The coastal temperate rainforest or Celtic rainforest, as it’s known, kisses the coastlines of West Scotland, North and West Wales, Cumbria, Devon, Cornwall and parts of Northern Ireland – anywhere wet, humid and holding a stable temperature. On Bodmin Moor and Cornwall’s coastline, where I bring Jamille, you can find rivers cascading down rocky gorges, the branches of sessile oak, ash, hazel, rowan, birch and alder reaching over granite boulders smothered in moss and fern. Lichen drips from every surface like a mass of tangled beards. Life builds upon life, green builds upon green, until you’re facing a tapestry of countless shades. Fragments like these are all that remain. Britain’s temperate rainforest once stretched far wider, and the little that survives today is endangered.
In the Amazon rainforest, it’s the smell of decaying leaf matter that’s familiar. Here too, the light hits the leaves before hitting the ground in golden circles, providing a bright relief from the looping, twisting vines. But this environment holds a deeper, hotter, more claustrophobic intensity, a vastness of matter that shrinks you to just another lifeform amongst millions.
Our relationship is amplified by a shared love of these biomes and the work we do to support their protection – Jamille as an academic focused on Latin American Indigenous arts and environmental thinking, and me as a writer amplifying these stories. As an Amazonian, Jamille understands this region in ways I do not – its communities, its wounds and its abundance. I offer her access to the UK in return, as if we have arms stretched between both worlds, and we get to travel along them together. Or as Jamille poetically tells me, “you hold the keys to doors I wanted unlocked, but didn’t know how.'”
Stepping into my girlfriend’s home as a traveller, I notice that my desire to get to know this landscape is supporting her to venture deeper. After two months in Belém, my girlfriend, my dad and I find ourselves on the banks of the Rio Negro, Amazonas, near Manaus. We’re ready to depart on a five-day traditional riverboat cruise into Anavilhanas and Jaú National Park, which together hold a combined protected area within Brazil’s North Western Amazon of around 26,000km². We’re sailing with Katerre Expeditions, a company that’s been navigating these waterways for over 20 years. Lovingly nicknamed Jacaré-Tinga, or small caiman, our vessel has three cabins, two hardwood decks, a lick of forest-green paint, and would not look out of place in an animated Pixar movie.
