Dateline: Belém, Entrance to the Amazon, March 3

I’m not prepared for the Amazon. Few or my Brazilian friends have ever visited the jungle, and well-intentioned friends in New York who are investing heavily to save the trees of a forest they’ve never seen aren’t much help, either. And no one I know has specifically gone there for the reason I am going—for the food.

My flight to the Amazon is in one of those puddle jumpers and takes the good part of the day. One of the stops is at Recife, an old Pernambuco town along the coast that attracts lots of European vacationers—especially male travelers because the female population outnumbers the male five to one, and hotels and restaurants are cheap. Arcing around the top of Brazil to Fortaleza and São Luis, over the thousands of miles of flat green terrain on one side and the Atlantic blue on the other, we approach the Amazon Delta, and land in Belém, the capital city of Pará, a port on the equator and the Amazon’s major city.