Life onboard a research boat
Editor's note: Graduate student Julia Cisneros and Vanessa Gabel conducted research on the Amazon River with geology professor James Best. Many LAS undergraduate and graduate students conduct research in the field each year. This blog post originally appeared on the Illinois News Bureau's website.
“It’s manioc,” declared André, our Brazilian colleague, over our first breakfast aboard the boat. “Everything here is manioc.”
This simple root veggie has been one of the principal characters in my Amazonian experience. Manioc (also known as cassava or tapioca), as I’ve learned, is a native root vegetable, and it manages to find its way into nearly every Brazilian meal. It can be eaten raw, baked, boiled or grilled – I first encountered it sautéed over beef. Ground into a fine powder, it’s bread flour. A coarser grind is added to soup. In parts of the country, the liquid that’s extruded during grinding is enjoyed as a juice.
Student Julia Cisneros and Brazilian colleague Cristiano enjoy some downtime on the boat while waiting for a thunderstorm to pass.
We are fortunate to have this food prepared for us every day – breakfast, lunch and dinner – by a talented and generous cook. But it is a simple fact of life on a boat that such impeccable preparation is not possible for everything.
Given the confining nature of our vessel, many routines that require no thought or preparation in our everyday lives become chores on the boat. We sleep in hammocks with mosquito nets on the upper deck each night, and they occupy the entire space. Because of this, they are taken down each morning to make room for other activities, and must be re-assembled every evening.
If a storm whips up, day or night, it is an all-hands-on-deck effort to unroll and secure the tarps that enclose the decks, to keep the rainwater out. Difficult? No, but not so easy as pulling a window shut, either.
Even taking a shower requires more forethought than at home. Do I have everything I will need? Soap? Towel? Sandals? I want to make as few trips downstairs in the morning as possible, both so as to not disturb others still sleeping, and to avoid letting mosquitos into the sleeping quarters when I open the door to the lower deck – neither have walls, but the upper deck is screened in, while the lower deck is completely open.
And of course, our supplies are limited. Some days we stop to buy fish from the floating markets; other days, the crewmen fish in the morning and we dine on their catch that evening.
An afternoon storm rumbles over the Solimões River, better known as the Amazon.
It will be strange to return to enclosed rooms, steady floors and a mattress, and it’s impossible to say if one way of life is better than the other.
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