One evening I sat at a waterfront bar overlooking the Amazon river and sank a few Pisco sours as I watched lightning crackle over the surrounding rainforest.
I was in Iquitos, a Peruvian port, a mere 3,600 kilometres away from the mouth of this mighty waterway. A good spot to contemplate the grandeur of nature and the foibles of man.
For the Amazon is not just a river or a highway. It's a force that gives life and takes it away, ruling the destinies of the people on its banks, influencing global weather patterns.
To visit Amazonia is an adventure but also an education, awakening in any sensitive traveller a wealth of conflicting emotions. You are conscious that here the virgin forest and the remaining tribes who inhabit it are under threat from modernising forces, from the urge to develop, to exploit natural resources.
Scientists value the forest as a genetic reservoir. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, 10 square kilometres of rainforest may contain 125 species of mammal, 400 species of bird, 100 species of reptile, 750 species of tree and 1,500 of flowering plants.
For a glimpse of this natural paradise, I spent a week at a jungle lodge in Ecuador, founded by a former Hollywood scriptwriter with an ecological bent.
It stood on a lake near the Napo River, a tributary of the Amazon. Ospreys dived for fish in a lake patrolled by turtles. There was time to gape at black-billed toucans and orange-winged parrots and listen to the chorus of howler monkeys.
At night you could check the mangroves for beady-eyed caymans, by day visit a butterfly farm or learn about the dragon blood tree whose sap has curative properties like iodine.
After that, visiting Manaus was somewhat shattering. This Brazilian city, once enriched by the rubber boom, later sank into sleepy decay. But no longer is it a sleepy backwater.
As Brazil has become an economic powerhouse of the southern hemisphere, the population has soared. Scores of assembly plants attract settlers from other parts of Brazil. Tourists flock in and modern office blocks have been thrown up.
Only the waterfront has a jungle air to it, bustling with cargo and passenger craft. Sling your hammock and you can take ship for Belem, 1,400 kilometres away at the mouth, or head up into the wilderness.
An obligatory excursion is a boat cruise to witness the meeting of the waters, where the black Rio Negro joins the muddy Solimoes, as the Amazon is known between Iquitos and Manaus. Dolphins leap close to be boat and ocean-going vessels plough past.
Here the river can be up to 100 metres deep. Typical of Amazonia, where everything tends to be over-sized, both the prospects and the problems.
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