One night, we hunted for water snakes on the shore with a long fork and a flashlight. On a jungle walk, sweating and slipping in mud and poking at giant centipedes in our path, we stumbled upon a ranch where a farmer scampered up a tree and dropped bunches of grape-shaped fruit. His two pet monkeys pawed us. At one village, we inched across a rain-slicked bridge over a gorge to a sculpture studio where an old man said he was starting an artists' colony. Many solitary hunters still stalk monkeys and other small game with blowpipes and poison darts.
Villagers cater to tourists, selling piranha jaw necklaces and tree roots shaped like phalluses.
Others are drunk at noon on the local firewater called tattoo. One chief let us stay in the village meeting place, a wood shack with a dirt floor. In thanks, we gave him bottles of tattoo, aspirin and other medicine. The Amazon captures the flavor of magical realism, the literary style associated with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's tales of his native Colombia. Pink dolphins, protected by environmental laws and shrouded in local legend, frolic in the river.