Home to see the kids (and by "kids" I mean the big screen TVs).

The journey home started in a canoe, then the back of a VW Westie in 32C with no air conditioning, then a ferry, then back into the Westie, then onto a small passenger boat, the a bus, then a taxi, then a plane, another taxi, an airport shuttle, then onto this plane...

...then back off that plane since it had fluids and parts falling out of it, onto a different plane, finally a transfer to a connecting plane, then a car ride.

After three days of travel we are finally home.

Lost!

Today we ventured out in the canoe to explore the waters of the Amazon at night. The critters of the night can be found by casting a flashlight around and watching for the blood-red reflection in their eyes. It took several hours but our guide eventually found us several snakes, a frog, and even caught a caiman:


Unfortunately, when it was time to go back to the lodge our guide realized he had lost his bearings along the way and couldn't find the way back to the lodge. (The landscape is nothing but water and the canopy of trees so the lake we were on had no actual edge – you could row for hours in any random direction. Also, did I mention the generator was not working at the lodge so there were no lights on and we could be 20 feet from it and not know it.) It's a strange situation to find oneself in: out on the floodplains of the Amazon in pitch darkness except for the faint outline of the trees on the horizon and random flashes of lightning in the distance, the only residents of the canoe being two Canucks, two Swiss, two very embarrassed Brazilians who didn't know where the f*ck we were, and several dozen unnervingly large spiders. Having to spend the entire night out there waiting for daylight became a real possibility, and everyone was just thankful that it wasn't raining (though nobody voiced this at the time lest they be the one to jinx it). I was absolutely killing myself for leaving my iPhone back at the lodge; even though we were 200km from the nearest cell phone tower, the GPS and compass would have still worked! (NOTE TO SELF: Never go anywhere without your iPhone.) Thankfully, our guide eventually managed to find an area he recognized by flashlight and got us back to the lodge at almost 1AM after five hours on the boat.

At last count, our guide has apologized to us about this eight or nine times; he was pretty embarrassed about it.

Snakes

The movies have always portrayed the snakes of the Amazon as huge, vicious killers. In reality, they are only a few feet long and ADORABLE!

First, here's a boa spotted in a tree at night:


This is a type of viper that was one of the most venomous snakes in the Amazon (difficult to see as it's well camoflaged - it was coiled right in the middle of our trail):


And finally, there is the famous Anaconda:

How Monkeys Work

First you feed the monkey some breakfast:


Then the monkey lets you rub its belly:



Later on the monkey stole my beer, chewed on my sunglasses, then tried to eat my iPod earbuds. Bad monkey!

"It's always a good day for fishing; not always a good day for catching."

Our lodge is quite nice but it`s humid & hot and there's no air conditioning (one wall is just mosquito netting so it's essentially open-air). There is a fan, but we only get a few hours of electricity a night, so the goal will be to try to get to get to sleep before the eletricity goes out. Furthermore, the rainforest is quite noisy. I think it`ll take a few nights to get used to. (UPDATE: The generator is out! No electricity; no fans; just humid heat. We did sleep okay, though.)

In the afternoon we went piranha fishing. Unfortunately it was not the right season for fishing and only a single piranha was caught in three hours of fishing, and it was tiny.


We spotted a few of the pink bottlenose dolphins, but only briefly or from a distance. It's the wrong season for dolphins as well.

Into the Amazon.

Today we crossed the river where the brown water of the Rio Amazonas and meets the black water of the Rio Negro. Being inherently racist, this water stays segregated and leads to a phenomena in the Meeting of the Waters.


Fortunately, by the time the water reaches the Atlantic it has fully integrated and even elected a black water president.

The trip to our jungle lodge took several hours. We crossed the Amazon in a small boat, then an hour's car ride, then a ferry ride, then another hour in the car, and finally a thirty minute canoe ride to get to the lodge.


The canoe ride was surreal because the water is very dark and very still which makes it function as a perfect mirror. This leads to an optical illusion where you can't actually tell where the waterline is and you start feel like you're floating through the air high up in the trees, leading to some vertigo. Seriously, here's a photo off the front of our boat. The waterline is roughly half way up the photo. Can you even see it?


This one is a little easier since you can see the trunks of the trees are slightly wet where they touch the water:

BACK!!!

We're back after our Amazon adventure: four days with no phone, no cell phone, no wifi, no internet, no air conditioning, and no electricity. (I guess I could have just said no electricity and that would have covered everything else, but I'm playing for sympathy here. Also, electricity was the one thing we were supposed to have (for six hours a day anyway) but the generator was out the whole time we were there.)

I'll be putting up posts with a delay so that they'll show up over the next couple days until Wednesday or so, well after we get back.

A new post soon; now I'm off to spend an hour standing in front of the air conditioner.

Manaus

We are now in Manaus, a city of well over a million people in the heart of the Amazon jungle.

We tried going out exploring, but found the city hot, crowded, and dirty, and OPPRESSIVELY HOT! We've ended up coming back for a siesta in the hotel room with the air conditioner. Maybe we'll try again when the sun goes down.

We're leaving for our jungle lodge tomorrow where I'm 90% sure there is no internet access so there will be no updates for a while. If we don't show up again then please pay whatever ransom our kidnappers demand.