So today is the first day back on the Amazon River heading back towards the Atlantic and Brazil has left me exhausted, bug bitten, and extremely excited, because the fun I have already had on this trip can only just be beginning. I am going to try to recount all that has happened to the best of my ability so here goes my time in Brazil!
Getting into Manaus the city was nothing like I had expected. First off I pictured Brazil as this really exotic place and instead Manaus just looked dirty and industrialized. Getting off the ship there were Amazonian dancers which was pretty cool. The first thing I did when we got into port was go on an FDP to a local orphanage. I was pretty nervous going, just because I wasn’t sure how I would feel seeing parentless children but when I got there my perspective changed. The Monte Salem orphanage works more with children who have been taken from their families for various reasons but should be going back when they reach a certain age. This sparked some concern for me because some of these kids had been victims of domestic violence and I didn’t think that returning them to those sort of situations was necessarily good. Most, if not all of the children were however unadoptable. They were all really precious though and I am so glad that I had the forsight to bring toys with me. The little boys loved the planes, the girls liked the bracelets and all of the bubbles were snatched up in a matter of minutes. It also helped to clear the air of any awkwardness and I think that my fellow shipmates were also glad to have stuff to give the kids-and I didn’t mind sharing because I was not trying to win a popularity contest with the children, just wanted to make them happy. The hardest part was the language barrier I reverted to slow speaking Spanish and was fairly successful but Portuguese and Spanish are pretty different. I ended up spending most of my time with two little boys Louis and Zac. There were so precious and I played a lot of trucks with them they kept saying Chia which I didn’t learn meant auntie until I asked Becca later. Overall the visit was rewarding and I definitely respected the establishment and all the hard work the people running it put into it. They receive no compensation from the government and have to work hard to keep it up and running. When I got back I relaxed a little bit and prepared to go out. Everyone was planning on going to a place called Samba. I is basically just a street were musical groups go to practice for the upcoming carnival. Becca and I didn’t go until around 10 oclock and by the time we went to get a taxi people were already coming back. Apparently our dean had said that now it was unsafe for people to be out and that everyone should return to the ship, however this did not deter us in the slightest. I knew that a ton of people were still there and that while the dean was acting on good faith, he also had told us to wash ur hands every hour, and thus was being a bit overprotective. A boy named Max who had returned to go back to the ship didn’t want us going by orselves and we semi convinced him to return with us even though he was certain it was ending. Good thing he did because we arrived to find the party in full swing! It was so much fun we hung out with locals (all of whom are very interested in americanas lol) and a ton of people from SAS were there as well so we had a blast dancing samba and drinking caprinhas (a mixture of cashasta lime and sugar) As it got later and later more and more people started to leave but I was now hanging out with Becca, Bruno, Tom, and Max. Bruno is from Brazil and is awesome, we hang out a lot on the ship and now being in his native country it was nice to have another person around who could speak fuent portugese. It was really fun to hang out with them and hang out with local people, so we stayed out way to late!
After a whopping two hours of sleep I was up again because my trip was scheduled to leave at 8 and I had told everyone to assemble at 7:45. In the end we had 27 people going, this is with two not showing up (they were too drunk and hungover), and four joining in at the last minute, after waiting a bit for stragglers we ended up being about a half hour late. After collecting all the money from people I was walking to the Amazon backpackers office with over 3,000 in my purse and was very conscious of all the street people around me. It was a relief once we got to the office and everything started rolling smoothly. Claudio, the owner explained exactly what we would be doing, and our tour went underway. We were going to take a boat ride to see the meeting of the waters, then go see some giant lily pads, after which we would get on another boat which would take us to the jungle lodge for traditional Brazilian lunch, after that we would take canoes for over an hour to go piranha fishing and then finally arrive where we would build camp for the night. The first thing great about our tour was the main tour guide, Sami he was an Indian man from Guyana who was a straight Rastafarian and spoke a lot in Bob Marley Lyrics his favorite probably being “one love man, one love” He definitely made our trip. Going to the meeting of the waters was AMAZING it is where the Amazon River meets the Rio Negro. The Rio Negro is a lot more acidic and dense than the Amazon and appears really dark in color while the Amazon is almost a muddy consistency. Where they meet there is a clear division and you can see the line separating the black water from the brown. It was really cool to see, after we crossed into the Amazon we took a van which stopped off at a local floating house. A lot of houses here are either floating on the banks of the river, or are on stilts. This one was unique because all around it in the water were giant lilly pads. The lilly pads were huge probably double the size of my face. After that we boarded a river boat that was pretty cool, it had a few decks and we jammed out to Bob Marley and got to know our guide as we continued on. Sami is originally from Guyana and has had a very interesting life, he does not know how to read or write but his knowledge of the jungle is impeccable. Before he came to Brazil he worked in the diamond and gold mines in Guyana and had experienced extreme violence showing us multiple bullet and spear wounds he had gotten throughout his life, many from trying to protect good mining areas. It was funny to watch him dance around to Marley as he swung and sharpened his machete. After a while we arrived at the Amazon Lodge where their eco lodge is. There we had lunch of traditional Brazilian fare the lunch consisted of fresh little bananas, pineapple, rice with potatoes and onions, beans, fresh cucumber, onions, and tomatoes, chicken in a soup sauce, breaded whole piranhas and other breaded fish, this powder (that I can’t remember the name of used to aid in digestion), a salad of beans and finely chopped green peppers, and onions, bread, and another sort of chicken dish. It was really good and all of us were starving so we ate a lot. I also got introduced to guarana, a soda drink that is AMAZING! If you ever have the opportunity to order it or try it DO IT! After that we chilled at the lodge for a little bit and there was this black little monkey there that was sooooooo cute it had the most precious face! I will try and post a video of it! After that we headed out on motorized canoes to head closer to our camp as well as to go piranha fishing. It was really cool to just be cruising down the Amazon River and I really tried to take everything in that I was seeing. The water of the amazon is this really muddy color but it also appears as smooth as glass. With our boats cutting through the water it created a very interesting ripple that sort of mesmerized me. The water was also the perfect temperature not too hot or too cold, the kind you automatically want to jump into. As we started to try our luck at piranha fishing closer to the banks of the river I began to get frusterated. Firstoff we were using raw chicken skin for bait and everytime I felt a tub (which was often ) I would yank only to find that the piranha had managed to bite my bait off of the hook without getting caught. This continued for an hour and a half as I continued to fail, while watching a few others around me succeed, sooooo frusterating! I ended up not catching one which made me really sad, but by this time the sun was starting to set and we really needed to start setting up camp. I had no idea what this actually entailed but I soon found out, and man was I surprised. While my boat arrived about 30 minutes after some apparently Sami had taken the first group into the middle of the jungle had looked at a spot covered in trees and vines and proclaimed it the spot and instantly started machetying everything in sight. By the time I got there they had cleared the area and were in the process of cutting down trees to create a base from which we would hang our hammocks. The company had never had a group of our size and I think that they underestimated the time and energy that it was going to take to finish our camp. The sun continued to set and we continued to toil getting more and more agitated as we became hungry, sweaty, and kept encountering bugs of massive proportion. Never before had I seen bugs the size of the ones I kept witnessing multiple were as big as my hand and I wont even go into the tarantulas, one of which was inside of my friend Dan’s shirt. Needless to say after setting up logs and creating our shelter all of us were ready for a drink. Luckily Barbara using the machete that had done multiple things (kill a piranha, cut down a tree, etc) was now slicing limes for much needed Capirinhas. We also then went hunting for Caymen. I was searching for my flashlight when I realized that I had been left behind! I was so mad because I was the one who had kept on bugging sammi to make sure that we got to go. So I grabbed another few people who I knew wanted to go and we began to navigate our own way through the dark of night in the middle of the jungle. I don’t know what possessed me to do this other than I really wanted to hold a caymen and I was a little bit tipsy after my capirinha. Phil, me, Simi, and Micah carefully made our way as we tried to navigate the path that was barely visible in the dark. Luckily we ran into a guide who pointed us in the right direction and we made it just as the boats were about to leave us. OMG the stars were the most beautiful I have ever seen them. In the middle of the amazon with little civilization around us the sky was filled with them. The guide pointed out cinturon de orios or in other words orions belt and me and Micah sat and absorbed the sights. Because of this it came as a surprise when all of a sudden our guide Tonio was holding up a Caymen! It was pretty small but had been hypnotized by the light of the flashlight and was laying fairly motionless with Tonio only holding him by the head. He didn’t even respond as we each in turn held him. When we returned to the shore Sammi had another Caymen and gave us specifics about their nature which I video taped. After we returned back to camp we had dinner which consisted of this amazing chicken that I ate but I am pretty sure it was undercooked. Then we stayed up and talked and went to sleep, my hammock happen to be located right over a stump and so my sleep was not very restful and I only dozed off and on. The next morning I woke up feeling probably the worst/most disgusting I ever have in my whole entire life. I finally left my hammock when Sammi announced that it was breakfast which consisted of fruit covered in swarms of honey bees, and hard boiled eggs, and other fare equally covered in insects, needless to say I didn’t eat a lot of breakfast and planned to wait till lunch but first we had to trek through the jungle. There isn’t a whole lot I can explain about this, he pointed out a lot of plants and trees that had a multitude of uses like ingredients in aspirin, acai trees, malaria cures and leafs used to make houses. It was muggy and hot and everywhere you looked you saw green whether it be trees, vines, etc. There was also crazy insects like giant ants, huge bee hives, or gorgeous butterflies, beetles that lives in little tiny mud mountains, it was amazing and utterly unexplainable so for that I apologize. Sammi kept telling us that we were real jungle ladies and made us bracelets out of a bark that works as a rope. He accidentally called them slave bands forgetting the word for bracelet and we now call ourselves the slaveband brigade. On our way back to the lodge we stopped to jump off the top deck of our ship into the river. So yes I am sorry I did swim in the Amazon and after feeling disgusting it was a definite improvement on my situation and I did not catch a parasite or anything like that. We went back to the jungle lodge and enjoyed the same delicious meal we did on the way in. After about 4 hours we finally made it back to the ship and somehow found the energy to go out again I don’t know how we did it but we did.
The next day I went swimming with Dolphins. When I signed up for this trip I assumed that it would be like the dolphins you would see in places like Hawaii or Florida, boy was I mistaken, There are two different types of River Dolphins there are small blue ones, and then larger pink ones. Both have elongated snouts and a slight hump in the place of a dorsal fin. They are pretty freaky looking especially the pink ones which is what we swam with. This was not the traditional swimming where the dolphins are trained but we swam with wild dolphins who came over through plain curiosity and the enticement of a fish or two. They were fairly friendly and hung out a lot around our feet, one came in between my legs so I was straddling it. They didn’t really break the surface a whole ton and they felt really WEIRD! Sort of rubbery and squishy at the same time. The pink ones get their color because at a certain size their skin stops growing and so as it stretches it turns pink. On the way back we stopped at a local village for lunch which was very similar to the ones I had enjoyed on our tour. We also toured the traditional way of making rubber. Way back in the early 1900’s (I think) rubber was made from trees in the Amazon they would extract this white sap and volcanize it over a fire. It was pretty interesting to see but it was also sad to know how the rubber industry here pretty much failed. Englishmen brought back seeds from the Amazon to Malaysia and then totally destroyed the market for rubber in the amazon. Then we went back to the ship. I went out that night and our tour guide got us free bottles to share among shipmates for being such great clients! Thought that was pretty cool. The next day I just went shopping for souveniers and went to sleep because I was so tired and woke up to us back on the River heading towards the Atlantic. I had an Amazing experience and would not change it for the world, but I am super excited to get to Africa. If you guys want to know specifics on anything email me (amreddy@semesteratsea.net) and I can add detail!
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