Visit to Encante - dolphins of the Amazon region

Realm of the Pink Dolphin

The days are full of water. The wet season has drowned the village soccer fields and banana groves and manioc gardens, even flooded some of the less carefully placed stilt houses along the river. Young saplings are submerged completely, and fish fly like birds through their branches. Huge muscular trees stand like people up to their torsos in water.

Every day there is an extravagant, transforming rain. Sometimes a storm cracks the sky with lightning, crashes branches, rips animals from the trees, and then is gone. This is a man rain, Moises Chavez says. But a rain that pours itself out for hours, sobbing and heaving--that, he explains, is a woman rain, "because a woman can cry all day."

As the days are full of water, the nights are full of sound. From tree and ground and water, voices rise like little bells and tiny flutes: trills, screams, warnings, laments. They speak in the language of water. In the wet season, the sun-grebe's nighttime call sounds like water falling into a tin cup. A ladder-tailed nightjar cries out the name of the river: "Too-WHY-you! Too-WHY-you!" Jewel-eyed tree frogs sing in voices like bubbles rising up from the water, breaking its surface like breath.

The river is the looking glass into another world. By day, the water is a perfect mirror of trees and sky--and yet its glassy surface moves so quickly that if you enter the water without a lifejacket, the current will sweep you under. The river people speak off the Encante, an enchanted city beneath the water, ruled by beings they call Encantados. Those who visit never want to leave, because everything is more beautiful there.

At night, even the stars seem brighter in the water than in the sky. In your canoe, you feel like you are traveling through the timeless starscape of space.

But if you stop and wait, the Encantados will come. At first you may feel a sizzle of bubbles rising beneath the craft, an effusion of pearls cast up from below like a net of enchantment. If the night is moonless, you will only know their breath. But if the moon is full, you may see a form rising from the water, gathering into the shape of a dolphin. Inches from your canoe, a face may break the surface--a face at once otherworldly and eerily familiar. The forehead is clearly defined, like a person's. The long beak sticks out like a nose. The skin is delicate, like ours. Sometimes it is grayish, or white--and sometimes dazzlingly, impossibly pink. The creature turns its neck and looks at you, and opening the top of its head, gasps, "Chaaahhhhh!"

In Brazil, they call this dolphin "boto." They say the boto can turn into a person, that it shows up at fiestas to seduce men and women. They say you must be careful, or it will take you away forever to the Encante, the enchanted city beneath' the water. In Peru, they call the creature "bufeo colorado"--the ruddy dolphin. Shamans say its very breath has power, and that the sound it utters when it gasps can send poisoned darts flying, as from a blowgun. Scientists call it by the species name: Inia geoffrensis. They say it represents an ancient lineage of toothed whales--a freshwater dolphin, caught in a Miocene time warp since the era when alligators bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex lurked in the shallows.

Each person who encounters an Encantado comes away from the encounter speaking a different truth, informed by dreams and ghosts and the hot, whispered breath of rain on the river. For here in the Amazon, where unfathomable tragedies collide with unquenchable desires, the most preposterous of impossibilities come true.

We motored away from the dock in an open 16-foot aluminum motorboat that would take us to the Meeting of the Waters and to the dolphins.

The Amazon was full of trash. As we motored away from the dock, we viewed the muddy water around us with growing despair. We saw spray cans, cola bottles, oil cans every fifty yards or so. Plastic bags floated like jellyfish; stray barrels bobbed like bloated carcasses. We looked back toward Manaus and its industrial district where towering buildings proclaimed Samsung, Sony, Honda, Shell. An iron factory spewed black from one smokestack, while another glowed orange. Speedboats, reared up like anxious racehorses, whizzed by, so we had to pause to weather their wakes.

Within five minutes, we came to the Meeting of the Waters, where the black water of the Rio Negro and the white water of the Solimoes meet. Tourists peered down from a party boat at the two wide, wet brush-strokes of coffee and cream. The separate waters looked like living creatures traveling together, two monstrous eels or fringed water snakes, flowing side by side for nearly four miles. Atavistically, I wanted to touch the waters, as a child reaches out to touch an animal; but I recoiled at the floating trash. It seemed impossible that dolphins could be living here.

Just then, two triangular fins split the waters. They sliced precisely between the two halves of the river, at the intersection of the two colors, as if being born.