I didn’t wrestle an anaconda, but I turned the tables on a piranha

Manaus, Brazil: As it turned out, I ate a piranha and did not get eaten by one of those nasty little fish with the sharp teeth, as I feared when I planned to swim in the Amazon.

Here piranhas are as common as guppies. They suffer, it appears, mostly from a bad press thanks to visit to the region by a former US President and an early James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, in which one of the baddies was shredded after being thrown into a pool of hungry piranha.

According to Wikipedia, to guarantee a good show for Roosevelt during his visit to Brazil, local fishermen blocked off a portion of the Amazon with nets and dumped hordes of starving piranhas into the pool that had thus been created.

Then they sliced up a cow and tossed it into the river, setting off a wild feeding frenzy and a leaving a skeleton in their wake. Roosevelt declared the fish evil, and the journalists traveling with him spread the word.

Pira-nia, as Amazonians pronounce the name, do not generally eat people except when they are really, really hungry. Otherwise they swim around much like other fish, underwater not bothering anyone.

What was more worrying to me were huge iguanas. They kept dropping off the trees and plopping into the water around and about the canoe from which I was fishing. I am not into reptiles at the best of times so this was rather disconcerting; piranha below and iguanas above.

I did not swim in the river where I caught the piranha, as they were obviously hungry and taking what bait they could. So once I had dropped my line into the water and caught my fish I was paddled in my canoe to a nearby riverbank in a completely different section of the river for a swim.

The day before our party of nine had been taken deep into an estuary, our canoe had been run aground and we had been marched off the front end into the Amazon rainforest.

I was not too happy seeing the canoe disappear back downstream while our forlorn group, dripping wet in the tropical rain, stood on the bank, as our guide later described - like wet chickens.

Then suddenly we were alone in the rainforest, nine gringos, one Peruvian and one Amazonian with a nasty looking panga in his hand. I stood there recalling scenes from a film I saw about a crazy Brazilian slicing and dicing tourists to stock his trade in body parts.

But our guide was quite friendly. He taught me how to make poisoned arrows and shoot them from a blowpipe and how to tempt tarantula spiders out of their holes in the ground while I wondered why I would want to that.

I am not particularly fond of anything with lots of hairy legs that creeps and crawls, particularly when I am in the Amazon rainforest on the lookout for Anacondas three days away by boat from help at the Amazonian capital of Manaus.

Not that being in Manaus would have helped. It’s just the kind of Grahame Greene place from which people disappear. It feels like the end of the earth, from where, if you took one more step, you might plunge off the edge of the world; the kind of place you get to when you are on the run from the Federales and there is nowhere left to hide.

Mind you, it was there where I saw my first piranha — at the fishmarket where they were piled in sharp edged little pyramids. Little did I know that a week later I would be eating one, grilled! And what a bony little fish they are; mostly skeleton in fact which was all that was left of the piranha on my plate after it provided a meal for me.