Amazon Rainforest Tours and Travel | Armchair adventure in the Amazon
Some adventure travel memoirs are linked to a certain period of history. A trip across the United States, told in the 1800s, is a covered wagon journey of hardship, and recounted today, becomes a ho-hum car ride along the Interstate. But on Amazon tours, where conditions have remained more or less unchanged, adventure travel chronicles penned yesterday can be as harrowing and suspenseful as those written centuries ago. From the comfort of your home or the sanctuary of a lodge hammock during your own Amazon eco-travel, the rainforest memoirs of Amazonian explorers make spellbinding reading.
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Among contemporary page-turners you'll find: American adventurer Joe Kane's 1985 best-selling memoir, Running the Amazon that traces his six-month 4,200-mile grueling Amazon tours from the Peru Andes to the Atlantic on foot, raft and kayak. The published journals of British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett were mostly written from Rurrenabaque on the edge of Bolivia rainforest in Madidi National Park. Israeli adventurer Yossi Ghinsberg's memoir, Back from Tuichi, is a gripping tale about finding his way out of the Bolivia rainforest after being swept overboard and over a thirty foot waterfall while rafting on the Tuichi. For a comic look at the foibles of Amazon eco-travel, there is In Trouble Again, A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon by Redmond O'Hanlon.
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Historical accounts have their own appeal. Clearly a sense of adventure clouded the imaginations of these early travelers who lacked the modern-day conveniences of a helicopter rescue and cell phone contact with the outside world. In her book, River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, Candice Millard chronicles the former president's 1913 excursion down the Amazon. After serving two terms, he made a final bid for the White House as a third party candidate representing the Bull Moose Party. His defeat to Woodrow Wilson made him seek the "strenuous life," to put his current cares in perspective as he had done following previous disappointments.
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On the South America lecture circuit after his defeat, he delivered several speeches as a guest of the governments of Argentina and Brazil and then set out on a Brazil rainforest expedition to determine if the uncharted Rio da Duvida was in fact an Amazon tributary. With his son and a group of fellow-explorers, he traveled 400 miles from the highlands to where the river meets the Aripuana River. Today the Rio da Duvida is known as the Roosevelt River. As in most accounts of Amazon adventure travel, his party met hostile tribes, wildlife that was none too friendly either and exotic devastating diseases. Five years before his death, Roosevelt wrote his own memoir about the expedition, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, published in 1914.
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Gordon MacCreagh's White Waters and Black is a first-hand account of a group of noted scientists who set out to explore the Bolivian rainforest in 1921, knowing more about science than they did the pitfalls of Amazon tours.
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Long out of print, the re-issue of the 1953 memoir, The Rivers ran East, by Leonard Clark tells of his journey in the Peru Amazon in search of a mythical city containing gold that in earlier centuries had lured explorers into the rainforest.
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For more books about the Amazon, go to www.longitudebooks.com.
