Holy crow!!! today was basically one of the best days of my life, for reals. We are in the Amazon. We flew out of Fortaleza yesterday, we had to get up before 3am in order to get there in time for our flight-super gag, but Manaus totally makes up for it. We stayed one night in the actual city, went and had a tour of the theater, walked to the pier and looked through a bunch of booths at the fair they had set up.
Then today we set out for the actual
jungle experience and oh boy, has it been a doozey so far. We got here by boat, it was about a 20 minute
boat ride from the mainland and city to our isolated little hotel (which, by
the way, was closed for about three months this summer because the water was so
high that they were flooded out, luckily it was down and the hotel remodeled
and fixed by the time we got here or I don't know what we would have
done). It is super cute, it is right off
the river and by a swamp kind of thing that has at least two
caimen-that is
what they call them here anyway, kind of like a small alligator-that lives in
the swamp, and the houses you stay in are located around it. You have to walk over a boardwalk type thing,
the wooden walkways built over water, to get to our rooms. The houses are built on stilts and so have
water underneath them and they are just super cute.
They met us on the dock with a big glass of Brazilian juice
and that just hit the spot and set the mood right there for the rest of our
stay.
Ok, now we are going to get into the really
good stuff. After having time to play in
the pool and rest up a bit, we went out fishing for piranas, so exciting! On our boat we had Vanessa and her
kids-Marcello, Felipe, Danilo and Natalia, as well as Joe, Cristina and I. Basically we had the coolest driver and guide
ever. The spot they took us to was
hopping with fish, we caught around 30 fish all together, mostly piranas, but a
few sardines. I caught 6 all on my own,
well one or two were sardines but it was still cool. They gave us fishing poles that were made
from bamboo and then a cup of raw meat, kind of
gross but perfect for what we
were trying to catch. At first Marcelo
was like, the only one catching anything, and poor Joe only caught one the
entire time, but Felipe ended up catching the biggest ones, Vanessa caught the
most Sardines, and I myself caught 6 like I said. Numbers 4 and 5 were a little bit sassy, one
of them might have been a sardine, but the fact of the matter is that while I
was trying to have my picture taken with them, they decided to jump of the hook
and flop around my feet! The funny part
was that most of those fish I caught while I was not paying 
attention. I was super busy trying to take a picture of
the amazing sunset, take a picture of Natalia with her catch or someone else,
and that is when I would feel my pole start to take off! Basically they thought they were pulling a
fast one over on me but boy were they wrong.
It was amazing, the Amazon is just gorgeous and the place where we were
fishing, it was beautiful. It was
definitely very relaxing to be in that location just lounging around fishing. He
put all of our fish on a line, it turned into a pretty cool looking
necklace. They are going to make a soup
out of them that we will get to eat tomorrow, how amazing is that, I actually
caught my own dinner...which was a pirana!
Once it started to get dark we gave up on fishing and went
searching for Caimen. Our guide had a
light that he was scanning the vegetation with because when light hits their
eyes they glow. It was the coolest thing
just cruising on a river, in the Amazon, in the dark scanning for these
guys. Our guide finally saw one so they
slowly took the boat over, he leaned over the front, and just snagged it right
out of the water! It was super cool to
see, our very own Caiman. We named him
Elmer, till the guide informed us that she was actually a girl, then I think
Danilo renamed
her Betty. We all got to
take turns holding her and getting our pictures taken-this place is
phenomenal. Our boat was awesome, I am
pretty sure we caught the most fish out of anyone and we are the only ones that
caught a caiman, so of course we kept him on the boat and showed him to all the
others and let them take pictures, which was cool, but I am so glad I was on
the boat that actually caught it because it was a lot of fun to see.
After we handed
Betty over to another boat we started towards home, still searching for
more. And we found one. When we found Betty, I didn't know what was
going to happen exactly until they already had her on the boat, but with the
next one I was prepared. We had an
awesome angle where you could actually see the eye glowing as we slowly road up
to it. It was legit, just this bright,
glowing thing in the night. Anyway, our
guide went to try and catch it, but then jumped back-apparently it was over 2
meters long...however long that is, but it must have been too much for him to
handle. Anyway, all in all I was in the
best boat and we had the absolute time of our lives!
When we got back to the hotel we found a frog in the
bathroom, he was pretty big too. Someone
named him Tom, as in Peeping Tom, seeings how he was in the girls bathroom and
all. Then I got back to my room and
Michelle was already here all upset because she could've sworn that she heard a
plop in the toilet when she got back and was pretty sure she saw a little frogy
and he was hiding in our toilet. Well,
what can you do? She didn't want to
flush him, but she needed to use the facilities and we couldn't find it anyway
to prove if it really was there, so I flushed it, and out of the hole part in
the front-I think it reduces water when you flush it, anyway, something shot
out of that and then was flushed so poor Michelle lost her pet frog :(
So that is the
beginning of my trip to the Amazon, hope you enjoyed it even 1/16 of what I did
because that would make you so happy.
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