PHOTOS BY AMANDA JONES Isabel Allende was born in Peru and raised in Chile, and currently resides in California. Best known for her fiction, she is the author of "The House of the Spirits," "The Infinite Plan," "Of Love and Shadows" and "Eva Luna," among other works. Her most recent book is "Paula," an autobiographical family memoir.

C O N T E N T S Welcome to Wanderlust Don George, Editor On the Amazon: Snapshots of a Green Planet By Isabel Allende - Isabel Allende booklist - Books on the Amazon - Getting there Two Sides of the Rhine By Jan Morris - Jan Morris booklist - Getting there My Best Holiday Experience By Pico Iyer - Pico Iyer booklist The Dangers of Provence By Peter Mayle - Peter Mayle booklist - Books on Provence - Getting there Fade into Blue By Amanda Jones D E P A R T M E N T S Passages "Pass the Butterworms" Tim Cahill - An interview with Tim Cahill Postmark: Paris David Downie Table Talk - Romancing the Road - Readers Tips - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

B Y | I S A B E L A L L E N D E a powerful dream led me to the Amazon. For three years I had been blocked, unable to write, with the feeling that the torrent of stories waiting to be told, which once had seemed inexhaustible, had dried up. Then one night I dreamed of four naked Indians emerging from the heart of South America carrying a large box, a gift for a conquistador. And as they crossed the jungles, rivers, mountains and villages, the box absorbed every sound, leaving the world in silence. The songs of the birds, the murmuring of the wind, human stories, all were swallowed up. I awakened with the conviction that I must go there to look for that voracious box, where perhaps I could find voices to nourish my inspiration. It took a year to realize that wondrous journey. The Largest Forest In the World How shall I describe the Amazon? It occupies 60 percent of the land mass of Brazil, an area larger than India, and extends into Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. From the airplane it is a vast green world. Below, on the ground, it is the kingdom of water: vapor, rain, rivers broad as oceans, sweat. I approached the Amazon through Manaus. The city is far from the Atlantic coast, and appears on the map as solid jungle. I imagined a village on stilts, ruled over by an anachronistic baroque theater. I had been told that during the height of the rubber boom, the city was so prosperous that its ladies sent their clothing to Paris to be laundered, but probably such tales were only legend. It was a surprise to land in an effervescent city of a million inhabitants, a free port, a center of a broad spectrum of businesses and trafficking, both legal and suspect. A wall of heat struck me in the face. The taxi took me along a highway bordered with luxuriant vegetation, then turned into twisting little streets where the homes of the poor and the middle class were democratically interspersed, both far from the neighborhoods of the wealthy, who live in luxurious fortresses under heavy guard. The famous opera theater, remodeled, is still the major tourist attraction. During the last century, Europe's most famous opera stars traveled to Manaus to delight the rubber barons. The surrounding streets are paved with a mixture of stone and rubber to mute the wheels and horses' hooves during performances. After seeing the theater, I had piracucú, the best freshwater fish in the world -- delicious, but horrifying in appearance -- served on a terrace facing the incredible river, which in times of flood stretched out like an ocean. Into the Jungle I stayed in Manaus only a couple of days, then set out on a boat with a powerful outboard motor. For an hour we traveled upstream at a suicidal pace, following the Rio Negro to Ariaú, an eco-hotel constructed in the treetops. The hotel consists of several towers connected by passageways open to monkeys, parrots, coatis and every insect known to man. Chicken wire everywhere prevents animals from coming in the rooms, especially the monkeys, which can wreak as much destruction as an elephant. I took a walk through the thick undergrowth, led by a young caboclo -- a jungle dweller -- as guide. It seemed to me that we walked for an eternity, but afterward I realized that the walk had been ridiculously short. Finally I understood the meaning of the last line in a famous Latin American novel: "He was swallowed up by the jungle." Compasses are useless here, and one can wander in circles forever. The jungle is never silent; you hear birds, the screeching of animals, stealthy footfalls. It smells of moss, of moistness, and sometimes you catch the waft of a sweet odor like rotted fruit. The heat is exhausting, but beneath the dark canopy of the trees you can at least breathe. Out on the river the sun beats down unmercifully, although as long as the boat is moving, there is a breeze. To inexpert eyes, everything is uniformly green, but for the native, the jungle is a diverse and endlessly rich world. The guide pointed out vines that collect pure water to drink, bark that relieves fevers, leaves used to treat diabetes, resins that close wounds, the sap of a tree that cures a cough, rubber for affixing points on arrows. Hospitals and doctors are beyond the reach of the cabaclos, but they have a pharmacy in the forest's plants -- barely 10 percent of which have been identified. Some with poetic names are sold in the hotel: mulateiro, for beautiful skin; breuzinho, to improve memory and facilitate concentration during meditation; guaraná, to combat fatigue and hardness of the heart; macaranduba, for coughs, weakness, and lugubrious chest. | LIFE ON THE WATER