- [David] The Amazon River stands alone in our world for it's size and it's immense volume of water but also it's great diversity of wildlife and human cultures.

A couple of times a year at the river's mouth the Amazon and the Atlantic ocean do battle.

On these few days the Atlantic wins, the Pororoca.

- [Narrator] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(cheerful music) - [David] For years I've heard about a remarkable water phenomenon known as the Pororoca in Brazil.

It's a large tidal bore wave that originates at the mouth of the Amazon River but just a couple of times a year.

It's become quite a celebrity among surfers.

To understand the wave the best way is to go a thousand miles upstream on the Amazon to the city of Manaus where two great rivers join to produce the biggest, most powerful river in the world and see what it does when it gets to the ocean in the spring and in the fall.

(soft music) Manaus is Brazil's river city.

It's a little burg of about two million people.

It's associated with the Amazon River but the reality is it's located on what they call the Rio Negro, the Black River.

Or they call it here the Coca-Cola River.

Manaus back in the 19th century was Brazil's largest and most prosperous city.

That was based upon rubber and the world's supply of rubber came out of the Amazon basin.

That changed when a few smugglers took a few rubber plants out and took them to Southeast Asia and Manaus declined.

But it is now still the river port where traffic up and down the Amazon and the Rio Negro go back and forth and keep the city alive and bustling.

- They say that there are two million people in Manaus but in reality it has almost four million.

Many are immigrants, Manaus also has a wealth of fish.

The river produces an immense amount of fish.

The city has many places to visit such as the Municipal Theater and the Amazon Theater is famous.

Today we still have operas here.

It is a very wonderful building that was built during the rubber boom in the 1890s.

Ships spend months traveling across the Atlantic and traveling upstream in order to assemble the theater.

In addition we have the Port of Manaus, a meeting place for vessels from all parts of the region.

Boats are the primary means of transport here.

Boats that transport passengers are called.

- [David] If you go out to the Rio Solimoes which is what they call the Amazon here in Manaus.

It's a matter of about three thousand miles up to the end of the Amazon, high up in the Andes.

Where the two rivers meet, they call the encountering place.

The muddy Amazon which is bringing the Andes Mountains down to the ocean meets the Coca-Cola river of the Rio Negro and they run side by side for mile after mile after mile and one of the great sites of the world.

- When people talk about the Amazon they usually think of a universe of plants and animals.

The forest itself but they don't usually consider the reality beyond the biodiversity.

The socio-diversity that exists in the Amazon and when we talk about the Amazon most people immediately think of Indians, right?

Of Indians living inside the forest but the Amazon is full of social diversity.

You have miscegenation of many people who came from northeast during the era of the rubber boom.

Mostly from the state of Sierra but from the northeast in general.

These were migrants who went into the jungle to work on the rubber plantations.

You also have all the indigenous communities but with this mixture the result is a population of indigenous people and even north easterners.

They formed a city within this region.

This universe of people living in the forest live off the forest and even though they frequently travel to Manaus, they do not lose their relationship with their villages.

You have a network of social relations where the relatives are always sending flour, sending food, sending medicinal plants, sending dry fish.

The city of Manaus is a great metropolis located in the middle of the forest near immense rivers where the rivers are the roads for the majority of the population.

Everything is transported by boat.

There's no one Amazon, there are several Amazons that vary from state to state.

- [David] The Rio Negro, the Black River, if it were not for the greater Amazon, would be the largest river in the South America.

Right here it varies from five to 20 kilometers wide and in many places it's 80 meters deep.

Which is a little over 250 feet and that's just one of the great branches of the Amazon River.

- This is my very first time.

- [David] In Manaus I meet up with my friend, Thiago Bahia he grew up on the Amazon but a thousand miles down stream.

- Belem is more a fort city, it's in the mouth of this river.

Here we are inland, the only way to get here, Dave, is by boat or by air.

There are no roads that lead to Manaus.

I grew up in Belem, the first 20 years of my life were there and I only saw once, once pink dolphin and I hear from our boat captain.

He's gonna take us tomorrow to this location where, hopefully, we gonna see some and if we are lucky to see any we can get in the water with them.

- [David] There are also what we call manatees.

I don't what you call them here.

- [Thiago] You have sea manatees in Florida.

You have a bunch of those but those are saltwater manatees.

Here we have the manatees, we call them peixe-bois and they live in the fresh water and they are mammals as well.

- [David] Peixe-boi means cow fish, right?

- [Thiago] Correct, peixe.

- [David] Yeah.

- [Thiago] Boi.

(playful music) - [David] The river rises and falls about 50 feet depending on the time of year.

When the water is high it makes these very marshy areas and that's perfect for these Amazonian freshwater manatees.

They are vegetarians and they come to places that have good food for them.

- The river's 10 meters deep right here.

The deepest part is around 32 meters.

Over there around the point and now you're taking us to an Indian village?

Yes, it's called Tupe.

- [David] In the Amazon basin there are hundreds of indigenous groups and hundreds of different languages.

They live traditionally, they raise their crop of manioc and traditional fruit crops, native Amazonian fruit trees.

They cultivate them and they fish.

There's so many fish in the river and apart from visits from people like us.

They live pretty much the way they have for several thousands of years.

- Here's a community of songs and this is the location where we do part of our work.

In this Orka of the indigenous group called.

- It feels cool and slippery.

- I'm making a fish here, drawing a fish.

- We are a small group of 30 adults and children.

I work making arts and crafts for the tourists who come here.

After the European invasion of Brazil the Portuguese said our native culture was a bad thing, the work of the devil.

So, they called our sacred structures mal, meaning evil and the name then become maloka.

The correct name is Orka.

This Orka here is unique, a space for demonstration of our culture.

So, this drawing here is of a fish.

That drawing there of the base is a snake.

Our origin story tells us we arrived in a snake canoe.

The drawings come from our origins.

Originally the design was all invisible.

The original instrument was very large, four or five people carried it.

This is a miniature version, it produced a very loud sound, very loud.

(happy music) - [David] We return to the boat for a late dinner and a short night sleep.

Our captain just told us of a floating deck who's owner is in close communication with the pink river dolphins.

- They are born gray and the acidity of the water then turns the color of their skin pink.

- [Off-Screen] Here's one right here, there's one right there.

- The pink dolphins are born gray.

They grew to be 2.8 meters in length and weigh up to two hundred kilos.

They live about 50 years.

- They came this close of getting extinct.

- Extinct.

- [Fisherman] They are wild dolphins, even though they have contact with us they are still very wild.

Two days out of the week I have enough fish to feed them and two days out of the week we have no interaction with them.

- [David] I want to call 'em beaks but they're just mouths is all they are and they know him.

- [Thiago] In the 80s, the natives always knew they were here.

- [David] Sure.

- And they would call them red botos because of the reflection of the red, blackish river as they would surface.

But then Jacques Cousteau, French guy, came here, did all the studies, realized these are mammals and they are not red, they are actually pink.

So, today we call them pink dolphins.

The reason for the long snout is the flooded forest, very hard to catch fish inside all of that vegetation.

With the long snout, like a beak, you know, bird, they can get in there, in the foliage, get the fish and get out.

It's not round like a bottle nose for instance.

- Yeah, well, yeah the marine, the ocean dolphins don't have a long snout like that.

They don't need to, there's no need.

- [Thiago] A hunting dolphin.

- [David] But they have to be able to poke through the roots of trees as they go in to the flooded forest.

- [Thiago] How neat.

- [David] Isn't that evolution in action.

- [Thiago] Yes.

- When they're this tame the dolphins will accept anything.

Shouldn't go swim among them and pet them and actually have a conversation if you wish.

So, Thiago, who, you know, he's from the lower Amazon so he's a little bit timid about doing this.

He lives a thousand miles away on the river.

- There's one nibbling my leg.

- The gestation of these botos is about same as humans, about nine months.

And they are mammals so they nurse and being aquatic is a little bit tricky to make sure they fasten on and get milk, not just water.

But these creatures are highly, highly evolved.

- We both, botos, are native, speak of the legend of the boto, the pink dolphin.

It's an ancient story that when people are celebrating fiestas the boto takes advantage of the situation and changes into a man.

The women become enchanted by him and many of them become pregnant and always their parents ask who is the father.

Pregnant women reply, it was the boto.

Even today when the botos, a native, see the boto, they say that some day the boto will turn into a man.

To use a young lady and run off with her.

- [David] The Amazon basin gets a huge amount of rain and a lot of it comes in the wet season.

And when that happens the river floods and it rises around Manaus, the Rio Negro, the Black River, as much as 50 feet.

All this area is now flooded and what that means is that a whole series of different ecological relationships are developed.

Fish can come in here and spawn, animals can come in here and hide.

And the pink dolphins can come in here with their long beaks, they can chase fish through all of this jungle where no other dolphin could do that.

(happy music) The pink dolphins were a bonus but my goal is to see the Pororoca.

That happens 12 hundred miles down stream.

To get there we pass through the huge city of Belem.

A couple of hours drive beyond, we arrive at the best viewing site for the Pororoca on a minor tributary of the Amazon.

I'm supposed to join some surfers here who are also looking for the great wave.

Sao Domingos do Capim is a small city of about 30 thousand people but during the annual festival that comes in April each year, depending on the wave, the population doubles and there is nowhere for anybody to stay unless they have a reservation a year in advance.

People living next to the river have to have a way to get around and it's only been in the last 50 or so years that motors for boats have become generally affordable.

And now everywhere that you're on the river, this greatest river in the world, you hear a constant, thup, thup, thup, thup, thup.

It's a constant noise, a constant reminder of the activity and the importance of the river to commerce and people moving back and forth.

(boat motor) We're going down stream now, couple of miles to the place where there's a bottle neck in the river.

It's called the belly and that is where the most powerful of all the Pororocas in the region supposedly arrive.

The only place you can get to this by boat is with a small boat with a powerful motor.

It has to be able to accelerate very quickly in an emergency, these guys have it easy, they're on a jet ski.

Because the Pororoca is so unpredictable the surfers like to stop from time to time to ask people who live along the river, who really know it well, what their opinion is on if and when it will arrive.

These surfers are tourists and tourists are not use to seeing water buffalo anymore than I am.

So, they wanna get their surfboards, climb on top and have a photo to send to the folks back home.

- When the surfers arrive here the locals say those guys with the surfboards are back.

We like these guys.

The ancients speak of the legend of the three black children who made the Pororoca appear.

The legend tells of a mother who put her three children in a canoe so they would go to school not far from home.

Halfway into the journey, out of nowhere, a strong wave flipped the canoe and killed three brothers.

That's how the Pororoca phenomenon began.

Boats like this one are in danger when the wave comes and the boat is caught sideways.

There's already been many tragedies, many tragic accidents when the boats get flipped.

The boat captain needs to be prepared when the wave is big and strong.

- [David] This is a narrow place in what they call the Rio Capim, the Capim river or the Grass river.

A minor tributary of the Amazon but here the conditions are perfect for the magnification of the great wave that comes up the Amazon, the Pororoca.

This is a place where surfers and paddle boarders come from everywhere to get on the wave and if you look up and down the river you can see the destruction, the amount of logs and debris that the wave leaves.

It only comes a couple of times a year and there's terrific anticipation here.

Among my companions here in the Rio Capim I have distinguished company.

To my left is the paddle board champion of Brazil, next I have the wake board champion of Brazil.

Over here is the deep dive, former deep dive champion of the world and the first deep diver to ride the Pororoca.

The jet ski champion and the president of the Pororoca Association who initiated all of this.

The Pororoca occurs because every once in a while when the moon's orientation toward the earth is in the right place, it reverses the immense power of the water coming from the Amazon into the Atlantic and gives the Atlantic the advantage of pushing back against the Amazon.

And that wave begins at this huge mouth of the Amazon but in places where there are other rivers coming in, particular rivers that narrow, that power gets concentrated and creates a Pororoca.

In some places a Pororoca goes eight hundred kilometers up the Amazon.

- [Woman] The Pororoca gives us an adrenaline rush for we only discovered recently.

- [Man] When you see the wave rise out of nowhere you feel ice in your belly but we like the challenge and we can't show fear.

- We learn to surf right here.

For many years people would come from the big city to surf the wave.

We took up surfing because this wave is ours and we made it our own.

Now people from far away recognize that we who live here are surfers too, that's the way we want it.

This is my son, my nephew, another nephew.

- We are native to here and it's easy for us because we are raised in this river.

We surf when there are waves.

It usually happens during the crescent and the full moon.

- [Thiago] It looks hopeful but you never know.

- [David] You never know, so, I come out all the way here and you never know whether there's gonna be a big one or not.

It's gotta be a huge one and look, the surfers are gettin' real.

They're paddling around looking and there goes a jet ski.

- [Thiago] Some get on the water there, another group.

- [David] There's more, yeah, there's more.

So, they must know something, now they're looking down stream.

- The Pororoca is a natural phenomenon that has a scientific side and a mystical side.

And here in Sao Domingos do Capim the Pororoca wave occurs between two fresh water rivers.

The city of Sao Domingos do Capim is considered the Pororoca capital and we are already in the 19th year of the great annual surf event.

An event that brings 30 thousand people to the city.

It is undoubtedly an event that serves as a reference.

Not only on a state and national level but also on an international level.

Today, Surf the Pororoca has put Sao Domingos do Capim on the world map for adventure tourism.

- We started the movement in 1997 and in 1998 when we surfed the wave here for the first time in Sao Domingos do Capim.

After that we surf all the Pororocas here in the Amazon region.

In the states of Amapa, Maranhao and Para.

Sao Domingos do Capim is a special place since this wave is a result of pressure from when one river meets another river.

The influence of the sea is 300 kilometers away.

- I'm a native surfer, I surfed the Pororoca for the first time in 2010 and I have surfed it every year since then.

- The feeling was incredible, first time I surfed the Pororoca, I am here again today.

- I learned to surf the Pororoca in 2003 and 2004.

- My name is David and my first Pororoca was last year, I'm twelve.

- The Pororoca has always been synonymous with tragedy and destruction.

And today it has become an international event that benefits hundreds of native families.

Bahiga, who lives here, set up this commercial establishment to provide support for tourists coming to Sao Domingos do Capim.

(light music) - The Amazon is one of the world's great ecosystems.

The Amazon forest itself drives the world's climate.

There are thousands of species of animals, especially fish, many of which are still unknown.

There are tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of species of insects yet to be discovered.

The place is an unfolding drama of nature and the river is what drives the whole system.

Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetman.

The largest city in Eastern Cuba is Santiago de Cuba and was once Cuba's capital.

It remains strongly African in it's roots.

To the east is a rural region seldom visited by non-Cubans.

It's a land of sugarcane fields, semi-desert, pine forest and mountains with indigenous roots.

It's called Baracoa.

This is a minor tributary of a minor tributary of a major tributary and it's got a huge flow.

It's no more than about 30 yards wide, you can actually get out of it here.

So, this is solid land.

- Hang on to your hat, Dave.

- Alright, if that takes my hat away, I'm ruined, my career is done.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from The Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632, please mention episode number and or the title.

Please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or intheamericas.org.