Exploring the Amazon Rainforest with Amazônia Wild Experience
Words: Pierre from Amazonia Wild Experience
Ever wanted to explore the Amazon Rainforest? The idea of trekking through its wilderness and learning about ancient indigenous traditions has maybe crossed your mind a couple of times.
We share some words from Pierre, a French-born explorer based in Manaus, in the Amazon. Pierre is part of Amazonia Wild Experience, an agency born out of the friendship of three backpackers, who are passionate about the Amazon.
Holding a great deal of respect for the Amazon local inhabitants and wildlife, Pierre and the team are committed to protecting the rainforest and sustainability while offering personalised expeditions into the Amazon.
What to expect when setting out on an expedition in the Amazon
The question about "technical" preparation and dangers in the Amazon is super interesting because it breaks some myths! (Spoiler: piranhas are not going to eat you, even if you fall in a piranha-infested river).
Speaking of dangers, I would say that you should take all the usual precautions when you camp in the forest (Amazonian or not). For example, never camp near a dead tree that could collapse. This is what happened to me on the first day of my very first trip to the Amazon. While we were eating after a storm, we hear noise in the branches, we thought it was monkeys... and no it was a dead tree which collapsed on us, or more precisely on my backpack on the ground!
During the storms, we are careful with the lightning, even if there is not really a parade. But I already saw the lightning pass a few meters away from me!
The other danger that we fear during the storms is that when we sail, the big rivers like the Rio Negro, the Rio Solomon or the Amazon are agitated, and there are waves like the sea in storm, and they can turn over the small boats. We have to take refuge as soon as possible in a bay or a river to avoid being trapped.
Some people have already had bad surprises by camping too close to small rivers, with the water rising very quickly during the night, to wake up with the water close to carrying away all our stuff. These seem like beginner's mistakes but that's how we learn.
As far as animals are concerned, the main problem is in fact insects. Ants, if they pass on the way to your camp and bivouac, will visit you at night to inflict you with dozens of bites for a wake-up call. Of course, mosquitoes are dangerous, mainly because of malaria.
There are a lot of ticks in Amazonia, after an afternoon of hiking with torn pants, I had to remove 80 ticks the same evening. Fortunately, Lyme disease only exists in temperate zones, and some tribes of Indians eat ticks.
It happens quite regularly that stingrays bite people who go swimming. Rays lie on the bottom of shallow water and you can sometimes walk on them, which is when they will bite you on the foot. You will spend several days with a swollen foot. The technique to avoid this is to take a branch and feel the ground in front of you when you walk in the water.
Regarding large animals, be aware that jaguars will not attack you. They often eat the dogs of people living in small communities in the forest and that's about it. Jaguars avoid humans, if they were to attack someone it would only be in self-defense.
On the other hand, we are careful with the anacondas. I have never seen an accident with this animal, but I know that they do not hesitate to attack young children.
Otherwise, as I told you, piranhas do not attack humans. This is one species that is more aggressive than the others, but nothing that would put your life in danger! You can swim in a river full of piranhas without any problem.
To conclude, in the words of several Indians I know, the danger in the Amazon is human!
For the clothing side of things, I would say that it is necessary to take good hiking shoes, long sleeves because of the insects and take clothes in double (in case you tear or lose one of the 2 items) but no more so as not to be too cluttered.
It is always easy to wash your clothes in the rivers. Of course, there is the whole accessory part like knives, water filter, headlamp, poncho... but it remains standard.
I must say that for the part about the equipment, I met so many people from the local populations who leave several days in the forest with a machete in their hand and who are satisfied with a pair of shorts, a long-sleeved T-shirt, rubber boots, a rusty knife and a bag made of braids of lianas that I relativized a lot on the subject.
A brief introduction to us (Amazonia Wild Experience)
Amazonia Wild Experience was born in the middle of the Amazonian Forest in Guyana.
We are an agency based in the city of Manaus, that offers expeditions in the Amazon. We also have a small base at the border between Brazil and Guyana.
Our idea is quite simple: to get off the beaten track and offer real adventures where no one else goes.
We are really on the tailor-made side of things, as opposed to mass tourism. For all our stays, we either sleep at the inhabitant's house or on the boat's deck and most often in a bivouac, always in a hammock of course!
We propose several itineraries in remote places in Brazil and Guyana, and we give the possibility to our clients to personalize the itinerary. Or they can start from zero and build an expedition where they want to go.
I think it's important to say why we're doing this before anything else.
I discovered the Amazon in a context where I was a French expatriate in Brazil in Rio. Big fan of trekking and hiking, I explored Brazil extensively, until the day I decided to finally go to the Amazon.
I quickly realized that it was impossible to prepare for the trip in advance because there were no offers for people who wanted to go on an adventure. It was very difficult to find information and what came out of my research was that basically, you had to go to Manaus and do it yourself.
The only things you could find on the internet were rather sanitized stays, without any adrenaline, and frankly, it's frustrating when it comes to the Amazon.
So I left for Manaus, I went around the local agencies, which didn't propose much of interest: often they were hostels in the jungle where you don't do much of your days and where the activity they announce you as the highlight of the stay is, in fact, to sleep one night in the forest in a hammock during your stay.
With my friend, we found an agency that proposed we go for a week in the forest with a guide in survival mode. That's what we did, and it was a revelation, sleeping in hammocks, hunting, fishing, frankly, it was the total freedom.
The guide, his name is ‘Clever’ that we had was quite amazing, a Wapishana Indian from Guyana, who spoke to us a lot about his native lands, and who explained to us how beautiful the place was.
In short, we finish our stay in the forest, and one year passes, a year during which we want to leave again for the Amazon.
So, I make some phone calls to Manaus, and I manage to recover the contact of the guide that we had had! I tell him that we want to go to Guyana with him, and bingo, it is gone. A few weeks later we find ourselves at the border and we go to Guyana.
The country is super preserved and it has simply no tourism. We join an Indian village and we leave 10 days in the forest, total exploration, landscapes to cut the breath, a lot of animals, full of super rare species that here you see easily.
This second trip was the starting point of many expeditions, we started to make a lot of contacts and create a network of local guides.
For us it was sure, we had to create an agency.
Overall, our objective is: to allow people like us, in search of adventure and discovery, to discover the Amazon by proposing real stays prepared to measure. We address the adventurers, the curious nature lovers.
And our second objective is to involve the local populations. When you are born in the Amazon, you do what you can to survive, and some of them do gold panning because that is all they have to live on. Our idea is to make these people work with us so that they understand that the forest and its ecosystem must be protected. We aim to develop reforestation projects in the medium term.
We love what we do because the fact of going very far in places where nobody goes allows you to really create a special relationship with people and to find real human values of sharing and exchange.
For me, it's a great inspiration and what is great about what we do is that on the one hand we meet such humble people in the middle of nowhere but on the other hand our clients are also very interesting.
All the people who travel with us have a thirst for adventure, have done a lot of things, and always have a lot to tell and frankly, that's great too. It's pure pleasure to be in the middle of nature with people like that! We are far from the super square format of 2/3 days where the goal of the person is to take selfies and go live on Instagram.
We started this business, simply to meet the needs of people like us, who want to discover the forest in total freedom, without making a boring and super framed trip, whose itinerary is always the same.
I'm doing this for people like you or me, who love nature and adventure, but who don't really know how to organize a trip in this region of the world.
Pierre’s personal adventures in the Amazon Rainforest
Why the Amazon? For so many reasons...
It is a huge territory and quite varied, which changes a lot from one place to another. Like Europe for example, which is not a big equal whole but a variety of specificities. And this diversity of the Amazon is very interesting, between forests, hills, big rivers, small rivers and even savannas.
This feeling of freedom while trekking in the forest is magical. There is always a little bit of excitement when something unexpected happens in the middle of nowhere, a breakdown or something, and I love that too.
After my first trip in the rainforest back to the city, I would wake up every night feeling like I was in the middle of the forest.
In the dark of my room, I could see the forest and hear all the sounds of the jungle, so weird! It happened to me several nights in a row, I wondered if I was not going crazy. I read once in a book about an adventure in the forest in Congo, that this had also happened to the writer when I came back to town, I felt less crazy…
Of course, the fauna and flora are fascinating in the Amazon. And every time you see an animal, it is a great feeling. Sometimes we spend hours following tracks to find an animal, it is very exciting. It is necessary to say that it is not always easy to see animals, the vegetation is so dense! So, you are always happy that you manage to see it. And some animals have really something special. I can tell you that every time I see a jaguar it's magical, especially if you are on foot, you feel the proximity! When it roars, I can tell you that all the hairs on your body stand on end! The Amazon manatee is quite crazy to see, very difficult and rare but superb. And I always enjoy seeing dolphins or parrots, which I can easily see every day, I never get tired of it!
Finally, the men and women you meet in the Amazon are so interesting. Obviously, there are the indigenous population who live in the forest, these people fascinate me by their presence and their history, the meetings are always great.
And there are also other local people who live in the forest, real communities of solidarity and kindness and it is warm to spend time with people like that. The people have a lot of stories to tell. I think I could write a book with short stories about these people.
I once met someone who works for a German company that was collecting the leaves of just one tree to make medicine. This person's job was to locate trees in the forest and so he would go into the jungle alone for several weeks. One day he went to the forbidden indigenous lands, without knowing it, and he was captured by the indigenous people! He spent 2 weeks in captivity with them before they decided his fate. I would have loved to have had that happen to me! Today this guy works with us, he helps us with the logistics between the border of Brazil and Guyana.
I would say that my favourite trip was in Guyana when we were exploring new areas.
First of all, Guyana is great because it's super preserved, so you see a lot of animals. During this trip, where we were going day by day, we came across a gold mine in the middle of the forest. It was very instructive because you see that the people who make that, and who pollute to make this activity, are in fact people who want to survive and look for a job, it was instructive to be confronted to that. We spent one night in their camp, we could ask them a lot of questions and talk about all the threats that weigh on the Amazon.
During this same trip, we had joined an Amerindian community, and the chief of the tribe had authorized us to spread our hammocks under the malloca, the main hut of the village. The next morning, I woke up with all the inhabitants around my hammock to know who I was, it was funny! Still, during this same trip, we had stopped in another community and we had put our hammocks at the shaman of the village.
He told us how he healed and invited us to sleep in the sacred hill behind his house so that we could tell him the dreams we had had so that he could heal us...
