This was the day we were all waiting for - the trip to Tumbira. We had an early start and drove on a fast boat with Roberto as our driver and guide. We zoomed over the river, the rainforest on either side, with more unknown sights and sounds on the flat river that reflected the blue sky like a mirror. When we got to Tumbira we saw colourful bunting and movement all over. The community was in the last days of preparing for a big festival that we were able to attend near the end of our stay there. We set up our beds for the week: hammocks outside a wooden building, with mosquito nets covering them, that have a wonderful lookout over the river.

 

We walked around the island and had a tour of the community. We saw the wooden houses where the locals stayed, so different from the city, with hammocks outside every home and wooden shutters over the windows instead of windows. The community consists of the houses, two shops, a restaurant, a massive soccer field with communal areas surrounding it, a playground, gardens, a school, a place for researchers and teachers to stay and then the forest. The community members have gardens or workshops where they run their businesses, practice their crafts and make their provisions. 

 

We sat on a wooden deck underneath a massive tree where we shared our space with alarmingly big ants and had a learning session with Dr Rita Mesquita. Rita shared her research with us and taught us about the history, composition and dynamics of the amazing Amazonas.

 

She mentioned that the biodiversity of the Amazon is the key factor to finding solutions to some of our more pressing problems by resulting in production chains that can solve income generation problems, food safety issues and offer new medicinal products. Not only that, but the biodiversity also performs critical ecological processes that are responsible for the functioning of the forest and all lives that depend on it. In this way, biodiversity is not only a product to be utilised but also an agent in the future environmental state of this region. Small communities like Tumbira show the level of human interference that can be tolerated by the forest and that cities, and the large number of people and resources associated with cities, cannot be developed in the forest in a sustainable way.

 

We went on a silent evening walk in the rainforest with guides to lead us and show us the secrets that the forest hides at night. We were looking for the Urutau bird known as the mother of the moon, but we were out of luck. But we did see whip spiders, tapir homes, blind ants that scuttled under the flashlight and a sort of forest chicken called Tinamou that was sleeping on a branch.