Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

Scientists call them "Inia geoffransin, " an ancient species of toothed whale whose origin dates back about 15 million years. To the local people of the Amazon, pink river dolphins are "botos, " shape shifters that, in the guise of human desire, can claim your soul and take you to the Encante, an enchanted underwater world.

As tributaries braid into a single river, "Journey of the Pink Dolphins" weaves ancient myth and modern science into one woman's search for these clusive creatures. With their melonlike foreheads and tubular snouts, pink dolphins look eerily familiar, like people in watery beginnings. No one knows for certain what gives the dolphins their distinctive coloring they may glow pink with exertion, or with age, or their color might change with the temperature of the water. With their flexible bodies -- stretching to eight feet long and weighing up to four hundred pounds -- and finely tuned echolocation abilities, the pink dolphins perform their water ballet on handlike, five-fingered flippers, in a habitat no other dolphin could colonize.

"There are so many stories of botos, you will die writing, " says one river guide. Ancient legends tell us that dolphins have guided humans for millennia, and in "Journey of the Pink Dolphins" Montgomery answers their call, taking us to that perfect place where the Amazon melts into the forest, dolphins swim among treetops, and the twenty-first century dissolves into the beginning of time.