So 5-stars to the Forsyte Saga for a brilliant story and being so damn useful in a time of great need.

I wish I could remember what it was because it was so much nicer than any toilet tissue I have ever used and I would grow it in pots in the bathroom. I did learn the name in Xingu but never in English. It was a largish, quite thick leaf whose furriness made it very soft and when crushed it released a very soothing, slightly scented liquid, a natural body lotion. Later in the village, which was floating houses and ones built on stilts, about 40 altogether, spread out around a lake that took a motorboat over two hours to go around, I was shown the local variant of toilet tissue. Which was good, because as I read them I ripped them out and used them. Despite it being a big book, it wasn't really heavy as the pages were tissue thin. During that journey there had been long periods of just waiting while trees were chopped down to bypass huge potholes - ones big enough to have 6' Victoria Regina water lilies floating in them - and I read the only book I brought, the 800+ page Forsyte Saga. Travelling by small boat, bus, river boats and sometimes walking miles to reach another place on the red laterite road to get to another tributary and another boat, several days later we reached the village.

He spoke English, Portuguese and Xingu and was happy, for a smallish fee, to take me along.Īnd this is where the Forsyte Saga comes in. I was lucky enough to find an Indian who had been a tour guide but was now returning to his village on a lake several hundred miles away.

It took me a few weeks to sort out a guide I could afford as I didn't want to join a tourist party and although previously my travels had been on my own, I wanted to leave the towns, the river boats, roads and really penetrate the jungle and obviously I couldn't do that on my own. I thought this would be my one and only chance to see the Amazon so I stuffed a backpack full of the necesssaries, abandoned the rest and got a bus to Belem at the mouth of the Amazon.Ī month later having explored Belem, Santarem and a few other small places I found myself in Manaus, 1,000 miles up the Amazon. I had just crossed the Atlantic with three friends on a yacht and got off in Fortaleza, Brazil. The first time I read this book I was going up the Amazon.

The forsyte chronicles