia because (as noted in the post on the world's smallest Coca-Cola bottling plant) everything has to be shipped in and out of Leticia, but that's very expensive, so plastic trash just... piles up.

So she and other researchers at Sinchi have been working on various substitutes, using, among other things, cassava starch--and they have prototypes! These samples look a little battered, but that's because they've undergone various stress tests.

tray made from a palm leaf:

tray made from plant fibers:

Stiff-plastic substitute made from cassava starch. This could be used for things like cups:

5-second video of a flexible-plastic substitute, also from cassava starch:

Watch on YouTube

She said they've tested various different types of cassava, and the starch from all of them works equally well--which is good, because it means that local farmers could keep on growing whatever they're growing now, but some of their produce could go to make these products--assuming there's a way to produce these materials affordably for local hotels and businesses. They have a test plant in the nearby town of Puerto Nariño to try to make this happen.

What's cool about this initiative is that they're not trying to find THE ONE TRUE PLASTIC SUBSTITUTE or dominate the world packaging industry: on the contrary, they're trying only to develop something that will work in this immediate region. This is important because it means it would be self-limiting: you wouldn't get people clear-cutting vast swaths of the rain forest to grow cassava for plastic substitutes, which would be a terrible unintended consequence. But if it's solely for local businesses to use, then it would provide farmers with additional income without too much damage to the forest, it would provide job for people in manufacturing, and it would provide hotels and businesses with an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic, one that would biodegrade and wouldn't clog and pollute waterways.

... On our (motorized) boat ride back from the flooded forest, we were moving through large patches of water hyacinth, and floating in the water hyacinth was... lots of trash. At one point the engine stalled out. Why? Because a plastic bag had wrapped itself around the propeller. That experience highlighted just how bad a problem plastic trash is.

I would love to see other hyper-local plastic substitutes developed. Cassava starch doesn't make much sense for my locale, but maybe potato starch? Things that can be locally produced, so there's not the pollution and expense of shipping. And things that biodegrade. (And of course they need to be produceable without huge amounts of petrochemical inputs, or that, too, defeats the purpose....)

This tweet contains a longer video from SINCHI, where Dr. Peña talks about the program (in Spanish).

Current Music: Yeasayer: I am chemistry

I discovered I have a pair of photos that makes a good comparison of the lower water levels of the Amazon in July and the higher levels in March. Same location, different times of year! (Note: this isn't the actual Amazon, it's a little ingress--you navigate out of this and to the main river.)

Look at the difference between how much land there is between the houses on the far shore and the water. At peak water rise in most years, the water will cover the island those houses are on. (You can click through to see everything larger.)

July 2022

March 2023

What the heck, have a photo of the actual river in all its mighty mighty majesty, from a popular lookout spot in Tabatinga, Brazil:

Among a bouquet of interesting links offered by

conuly was one on the economics behind why soda cans in Hawaii are slightly differently shaped from soda cans in other parts of the United States. The video is here, but it comes down to the fact that Hawaii is an island, so most of the inputs for manufacturing have to be shipped there; that, and the fact that because soda is mainly water, it's most economical, in terms of shipping cost, to make it very close to its market--rather than, say, ship it from across the country (easier to mix up the sugar, water, CO₂, and flavors close to hand).

Well... those same factors explain in part why Leticia has its own Coca-Cola bottling plant--the world's smallest, so I'm told. Leticia is much like an island: most things have to be brought into the region ... which is not easy: there are two tiny airports (one in Leticia and one across the border in Tabatinga, Brazil), and other than that... the river. Things do not travel over land to Leticia.

(I'm not entirely sure about the claim of being the smallest. There might be smaller ones, these days. The Washington Post article I found confirming the Leticia plant's status as smallest is 24 years old. At that time Leticia's population was half what it is now.)

The plant is very small, though! It has pretty curved roofs, and right now there are murals on the outer walls showing arms and hands fistbumping each other, arms of different colors, a nod toward racial diversity. Did I think to take pictures of these? I did not. But here's a version of the image from their Facebook page--you can see how the arms are meant to imitate the Coke swoosh:

And this still from a video shows you the roofs (upper right)

They also bottle local soft drinks, plus potable water (...). The San Juan water bottle that I saved from my first trip was bottled there. I used it (refilling it) all through my trip this time, but alas had to give it up at the airport because I didn't have it empty when it needed to be.

Current Music: Natalie Merchant: Tower of Babel

Different palms for different purposes: the caraná palms are for the roofs of the malocas (communal houses). Look how beautiful the weaving is for the roofs:

Photo by Andrés Felipe Velasco, from his page "Tejido Palma de Caraná" on his website Buscando La Raiz

Velasco writes that there are close to 25 types of weaving, representing worms, deer, and crabs, among others.

This 4-minute video shows collecting the leaves of caraná and then weaving them for the roof. So beautiful. The man credited at the 2.06 mark, talking about the figures in the ribs of the roof, is among other things a guide for the Ethnographic Museum in Leticia--we went there; it's a small building but FULL of information.

The weaver is Geiser Peña Ipuchiwa, from Comunidad Bora, at Kilometre 18 in Leticia. (We only found out about this system of identifying where places are located during our visit--by how far along a road or along the river they are.)

And then there's the chambira palm, from which you get the fibers used for making hammocks, bags, fishing lines, and other things like that. When we visited a "tierra de conocimientos" in Puerto Nariño, we made bracelets out of chambira twine--but if/when I go again, I would love to do the background stuff: cutting the palm branches, stripping the leaves, extracting the fibers, and making the twine.

This 7-minute video shows the dying process, as well. The rhizomes that the woman is harvesting from 1.17 is el guisador, Curcuma longa--turmeric! (Not native to the area but well established there.) She also mentions achiote, which makes a red color, el chokanari, Picramnia sellowii, which makes a purple or red color, el buré (Goeppertia loeseneri), which makes a blue-green color, kudi (Fridericia chica), which makes a brown color, and huitillo (Renealmia alpinia), which can make a deep blue or black.

(I've been using the site color.amazonia.com to get the botanical names of these plants--they have a great page showing all the different pigments produced.)

... This post is the result of a long rabbit-hole journey. I was reading more of Aventura en el Amazons, and the family were talking about building a house in the style of a maloca, and they mentioned the different types of tree/plants to be used for the different parts, and when I went to look those up to find out what they were--well, I ended up here.

I realized it's September, which means this little access stream, which is where we boarded all boats to get to the Amazon, will have dried up, or is about to. You can walk to those stilt houses across the way. (And those stilts tell you how high the water will get. Right now, though, the people in those houses are cultivating crops** that will mature in the months between now and the river rising, using the 40 centimeters of alluvial deposits the Amazon leaves behind as it recedes.)

Note: I'm linking all these photos from Flickr. You can click through to see them much larger.

And all the floating buildings in the photo below will have been pushed out to the main river, or are about to be. "How do people know when to make the move?" I asked. My guide shrugged. "They just decide."

But I want to call your attention to those planks that connect to the floating buildings to the shore. Notice how narrow and unsecured they are? Everyone is so casually badass here, just casually balancing on those like it's no big deal.

And, not to put too fine a point on things, but it rains a lot here, and as you can see in the photo below, things tend to be damp:

But the most casually badass walkway of all was the one I walked along the day I went solo (well, not solo: I had a husband-and-wife pair of guides, plus their youngest daughter, who was three--but I didn't have Wakanomori with me) to see the giant Victoria Regia waterlilies:

Way out in the distance, almost out of sight, is the river. And all this way where there's a walkway--that's how far the river is going to rise when it breathes in. And you can't tell how high up the walkway is, but it's about ~~15 feet up~~ [ETA: I think I'm exaggerating in memory. It felt high, but 15 feet is ... too high, as your reactions are making me realize. I wouldn't have been brave enough to walk it if it was 15 feet. It was taller than a person, but not taller than two people, which is what 15 feet would be. So let's say 8–9 feet up.] Please appreciate that the ~ single plank ~ for walking on is about 12 inches across and that there's no rail, just that rope on the right. And jolly good thing that rope is there, because guess what you have to do if, on the walk from the river to the reserve (or back the other way), you meet someone coming in the other direction? One or the other of you has to step on the platforms on which the planks are resting and lean back on that rope while the other people walk by! I experienced both other people giving way for me this way, and doing it myself for others.

(Also casually badass about the Amazon is machetes everywhere. Kids playing with machetes, a woman walking home carrying a wooden chair on her shoulder with a machete in her other hand. Or here, this machete currently at rest in this boat--see it nestled there?)

So many different sizes of boats. Bigger ones have canvas/plastic sheeting lashed up, like in this boat that's delivering eggs. That way when the rain comes, you can lower it and keep from getting so wet.

But the boat we went to see the water lilies in was a little one, like the one with the yellow roof in the photo below, with no side curtains:

On our way back to our boat, we knew a downpour was coming:

And it came, wind and buckets of rain. The husband half of the guide team and the boatman were up front, with only life vests as a rain barrier. The wife and I were in the back--she with her three-year-old on her lap--with a big blue tarp pulled up over the front of us. And in all that wind and rain, the three-year-old ... drifted off to sleep on her mother's lap. Perfect.

A few more lovely boats for you. You can see some are powered just by oars, but many have what I call dragonfly motors: a propeller at the end of a long stem, and then the actual motor part affixed to the boat. (You can see a dragonfly motor up close in this photo: the propeller is tucked into the boat right now because it's not in use.) You change the direction of the boat by swinging the propellor to one side or the other. But there are also boats with fixed motors, such as you see in the United States--we traveled in both sorts.

**rice, cassava, tomatoes, corn, soy, watermelon, Brazilian peanuts, black-eyed peas, and plantains, for example.

Current Music: Canalon de Timbiqui: Zapato al Pie

When we lived in Japan (nigh on 30 years ago--yikes!), the signs at various trains stations, advertising businesses in the towns, were often hand-painted. A dentist's office, an ob-gyn, a grocery store, a florist, etc. Sometimes we'd see someone painting a new one.

I hear from my kids in Japan that now, as here in America, they're mainly printed.

But in Leticia they are still hand-painted. We rented bikes one day and passed this guy, just short of the airport, painting a new sign (I asked him if it was okay to take a picture; he said yes).

I've been painting signs myself, recently--first for a neighborhood picnic and this time for a movie night. Normally I like to use markers or cut-out letters on bright poster board, but I didn't have any bright poster board, and neither did the nearby supermarket, so I made do with paint on kraft paper. It would be better if the paint were black instead of white, but white was what I had:

It's not a very exciting presentation--it could be done better!--but I love the concentration and control involved in painting the letters. I'd love to know more about the guy painting the sign for the colchones (mattresses) shop. Do people hire someone professional to do this work, or does each company get one of their employees to do it? The signs are pretty good... I'm thinking it must be professional work. But how do you get to be one of the people doing the painting?

There were all kinds of paintings around--in buildings, on buildings, but I'll save those for another time and will close with a photo of a magnificent stormcloud over the Amazon, because--well!

Current Music: Rio Mira: Aguacerito

We didn't actually ride in a tuk-tuk until we were heading back to the airport on our last day in Leticia, but I thought I'd share these very short videos Wakanomori took because it'll let you see the streets of Leticia and how dominated they are by motorcycles (and secondarily: tuk-tuks).

We saw whole families on one motorcycle: a mom and two schoolkids she just picked up from school,* plus a baby asleep on her shoulder. Most people ride astride, but we saw some passengers sitting sidesaddle. We also saw lots of people carrying home big bottles of water**--the water-cooler water bottles.

Here's a photo of evening motorcycle rush hour, as seen from our open-air eatery:

*A lot about Leticia reminded me of Timor-Leste, and one thing was that there aren't enough school buildings for the students, so kids do school in shifts: some kids go in the morning and some in the afternoon. We went walking one day at around noon and happened to pass a school where parents were picking up kids, and it's quite evident again at sunset that another group of students have been let out.

**The tapwater isn't drinkable in Leticia or in the other municipality we visited, Puerto Nariño. But Leticia is building a water purification plant, so maybe one day? And Gustavo Petro, former guerrilla fighter and new president of Colombia, has promised to invest in the countryside, so maybe for Puerto Nariño, too, one day.

None of this is the rainforest-and-river content you might be expecting from a trip to the Amazon, but I really love, love, love knowing, as best I can, ordinary daily life in the places I visit, and this is part of that.

Part one (40 seconds)

Watch on YouTube

Part two, featuring the roundabout (36 seconds)

Watch on YouTube

I learned so much in the Amazon: one, that the river inhales and exhales: when it has breathed in deeply and its waters extend the farthest, tall trees are underwater and the fish feed on palm fruits. Maximum expansion is March. And then it exhales, shrinks-shrinks-shrinks, and temporary islands appear, and people rush out and take advantage of the 40 cm of rich soil the river has left to grow quick crops that can be harvested before the river rises and swallows the islands back up again. The river is at its lowest point in September--at which time you can walk to the island across from the pier where we got boats when we went out on the water (this is on a tiny tributary--one of our guides called it a creek--but it looked pretty big to us!)

I saw all the types of liminal houses: houses on stilts, floating houses, and house boats. Here is a floating house.

I have more stories to share (of course!) but we caught Covid (despite everything; we were vaxxed and masked to the max), so I'll probably still be a little scarce around here for a bit.

One more thing before I go: I loved how indoors and outdoors blended. Here's a coffee shop and bakery where we stopped on the way back from a bike ride:

By this time on Friday--assuming no flight cancellations and no sudden-onset covid--Wakanomori and I will be on a plane to Colombia. We'll spend a day in Bogotá, staying at the same place we stayed in 2018, and then we'll hop on a plane to Leticia.

I blocked off this week from work so that I could be free to prepare for the trip, and the result is that I think I'm well prepared (

sovay--I have in fact purchased antiseptic ointment and band-aids, and I can feel the ~ scorn ~ of Markiyan Kamysh), but I have plenty of free time for my body to mount a huge pre-travel anxiety onslaught. It's beyond the ken of reason, just wave after wave of cortisol flooding my bloodstream, leaving me practically fainting. I've been through this before, so I know what to do, but even though I can defuse it or grapple it back into its box (choose your metaphor), it's always waiting to surge back.

Right now it's receded, so I can write this! Most recent thing I've done, taskwise, is load a couple of books onto my kindle for downtime when we're not watching macaws or river dolphins. Thanks to a recommendation from

skygiants, I'm taking Julie Czerneda's Survival, and thanks to a recommendation from Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, I'm taking Gina Cole's Na Viro, a work of Pacifikafuturism.

Fun fact that Wakanomori just shared: Bogotá is 4 degrees north of the equator, and Leticia is 4 degrees south. So we'll cross the equator! We'll maybe see Southern Hemisphere stars! (... I should have looked for them when I was in Timor-Leste, which is 8 degrees south of the equator, but I didn't.)

... The forest presses in all around. There's roads and houses, and then forest, and forest, and forest, and forest, on and on. Here's a screen shot from Tabatinga, the part of Leticia that's in Brazil (or you could call Leticia the part of Tabatinga that's in Colombia--you cross the street and you're in another country).

Even now, with my brain in cortisol overproduction, when I think about being in this green embrace, held so tightly, I feel as if I'm about to sprout wings.

Profile

asakiyume

June 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

acorn bread and açaí
Donal Trom y Greg Abbott ... en Leticia Colombia?!
intangible cultural heritage
kittens doing kitten things
Who can be on campus? An agouti, for one
Cho-co-la-te
a trip, a graphic novel
Low low low
last two pictures in Semillas y huevos
Jennifer
cassava-based plastic packaging substitute for Leticia
Low(er) and High(er)
World's smallest Coca-Cola bottling plant (maybe)
palmas de caraná y chambira
narrow gangplanks/walkways, boats
painting signs
Tuk-tuk ride
inhale, exhale
trip countdown

Active Entries

Style Credit

Base style: Corinthian by momijizukamori
Theme: Trust Fall by zaluzianskya

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 29th, 2025 03:38 pm

Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with leticia

acorn bread and açaí

Donal Trom y Greg Abbott ... en Leticia Colombia?!

intangible cultural heritage

kittens doing kitten things

Who can be on campus? An agouti, for one

Cho-co-la-te

a trip, a graphic novel

Low low low

last two pictures in Semillas y huevos

Jennifer

cassava-based plastic packaging substitute for Leticia

Low(er) and High(er)

World's smallest Coca-Cola bottling plant (maybe)

palmas de caraná y chambira

narrow gangplanks/walkways, boats

painting signs

Tuk-tuk ride

inhale, exhale

trip countdown

Profile

June 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags