John Hartford included those words in a song about the Ohio River. A version of the line was originally attributed to Mark Twain as “Too thick to drink, too thin to plow” about the Missouri. As we rode in a canoe with an outboard motor through some of the “floating islands” on the Amazon I thought of that line.
We were calling at Boca da Valeria. It is a village of fewer than 100 people. When cruise ships call it overwhelms the town. In 2025 that will happen five times with ships from Holland America, Oceania, and Silversea. While the town itself is under 100 people, Boca da Valeria is at the mouth of the Valeria River, the larger town of Valeria is just a bit upstream and Rita do Valeria a little further up. One of the Holland America people said there were several thousand people in the catchment area but when I spoke with the “chief” he said that there were under 400. When a ship calls people flood into town, not only from the ship, but from neighboring towns. As we left the town, we could see families leaving in their canoes and small boats or on foot back to Valeria and other communities.
When we got off the tender we were mobbed by kids. Sometimes in a strange city when I am mobbed by kids it can be a pickpocket ring. Some kids distract you while someone else reaches for your wallet, cell phone or watch. While here I didn’t need to worry, instinctively and my hand went to my wallet pocket. A kid grabbed each hand to give me a tour and others grabbed their hands and soon I was leading a train. Suzi, with her arm in a sling, only had one hand to grab. The disadvantage of kids grabbing your hand is that there were no hands left to take pictures. The ground was slippery with mud and sometimes the kids pulled me off balance, but I did not fall. I only had a small train. My friend John looked like the pied piper.
When we got to the church, only a few dozen yards away I thanked the kids, gave each one a dollar and they scampered off to escort the next tourist for several dozen yards.
Kids are a main tourist industry in Boca do Valeria. Many of them carry baby sloths, baby caymans, or parrots and ask for a dollar to take their picture or for you to hold the baby sloth for a selfie. One adorable child had a baby sloth on his stuffed animal. It turns out that that was closest to the right thing for him to do.
In our P2P cruise Facebook group, a letter posted from the Sloth Conservation Foundation urged us not to encourage the kids to take baby sloths from their mothers for pictures or selfies by giving them a dollar. They pointed out that these “pets” were highly stressed, and that they would not survive long after our visit. I thought the letter was convincing, but I wanted to verify so I did a search and found that several conservation NGOs and at least one official agency agreed. I checked to make sure that they were not quoting each other in a sloth feedback loop.
In the rare occasions when a mother sloth has twins, she abandons one because she can only support one. In the case of abandonment one NGO tries to raise the sloths and finds that the most comforting thing for the baby sloth is to give it a stuffed animal to cling to. It’s the closest thing to cuddling mama, so one kid had it partially right. Raising abandoned sloths is difficult because a sloth mother’s milk is not like other milks and giving the baby other milk can kill it. Also, a sloth needs a variety of leaves that its mother provides, and they must be fresh. Successfully raising a surviving baby sloth is labor intensive. So, they die.
I was convinced that I should not, and I did not intentionally, take pictures of cute kids with cute baby sloths. Even as one kid cuddled and kissed it on the head. I certainly did not give them a dollar for a picture. We left money in town in other ways. Like paying the “tour guides” and taking a canoe with an outboard motor around the sloughs and backwaters of the Valeria River delta.
(I found several baby sloths in arms in the corners of pics I took, it was impossible to avoid. They were everywhere.)
The boat went through the floating patches of grass and, what looks like peat, past giant lily pads. We saw birds and lush vegetation and went upriver to the larger town of Valeria, which is located on a high bluff, safe from the rising and falling river. The engine drives a prop on a long shaft and the boatman adjusts the depth of the prop based on conditions. He also has a paddle when the engine conks out, which ours did. But our boatman was always able to restart it. Our cruise director reports that his bat had the engine die and he and his companion were left floating in a raft with other boats while the boatman got a wrench to fix it.
The town sells a lot of souvenirs, many of them hand-crafted locally but some, I suspect, not so authentic. In Rio a lady at the tourist desk directed us to, what she called, the Chinese Market. It is not overtly Chinese in what it sells but what it sells are Brazilian souvenirs made in China. She assured me no one would know the difference and it would save me a lot of money. We walked through it but did not buy. I suspect some of those items may have filtered up the Amazon, even to this remote village.
In reading over I realize that I may sound a little cynical about this authentic experience in a remote Amazon village, but it really was one of the highlight days of the cruise. We did see a real small town, with a school and church. We did see a problem common with our town in Alaska, landslides. One recently came down and damaged the back of the church.
But being in a river delta leading into one of the main water highways in the world. Valeria is not quite as remote or isolated as promoted. Living in Alaska, I have a whole different idea of remote and isolated. One of our cruise mates commented that this stop took us back 400 year. I looked up at the satellite dish on the roof of the hut nearby and the electric lines strung between poles and houses and chuckled. But this place resonated with me. Even the kids with the sloths. We had an Alaskan malamute and our son, when he was a cute little kid, taught the dog the command “Skiff, pose.” The dog posed with that happy husky smile that malamutes can affect, and cruise tourists did give him a dollar.
