Family adventures in the Amazon

An adventure holiday in the Brazilian Amazon turned out to be full of surprises for all the family, writes Christopher Middleton.

There are 18 of us altogether; 11 children and seven grown-ups, lost and sweating in the heat of the Amazon jungle, with only Paolo our native guide between us and the poisonous spiders, not to mention the dehydration, disorientation and eventual starvation - speaking of which, Paolo is showing us how to set an animal trap.

“First, spread white sand on the path the animals use,” he tells us. “Their prints will show you the size of animal and the direction they travel in. That way, you know what height to set the arrow.”

Arrow? Yes, our wily guide has set up a hidden crossbow-type device, triggered by a tripwire. With any luck, we’ll soon be tucking into anteater. And it won’t have to be raw, either; as well as being on top of all the ancient jungle survival techniques, Paolo has a few modern tricks up his sleeve, too.

“In a plane-crash situation like this, you want to find some batteries in the wreckage, plus a bit of wire wool, the kind the air stewards use for washing dishes,” he tells us. “Strike the two batteries together at the positive end to cause a short circuit, and you’ll make a spark that will set fire to the wool.”

A few minutes later, two burning torches stand guard outside the makeshift, plaited palm-frond shelter that Paolo has constructed. “The flames will keep away the insects and frighten off the jaguars,” he says. “We should be able to keep going now until we are rescued.”

Not that anyone’s actually out looking for us because this is just a pretend survival scenario. That said, precious few of our party (ages five to 52) would have the faintest clue how to find the way back to our Ecolodge, half a mile of impenetrable undergrowth away.

We’re all here in Brazil on a 14-day Amazon family adventure, run by the long-established adventure holiday company Explore. While this is the leafy, rainforest section of the trip, there’s also an urban part (Rio de Janeiro), a waterfalls part (at Iguaçu, on the Argentinian border) and a beach part (Praia do Forte, near the north-eastern city of Salvador).

All this is interspersed with lots of flights, what with Brazil being the size it is, and some of our destinations being more than 1,000 miles apart. Our plane from the Amazonian capital Manaus to Salvador, for example, makes six stops en route, though mercifully that has been reduced to three for the 2008 tour.

There is no question that the schedule is demanding (some mornings start at 4am, others at 5am), but at the same time there are plenty of treats in between. All of our hotels have swimming pools and, in terms of activities, there aren’t many holidays where you get the chance to eat termites (they have a woody taste) in the world’s densest jungle and to sip chilled passion fruit juice on the world’s most famous beach (Copacabana).

As with any holiday, there are experiences that are good and experiences that are bad, but on this trip there are far more that are just plain surprising.

In the “E for every bit as enjoyable as expected” column, you can put the spectacular views over Rio, from both Sugar Loaf Mountain and from the colossal Christ The Redeemer statue on Mount Corcovado. Add to these the thunderous beauty of the Iguaçu Falls, spanning two borders, a canyon nearly two miles wide that looks at first sight like a gargantuan steaming disaster zone – or the world’s biggest bath overflowing down countless craggy walls, sometimes in lumps of leaden meringue, sometimes in symmetrically fizzy soda streams.

Under “D for disappointing”, you can file a couple of lacklustre outings: one to an Amazonian Indian village, full of locals who gave the impression they were going through the motions, and one to see whales off the north-east coast (the odd distant spouting).

Then there is the rather large number of excursions (£20-£45 per head) that are billed as “optional” but aren’t really; at least not unless you’re prepared to make your family sit grimly at the hotel all day while everyone else goes off to the Argentinian side of the waterfalls, or whizzes down the Amazon on a speedboat, taking in anacondas, giant fish and wild cayman crocodiles close up.

Far outweighing these little pluses or minuses, though, is the sheer volume of undreamed-of discoveries that this tour presents on an almost hourly basis - the ferocity of the waves on Copacabana Beach, for example, compared with the elegant, green-glass coolness of the subterranean shower rooms under the sand; the extraordinary Brazilian penchant for serve-yourself buffet restaurants, where you pay according to the weight of the food you pile on your plate; and the gentle, unobtrusive attitude of everyone from souvenir-sellers to car drivers (several actually stop for us to cross the road), compared with the acquisitiveness of the coatimundi. These badger-sized beasts seem sweet and cuddly until they start swarming over your café table in pursuit of Coke and crisps.

The cities are surprisingly unlovely, too; most are a tropical hodge-podge of buildings ranging from the weary-looking to the positively distressed (witness the bare brick slums that cling to the hills). Notable exceptions are the old, colonial part of Manaus (with its extravagant, pink opera house topped by a shiny dome in the colours of the Brazilian flag), plus the cobbled Pelourinho quarter of Salvador, full of old churches founded by the city’s once-vast African slave population.

As for the food: the serve-yourself system allows you to try small amounts of the local specialities without commitment - spicy piranha soup, sawdust-like manioc flour, cayman fritters with coriander, plus as much cooked beetroot as you can handle.

When it comes to freshly squeezed fruit juices, you can start at abacaxi (pineapple) and work your way down the list, via maracuja (passion fruit) to uvas (grapes). Mind you, most Brits seem to stop at “c” for caipirinha, the tropical cyclone-in-a-glass, featuring piles of chopped limes powered by a gorgeous sugar-cane rum called cachaça.

Fortified by a couple of these, I fall victim to the one incident of street crime that we encounter all holiday (though God knows, the guide books give out stern enough warnings). Walking along Rio’s sunlit, seafront Avenida Atlantica, I look down to see some oily, grey lumps of engine sludge all over my sandals, at which point a shoeshine man rushes up to undo the damage his unseen colleague has done.

It’s clearly a trick, and though tempted to stop and defoul my footwear, I instruct the family to take no notice and keep walking. We might be in Brazil, but, dammit, we’re still British.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/familyholidays/810678/Family-adventures-in-the-Amazon.html