Despite encounters with piranha-filled waters, toxic ants, and large rats--not to mention boat failures, foreign language problems, and alternate blasts of sun and rain--the persistent Montgomery pushes happily on, offering a lyrical account as intoxicating as the subject itself. She eventually makes contact, swimming with them, even holding one in her arms, but that may be the least relevant aspect of the entire book. Montgomery turns nature into a bewildering drug, opening doors into cultural and biological worlds invisible to most, but which teem with as much unseen life as a drop of river water held under a microscope. --Melissa Rossi

Product Description

Scientists call them Inia geoffransin, an ancient species of toothed whale whose origin dates back about 15 million years. To the local people of the Amazon, pink river dolphins are "botos," shape shifters that, in the guise of human desire, can claim your soul and take you to the Encante, an enchanted underwater world.

As tributaries braid into a single river, Journey of the Pink Dolphins weaves ancient myth and modern science into one woman's search for these clusive creatures. With their melonlike foreheads and tubular snouts, pink dolphins look eerily familiar, like people in watery beginnings. No one knows for certain what gives the dolphins their distinctive coloring they may glow pink with exertion, or with age, or their color might change with the temperature of the water. With their flexible bodies -- stretching to eight feet long and weighing up to four hundred pounds -- and finely tuned echolocation abilities, the pink dolphins perform their water ballet on handlike, five-fingered flippers, in a habitat no other dolphin could colonize.

Since these mysterious creatures appear mostly at dusk and dawn, and their migration patterns are unknown, Sy Montgomery's Amazon quest encompasses four separate journeys. In the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo region, she follows the pink dolphins to the spirit realm, where shamans commune with the powers of the plants and visit the Encante. With paleontologist Gary Galbreath, she follows them back in time, tracing the history of the species. At Mamiraua, the pink dolphins illuminate the Amazon's present-day conservation dilemma. And in a final, glorious burst, Montgomery follows the dolphins back, down, deep, to the watery womb of the world, touching the very soul of the Amazon.

"There are so many stories of botos, you will die writing," says one river guide. Ancient legends tell us that dolphins have guided humans for millennia, and in Journey of the Pink Dolphins Montgomery answers their call, taking us to that perfect place where the Amazon melts into the forest, dolphins swim among treetops, and the twenty-first century dissolves into the beginning of time.

The book focuses on the author's quest for the pink dolphin, but really it is a journey to find not one but two dolphins. I don't refer to the other species of dolphin that lives in the Amazon, the tucuxis (one which she also covers in the book), but for two sides of the same animal. On the one hand she searches for the pink dolphin, the bufeo in Spanish or boto in Portguese, a living animal of which little is known about in comparison with many other dolphin species. Living in the most massive river system on earth, one connnected to innumerable lakes in the rainy season, in waters often black as coffee and infested with caimans, piranha, stingrays, and electric eels, in often very remote regions to which there is no reliable transportation to, it is a difficult subject to study. An example of cetaceans from an earlier geologic era, primitive when compared to modern oceanic dolphins, the pink dolphins preserve something from an eariler era, a holdover in the modern world. Montgomery and her various companions in the book struggle to get good observations of the dolphins, to try and track them, to identify individuals, to observe their behavior. The author finds that even experts who have studied the bufeo for years are often perplexed by them. She has many successes, providing much interesting information on them and a fine series of color photographs of the often startingly pink dolphins.

Montgomery though is also questing for the Encante, the mystical shape-shifting dolphin that is very real to many of the peoples who live along the mighty Amazon. Believed to exist in fabulous cities beneath the surface of the river, the locals speak in conspiratorial tones about the dolphins' magic powers and often lust for attractive humans. The natives often worry that their wives, husbands, sons, and daughters will be stolen about by the fabulous Encante, and speak with awe and reverence about the dolphins. Montgomery continually quests for the natives' views of the Encante, for their "true" tales, and for how they protect themselves against their fantastic attention.

Montgomery doesn't exlusively focus on dolphins though. Her book in part is a vivid travelogue of Amazonia, bringing us to many exotic locations. We visit Manaus, the impossible Paris of the Amazon, home to an opera house right out of a fairy tale. Built upon the backs of native jungle peoples by rubber barons, today it is a squalid city trying to embrace change. She takes us to amazing Meeting of the Waters, where for miles two tributies of the Amazon, the black River Negro and the white Solimoes, flow side by side before forming the true Amazon River. We are taken to two different nature reserves, both with differing strategies, Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo and Mamiraua, where some of the rich life and deadly beauty of Amazonia is preserved against an uncertain future. Montgomery takes us to the impossibly clear waters and white sandy beaches of the Tapajos and Arapiuns Rivers, where she actually swims with the dolphins, something not possible elsewhere in the dark and piranha-infested rivers elsewhere. She undertakes a vision quest by taking the hallucigenic Ayahuasca or "Mother of the Vine," something few Westerners have done (and for good reason).

Further, while the bufeo or boto is the star of the book, many other animals form a rich supporting cast. The odd hoatzin, a bird with claws, seemingly someting out of the Mesozoic. Electric eels, extremely common and suprisingly complex. Caimans, another seemingly prehistoric species. Amazonian manatees, gentle vegetarians that are much more intelligent than often given credit for. The weird side-necked turtle. All manner of insects, including ants. And more are given space.

Some have said that she rhapsodizes too much in the book, but I disagree. She has done her research, the book is filled with interviews with experts, and there is a nice bibliography at the end. She has skillfully combined hard science with poetry, and the effort is very worthwhile. I highly recommend it.


Amazonian vacation   December 4, 2002
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This is one of those books to read when you don't have the money and/or time to actually travel the planet. I enjoyed that Sy both had a grasp of biology and is a truly talented author. She also obviously cares about the socioeconomic situation of the peoples who live in the area that her biological studies took her. This book transports you into a magical world in which pink dolphins inhabit rivers in a mystical jungle. Sometimes the truth is better than fiction.