Heal the World (I'll tell you later)
- 14 Jan 08, 11:11 AM
Posted from: Andoas.
We're in Andoas at last. It's been a mission to get here, as always. First the oil company agreed we could fly up here on one of their planes. Then they decided we couldn't (we later heard one of their platforms had been peacefully occupied by the Achuar so they didn’t want us around). Then they said we could fly again but then they bumped us off the flight. Eventually we reverted to Plan A, which was the usual option of three days on a boat with a stop-off in the Prison Hotel of San Lorenzo and the usual boat diet of crackers, tinned cheese, frankfurters and tinned peaches.
Matt Norman
Matt Norman, our cameraman, has come back from his Christmas break totally kitted up for the second phase of his adventure – he has a pop-up tent, folding cutlery, a miniature electric kettle and lots of dried food. Initially I was quite offended by the implication that he hadn’t been fed properly last time – then I tried one of his dried meals (chicken korma and rice) and the tinned cheese seems miserable by comparison. I wish I had a kettle.
However, by far his most coveted new possession is an MP3 battery that lasts 55 hours! He now luxuriates in his private world of music and movies while the rest of us have to talk to each other to make the long hours pass.
We motored up the River Pastaza all day. It was beautiful, a vast expanse of silver threading through the forest. After the Huitiyacu it feels as wide as the sea. The wet season is here now and we passed through huge storms of driving rain. But there are benefits – the clouds make the sunsets breathtaking.
A river scene
Andoas is really horrible. It’s an oil town in the middle of the Amazon, a ramshackle shanty town of rusting tin roofs and wooden huts around a muddy field. It has two nightclubs (one is called in Spanish ‘I’ll Tell You Later’) and I suspect it houses ladies of loose virtue. The music is thumping as I write. Andoas has electricity and concrete walkways. It feels like a frontier town, the brave new world’s first ugly foothold in the forest. The difference between the Achuar communities here and the ones we visited before Christmas is incredible – music and noise and lights. The orange neon of the oil plant lights up the night. You can’t see the stars here.
We filmed the flashing red lights outside the brothel tonight. As Bruce did a piece to camera, Michael Jackson’s ‘Heal the World’ came on the stereo. Good luck Michael, you may need some help here.
Tomorrow we go looking for the effects of the oil pollution in the forest, but I think we may already have found them.
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