Deep in the Amazon Rainforest, a Bucket List Trip With a Thoughtful Mission

livemint.com:

THE FANTASY VERSION of the Amazon that often seduces travelers—of a pristine, impenetrably vast jungle populated by jaguars, sloths and isolated pockets of indigenous tribes—does not prepare one for Manaus. A sprawling metropolis of more than two million people in the middle of the rainforest, the city is Brazil’s pre-eminent free-trade zone and home to multinational corporations like Foxconn and Samsung. A superb vantage point for people watching is a window seat at Caxiri, a restaurant overlooking Teatro Amazonas, a Belle Epoque opera house that opened in 1896.

Back then, legend has it, Manaus was awash in so much wealth that some rubber barons shipped their clothes to Europe to be laundered. Today, the crowd at Caxiri is a frothy mix of the Amazon basin’s modern power brokers: deal-making executives, government officials, NGO leaders, activists and tour operators, all trying to protect or exploit the area’s resources. Caxiri—where starters include crispy fried piranha, fangs still bared—is the brainchild of Débora Shornik, 47, a chef who has been cooking in the region for more than a decade.

“I came here to discover the Amazon," Shornik says. “I wanted to learn something different. Here I found fruits, vegetables and fish like nowhere else I’d ever been.