Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Encontro das Águas and the Amazon :)


The Rio Negro and Solomon River (I can't remember the Portuguese name for that one) meet to form the Amazon, but because of the different speed, density, and temperature of the two rivers, they flow together but separately for quite some distance before they completely merge. It's super cool to see; you can literally see a line down the middle of the river!

Cindy asked me to French braid her hair on the boat, and while I was doing it, this cute girl (~10) kept looking at us. [She and her parents were in our group basically the whole trip, but she only seemed to know about 10 words of English and no Portuguese, so we sort of became smile-buddies :) Their whole family was so cute!] Anyway, she kept looking over, so we asked if she wanted her hair braided. She said yes! I'm not really sure why I was so excited, but it was so fun to feel like I made a friend in Manaus. So here's a picture of us with our matching braids (even though I started hers a little lower on her head so you can't actually tell it's braided haha).

Then they said goodbye and got off the boat, while we headed to a little floating restaurant, complete with monkeys! I have about a million pictures, but since I did an entire post on monkeys before, I'll just post two :)

After that, we went to meet these guys:

Yes, that would be a SLOTH and an ANACONDA!

Yes, I held both of them. Yes, it was awesome.

YES, you should be jealous. :)

In the afternoon we had a hike/nature walk through the AMAZON. They showed us all kinds of cool things, like where certain types of seeds can be found, clove vines (like the little cloves, but it's an entire vine, so you can cut off sections of the vine and use it to flavor tea and stuff), ants that can be squished on your hands to create “Indian Perfume” or a natural bug repellant, and even how to build/set off certain types of traps!

Do I look like I fit into the Amazon?

No comments:

Post a Comment