Imagine trekking though the earth's largest remaining tropical rain forest.
Wearing light-colored safari clothing, you are surrounded by lush greenery and
a large portion of the earth's oxygen. Your senses absorb the beauty of the
Amazon River.
By Kimberly Wheatley
Assistant Editor
Florida State Times
Imagine trekking though the earth's largest remaining tropical rain forest.
Wearing light-colored safari clothing, you are surrounded by lush greenery and
a large portion of the earth's oxygen. Your senses absorb the beauty of the
Amazon River.
It's an experience that FSU anthropology graduate Morgan Smith has four times a year, when he leads expeditions into the jungles of South America.
The journeys start at the gateway to the Amazon, in Iquitos, Peru. The first night, groups stay at a rustic hotel at Iquitos, a frontier-type town and Atlantic seaport . The next day, Smith's explorers leave for a field camp at the Acosta Lodge in Albergue, where they have access to reference books, maps and periodicals, microscopes, telescopes and plant presses.
"The whole idea is to experience science through botany, zoology and to meet with people of different cultures," Smith said.
The groups spend one week exploring the Peruvian region of the Bora Indians, who wear traditional clothing made of tree bark.
"They peel strips of bark and pound it with a wooden mallet," said Smith. "They wet and pound it until the outer bark disintegrates and the inner bark is left. This inner bark is a natural fiber that they use for clothing."
The bark clothes have the coarse, stiff look and feel of burlap. They are colored with natural dyes: yellow and rust from a ginger plant and black from pressed green berries of the huito plant. The huito liquid is clear when painted on and oxidizes and turns black as it hits the air.
Smith said the Bora Indians, who waste nothing, are a good model for more developed societies. The Indians, for example, eat macaws and parrots and then use the feathers in ceremonial clothing.
Smith, 68, lived a varied and adventurous professional life before he went into the excursion business.
As an anthropology student, he was director of FSU's first international expedition and spent the summer of 1952 in the Darien Rainforest in the Republic of Panama near the Colombian border. Many of the artifacts collected in that expedition are still at FSU.
After graduating in 1953, Smith went to Cuba with the FSU botany department and later explored regions of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama.
He joined the U. S. Department of Defense in 1954 and spent 13 years establishing a jungle survival school for the Air Force and helped the Army start its jungle warfare center. His talents took him further to Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, where he became chief of the Arctic, Desert, Tropic Information Center before he retired in 1981.
For information about the expeditions, call Dr. Alicia Whatley at 334-670-3624.