Presidente Figueiredo

Here, finally, is the post I was supposed to do on Tuesday.

On Thursday morning, I got into the car and drove (I wasn't the one driving) to this place about 120 km north from Manaus called Presidente Figueiredo. Well, I didn't actually go to the city itself, because the city isn't what's interesting about the place.
What is interesting about the place is that there are so, so many waterfalls in the area. I don't know why they're all there, but they are. And that's why I was there too.
I've been trying to go to Presidente Figueiredo (no, I don't know why it's called that) for months now. But I realised pretty early on that the two most practical ways to get there to see the waterfalls is to either go on a tour organised by a company that organises tours, which is quite expensive, or take a car and drive. So I'd been trying to find people who would go with me, preferably someone with a car, but if not then a group of people who could then rent a car, which I've heard is relatively cheap here.
But no such luck. It turns out that the students also here have no money to do anything fun, even though going didn't actually cost that much when someone already had a car. And since the rents here are so much lower than in Finland, the students here living off of the student allowance are actually left with more money after rent and bills than the Finnish student living off of the student allowance. And the food here is way cheaper. So I don't know.
Aanyway.
Back to the waterfalls.

We went to two waterfalls, because that's all we had time for in one day. But there are so, so many waterfalls around there.
this one is from cachoeira (aka. waterfall) do Santuário, from below the waterfall. I'd dug out a blog about the waterfalls before to figure out where we should go, and this didn't look so interesting in the fotos there, but it was a lot better in real life. That might also be partly due to the fact that the couple who wrote the blog went to see these later in the dry season when there's not so much water, while for us, now, the dry season is only starting. It's been raining a lot for months, and the water levels are right now pretty much as high as they get.

This one is from higher up in the waterfalls.
And man, I love waterfalls. Seriously. They're one of the best things. I mean, none of the waterfalls here are Wentworth falls (near Sidney, in Australia, I was also there at a time when it was flooding and it was absolutely amazing.)

One reason I love waterfalls so much (aside from them being pretty) is the sound they make. They make a very loud sound, but at least to me it's a really, really comfortable sound. I usually really hate loud noises, which is why I don't like crowded places, or bars (or cars) with loud music, or capoeira workshops, or vacuum cleaners. Too loud, too long. But waterfalls... Waterfalls are ok. They're great. Their hum is not tiring, or uncomfortable. They're just amazing. Their sound is pure and wild, and doesn't hurt the ears and doesn't tire the mind.
After having lunch there and taking a lot of fotos, we got back into the car and drove to the second waterfall.

We didn't even get all the way to the waterfall from the parking lot before running into something amazing. There were these wonderful caves by the path, and we got stuck admiring them and taking photos for a good while.

Seriously, wow. They looked like they were probably carved out by water, some time in the past, when the water has been a lot higher than it is today.
Or something. Either way, it was incredible.
Even if there were bats in the caves. Not many, though. Or maybe there were, but all but a few were sleeping because it was daytime. We only saw a few. It would have been worth going to that waterfall even if there hadn't been a waterfall, just for the caves.

Because there were a few other people at the main waterfall when we got there, we first walked down one of the paths leading down stream, because there was another waterfall there. Or I guess technically two, side by side. This was called cachoeira de Araras. I tried to get a better picture of both of the falls (the other one is behind some trees there) from below the falls, but I soon figured that I would need to be in the middle of the river to get a good shot with them both, so I gave up.

And then we headed back to the main waterfall, cachoeira da Iracema.
The blog I had been reading said that towards the end of the dry season this was excellent for a natural massage. I took half a look at it and thought "yeah, no." There was no way to get anywhere near that, not even mentioning getting under the waterfall itself. I could feel the faint spray from it on the shore, from where this foto is taken.

Here's a panorama (that I didn't know I could put up here, because I've tried and failed before, but decided to try again now, because really only a panorama can do this place justice, even if it is taken with the phone camera). You should open it as big as you possibly can. (I'm looking forwards to showing my travel pictures to the family once I get back home, because that means I will see this picture wall-sized instead of small computer screen -sized.

Another reason why I like waterfalls is that I think they are excellent in helping at trying to learn to use my camera. It's because all the water is moving, and that means that the exposure time of the photos really make a difference to what the picture looks like. So any time I see waterfalls I like to try to take pictures with different exposure times, to get the water to look a bit different, and that means I have to change the other settings too, to match the change in the exposure time to get a good foto. I'm not very good at it. Or any good at it, really. But I try, at the very least when I see waterfalls.

A third reason why I love waterfalls so much is the sheer energy that they carry. There are incredible amounts of water, crashing down to the ground after plummeting off a cliff. I can almost feel the power they carry, just looking at them, hearing the rumble and feeling the spray tens of meters away.
You know how they say standing on the shore of an ocean makes you feel small, because it's simply so, so much bigger than anything else? Well, I think with the same logic looking at a waterfall, feeling a waterfall should make you feel your weakness, because let's face it, the same way humans are tiny compared to a lot of things in the world, humans are weak, easily crushable and hurt, compared to a lot of things in the world.
But waterfalls don't make me feel small and weak in the face of the power that just appears in nature, all on its own.

The strength of a waterfall makes me feel strong, too.

~matu

The smell of sulphur, dust and insect repellent

So.
Like I said two weeks ago, I was in the field for ten days. This means I've been smelling like sulfur and dust and insect repellent for ten days. Insect repellent for the obvious reasons. There are a lot of mosquitoes in the forest.
Sulfur, because aside from the insects, there are also ticks, and apparently they hate sulfur or something, because people (including me) use this sulfur soap to wash every day to keep them away. And it works. I only found four ticks on me the entire time (and those were on a day I didn't even go out into the forest, which... I don't know). Four ticks is obviously four too many to be comfortable with, but it's a lot less than the dozens it would have probably otherwise been. So I'm incredibly happy about that, since I can still see where I got bit by ticks last time I had them, about two and a half months ago.
I actually stopped noticing the smell of the soap about half way through. Or I think I did. I think it's more likely that my brain started to ignore the smell than that suddenly I stopped smelling like it. But for the first half of the time, that's what the world smelled like.

And dust, because our campsite was in a white sand area. And when there's sand, there's dust, and it's everywhere. There were two buildings there. One two-story building, and a shelter with tables for eating and doing other things that require a table. Well, I guess the shelter can't be called a building, exactly. And the other building was more like a one-story building, just lifted one story off the ground for some reason. We hung our hammocks (to sleep in) on the first "floor" that had no floor.

There was electricity there, and running water (by which I mean a flushable toilet and a couple of sinks by the shelter for washing hands and dishes) that I think came from a huge tank on the roof that I think collected rain water, except it seems to me it wasn't that big and with more than thirty people there we should have ran out. So I don't know where the water came from.

Washing more than just hands and face in the sink happened in a creek (or igarapé, the bath place in the picture) nearby. I keep wondering just how much we increased the sulfur concentration of that stream while we were there.
What about the smell of sweat, you ask? Yes, there was a lot of sweat. Walking in a forest when it's almost 30 degrees outside does that. But the smell of sweat was pretty much covered under all the other smells, especially when you added a bit of sun lotion.

So what did we actually do?
For the first half of the ten days we did different things, counting plants and catching birds and fish and going out in the dark to see all the things that are out at night, and tried but failed to catch some bats. We also had some lectures, basically about what ever we were going to do next. With a projector and slide shows and everything. I was not expecting that.
And we walked a lot. The area that we used for the field exercises was actually maybe a kilometer away from the place where we camped. It was a 1km*5km area, with some permanent research plots and a small path running around it. So every time we went out to the actual forest we had to first walk to the are, and then however long it was to the place inside the are we actually wanted to go. The longest days were almost 15 km, which doesn't sound like that much for one day, but walking a forest path is a lot harder than walking on a road.
Ok, enough talk. Let's get to the pictures. They're a lot nicer than reading me talk anyway. And there are so many pictures. So many. There were almost 600 pictures in my camera after the ten days (I admit, that number could be higher), and while a lot of them aren't worth sharing, there are so many pictures I'd like to show you. Too many. I can't fit them all here. So here's the highlights of the highlights.

 As I said, we caught some birds.

And some fish. We blocked a portion of the stream with nets and then used hand nets to find them.

We also did some work on computers. I think here we're analysing some data on plants we had collected the day before.

 There were some pineapples growing nearby.

 And some relative of passion fruit's, I was told.

And this plant that had decided to grow in what I assume is the stub of a branch on a tree. Things growing on things is actually really common here. Like here:

There were a lot of these trees covered in these plants. I don't know what either the tree or the plant growing on it are. I just know there were a lot of them.

 This is where the world decided to put all the ferns.

 This is what a cashew-tree looks like. I did not know that.

Then there was this guy and a couple of its friends who I happened to see as I and one of my course mates as we were making our way to the area where the bird nets were that day, far away from the camp. I simply noticed some animals and obviously took a picture (though it ran away before I could get a good one, so sorry about the quality), and afterwards I found out that this is apparently a really rare animal to see, and no one knew they lived in the area, despite the fact that it was a permanent research area. So everyone was super-excited about it, and they told me it's called a cachorro-vinagre or a bush dog in English, although now that I'm at home and googled it, I'm not convinced that the animal that comes up there is the same animal I saw. The one in the photo there has longer legs and tail than what comes up from google, and the face is a bit different. But I don't know.

We also saw some monkeys when we were out trying to find frogs with my project partner (I'll get to the project we did in a bit). He actually took this picture instead of me, because it turns out he uses my camera better than I do. (obrigada pela foto, se você tá lendo isto!) And trying to take a picture of a small monkey hidden in the canopy some 15 meters above you is not easy at all.

We also went out during the night aka. after 6 PM, to see animals that could be found during the dark hours. Here's some of them:

This leaf-insect had clearly decided that it's not worth the effort to find a spot where it would actually be camouflaged when it's dark.

We were actually mostly looking for frogs and lizards, but we also found this marsupial, which, if I understood correctly, doesn't have a pouch, despite being a marsupial. I have no idea how that's supposed to work.

This is a frog that's about the size of my palm. By which I mean enormous.







Ok, one more. Not from the night, though.

This is probably the best photo I've taken the entire time here.

For the second half-ish of the ten days we did our own projects. We chose some question, and plan an experiment, and then spend three-four days collecting data from the forest and analysing it and making a small presentation to the others about what we found. We did the projects in pairs, and ours was about the camouflage of frogs. Basically we spent two days walking around the forest trying to find some frogs, took a picture of them, ranked them based on how complex their camouflage pattern was, and then showed the pictures to all the others to see how long it takes for them to find the frogs in the pictures. The idea was that a more complex pattern will make the frogs harder to find. So I ended up with a bunch of find-the-frog-photos. Here's some of them:

So all in all, what's my impression of the rain forest, now that I've actually spent some time there?

Ok, no.
Ok, yes. This image came to my mind at some point while walking through the woods, and I laughed at it silently in my mind for a few seconds until I realised that it's not actually that far off. (If you don't know what this is, you need to go watch Emperor's New Groove immediately after reading this blog. It is great. And completely underrated. I've seen it in Finnish, English and Portuguese, and I have to say, the English version is actually the worst of them.) There was a lot of mud (but I survived without rubber boots, with just my gore-tex sneakers! It was tricky getting around the muddiest places, though, and I did get my shoes wet more than once. Luckily this is a part of the world where even soaked shoes dry in a little over a half a day, if you just leave then in a sunny spot), and there was a lot of insects. The picture is an exaggeration, obviously, but especially when it was getting dark the only way to not have a mosquito constantly in your ear was to keep walking. The moment you stopped was the moment the sound started.
Then again, forests in Finland also have mud and mosquitoes, so maybe it's not that different after all. The ununfamiliarity of the forest was actually one of the weirdest things about the rain forest. You expect something that's completely different from everything you've ever known, and then you walk into the forest and you think "oh, it's just a forest". Sure, you don't recognise any of the species, and there are so many palm trees and zero pines ans birches, and the forest floor is covered in roots and leaf litter and palm saplings instead of moss and blueberries, but it still feels like a forest in the same way a Finnish forest feels like a forest.
And while it is one of the most biologically diverse places in the world, the animals are just as hidden as in Finnish forests. Most of what you see is ants and mosquitoes, and some spiders. And bats, once it starts to get dark. No stumbling upon sleeping panthers and almost running off a cliff. I did see a tiny alligator in one of the tiny streams, the night we we out after the dark. I don't have a picture of it, because it turns out that taking a picture of a thing underwater from above water when it's dark is not all that easy.
Despite being in a rain forest, I didn't need a raincoat. It only rained on a couple of days while we were out in the forest, and on one of those I was comfortably sitting in a shelter writing down bird measurements while others were doing the running to the nets to untangle the birds and back. It also turns out that even when it's raining, it doesn't really rain that much all the way to the forest floor. Most of the rain gets stuck in the canopy. Although this obviously means that even once it's stopped raining, there will be plenty of water dripping from the canopy down on the people on the forest floor. Either way, based on my current experience you're never completely soaked (I'm probably wrong). Unless you walk into a waist-deep stream fully clothed to capture fish, like basically everyone but me did that other time it was raining. I had my camera with me to take pictures of the fish, and I felt that excuse enough to keep myself mostly dry and comfortable. And by dry I mean not dry but significantly drier that anyone else.
It turns out that I am perfectly capable of sleeping in a hammock. I was sure I wouldn't be sleeping much, but I actually slept really well. Also, which is really rare, my sleeping bag is the perfect thickness for sleeping in a hammock in the tropics. Almost always when sleeping in a sleeping bag it's either too cold or too hot, but not this time. We had a few colder nights when it was a little cool, but never too cold. I'm seriously surprised.

The best moments were were at about six in the morning, when the sun was rising. Most people were still in their hammocks (usually there were a few already walking around, and actually the people doing bird research, who were sampling the entire stretch of the 5 km now that they were there, usually left so that they were at the nets already at sunrise or at least soon after). And it was quiet, and cool, and beautiful.

I think that's a good note to end on.

~matu

About rain, religiosity and growing up

This post comes to you in five parts, because apparently parts are fun. And because I have a few things I want to talk about, and they have nothing to do with each other.

Part one: First things first
I am currently out in the field, because I have a field course. (Well, technically I am currently on Thursday evening avoiding studying for the aquatic ecosystems exam I have tomorrow by starting on this post, but when you're reading this, I will be in the field.) This is a bit odd, since I spent my entire two years as a biology bachelor's student successfully avoiding all field courses, and yet, here I am, out in the rain forest. I tell myself it's because in Finland, field work will be cold and wet. Or possibly not, you can never be sure when it's Finnish weather, but the chances are that it's cold and wet. Either way, here at least I can be sure it won't be cold. It will probably be wet, though. I am literally in the middle of a rain forest, after all. However, I will be in the field until next week's Thursday. This means that I will be internetless between today and next Tuesday, which in turn means I will not be able to write a post. Of course I could write it before I leave for the field, but I don't really have two posts worth of things to say right now, so instead there will be no post from me next week. I will make it up to you, though. I'll make an extra post some time. I have a post about the fruits here that I've been working on, and yes, I could post it next week, but I want to give it some more time. Because I'm not quite done with this place yet, and I hope to find some more odd fruits to share with you before I leave. So instead of posting it next week, I will post it as an extra post once I deem it ready. By mid-July, the very latest.
Wow, that part turned out to be longer than I expected.

Part two: The rain
While studying for the aforementioned aquatic ecosystems exam, I realised that despite being in a rain forest, I haven't talked about the rain at all here, I think. So here goes.

If you look at the weather forecast for Manaus, you will see that it basically says it's always thirty degrees and raining. That's been pretty much the case all four times I've bothered to check the forecast over the last few months. There have been some odd days in the forecast without rain, but that's what it's always for most days. Because that does not mean what it seems to mean to a Finnish person, because the rain here works with a completely different logic here than it does in Finland. In Finland that forecast would mean there are five days of unending grey clouds and constant drizzle with some heavier showers in between. But here that's not what happens. Here we (they) don't get eight days of unending rain. Or at least they haven't, during my time here. It does rain almost every day, this is the rain forest, after all. But usually it only rains for a half an hour, or maybe two or three hours at a time, and then the sun peeks around the clouds again. The thing here is that when it rains, it rains hard. Soaked-through-in-a-few-minutes-probably-even-with-an-umbrella hard. We do get this kind of rain occasionally in Finland too, but it's not that common. So yeah, despite the fact that I'm in a rain forest, I've only been caught in the rain maybe four times while I've been here, and been completely soaked every time. Ok, that's not entirely true, I think I've been out a few times also when it's been raining when the rain hasn't been that hard, or I've been able to get to some shelter for a while to wait it out. But like I said, mostly the rain is fast and hard when it comes. So it's quite easy to avoid.
Unless you're in the field. I'll let you know in a couple of weeks how that turned out.
But this isn't even the area here that gets the most rainfall per year. Manaus only gets an average of 2300 mm/y. The place around here with most rainfall is in northern Peru and Columbia and that area right next to the Andes. That's where I'm going next. So yay. But it's the dry season, which means only ~200mm/month in Iquitos, so it's probably fine.

Part three: Deus é fiel
Brazil, like all of Latin America, is very Christian (is apparently spelled with a capital letter?). I'm able to avoid most of it by simply not talking about religion with people, but the thing is it's also visible all around, and not only in the fact that there are churches everywhere. One of the things that I keep seeing all over the place from car bumpers to restaurant names is the phrase "Deus é fiel". (Seriously, you almost can't go outside without running into it somewhere.) In English this translates to "God is faithful". I find it incredibly odd. I'm definitely and expert on religion, but I'm almost completely certain that in Christianity it's the people who are supposed to faithful to God and not the other way round. I mean, that's the point of the whole religion, right? That if you, a person, believe in (this particular) God and are faithful to him, he will then reward you with a place in heaven once you die. So... yeah. Can someone explain to me why suddenly God is supposed to be the faithful one?

Part four: Time, and growing up
I don't really know how to get into this, or how to make my separate points into one thing.
*stares at the screen for ten minutes*
My little brother just graduated high school. (I'd say congrats, bro, but let's face it, he'll never read this.)I'm the oldest of four, and suddenly not only I don't have any siblings young enough to be in elementary school, because the youngest just finished high school. And I have no idea where those years that must have been in between those two points went, because it makes no sense. It hasn't been that long.
I increasingly find myself thinking about something, and realise it's been ten years. Since when have I been old enough that things that happened ten years ago are not the same things that happened when I was a kid? (The answer, of course, depending on your definition of a kid, is anywhere between about two or three years ago and five years onwards from now. But at least I, at least for now, think that a fourteen-year-old isn't a kid anymore. Also definitely not an adult, but a kid in my head is someone maybe twelve or under.) It's just that ten years is supposed to be a long time, but ten years ago doesn't seem like as long ago as it should.
I have also apparently reached the age when people get married and have babies. Just last summer there were four weddings or something among my facebook friends. Three of them (facebook friends, not necessarily the same people who got married last summer) have had a baby in the last couple of years, and a fourth one just posted this week that she'll have one later this year. And half of those people are younger than me. And it's not that I'm not happy for them, I am, but as Ted said in How I Met Your Mother when Lily and Marshall came with the news Lily was pregnant: "When your friends have great news you're happy for them for like a millisecond and then you start thinking about yourself: What am I doing with my life?" Seriously, why is everyone having babies except me? Yes, I do realise four people isn't everyone.
My point is this: I have no idea when I become old enough that I have only siblings that are technically adults, and that people my age are doing actual grow-up things, with jobs and mortgages and weddings and babies. I wish I wasn't quite that old. No, you know what, that's not actually true. I wish I was doing the grown-up things too.

Part five: Velho
This is a minor detail that I simply find incredibly amusing. Velho is a word in both Portuguese and Finnish. In Portuguese it means old man, or just old, since it can be used as either a noun or an adjective. In Finnish it means wizard. And I like the idea that in Portuguese all old men are wizards.

Ok, that's enough from me. I'll get back to you again in two weeks. Assuming I don't die in the field. My roommates had a lot of fun the other night introducing me to all the dangerous animals that live around these parts of the world.

~matu