The Amazon as it was

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 23

The Amazon as it was

The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness. By Peter Matthessen. Collins, 1988. 280 pp. Illustrations. $21.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by W. R. Philipson.) This is a vividly written account of the wanderings of a youth in search of adventure. His tortuous journey takes him up the Amazon, among the Inca ruins of Peru, south to the desolate sheep runs of Tierra del Fuego, across the Mato Grosso of Brasil and Bolivia, and finally through one of the gorges of the Urubamba. There is a certain strangeness about the text until you realise that this is a reprint of a book des-

cribing a journey that took place 30 years ago. In those three short decades the whole aspect of the Amazon has changed. No one today could write so complacently about the forests with so much of them irretrievably lost. The photographs too are very much dated, but may give impressions of the rivers and peoples more telling and nearer reality than the glossy colours we now expect. For that is what the Amazon looks like — a dark line of distant forest between the immense

void of the sky and the empty expanse of the river. In colourful prose the author tells oi the interesting and often curious people he meets and of the environments in which they live. Next to the people, he is chiefly concerned with the bird life he encounters and he has much to say about it, less about the animals, and disappointingly little about the plants. He relies heavily on anecdotes he picks up in contacts with often rather dubious authorities, and this results in some unfortunate misinformation. An example is the belief that the beech trees of South America are the same as those on this side of the Pacific.

Half the book is devoted to his last excursion, which is the only one which is a true adventure. All his other journeys are by steamer, plane, jeep, or other civilised transport. But his voyage down the Urubamba by canoe and raft was taken with inadequate information and against all advice. With his companion he got himself into a position where retreat was impossible and progress ill-advised. We are lucky that he survived to give us such a lively commentary on so much of South America.