rach150384 -

rach150384 -

rach150384

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	[Apr. 13th, 2008\|08:06 pm]
Hey all, It's been a while so I'm going to backtrack to the second half of my journey up the Amazon. After I left the internet cafe in Santarem I grabbed lunch and supplies with a Canadian guy who is riding his motorbike across the Americas. He has been travelling for over 18 months now and has clocked a crazy number of miles. We bitched about the cost of visas to various countries (he had to pay 130USD for his Brazilian visa while I didn't need one) while eating acai (ah-sy-ee) icecream from a supermarket. Acai is made from the pulp of acai berries (duh) that are grown mainly in the north of Brazil. The Brazilians make it into drinks with milk or just water, or add fruit and granola to make a snack. I hadn't heard of acai icecream but it was good! It did stain my entire mouth purple though. We made it back to the boat where I found street vendors wandering the decks, selling their wares to the passengers. I bought a bag of little peach cakes for 1R$ and shared them with the family of three next to me. We had the most amazing sunset that night (hopefully I will upload photos shortly, internet is very slow). I skipped dinner to watch, well worth it. The next two days were uneventful. I finished reading Papillon (highly recommended) and ran down the battery in my MP3 player. The little boy next to me, who had been highly suspicious of me since boarding in Belem, suddenly decided on Sunday that I would probably like to play with his toy cow (vaca in portugues) and so we played together for a while. We listened to Elvis and the Beatles before Pinky's battery finally kicked the bucket. I took a couple of pictures of him, the kids on board like to see themselves on a digital camera, but he hadn't figured out that he needed to stay still. To be fair, he was about 2 years old. He chattered away to me for the rest of the trip but I have absolutely no idea what he was saying. Ok, half of this post just got deleted, the number five key seems to double as delete. The internet here is driving me crazy. It would be ok if I wasn't trying to upload photos. You better appreciate those! (new photos have possibly been uploaded to picasaweb.google.com/rach150384 or somewhere like that) As I was saying... The boat trip was definitely worth the time and money. It would be interesting to do it again at the end of the dry season when the river can be up to 10m lower and 7 miles narrower (it was >12miles wide in places). When we got to Manaus what was left of the gringo clan dispersed as we made our ways to various hostels and tour operators but we keep bumping into each other in and around Manaus. And now... for another post maybe. The photo uploads are irritating me to hell and back so we'll see how many I do before I simply delete everything and leave. Update: I have been waiting 40 minutes for 5 photos to upload and am giving up since I'm paying for this and would rather spend the money on an icecold coke. A few photos from Belem have made it. Photos from the boat and tales from the jungle will be coming in the next decade.
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