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The Amazon is a vast forest - the largest on the planet - and a giant river system. It covers over half of Brazil and a large portion of South America. The forest extends into Brazil's neighbouring countries, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, where the river itself begins life among thousands of different headwaters. In Brazil only the stretch between Manaus and Belem is actually known as the Rio Amazonas : above Manaus the river is called the Rio Solimoes up to the border with Peru, where it once again becomes the Amazonas. The daily flow of the river is said to be enough to supply a city the size of New York with water for nearly ten years, and its power is such that the muddy Amazon waters stain the Atlantic a silty brown for over 200km out to sea. This was how its existence was first identified by the Spaniard, Vicente Yanez Pinon, sailing the Atlantic in search of El Dorado. He was drawn to the mouth of the Amazon by the sweet freshness of the ocean or, as he called it, the Mar Dulce.

To many Indian tribes, the Amazon is a gigantic mythical anaconda, source of life and death. In its upper reaches, the Rio Solimoes from Peru to Manaus, it is a muddy light brown, but at Manaus it meets the darker flow of the Rio Negro and the two mingle together at the famous "meeting of the waters" to form the Rio Amazonas. There are

something like 80,000 square kilometres of navigable river in the Amazon system, and the Amazon itself can take ocean-going vessels virtually clean across South America, from the Atlantic coast to Iquitos in Peru. Even at the Obidos narrows, the only topographical obstruction between the Andes and the Atlantic, the river is almost 2km wide and for most of its length it is far broader - by the time it reaches the ocean the river's gaping mouth stretches further apart than London and Paris.

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