Up a river with a pink dolphin

The Rio Negro is a very dark river because of all the peat built up by the tons of foliage left in the river from the rain forest. It’s so dark that when you look at your hands they look orange and you can barely even see your toes. Imagine how surprising and exciting it is when a river dolphin comes out of the darkness to see what you are doing in its world.

 The river dolphins are quite different from the ocean dolphins you see at Sea World. The Amazon river dolphin has evolved sharper and longer teeth with a narrower beak to be able to better feed in the dark river. They also have poor eyesight and it looks like they don’t have eyes. Unlike the bottlenose dolphins in Sea World, they also are genuinely interested in seeing what you are doing. We had a time where we able to touch the dolphins while they were fed and then we had a little time to swim around and most of the dolphins stayed close. I touched 4 or 5 just floating around. You almost never saw them, but they would touch your feet and hands. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

                The dolphins feel different from the dolphins from the ocean. Instead of a hard rubber, the river dolphins feel like soft gel. The males are a little darker, but some of the females, especially the pregnant one (her name is Sophie), are a pink-white color. There can be nothing so amazing as seeing them float up to you out of the darkness and for them wanting to know more about you.

                We ended the day with going to a set of movie that was about a rubber plantation. The owner lied and cheated and even killed people to use poor European immigrants as his slave workers. It was a tragic but very interesting story. It reminded me of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. We saw how they collected rubber by cutting diagonal lines and slicing a cup into the side of the tree to collect the rubber sap. They would then smoke the rubber and put it onto other rubber to make a 30-50 Kg ball. The amazing thing is that is actually bounces when you drop it!

 

Random story-the rubber trees of Malaysia and Southeast Asia were stolen from Brazil and smuggled by the English. As the number of rubber trees quickly grew in Asia, the Brazilian market was collapsed by the cheaper Asian rubber. The Brazilian rubber industry creped along until 1941 when Japan invaded Southeast Asia to gain access to the natural resources found there, among them rubber. With the United States and the Allies needing rubber to fuel the war machine, they bought Brazilian rubber to win World War II. Cool huh?