Читать книгу Last Chance to See - Mark Carwardine - Страница 7

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TRAVELLING CASE FOR A SEAL

Stephen reminds me a little of Douglas: unnaturally bright, exceedingly well read, enthralled by obscure facts and figures, never without a pocketful of weird and wonderful gadgets or an Apple Mac, and very tall.

He strode into the Arrivals Hall, head and shoulders above his fellow passengers, wearing a slightly crumpled light-blue shirt, a blue-and-white striped blazer favoured by wealthy yacht owners, beige chinos, a deep golden suntan after spending Christmas in the Caribbean, and a broad smile.

I had the fleeting impression of Crocodile Dundee arriving for the first time in Manhattan, except in reverse, if you see what I mean.

Admittedly, I was a little apprehensive. Stephen is no Crocodile Dundee. Travelling with him was going to be like travelling with Wikipedia permanently online. He knows pretty much everything about everything. I’ve never heard him struggling to recall a person, a place, a fact or a figure (I probably have, of course, perhaps once or twice, but I’ll be damned if I can remember when).

Sure enough, next to him I felt unnaturally short, pitifully pale and extraordinarily dim. It wasn’t his fault. Stephen is far too unassuming and generous to make anyone feel in any way deficient on purpose. But he’s the kind of person who makes you continually question your own intellect. Why on earth didn’t I know the name of the Key Grip in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, how many syllables there are in a dodecasyllable, which was the last place in Britain to be converted to Christianity, when Daniel O’Connell became Lord Mayor of Dublin, what a quatrefoil is, or so many other things from countless topics of conversation that cropped up during our travels together?

Stephen has a few minutes to spare, so he decides to learn Portuguese.

Sometimes it felt as if we were on two different channels – he on BBC News and me on the Home Shopping Channel. At one point I actually wrote a rather desperate-sounding note in my diary: ‘Must read more’.

But I sought refuge in the knowledge that my work as a zoologist takes me to the world’s wildernesses for so many months every year that my mind has been broadened and my bowels loosened more often than I care to remember. A lifetime of being on the move, unrecognisable food, strange beds (or no beds at all), communicating by sign language, and hair-raising or life-changing experiences made a month-long expedition to the Amazon seem quite normal.

In fact, to be honest, I feel more like a fish out of water when I’m at home, wearing slippers, watching telly.

Stephen, on the other hand, is more at home at home – at least, appearing on telly rather than watching it. His natural habitat is a television or radio studio. He’s by no means a stranger to travel or even wildlife (he’s the only person I know who has been on an expedition to search for Paddington Bear in Peru) but, let’s face it, you’re unlikely to bump into him in an outdoor shop with armfuls of mosquito repellent and Imodium.

It didn’t even cross my mind at the time, but he was a little apprehensive too.

‘I felt quite nervous of you,’ he admitted later. ‘I was expecting to feel very foolish if ever I said “what’s that?” and you’d give me one of those long, burning looks as if you couldn’t believe there’s a sentient being on the planet who is unaware of what a capybara is, or whatever it might have been.’

We did have at least one thing in common. Our Amazon adventure had been occupying our thoughts a great deal over the previous year or so, and we were both thrilled and eager to get started. Although it was already well past midnight we had a great deal to talk about, and we talked about it until we could barely keep our eyes open.

Not once, strangely, did we talk about potential dangers. The jungle is full of bottom-emptying and life-threatening hazards. Yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, tetanus, rabies, giardiasis, cholera, typhoid, Chagas’ disease, bilharzia, dengue fever, several strains of malaria and leishmaniasis immediately come to mind. The Amazon is the perfect place to go if you’d like to increase the odds of dying from something you’ve never even heard of.

In fact, if the Amazon were in Britain, the Health and Safety Executive wouldn’t allow it at all.

Most exciting, among all the potential hazards, you could be killed by an animal that hasn’t yet been named by science: perhaps a rare species of poison-dart frog, a chigger that no one has had the time (or bothered) to investigate, a well-camouflaged spider, or a particularly secretive venomous snake.

Stephen ready for anything in his expeditionary gear.

A welcoming face in the Amazon.

By the way, if you want to be cleverer than almost everyone else on the planet (even so-called ‘experts’ who write about these things) here’s an interesting fact. Dangerous snakes are not poisonous. They are venomous, and there’s a big difference. For something to be poisonous it has to be ingested (or, in some cases, touched). An animal that is venomous, on the other hand, actually injects its poison with a bite or sting. Try to bring it up in casual conversation – everyone will be amazed.

While we’re on the subject of potential misadventures, perhaps worst of all (certainly commonest of all) is traveller’s diarrhoea, especially if you’re on the move every day, staying hundreds of kilometres from the nearest loo, and filming. The trots, the runs, dysentery, gastroenteritis or Montezuma’s revenge are all part and parcel of travelling (Stephen’s philosophy, quite rightly, is that travel boils down to laundry and bowels). You simply have to choose whether to go for amoebic dysentery or bacterial dysentery, and the ghastly concoction of microbes lurking in virtually everything you eat or drink will take care of the rest.

In reality, of course, these things sound much worse from afar. There’s probably more chance of getting deep-vein thrombosis on the cramped long-haul flights from London to São Paulo and on to Manaus than of being struck down by a deadly disease or bitten by an animal that’s venomous not poisonous.

Aerial view of part of the largest nonstop expanse of pure, unremitting nature on earth.

What we hadn’t anticipated was something the Health and Safety Executive would probably have warned us about, had we bothered to ask, and that’s the risk of slipping on a wet wooden boardwalk in the dark at 5am. But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Whether or not jungles keep you awake at night, overwhelmed with awe and wonder, you’d have to be a lump of rock not to be impressed by the Amazon Basin. If you’re like most people, and it occupies a murky, something-to-do-with-jungles place in the back of your mind, you deserve a good slap for failing to grasp the sheer scale and splendour of the largest nonstop expanse of pure, unremitting nature on earth.

Imagine a place nearly the size of Australia, spread across no fewer than eight different countries and one overseas territory (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana). Then cover it with all the jungles, or tropical rainforests, from Africa and Southeast Asia (indeed, half of all the jungles left on earth). Add the world’s mightiest river (watercourse connoisseurs will get cross if I say ‘longest’, because the Amazon is ‘only’ 6,448 kilometres (4,030 miles) long – 222 kilometres (139 miles) shorter than the record-breaking Nile); and crisscross the entire region with a mind-boggling spider’s web of 1,100 major tributaries (many of which are among the world’s largest rivers in their own right). And then, like the icing on a cake, fill it up with nearly one-fifth of all the free-flowing fresh water in the world.

I would say it defies description, but then I’d have to delete the last paragraph.

Larger than the whole of western Europe, and draining half the total landmass of South America, it bombards you with sensory overload at every turn. Compared with lesser parts of the world, even its palms look palmier and its rain feels considerably wetter.

But there’s more. This vast territory of trees and water is home to something like one in ten of all known species of plant and animal. Counting them can be tricky and time-consuming, even for people who like to do such things, so we can only guess at total numbers. But here’s a recent list: 427 mammal species, 1,294 birds, 378 reptiles, 3,000 fish and 40,000 plants. I don’t know anyone who’s even tried to count the insect species, so let’s just say that there are more than you can shake a stick at. Millions of them.

Now, the bad news is that all these figures are wrong. New species are being found in the Amazon almost daily, so by the time you read this they’ll be completely out of date. But the good news is that, if you can tell a waxy-tailed planthopper from a South American palm weevil, or a kissing bug from a peanut-headed bug, you could take a couple of weeks off work, set up camp in a quiet corner of the rainforest, and discover a whole assortment of species entirely new to science.

You could name them, too, though you’d have to be drunk. Judging by the names dreamed up by many experts, one can only assume there is a serious drinking problem among the world’s zoologists: I have little doubt that whoever came up with no-eyed big-eyed wolf spider, dik-dik, bongo, blob fish, burnt-neck eremomela or Bounty Islands shag had more than one celebratory drink to toast their great discoveries.

A friend of mine once named a new species of sea slug after his wife; she didn’t like it.

A great potoo – who comes up with these names?

Alternatively, you could take a proper sabbatical and go in search of something really newsworthy. Vast areas of the Amazon remain as unexplored as in the days of the early adventurers, so you could set off to find the warring women who apparently fight like the Amazons of Greek mythology or the tribe reputed to have their feet facing the wrong way to deceive trackers.

The last thing you’d expect to stumble upon in the Amazon is a large city. But, sure enough, plonked in the middle of this natural unexplored treasure trove is just that: a city of 1.7 million people in northern Brazil, called Manaus.

Manaus is where our adventure really began.

Our challenge was to find one of the least-known and most outlandish animals on the planet. We were going in search of an Amazonian manatee, the first endangered species on our list.

There are several species of manatee around the world (informatively named the West Indian, West African and Amazonian manatees, plus the closely related but less informatively named dugong), all belonging to a group of aquatic mammals officially called the sirenians. They’re better known as sea cows.

We were looking for the smallest and hardest to find. Found only in the Amazon Basin, from the river mouth to the upper reaches of calm water tributaries in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana and Peru, the Amazonian manatee is shy and retiring and likes to keep itself to itself.

With a wonderfully carefree rotund body, predominantly black skin the texture of vinyl, a bright pink belly and diamond-shaped tail, a cleft lip, a unique sixth sense, a reputation for farting more than any other animal on the planet, and an affinity for remote corners of tropical rainforest rarely penetrated by humans, the Amazonian manatee is not your average endangered species.

A backlit squirrel monkey poses for Mark’s camera.

It was first described as a cross between a seal and a hippo, though it’s not related to either. Douglas Adams more aptly portrayed it as ‘not so much like a seal as like a travelling case for carrying a seal in’. There is nothing else quite like this perfect piece of evolutionary engineering in the world.

In the old days, when men were men and manatees were much more common, sailors used to confuse them with mermaids. Or so they say (the word ‘sirenian’ comes from the seductive ‘siren’ of Greek mythology – part-woman, part-fish). I like manatees, a lot, but I’m not sure I’d be so keen on a 400-kilo marine temptress with a bristly face.

Clearly, it’s not just zoologists who’ve been drinking too much.

Manatee-ologists say that the Amazonian manatee is active both during the day and at night. But ‘active’ is probably too strong a word. It is spectacular mainly for its single-minded determination to do everything as slowly and calmly as possible.

Either an Amazonian manatee or a travelling case for carrying a seal in.

Most of the time it eats, then farts, then sleeps. Sometimes it just farts and sleeps. It doesn’t leap out of the water to perform breathtaking acrobatics like a dolphin, jump daringly from tree to tree like a monkey, or hang upside down like a sloth. Its main activity is doing nothing much at all.

Oh, and it is vegetarian (not that there’s anything wrong with being vegetarian – I’m just saying so by way of introduction).

The Brazilians call it the peixe-boi, or ox-fish, which pretty much sums it up.

On the plus side, it is a mammal and that means it has to breathe air. This is where things start to get pretty exciting. When it rises to the surface of the river to take a breath, it pokes its bristly snout nearly a centimetre into the tropical world outside for as long as a second at a time. Few people have seen this happen in the wild (a manatee can stay submerged for twenty minutes, which means there are often tediously long gaps between bouts of such awe-inspiring activity) but, needless to say, most of them have never forgotten it.

Despite weeks of trying, Douglas and I had failed to see one all those years ago. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Our jungle guide saw a manatee disappear beneath the surface of a remote tributary of the Rio Negro, I saw the ripples after it had disappeared, and Douglas nearly saw the ripples. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we’d more or less breathed the same air as a manatee.

Stephen and I were determined to do even better.

But first a bit of luxury. The roughing it, the creepy-crawlies, the piranhas-for-breakfast survival cuisine, the jungle-borne diseases and the frightening lack of electrical sockets to plug in Stephen’s Apple Mac could all come later. Stephen, like Douglas Adams before him, was more used to comfortable hotel rooms larger than my flat. Like reintroducing an orphaned manatee to the wild, he had to be habituated first. Some things definitely call for a warm-up.

So we courageously booked ourselves into the surprisingly comfortable Tropical Hotel, on the outskirts of Manaus, and bivouacked for the night in our air-conditioned hotel rooms.

‘We’ were seven of us altogether. We’d brought a BBC film crew with us (although they’d probably say it was the other way round – they brought us) to make a TV series about our adventures: Stephen and I, a four-person team from the UK and translator Marina Barahona De Brito. We were planning to meet up with Ivano Cordeiro, our Fixer, in a few days’ time. We didn’t have a baggage handler or a chef or a masseuse, but with the BBC determined to cut costs we thought we’d try and muddle through.

Manaus is the biggest city in the world’s biggest forest. While much of the Amazon Basin remains unexplored, this particular part of it has been very heavily explored indeed – not least by coach-loads of tourists. It’s the launch pad for a motley collection of half-day, full-day, several-day and one-week jungle adventures.

The salmon-coloured opera house, or Amazon Theatre, is so out of place in Manaus it might as well be on the moon.

Surrounded by rainforest and water, some 1,450 kilometres (906 miles) from the open ocean, the city sprawls along the Rio Negro near its confluence with the Rio Solimões.

These two great rivers have different densities, temperatures and speeds, so they run side by side for several kilometres without mixing. You can actually see a distinct line between them – the dark, Guinness-coloured water of the Negro on one side and the light-brown café-au-lait-coloured Solimões on the other. After years of creative thinking, brainstorming and lively debate by an army of geographers, strategic planners, publicity agents and marketing consultants, the powers that be decided to call it the ‘Meeting of the Waters’.

Sprawling into the surrounding jungle – the city of Manaus.

Eventually, the two rivers grudgingly begin to mix, creating all sorts of intriguing whorls and eddies more like an Impressionist painting. And when they’ve finished, they form the mighty Amazon.

The city itself is best known for its sumptuously grand, salmon-coloured opera house. The Teatro Amazonas, or Amazon Theatre, was completed in 1896 at a time when Manaus was a rubber boomtown and temporarily had an overblown status in the world economy. With its exuberant red velvet seats, crystal chandeliers, Brazilian wood (polished and carved in Europe), Italian marble and 36,000 individually decorated ceramic tiles, it is so out of place amid the hot and humid streets of utilitarian, grime-coloured buildings it might as well be on the moon.

But the best thing about Manaus is the fish market (I realise that only a zoologist – or a fisherman – would have the audacity to say anything so ridiculous). I would never normally admit this to anyone, but I really do like fish markets, despite having to get out of bed at an ungodly hour to see them at their best.

Anyway, there’s no denying that the warehouse-sized fish market in Manaus is in a league of its own: a five-star deluxe version unparalleled by fish markets in lesser parts of the world. It’s not all sweetness and light (it also bears testimony to the industrial-sized fishing fleets now monopolising the market and openly flouting laws and regulations designed to protect Amazonian fish stocks), but it’s worth losing a few hours’ kip for.

The imaginatively named ‘Meeting of the Waters’.

But here’s the thing: it is far and away the best place to see some of the most peculiar and unbelievable fish you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams. A temple to biodiversity, it’s the next best thing to a lifetime of diving in the Amazon (except, of course, all the stars of the show are dead) and gives a wonderful insight into an ecosystem that harbours half of all the freshwater fish species in the world.

Manaus fish market, or Mercado Municipal Adolpho Lisboa to give it its proper name, is a bustling place. Every morning, as many as 100 fishing boats dump their colourful catches into large wooden boxes on the shore of the Rio Negro and then porters run, literally, with these heavyweight aquatic menageries balanced precariously on their heads. They race along the wobbly wooden jetty floating on metal drums, up the concrete steps, over the road and into the white-tiled market. There to meet them in the gloomy light, illuminated only by 15-watt bulbs hanging from a web of bare wires, is an army of fishmongers dressed in bloody aprons and equipped with long, curved knives.

The stalls were soon piled high with a truly eye-catching collection of weird and wonderful fish of all shapes and sizes. Many looked as if they had just been lowered down from a spaceship recently returned from a galaxy far away.

We found 1.5-metre (5-foot) long red and grey pirarucu – unfriendly-looking, grumpy-old-man-faced fish with creepy little eyes, mouths like World War II landing craft and long, barbed tongues. Among the largest freshwater fish in the world, pirarucu are reputed to leap out of the water and grab small birds from overhanging branches.

Next to them were grouper-like, olive-green tambaqui. Roughly half the length of the pirarucu, these fruit and nut eaters loiter beneath trees in the flooded forest and wait for breakfast, lunch and dinner to fall right into their mouths. They are armed with powerful, crushing teeth like the molars of a sheep to grind down the tougher parts of their food.

Elsewhere in the market there were fish that looked like large silver coins, others resembling the porcelain models used to adorn fancy ornamental ponds, snaky fish with zebra stripes, salamander-like fish with fleshy fins, enormous catfish with whiskers that would make your average moggy purr with pride, and perfectly round spotty stingrays like multicoloured Frisbees.

We even found some long-bodied, big-eyed aruanas, or water monkeys, which specialise in surface-to-air attacks on insects that sit around all day, rather unwisely, on branches above the water.

We saw more species of fish in a couple of hours in the fish market than I’ve seen during a lifetime of wildlife watching in Britain: there is no more graphic insight into the hidden underwater world of the Amazon.

Piranhas were everywhere and, as we watched, several different species were unloaded by the crate-full. My favourite were the red-bellies, which live up to their name with glowing red undersides and caudal fins – they must look like neon signs underwater. If you are partial to a surfeit of tiny throat-stabbing bones in your fish, piranhas make good eating. The locals like them because, despite a complete lack of scientific evidence, they are used as a cure for everything from baldness to a lack of virility (perhaps the two are connected, after all?).

I feel sorry for them (piranhas, not bald people). Their reputation as vicious pack-hunting monsters devouring villains in jungle B-movies is, well, utter nonsense. It’s President Theodore Roosevelt’s fault. He came back from a hunting trip in South America, nearly a century ago, telling tall stories of ‘the most ferocious fish in the world’. Experts quickly latched on to his wild imagination and warned that piranhas made ‘swimming or wading an extremely risky pastime over about half the entire South American continent’. Now that the tabloid press has latched on to the idea, there is no separating fact from fiction.

Visiting Manaus fish market is the next best thing to a lifetime of diving in the Amazon (except, of course, all the stars of the show are dead).

The people most at risk are fishermen, as so many local men have discovered for themselves. Their missing fingers are the somewhat predictable result of attempting to remove fishing hooks from inside piranhas’ mouths.

Under the circumstances you’d probably give an almighty bite, too.

The next day we were up at the crack of noon to catch a fast boat to a jungle lodge, just an hour away.

We would have left sooner, but Stephen was busy thrashing about in his hotel room. I went to see if he was okay and found him looking hot and flustered and trying to force a pile of neatly folded clothes into a bright-yellow stuff sack. I watched patiently, for as long as I could stop laughing.

‘You know you don’t fold the clothes,’ I said, ‘you stuff them into a stuff sack. That way they take up less space.’

Stephen gave me a sideways glance, and for a fleeting moment looked a bit cross. It wasn’t like him at all. He muttered something about a smart arse.

Our temporary home for a few days – a comfortable jungle lodge bang in the middle of the flooded forest – giving the sensation of adventure without the unpleasantness and inconvenience of adventure itself.

The many moods of Amazon adventurer and explorer Stephen Fry.

‘Anyway, you don’t need to look neat and tidy,’ I ventured, ‘because we’re on an expedition.’

He glanced at my crumpled shirt, slightly torn trousers and muddy boots. Then he grabbed his pile of clothes, ruffled them up like a tramp rifling through a rubbish bin, and stuffed the tangled mess into the sack.

‘Oh,’ said a slightly embarrassed Stephen, once voted the most intelligent man on television, ‘is that why it’s called a stuff sack?’

Our jungle lodge was a hotchpotch of ramshackle wooden towers and nearly 300 stilted rooms, interlinked by a precarious and rickety eight-kilometre (five-mile) wooden boardwalk. It was like an Amazonian theme park right in the middle of the Amazon. It took the jungle out of the jungle. It made everything seem artificial. Even its own wobbly boardwalk felt like the collapsible bridge at Universal Studios.

According to the official bumph, it was Jacques Cousteau’s idea. I think he may have been suffering from the bends at the time. Anyone who thinks anything so big and brash and out of place is a good thing must have missed some of the lessons.

I guess it was designed for the kind of people who think a naturalist is someone who runs naked through the woods. But for me it doesn’t really count as ‘exploring the Amazon’.

Maybe I’m alone in my aversion. Western lawyers would love the place. Gradually being reclaimed by the surrounding jungle, it had undoubtedly seen better days as its labyrinthine network of walkways and buildings was filled with cracked and creaking floorboards, gaping holes, splintered handrails and a variety of other litigation-inspiring hazards.

And judging by the picture-studded notice board in reception, the lodge was frequently visited by the high and mighty – everyone from Helmut Kohl and the Swedish royals to Jimmy Carter and Bill Gates – and to make such luminaries feel right at home the lodge had not just one, but no fewer than three helipads.

It did have one redeeming feature: its idyllic location, bang in the middle of the flooded forest. This is what the Amazon is all about. The water depth varies greatly throughout the year – reaching a peak in April or May and falling to its lowest level some time in October – thanks to the cycles of snowfall and thaw in the Andes. At the lodge, for instance, the water level can rise and fall by as much as 15 metres (50 feet) in a single year. The impact on the forest and its wildlife is phenomenal.

Nonetheless, intrepid adventurers like us feel out of sorts surrounded by loud and insensitive tourists wearing loud and insensitive shirts and oversized baseball caps. Whatever wildlife happens to be nearby, these are the kind of people who will be facing the other way and talking about the traffic in London, the weather in Munich or the best place to buy chocolate-chip ice cream in Seattle. I was once on a whale-watching boat in the Pacific, and we were trying to listen to the haunting sounds of a singing humpback whale, but we could barely hear above the incessant babble of indistinguishable people in loud shirts noisily swapping baseball caps to see who had the biggest head.

They may want the sensation of adventure, without the unpleasantness and inconvenience of adventure itself, but we didn’t. We were on a proper expedition and, as a matter of principle, in a determined effort to appear as professional as possible, resisted the temptation to have our hair done in the beauty salon or watch The Simpsons on satellite television or hide in our air-conditioned rooms to avoid the gruelling heat and humidity of the real jungle outside.

Admittedly, we failed to resist the temptation to lie in hammocks by the pool, sipping caipirinhas. But no one is perfect. And, to be fair, we occasionally looked up to watch the local squirrel monkeys and white-fronted capuchins and to make the most of high-speed wi-fi on our laptops.

Besides, we were recovering from New Year’s Eve. We hadn’t drunk too much, unfortunately, but we were struggling to cope with a combination of jet lag and hazy memories of a dark beach on the shores of the Rio Negro surrounded by jungle, with a huge bonfire, a firework display to rival the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, a motley collection of biting insects, pink champagne in dainty little glasses, and a blur of singing and dancing.

After a lot of debate and soul-searching, we managed to convince ourselves that our serious lying-down time was a productive and essential part of the jungle habituation process.

Eventually, a couple of days and a couple of dozen caipirinhas later, Stephen was almost ready to be released into the wild. We decided to start by getting wet.

The worst thing about swimming in the Amazon isn’t what you might expect. It’s certainly not crocodile-like caiman, which are large enough to eat the smaller members of a film crew, but rarely do. And it’s not bull sharks, which rather alarmingly leave the open ocean and make their way as much as 3,700 kilometres (2,310 miles) upriver, past Manaus and far beyond.

Stingrays, admittedly, can be slightly worrying. They lie flat on the river bed, waiting for you to step on them, and then give you an almighty sting that is so excruciatingly painful you have to run, not walk, to the nearest doctor. But if you shuffle your feet in the muddy or sandy shallows, rather than marching like a trooper, they are more likely to get out of your way than get out their secret weapon.

It’s certainly not piranhas, and it’s not even two-metre (six-foot) long electric eels or anacondas the length of minibuses.

No, the worst thing about swimming in the Amazon is the tiny candiru fish (pronounced can-dee-roo). Otherwise known as the toothpick fish, vampire fish or (more disturbingly) the willy fish, this is a parasitic freshwater catfish just a few centimetres long.

Eel-shaped and translucent (so it’s virtually impossible to see underwater) the candiru has a voracious appetite for blood. On a normal day it seeks out unsuspecting larger fish by following the flow of water from their gills. It dives underneath the gill flaps, opens its umbrella-like spines to lock itself in position and draw blood, and then drinks and drinks and drinks. It may consume so much blood that its body visibly expands, like that of a leech. Eventually, the little sponger unhooks its spines and sinks to the bottom of the river to digest its meal.

If you happen to be swimming in the Amazon, and peeing, the candiru fish will happily follow the flow of your urine back to its source. Before you can whip up your trunks it will swim straight into your penis and inconveniently lodge itself right inside your urethra. The pain, apparently, is spectacular.

If you are unfortunate enough to be candirued, the best option is to get to a hospital before infection causes shock and death, or your bladder bursts. Failing that (a likely scenario if you happen to be in a remote corner of the Amazon), the next option is to chop off your penis.

Stephen undergoing an essential part of the jungle habituation process.

Alternatively, there is a traditional cure that requires the use of two local plants: the juice of the jagua tree or the pulp of the buitach apple. These are supposed to be brewed into a hot tea that apparently dissolves the skeleton of the fish within a couple of hours (a synthetic version of the brew has been used in the past to dissolve kidney stones). Be wary of some survival books that rather unconvincingly suggest you insert the buitach apple into the affected area.

The main problem with such traditional cures is that, if you’re anything like me, you won’t have a clue a) where to find a jagua tree or a buitach apple, or b) how to know if you actually do. But if you think you’re capable of calmly flicking through a field guide, inevitably written in Portuguese, with a candiru fish and its open umbrella firmly lodged inside your penis, and then organising a nice little campfire to brew a piping-hot cup of tea with your correctly identified traditional plants, then you might just be okay.

The only good news is that, despite rumours to the contrary, it’s perfectly safe to stand on the riverbank and pee into the Amazon below. A candiru fish cannot, no matter how hard it tries, leap in mid-air and work its way upstream like a salmon.

I digress. We weren’t about to swim in the Amazon just to see if we could avoid penis penetration by a fish with a spiny umbrella. We wanted to swim with a blushing dolphin.

The pink river dolphin, or boto, is the kind of animal young children paint at school. A particularly naïve teacher might relegate the exuberant splashes of dazzling pink, the chubby cheeks, the gratuitously long beak crammed with crushing teeth and the gargantuan designer flippers to a wild and fertile young imagination. But pink river dolphins are real – a celebrated Amazonian speciality.

Their pink colour is caused by blood flowing immediately beneath the skin. It becomes even pinker when they are excited or aroused, and as they get older.

We found ‘our’ dolphins surprisingly easily (actually, they found us), tucked away in a quiet backwater far from the hubbub of the lodge. They were used to being fed by local villagers and, as soon as they spotted the boat, started leaping about excitedly. And blushing bright pink. They raced one way, then did a handbrake turn and raced back the other way.

Unlike most other dolphins, which have fused neck vertebrae (enabling them to swim fast and turn without breaking their necks), Amazon river dolphins have flexible necks that can bend remarkably well, as an adaptation for swimming in the flooded forest and weaving between all those submerged roots and trunks.

Stephen is rarely short of something to say, but for a few moments, admiring the dolphins around the boat, he was speechless. Then his remarkable powers of observation returned.

‘They’re unmistakably dolphinous,’ he remarked. ‘If there is such a word.’

Indeed.

We squeezed into our smelly, damp wet suits, rinsed out our snorkels, spat in our masks, climbed down the steps of a floating platform anchored in the middle of the river and stepped into the lukewarm waters of the Rio Negro.

The visibility below the surface was dreadful – less than half a metre (20 inches) – and when I stretched my arm out in front of me I could barely see my fingertips. It was virtually impossible to tell what, if anything, was down there. I glanced across at Stephen, goggle-eyed and smiling as much as he could with a snorkel rammed into his mouth, as he stared into the gloom. The dark, tannin-rich water made this alien underwater world surprisingly red in colour and, for a moment, he looked like an astronaut recently landed on Mars.

Men overboard – Stephen and Mark about to snorkel with pink river dolphins.

Endangered pink river dolphins in a quiet tributary of the Rio Negro – including an incredibly rare shot of one having a pee.

I followed his stare – and there, right in front of us, was a dolphin. Roughly the same size as Stephen and as pink as an embarrassed teenager’s blush, it was hanging vertically in the water and staring straight back.

Within minutes, we were being pushed and shoved and bumped by five or six different dolphins. They would suddenly appear between our legs, under our arms, over our shoulders or right in front of us peering inquisitively into our masks. They pushed and shoved one another, too, in their boisterous efforts to get a closer look at these strange beings from the land of loud shirts and baseball caps.

Photography was almost impossible – the dolphins were either too close, touching me or prodding the lens with their beaks, or they were whizzing around too far away and barely visible in the murk.

But watching them at such close range gave us a unique fish-eye view. Their eyes were tiny (though they can see reasonably well both under water and above the surface), and, like many dolphins, their long mouths were angled upwards in the shape of a permanent smile. This is an expression that cannot be changed – they continue to ‘smile’ when they are unhappy, in intense pain, and even when they are dead.

The proper way to tell a river dolphin’s mood, by the way, is to look at its bulging forehead (known in the scientific world as the melon). This changes shape like the forehead of an Ood from the Ood-Sphere, in Dr Who, and can appear swollen and globular or shrunken and lumpy. Frustratingly, no one has yet deciphered the code (perhaps not surprising, given that male zoologists can barely fathom the changing moods of female zoologists, and vice versa, let alone those of pink river dolphins).

They also have the most peculiar chubby cheeks, making them look like guilty children with their mouths full. In fact, they are so chubby they hamper the dolphins’ downward vision and, bizarrely, may explain why botos frequently swim upside down – it’s probably a simple adaptation to help them see better.

It’s easy to understand why such unlikely-looking animals are steeped in myth and legend. According to one particularly imaginative myth, perpetrated by early missionaries, the dolphins come out at night and turn into handsome young men, complete with black top hats and Edwardian waistcoats; they then ravish young village girls and impregnate them before returning to the river at first light. It was an inspired way of explaining the sudden appearance of pink babies in the local Indian population.

Best of all, legend has it that pink river dolphins are charged with protecting the very animals we had come to the Amazon to see. Apparently, if you really want to see a manatee you must first make peace with the dolphins.

So far so good.

Getting around in the Amazon can be time-consuming. It’s not a happy place for efficient people with a sense of urgency and a superlative quartz watch that is guaranteed to lose no more than 0.5 seconds a day (but then if you’re living so close to the edge that your life is thrown into disarray by normal mechanical timepieces that lose more than 0.5 seconds a day, a bit of time in the Amazon would probably do you some good). There are virtually no deadlines or roads in the region and most of the boats seem to take the best part of a manatee’s 60-year lifetime to reach the end of the jetty.

It was all well and good for the early explorers, who had months or even years to get from A to B, and no pressing engagements back home. But we were on a tight BBC schedule. Stephen had to get back to the UK in time for multitudinous TV recordings and I had to be on several different continents for multitudinous other reasons. Sadly, we didn’t have months to spare.

So we did what most people do under the circumstances. We hitched a ride on a missionary floatplane.

Missionary pilot Captain Wilson Kannerberg did the usual pre-flight checks, bowed his head in prayer, leaned back on a seat cover made of wooden beads normally used by Greek taxi drivers, and reached for the throttle.

Stephen was watching from the back and had that look on his face men get when their girlfriends start winding up tough guys in public. Not scared exactly, but wishing he were somewhere else. Wisely, he chose to ignore the religious mutterings from the cockpit and buried himself in a Portuguese–English dictionary, purchased at the airport. He had nearly two hours to learn Portuguese from scratch. Given that he already spoke French, German, Dutch and Spanish, and had a strong grounding in Latin and Greek, I was mildly shocked that he didn’t speak Portuguese already. But he was remedying the situation fast and I felt sure he’d be fluent by the time we arrived. I speak English and American.

On a wing and a prayer, we flew 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Manaus and began searching for a converted wooden ferryboat called the Cassiquiari. After a few theatrical swoops and turns over the jungle canopy, we found it tucked away in Arauazinho Creek, a tributary of the Rio Aripuanã, and thanked the Lord when Captain Wilson successfully landed with a splash and aplomb right alongside our home for the next few days.

‘Have I told you about my flatulence?’ asked Stephen, as we gathered our belongings and clambered down onto the plane’s gargantuan float. He’d heard a malicious rumour that we would have to share a cabin. ‘Or that I’m a pyromaniac? And did I mention my stabbing obsession?’

We were greeted by the boat’s skipper, Miguel Rocha, along with the guarantee of two entirely separate cabins. Such was Stephen’s cheering response, Miguel might have announced the end of income tax for one and all.

Missionary pilot Captain Wilson landing on a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon with a splash and aplomb.

There was, however, no power in Stephen’s private cabin. And that meant no power for his Apple Mac.

‘Right, that’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re going back.’

‘Never mind,’ I replied consolingly, trying not to laugh. ‘It’ll be alright.’

He looked a little wide-eyed and panicky as he tried to force his laptop plug into a cracked and rusty once-was-a-plug-socket hole in the cabin wall. ‘There’s no never mind about it. I cannot go four days without power.’

I left the cabin, in mock despair.

‘You may well despair, but not as much as I do.’

Miguel was a gentle, calm man in his late-60s. Born in the forest, but brought up in the city, he was one of nineteen brothers and sisters. His grandfather crossed the Atlantic from Portugal in the 1880s and his grandmother was a native Indian. This made him a caboclo, one of the so-called ‘forgotten people’ of the Amazon – mixed-race descendants of European settlers and Amerindians. The caboclos get none of the rights of the indigenous forest-dwellers and are ignored by government and aid agencies, and Miguel was leading their fight for recognition.

He’d been exploring the Amazon Basin professionally since 1981 and knew a thing or two about life in the jungle.

Two men in a boat – searching for one of the rarest and most elusive animals on earth.

We had a long, relaxing lunch on the rear deck, poring over an Amazon-sized map of the forest and planning our mini-expedition. By the time we’d finished we had convinced ourselves that our chances of finding a manatee were actually quite good.

Then it rained.

We happened to be in the Amazon during the rainy season. It would have been a bit rich to complain – after all, rain is the whole point of a tropical rainforest. The clue is in the title.

But there’s rain and there’s RAIN! I have rain at home, in Bristol. Rather a lot, as it happens. To be fair, it doesn’t rain all the time (the week before I left it had rained only twice – once for three days and once for four days), but I’ve always been convinced that I live in the rainiest corner of Britain, if not the entire known universe.

Until, that is, I checked the figures. Bristol doesn’t even register on the scale. My garden receives less than a quarter as much rain in a typical year as the Amazon (not the whole of the Amazon – just an area the same size as my garden).

But the biggest difference is that the Amazon has more professional rain. My garden gets a seemingly endless grey drizzle that starts around the beginning of January and continues through to the latter part of December. Meanwhile, the Amazon gets a heartfelt torrential downpour once or twice a day, complete with unforgettable displays of lightning and ear-splitting thunder, and that’s that. The daily ritual opening of the heavens would make Steven Spielberg’s special effects department glow with pride, but here’s the point: there’s plenty of time in between for everyone to go outside and do things without an umbrella.

Rain stopped play while we were filming at least once every day, typically between midday and 2pm, making an excellent excuse to break for lunch. Sometimes it rained at other times, too, making an excellent excuse to break for caipirinhas or a snooze. The prognosis was unlikely to improve for several months, until the end of the rainy season, but we were always optimistic and never quite got the hang of this new daily routine.

It was like spending a couple of hours every day in a power-jet shower.

We watched the rain lashing against the side of the Cassiquiari, pouring off the blue tarpaulin roof, running across the deck in torrents and visibly swelling the creek. Then it was time for a nap. There were hammocks hanging from the rafters and I picked a bright red one, crawled inside and fell into a deep sleep.

There’s a technique to sleeping in hammocks: you don’t lie in them straight, as in holiday brochures or dreamy advertisements for tropical drinks. You lie in them diagonally. That way it’s possible to lie completely flat and, over the years, you don’t end up with a permanently bowed back and forever curled up like a frightened armadillo.

I woke with a start to find the entire crew standing around me, filming.

‘Welcome to my world,’ muttered Stephen in his very rich, very warm, very English, best TV voice.

Stephen, meanwhile, had been counting mobile phones. He owns 121 altogether, at the last count, but was disappointed to discover that he had only six of them with him in the Amazon. Not a single one had reception. I made a mental note to buy him a satellite phone for his next birthday.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, and we were able to embark on our mission (I suppose we could have started earlier but we didn’t want to get wet).

Before searching for manatees we had to find Ivano, our fixer for the rest of the trip. Sure enough, as promised, he was ready and waiting for us in a delightful little settlement carved into a particularly wild and remote corner of jungle. Called Arauazinho, after the creek, and with just five families forming a population of fewer than thirty people, this teeny homestead of stilted wooden houses was too small to be called a village.

I liked Ivano immensely. Short enough to stand at the table during mealtimes, as bald as a baby manatee and never without a mischievous grin, he had the habit of addressing everyone he met as if he wanted to marry their daughter. He made the perfect fixer – a man who, if he wanted to, could persuade Prince Charles to eat genetically modified crops.

My only slight complaint is that Ivano introduced us to a long-haired Dutchman. This Dutchman talked so slowly, and in such a dreary monotone, that whenever he opened his mouth all you could hear was the sound of doors closing.

He was utterly obsessed with what he claimed to be a new, smaller species of manatee, which he’d already named the dwarf manatee. It’s found only in Arauazinho Creek, apparently, and he wouldn’t talk about anything else.

We’d offer him a beer and he’d say something like ‘Why don’t they call the beer “Dwarf Manatee Beer” instead of “Brahma Beer”?’ We’d invite him to join us for dinner on the boat and, quick as a flash, he’d say ‘We could watch my video of dwarf manatees while we’re eating.’

The Dutchman had been studying wildlife in the Amazon for decades, partly because he liked animals and partly because he was on the run. When we briefly managed to change the subject from dwarf manatees, with the help of a large jug of caipirinha, he told us hair-raising stories of warrants for his arrest issued by both the Brazilian and Dutch governments. He never satisfactorily explained exactly what he was supposed to have done, but it sounded serious.

We’ll call him Hairy van Pit-bull, just in case (speaking in monotone isn’t bad enough to justify a long spell in a Brazilian jail – and he claimed to be innocent of all the other, unspecified charges).

Travelling deeper and deeper into the flooded forest.

In theory, I suppose, he could be right and there may indeed be such a thing as a dwarf manatee. After all, there are pygmy blue whales, lesser white-toothed shrews and dwarf caiman. But Hairy was one of those people who could have sworn blind that our names were Mark and Stephen and we wouldn’t have believed him. To make matters worse, his best evidence seemed to consist of a blurry home video of a vaguely diminutive manatee (most likely a youngster) lasting no more than a few fleeting seconds. It was pretty iffy, to say the least.

He was clearly a bright man. He was fluent in even more languages than Stephen (Dutch, English, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and taki-taki – the mother tongue of the Creoles, once spoken by African slaves working on plantations in Suriname) and was the author of scientific papers on everything from wild pigs to a lost cousin of the Brazil-nut tree. But something was clearly amiss.

I wondered if it might be possible to be an unbearable bore in one language, but an exceptionally witty and enlightening raconteur in another. Perhaps, if we had made the effort to learn taki-taki, we’d have seen him in an entirely different light?

Naturally, both Stephen and I did the diplomatic soft-shoe shuffle and oozed as much politeness as we could muster. Despite our frustration, we couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. His whole world revolved around persuading the rest of the world that dwarf manatees are real. We even agreed to a 20-kilometre (12-mile) wild-goose chase, up the infamous clearwater creek, to search for his little hobbyhorses.

It would only take 15 minutes to reach them, he assured us. Half a day later we decided to go back and return to the mother ship, leaving Hairy to sulk and us to revel in the brief period of heavenly peace.

We said our goodbyes, politely but not too enthusiastically, and climbed back on board the Cassiquiari with renewed joie de vivre.

I asked Ivano about his own encounters with more customary, proper-sized manatees. He laughed.

‘I love manatees,’ he said. ‘They taste better than beef.’

He admitted that he hadn’t actually seen a manatee in the wild, and launched into a happy few minutes reminiscing about eating manatee meat as a child. He could barely stop licking his lips as he described its tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture and the unique, slightly almond-flavoured taste.

Arauazinho village – home to Francisco, his wife Ennis, their seven smiley children and innumerable chickens and goats.

I’d heard about almond-tasting sea cows before. The Amazonian manatee has a long-lost relative, called Steller’s sea cow, which once lived in the Bering Sea between Kamchatka and the western tip of the Aleutian Islands. Three times the size of its Amazonian cousin, this monster among manatees was discovered by the crew of the Russian brig St Peter, who were shipwrecked on Bering Island in November 1741. In fact, the weak and scurvy-ridden castaways survived only by eating their friendly neighbourhood sirenians.

Fortunately, one of the crew happened to be a naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, who spent much of his enforced time on the remote uninhabited island recording information about the animals he and his crew were scoffing. I feel for Steller. It’s hard enough studying wildlife at the best of times, without the added pressure of friends and colleagues eating your subjects as fast as you can write. He did it, though, and made the only detailed written record of the habits and appearance of the sea cow that was later to bear his name.

With full stomachs, the shipwrecked survivors cobbled together an escape boat and, some ten months and many almond-tasting, human-trusting sea cows later, made it back to the Russian mainland. But they blabbed about their miraculous discovery and prompted a rush of hunting expeditions. The sea cows didn’t stand a chance. They provided three square meals a day, and endless snacks in between, while the hunters killed fur seals, otters and other fur-bearing animals for big profit.

The outcome was predictable. Just 27 years after its discovery, Steller’s sea cow officially became extinct. The last one was killed in 1768.

Graca, our boat’s cook, overheard Ivano waxing lyrical about almond-tasting manatees and called out from the galley. I hadn’t seen her so enthusiastic and animated. She described some manatee recipes from her own childhood and told us about manatee-hunting expeditions with her father, armed with nothing more than a home-made harpoon and a rope. They would sit for hours in their little wooden boat, in complete silence, until a manatee surfaced near enough for her father to strike. Then they waited patiently for the injured animal to tow them around and tire itself out.

I asked Ivano and Graca if they still eat manatee meat today. Never, they told me. It’s illegal.

I pushed them a little more.

‘Well, you can still buy manatee meat on the black market in Manaus. Sometimes you can get it, but it’s not easy.’

‘Do you miss it?’ I asked.

‘A lot,’ laughed Ivano.

I left it at that.

The next day we returned to Arauazinho and met one of the villagers, Francisco, as well as his wife Ennis, their seven smiley children and just a few of their innumerable chickens and goats. Francisco had kindly agreed to help us find manatees. He’d seen them just the day before, feeding on water lilies in a hidden lake behind the creek.

Manatees are not just vegetarians – they are greedy vegetarians. They eat a heck of a lot. In fact, they can eat up to ten per cent of their body weight in a single day. That’s the equivalent of me eating ninety three-course meals a day. They are fussy eaters, too, scoffing just a few, carefully selected species of aquatic plants and nothing else.

Understandably, the few carefully selected species of aquatic plants don’t like it at all. So they’ve developed a special anti-manatee device. What they’ve done is to stuff themselves with silica, which is hard and abrasive and wears out the manatees’ teeth very quickly (ironically, silica is used in toothpaste for precisely the same reason – but to remove plaque rather than the actual teeth).

The manatees wouldn’t allow themselves to be outwitted by a few plants and responded – not by carefully selecting other species of plants – but by growing replaceable teeth. They have a canny conveyor-belt system in which all their teeth move forward about a millimetre a month; as the front ones wear out, and fall out, they are replaced by the next in line.

I had woken up feeling quite ill with heatstroke on the morning Francisco offered to help, and was trying to alternate between filming, lying down, and feeling sorry for myself. But Francisco’s sighting, almost within a stone’s throw of where we were standing, had triggered a surge of adrenalin and I couldn’t bear the thought of missing our best chance yet of seeing a manatee.

We manhandled Francisco’s canoe out of the creek, up a steep bank, through the tangled forest and across to the hidden lake. It was hard to do it quietly. Actually, it was downright impossible. Francisco never uttered a word and effortlessly sauntered through the jungle in complete silence, like a ghost in slippers. The rest of us bumbled about like drunks in a coffee shop, stumbling over hidden roots, yelping in pain every time we gashed our legs, cursing whenever we were seized by horrible grasping plants, stepping on each and every snapable twig, swatting irritable mosquitoes, and in the end giggling uncontrollably at the absurdity of it all.

By the time we reached the lake I suspect every local manatee had either moved somewhere else, or died of old age.

Unwaveringly optimistic, though, we launched the canoe and paddled quietly (relatively quietly) across to the far side. We cruised along the shoreline, weaved in and out of the half-submerged trees, zigzagged backwards and forwards in the open expanse in the middle, and every so often waited in silent (relatively silent) anticipation.

Hot? Every morning arrived complete with a full body sweat.

But all our efforts were in vain. We didn’t see a manatee disappear beneath the surface of the lake. We didn’t see the ripples made by a disappearing manatee. We didn’t even nearly see the ripples.

For the next two days we searched rivers and lakes and ploughed tributaries and tributaries of tributaries.

Then we gave up.

It was such a disappointment. I really thought we might be lucky and so wanted to see an Amazonian manatee – even fleetingly – in the wild. But if there were manatees in the Aripuanã, they’d chosen to stay concealed in the river’s murky waters.

We’d been outmanoeuvred by one of the slowest creatures on earth.

Francisco didn’t know of any other likely places to look. We tried to console ourselves in the knowledge that if he didn’t know anywhere else to look, that was definitive. Definitely not knowing was at least better than vaguely not knowing.

Next morning we called Captain Wilson on the satellite phone, reported calm conditions, and settled down to wait for the flight back to Manaus.

The thought of going home (or, at least, returning to the familiarity and relative comfort of the Tropical Hotel, in Manaus) made Stephen bound around the deck with renewed energy and enthusiasm. I’ve no doubt he had enjoyed our little escapade enormously, but I think four consecutive wi-fi-free nights in the jungle was just about enough.

I have a maddeningly low boredom threshold and simply cannot leave the house without something to keep me occupied, just in case my train is delayed, I get caught in a traffic jam or the person I’m meeting happens to be late. My worst nightmare would be to get kidnapped and be forced to cope with days, weeks or (heaven forbid) months of captivity without a notepad and pen, a book, a magazine, a solar-powered laptop … anything to while away the time.

How anyone can embark on a 12-hour long-haul flight without a bulging bag of stuff to keep them busy for at least 14 hours (allowing for delays) I’ll never know. The mere thought of doing nothing but stare out of the window makes me feel downright fidgety.

Except in the Amazon, of course, where there are plenty of reasons to stare out of the window.

The scale of the jungle beggars belief. Describing it as big is like describing Bill Gates as fairly well off. ‘Big’ doesn’t even register on the scale. New York is big. Wembley Stadium is big. The Amazon is absolutely bloody ginormous. As we climbed above Arauazinho not-quite-a-village, and banked towards Manaus, the forest stretched out below us, unbroken except for the occasional mighty river or creek, as far as I could see in every direction.

It made me want to say something. My brain couldn’t possibly grapple with this staggeringly, achingly beautiful expanse of verdant green. It was exploding with superlatives that wanted to get out.

I caught Stephen’s eye. He’d stopped learning Portuguese for a moment and, like me, was staring in disbelief out of the window.

‘Oh my God!’ I said.

‘I know,’ he nodded, knowingly.

We both felt better.

Some of the trees were considerably taller than others. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but jungles have a small number of very tall trees whose role in life is to tower majestically above the main canopy. They form what is known in the trade as the ‘emergent layer’ and they might as well be in the Sea of Tranquillity, they are so difficult to reach and so death-defyingly hard to study. As high as 70 metres (235 feet) above the ground, these emergents give a whole new meaning to the term ‘out on a limb’.

The scale of the Amazon beggars belief. Describing it as big is like describing Bill Gates as fairly well off.

Immediately below them is the thick leafy realm of the forest canopy. This is the heart of the rainforest – home to the vast majority of the Amazon’s large trees and, indeed, most of its animal and plant species. It forms a more or less continuous cover of foliage some 40 metres (130 feet) above the ground, and blocks out pretty much all the sunlight. To be precise, it blocks out 98 per cent of the sunlight (living in the gloom underneath must be like living under a particularly expansive, dark-green golfing umbrella).

The science of navigating and studying the jungle canopy is called ‘dendronautics’. If you fancy a career change, with more day-to-day risks than coal mining, deep-sea diving or flying with the Red Arrows, this is the job for you. It’s perfect for dinner-party conversation because, joy of joys, you would be allowed to call yourself a dendronaut.

As a dendronaut, you will be able to fire ropes into the jungle trees with a crossbow, erect elaborate cranes with rotating jibs, build precarious walkways, climb to dizzying heights using nothing but ropes and pulleys, and even fly above the forest canopy in a wonderful assortment of motorised hot-air balloons, tethered helium balloons and airships straight out of a science-fiction movie. You’ll also get to live in a real-life vertigo-inducing tree house.

The customary storm of the day about to drop its customary load.

Best of all, since dendronautics is still in its infancy and the jungle canopy is one of the last largely unexplored frontiers on earth, there’s a very good chance that you will come across something entirely new to science. The forest above a forest is believed to harbour literally millions of species, from lianas and bromeliads to frogs and monkeys, which are just waiting to be discovered.

Stephen was still staring out of the window. Every so often he’d shout ‘macaw’ or ‘eagle’ or ‘oooph!’ (there was a lot of turbulence with black rain clouds gathering for the next torrential downpour) to anyone who would listen.

I think we saw more wildlife from the plane, flying over the jungle canopy, than in four days of exploring from the Cassiquiari.

The striking thing about wildlife-watching in the Amazon is that you don’t get to do it very often. Far from being overwhelmed by the forest’s world-renowned biodiversity – it was once described as ‘the most alive place on earth’ – much of the time we were decidedly underwhelmed by the apparent absence of anything remotely resembling an animal.

The reason is simple: ingenuity. Competition for food is so intense that rainforest animals live in constant fear for their lives. They have to be clever and resourceful to avoid being eaten (or, at least, to avoid being reduced to gibbering nervous wrecks and dying from stress-induced heart attacks). Experts at concealment and camouflage, they simply can’t afford to be seen.

So it was our own fault, really, that we didn’t see very much. Unlike the jungle’s super-predators, with their finely tuned senses, our pretty useless urban eyes, ears and noses were virtually incapable of spotting anything – unless it actually landed on us and bit really hard.

What we did occasionally see were the animals that deliberately make themselves conspicuous, or simply don’t care whether they are seen or not. These showy jungle inhabitants tend to be either fast-moving, like birds, or inedible and dangerous, like poison-arrow frogs.

Halfway into the journey, it dawned on me that we were probably flying over vast areas of forest that no one had ever walked through, let alone explored or studied.

When Europeans first arrived in the early 16th century, the Amazon had an indigenous population of about six million people living in some 2,000 nations and tribes. Nobody can agree on exactly how many have survived the onslaught of western civilisation, but fewer than 700,000 is the most widely accepted figure.

There are many reasons for the disappearance of so many ‘noble savages’ (as early Europeans called them), but disease is perhaps the most significant. The explorers and early settlers unknowingly brought smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, influenza and a host of other deadly illnesses with them. The Indians had no immunity and were utterly helpless. Tens of thousands perished. Ironically, many never even came into direct contact with the outside world – entire tribes were annihilated by germs that travelled faster than their European carriers.

Then, as if things weren’t bad enough, Jesuit missionaries dedicated to spreading Catholicism terrified the hapless Indians by warning that this wave of sickness and death was God’s punishment for their lack of faith.

The number of indigenous people living in the Amazon seems to have increased slightly in recent years, perhaps because they have acquired a certain level of resistance to at least some of those diseases. Against the odds, there are still more than 200 indigenous groups in the region, talking 170 different languages and dialects, and at least 50 of them rarely or never have contact with the rest of the world.

But the depressing reality nowadays is that there’s more chance of stumbling upon mechanical diggers and bulldozers in the Amazon than of meeting indigenous people.

Since 1970, almost one-fifth of the entire Amazon rainforest has been destroyed. That’s equivalent to an area the size of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Germany and Denmark combined.

You couldn’t dream up a bigger list of more damaging activities if you tried: cattle ranching, land clearance for soya-bean plantations, small-scale subsistence agriculture, logging, and a mixed bag of commercial agriculture, mining, urbanisation and dam construction are responsible for most of the damage. Construction of the 5,000-kilometre (3,125-mile) Trans-Amazonian Highway (which bisects Amazonia and opens up vast areas of land to settlement and development) certainly hasn’t helped. Even misguided government policies, and outrageously inappropriate World Bank projects, have contributed to the environmental havoc.

So why aren’t we all shocked and appalled and waving our arms about in despair?

I think it’s because we tire of hearing about rainforest destruction. I remember writing articles predicting doom and gloom in the Amazon twenty years ago and I quoted similarly horrendous figures – ‘an area the size of Belgium lost every year’ springs to mind. Two decades of the same old revelations make them less shocking than they used to be. Our senses are dulled as the relentless stories of devastation become little more than background noise.

What’s really frightening is that nothing much seems to have changed since deforestation first hit the headlines. Actually, that’s not true – it’s getting worse.

Have all those years of campaigning, fund-raising, pleading, cajoling and cautioning by so many individuals and conservation groups made the slightest difference?

I suppose the positive response would be to say that it must, surely, have slowed things down. But clearly it hasn’t slowed things down anywhere near enough.

We couldn’t leave Brazil without seeing a manatee (or at least a manatee biologist), and the best place to do that happened to be a short taxi ride from the hotel. Right in the centre of Manaus.

I remembered meeting a charming and delightful manatee biologist (how can someone who devotes their entire working life to studying manatees be anything but charming and delightful?) at the National Institute for Amazon Research. In fact, Douglas Adams and I had spent a couple of days with her, along with several orphaned manatees in her care, when we were in Manaus in the late 1980s.

Almost one-fifth of the entire Amazon rainforest has been destroyed since 1970.

Vera da Silva was still at the Institute (known locally as the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonas – or INPA) and was as charming and delightful as I remembered her. She was one of a handful of people responsible for discovering most of what we know about Amazonian manatees (which, as it happens, isn’t very much – but that’s not their fault).

We agreed wholeheartedly that neither of us had changed one little bit in twenty years and walked towards a large concrete tank, complete with two enormous windows and four adult Amazonian manatees.

They were farting and sleeping. As we approached, one of them started walking along the bottom of the tank – literally walking, using its long, stubby front flippers to pull itself along in a bouncy, slow-motion way, like an astronaut walking on the moon. We couldn’t believe our luck: an active manatee.

Stephen stood and watched it for a few moments.

‘Oh my, I think I’m in love,’ he said, utterly spellbound. ‘They’ve got that slow grace that big animals, such as elephants, seem to have.’

We stood and watched the manatees farting and pretending to be weightless, plump and graceful at the same time, and marvelled at their sheer loveableness.

You’re probably wondering why we were so taken with these preposterous animals, and I can understand your scepticism. The problem, I think, is that Amazonian manatees don’t photograph particularly well (that’s not a criticism – I don’t photograph well, either, as my passport photograph spectacularly testifies). Look at a picture of a manatee in a book and you get the impression of an animal that only its mother, or a zoologist, could possibly find attractive.

An Amazonian manatee gasping for breath after hearing that Mark is about to get in its tank, and another one being filmed by cameraman Will Edwards.

But we were completely captivated. They looked so gentle, so harmless, so innocent … so sweet. I can’t believe I just said that. I never say an animal is ‘sweet’. It’s so unprofessional. In my defence, though, it was actually Stephen who said it first – more of a ‘sooooo sweeeeeeet’. And, besides, he’s absolutely right.

We’d been filming for over an hour, trying to think of other, more colourful and imaginative words to describe our new-found friends, and were failing miserably. I think it was the heat. We were trying to do it in the relentless glare of the tropical sun.

The day we visited the Institute was staggeringly hot and humid. Having said that, describing any particular day in Manaus as staggeringly hot and humid is a little like describing one particular sloth as exceptionally upside down. It’s rarely anything else.

Give me sub-zero temperatures, biting winds and icicles hanging off the end of my nose any day. I find high humidity a source of unadulterated misery. For most of the trip, every morning arrived complete with a full body sweat that stayed with me for the rest of the day. After a while, I had the permanent look of a red-faced Japanese macaque in a hot spring and felt hugely embarrassed about it from the moment we set foot in Brazil to the moment we left.

A couple of times I noticed super-cool Vera giving me a strange look as streams of perspiration trickled down my neck, off my chin, across my forehead and into my eyes like a series of dripping taps. She must have thought I’d been sweating buckets nonstop in the twenty years since we’d first met.

But I had a crafty plan to cool off and have a really close encounter with a manatee at the same time. I was also very keen to take some underwater shots – few people have had the chance to photograph these secretive creatures. I asked Vera if I could get in the tank. She hesitated for a moment, glanced at the colossal pile of diving kit I happened to have with me, just in case, and said ‘yes’.

I spent two glorious hours under water, with the four manatees and about four tonnes of manatee poo. I think they were excited. In fact, by the time I was ready to get out, there was so much excitement in the water I could barely see the manatees themselves.

They were a little nervous at first (who can blame them?) but got increasingly confident and inquisitive and, by the end of my dive, were out-and-out friendly. They peered into my mask, gently touched me with their tails and even nuzzled me with their rubbery snouts. Every time I tried to photograph one, another would inevitably be watching closely from the sidelines. If they had cameras, I swear they would have been taking pictures too.

Feeding a baby manatee with bottled milk – some people get all the best jobs.

Gently, I ran my hand over the largest manatee’s back. He didn’t seem to mind. It was surprisingly bristly. At first glance Amazonian manatees look bald, but their bodies are sparsely covered in short, wiry hairs (about one per square centimetre: eight per square inch) that are connected to a rich network of nerves. These are believed to give them a kind of sixth sense – by detecting slight pressure changes underwater – that may explain how the animals are able to navigate in their murky riverine home without bumping into things.

Nothing would have compared to encountering an Amazonian manatee in its natural habitat, of course, but a couple of hours in INPA’s tank was the next best thing.

I doubt if I will ever get another chance. As manatee numbers diminish, it will get increasingly difficult to see them wild and free. Rainforest destruction, dam building and accidental drowning in commercial fishing nets have all been taking their toll. Hunting, too, has long been a major threat. More than 200,000 were killed during the period 1935–54, for their meat, oil and hides, and although hunting at commercial levels has largely stopped, many thousands have been killed in the years since.

I couldn’t stop thinking, while making friends with ‘my’ four manatees, how their placid temperament (like that of the iconic dodo) made them all too easy to drive towards extinction.

It’s impossible to say how many are left. Maybe 10,000; maybe more, maybe fewer. But let me put it this way. In the 1980s, there were reports of as many as 1,000 manatees huddled together in a single river or lake. Nowadays, a gathering of half a dozen is considered quite a lot.

I would have stayed in the tank for longer, but Vera was keen to show us her babies. Hidden away in a quiet corner of the Institute were three more tanks. These were much smaller than the main one – more like the kind of paddling pools children in Kensington or Chelsea might play in – and provided a temporary home for half a dozen orphaned manatees.

As well as studying manatees, the staff at INPA provide round-the-clock care and attention for injured adults and orphaned calves. More and more youngsters had been arriving at this makeshift rehabilitation centre in recent years, and no one knew why. Perhaps it indicated a growing population or a greater awareness among the local people? More likely, it was an alarming sign that more adults were being killed.

Vera pointed out some rope marks on the orphans’ tails. Young calves are curious and naïve and relatively easy to catch. Hunters tie ropes around their tails, tether them to lakeside trees, and wait while the frightened animals call out in distress. As sure as manatees are endangered, their mothers come to their rescue – and almost certain death.

Vera asked if we’d like to feed one, with a bottle of exceptionally rich milk. Stephen was desperate to have a go, and she showed him how. He held the tiniest calf firmly under its chin, with its head just above the surface so it could breathe, and tenderly pushed a baby’s bottle between its enormous, prehensile lips.

With a flipper resting on the great man’s arm and a line of milk dribbling down one cheek, the minuscule manatee closed its eyes and sucked and slurped really loudly. If Stephen were a manatee his eyes would have been closed, too, and I’m sure he’d have been dribbling down one cheek. The two mammals – one already endangered and the other about to be (as you will soon discover) – were in seventh heaven.

The Amazonian manatee was first described as a cross between a seal and a hippo, though it’s not related to either. There is nothing else quite like this perfect piece of evolutionary engineering in the world.

A baby manatee confides in the man charged with nursing it back to health.

After a rejuvenating couple of days marvelling at manatees and poring over emails, we were ready for our final expedition into the wi-fi-free jungle beyond Manaus. This was the part of the trip we’d been looking forward to the most: we were going to release an orphaned manatee back into the wild.

We took a scheduled flight 700 kilometres (440 miles) west, to a small town called Tefé, and set up base camp in the Anilce Hotel.

If you’re ever given a year to live, move to Tefé. Founded as a base for missionaries in the 17th century, it’s pleasant enough, with a Central American flavour to its buildings and streets, but there is absolutely nothing to do. Every day lasts an eternity. I asked a couple of people how they spent their spare time there: ‘reading’, said one; ‘watching DVDs’, said the other.

It reminded me of an Icelandic friend’s response to a visitor who asked what there is to do in his remote village in the winter. ‘Well, in the summer there is fishing and fornication,’ he said, ‘and in the winter there is no fishing.’

We were fortunate, though, because we had things to do and people to see. We waited for the customary storm of the day to drop its customary load and then set off to find the offices of the Mamirauá Project.

We’d flown halfway across the Amazon to meet an honorary member of the project, called Piti. Rescued from a fishing net with a nasty wound in his back (probably made by a harpoon), Piti was a baby manatee. He had been nursed back to health by the staff of the project and was about to embark on the first leg of a long journey to be released back into the wild.

We found the offices, eventually, floating on a wooden platform in the middle of the river, and introduced ourselves to two of the staff: Miriam Marmontel and Carolina Ramos.

If you’re a single male zoologist, looking for a suitable study subject, I would recommend Amazonian manatees. You would be part of an elite group of specialists studying an enigmatic and endangered animal. Plus Amazonian manatee-ologists are all passionate and intellectual and, in my limited experience, would all turn heads on the streets of London, Paris or New York.

I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say.

‘Please can we see your manatee?’ sounded a little lame, or rude, or both.

Stephen took over.

‘Please can we see your manatee?’ he said.

We walked around the wooden platform, which was rolling slightly in the wake of a passing boat, picked our way past several garden sheds or offices (it was hard to tell which), and there in front of us was a bright blue fibreglass tank full of murky water. We leaned over the side, and saw Piti’s little back breaking the surface.

Miriam and Carolina introduced us to Michelle, who had been Piti’s nurse and confidante for the past few months.

The three girls asked who would like to help prepare Piti for his impending expedition. My hand shot into the air faster than a chameleon’s tongue.

We carefully drained the water from his tank, until he was floundering around like an eel in an empty bath, and gently manhandled him onto the wooden floating jetty to be weighed and measured. He twisted and writhed. There was no hint of aggression, no lashing out, no biting. He simply wanted to demonstrate that he could out-wriggle us if he really wanted to. Michelle crouched down beside him and whispered something in his ear. He listened carefully and, miraculously, calmed down.

I was instructed to hang on to his tail, in case he didn’t like being weighed and measured, and was thrilled to be able to help.

He farted.

This was not your average laugh-it-off friend-in-the-pub kind of fart. It was a lengthy, ear-splitting, far-reaching fart.

Stephen stepped back.

‘At least he’s not a meat-eater,’ he remarked, trying to be helpful and positive.

Then he farted again. This time it was a shockingly wet fart which I felt hitting my shirt, dribbling down my shorts and then running down my leg. I glanced up, gasping for air. Stephen was standing on the far side of the tank.

Miriam pronounced Piti large enough to travel, so we lifted the anxious manatee out of his pongy postcard from the wild and started carrying him to another tank, ready and waiting on the deck of a boat called the Com te Abreu.

‘Watch your feet!’ Stephen called, helpfully, from behind a garden shed.

The plan was to take Piti 160 kilometres (100 miles) into the heart of one of the biggest jungle reserves in Brazil where, ultimately, he would be set free.

We hoisted the unwitting little manatee onto the deck of the Com te Abreu and into his temporary new home. With a wriggle and a splash, he disappeared beneath the surface.

We said our goodbyes to Miriam, Carolina, Michelle and Piti, and arranged to meet early the following morning.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans? Without the benefit of hindsight, little did we realise that we were also about to embark on our biggest and toughest adventure yet.

It was still dark when we rolled up, lifeless and uncommunicative, at the appointed ungodly hour.

Mark, Michelle and Piti, preparing for a journey into the heart of one of the biggest jungle reserves in Brazil. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans?

It started to rain.

We commandeered two boats, just large enough to carry eight of us and 31 pieces of kit, and slowly motored out into the middle of the river. We found the Com te Abreu, which was moored alongside the floating wooden platform, and squeezed into a small gap in front of her bow.

Stephen got out first. I set foot on the wet platform a few seconds later, just as he disappeared behind the main boat.

Suddenly, there was a thump and a blood-curdling scream.

I turned the corner to see him lying by the side of the Com te Abreu, almost within touching distance of Piti in his tank, with a look of sheer horror and agony etched into his face.

Stephen never claimed to be the first to fall for an animal like Piti, though I dare say few have done it quite so dramatically. Everything seemed to be hurting – his arm, his shoulder, his back, his head, his ribs, his knee. He was feeling sick and yelping in pain with the slightest involuntary movement. But it was his right arm that seemed particularly bad, and we were worried because he was complaining of numb fingers and a ‘weird’ feeling in his elbow.

We were less than three weeks into a four-week trip. We weren’t quite at the end of the universe, but for a while that morning it felt pretty close.

We should have taken notice of the omens.

There’s nothing worse than seeing a friend in pain, and feeling unable to do anything to make it better. We made him as comfortable as we could, under the circumstances, and waited for help.

The next few hours are a blur of satellite phone calls, BBC medical kits, boat journeys, jungle clinics, plaster of Paris, injections, pouring rain and howls of pain. And all the time we were being filmed. Cameraman Will, ever the professional, kept his finger on the button.

Eventually, after a lot of agonising debate and soul-searching, we split the crew in two. Will, Tim (Sound) and Sue (Assistant Producer) stayed with Piti, while the rest of us returned to Manaus.

Captain Wilson had responded to our SOS and, surprisingly quickly, half of us were in the air heading towards proper medical help. I looked across at Stephen, eyes shut, slumped in his seat, with his shirt tattered and torn and his arm in a temporary plaster. The adventure was over and we were alone with our thoughts.

All I could think about during the two-hour flight was that it could have been much worse. Stephen could so easily have knocked himself out and fallen into the fast-flowing river. I had visions of the rest of us diving in, holding our breath, feeling around in the darkness under the hull, in the vague hope of finding and rescuing him.

The next 24 hours were awful – another blur of clinics, X-rays, blood tests, heart checks and second opinions. At least we got a firm diagnosis. His right arm was broken, very badly, in three places. We decided to get him to Miami for a delicate and potentially dangerous operation to put it right.

But just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do. I woke up with food poisoning and was vomiting every half an hour or so. A doctor was supposed to come to the hotel to clear Stephen for flying, but didn’t. Then we discovered that he couldn’t fly anyway, unless we could remove the fresh plaster cast from his arm (and all we could muster was a pair of curved nail scissors). In all the kerfuffle we lost the crucial hospital X-ray, and then mislaid the key to the storeroom where we kept all the kit. Tim and I were running around like headless chickens, while Stephen (who had slept in his torn and tattered clothes and looked as if he’d just stumbled out of the jungle after being raised by a troop of howler monkeys) was limping around with an unexpectedly stiff leg.

Stephen and Tim eventually made it to Miami – only after persuading the airline to hold the flight – while I hitched another ride on Captain Wilson’s floatplane to catch up with the remnant crew, and Piti.

I had the GPS coordinates of the Com te Abreu, hastily written on the back of a laundry list following a crackly satellite phone call from Sue, and after the usual death-defying swoop over the rainforest the missionary plane touched down in the nick of time. Against all the odds, I’d caught up with them just as Piti was about to be released.

Miriam had sent out a message inviting the children of five local villages to come and meet their new, and still rather anxious, neighbour. As we closed in on Piti’s final destination, news of his arrival had been spreading. By boat and canoe, in twos and threes, and then in a flood, they came. Most had never seen a manatee before.

The staff of the Mamiraua Project had built a temporary wooden enclosure next to a village overlooking the release site, where Piti could become acclimatised to his new home until it was time to be released fully into the wild.

We carefully lifted him out of his tank, carried him across another floating wooden platform and gently lowered him into his halfway house. He disappeared beneath the surface of the murky water, but not before releasing a telltale trail of bubbles that said simply ‘I’m okay.’

We collapsed in laughter.

I watched his ripples for a while and then glanced at Miriam, Carolina and Michelle. They were hugging one another, with tears in their eyes. This was their big day, the result of months of planning and preparation, and they cared so much about Piti and his wild and endangered relatives.

They had a dream. They hoped that the enthusiasm of all those children, for one baby peixe-boi, would feed back through families and traditional hunting communities and make manatees something to cherish rather than hunt. If their dream came true, Piti’s new-found freedom would be just the beginning and they would repeat the care and release of orphaned manatees across the Amazon Basin.

The next day I managed to speak to Stephen on the satellite phone. He was in surprisingly good spirits, under the circumstances, as he awaited his operation.

I was worried that he might be having second thoughts about our future travels together, but I think even he was surprised to discover just how much he was missing his home from home in the jungle.

‘Wherever we meet next,’ he said, though, ‘it is firmly understood that Stephen never leads, he only follows, and everybody helps him onto boats. Because he’s a clumsy arse. That’s just got to be understood.’

And that was that. After all the mad panic of the past few days, both Stephen and Piti were in safe hands and there was nothing left to do. As we began the 12-hour boat journey back to Tefé, picking our way along the backwaters of the Amazon, I crawled into a hammock and slept.

If Miriam’s dream comes true, Piti’s new-found freedom will be just the beginning, and more and more orphaned manatees can be released across the Amazon Basin.