Life of Luxury

Pieter and I are halfway through our 4 day luxury cruise down the Amazon. We just stopped for a couple hours in Santarem to unload some cargo (hopefully cargo is portuguese for people).

Got to Go. Waiter.......bring me another mai tai!

Yin and Yang, Shake and Bake

Manaus and the Amazonian Jungle

After last departing Pieter in Nicaragua I reconvened with MY BOY BLUE in Manuas, Brazil. Instead of Throwing Seven Different Kinds of Smoke as before, he had adopted a new phrase Shake and Bake while in Peru with the legendary Fico. I quickly acquired the new expression and it became the motto for our five day excursion into the Amazonian jungle. We spent the last five days canoeing through the jungle continuously looking for new paths through the sunken tree tops (right now the amazon is rising 2cm per day from the melting snow in the Andes).

The first day we met up with our guide Raymundo and took a boat-car-canoe trip to our first nights lodging where we stayed with the Jungle Man and his family. Went on a canoe trip through the treetops, attempted pirhana fishing (I am now 0 for 2), then at night went crocodile spotting and more pirhana fishing with and bow and arrow (more like a spear than arrow). All pretty manly. Thats the Yin or the Shake. Which I quickly juxtaposed with the Yang, or the Bake, by sewing together my pants at night that I originally bought for yoga in guatemala. I had to look my best for the Jungle Mans daughters birthday party.

The next two days and nights we spent camping in the jungle. Raymundo and Jungle Man showed Pieter and I how to set up camp in the middle of the jungle using only a machete and our hammocks. Using four trees as our base we hacked down everything else we needed to make crossbeams and supports to hang our hammocks from. Then we created another cross beam to hang the tarp above us for rain and tied the whole thing together with vines hanging from the trees. The first day the guides showed us how to do it and the next day Pieter and I set up our second camp for the most part solo. After feeling more manly than ever before I quickly slipped into my pants that I had sewed up the previous night and read Embrujadas (spanish version of the TV show Charmed). Yin and Yang, Shake and Bake people.

We spent last night with Jungle man and his family and arrived back in Manaus today. We leave on a 4 day boat ride up the Amazon to Belem in a couple of hours. From there we start our trek towards the west coast of Brazil in time to catch Carnaval.

Shake and Bake,
Christofer

Lakewalker to Cloudwalker

After Los Llanos I set off to Santa Elena in order to climb Mount Roraima (ranking third behind Nepal and Mt. Kilimanjaro). After all day haggling with different tour companies for a better price I bumped into Kiko. Kiko said he was a guide that was taking a group of volunteers up the next day for less than half the price of the other tour companies. Sounded good to me. The only catch was that we wouldn´t have porters and would have to carry all our food and equipment. I figured I could handle it if the two 100 lb volunteers in the group were doing it. Which turned out not to be very good logic, because it just meant the rest of us would have to carry more weight. And miranda ended up violently shaking from heat stroke on the 5th day. Then I found out that another dutch woman was so exhausted from the hike that she had to be airlifted off the top. This is making it sound more dramatic than it really was, but if you are over 50 and not in very good shape you might want to think twice before trying it.
The hike was six days in total: 3 days up, 1 day and 2 nights on top, and two days to get down. Roraima is a tepuis (table top) similar to the ones in utah. Except 40% of the life on top can only be found in Roraima. There were carniverous plants, black frogs that couldn´t, and it was the inspiration for the "Lost World" (i´m pretty sure thats right, but don´t quote me). Our group consisted of myself and another american, pat, I met on the bus to Santa Elena. 5 Volunteers: Jacob and Esther from Germany, Hazbol and Miranda from the UK, and Carolina from the states. And of course our guide Kiko from Venezuela.

After the hike I took the overnight bus to Manaus, Brazil where I am now. (For some reason the immigration official wrote expired below my entrance stamp to Venezuela. So I had to leave without getting an exit stamp from Venezuela, seeing I was never supposed to have been there. I think that means I probably won´t be going back to Venezuela anytime soon.) Pieter should be arriving in less than an hour after a journey from Bolivia. We are going to meet up and then head off on a four day tour into the Amazon jungle. After that its a dead sprint to the coast for Carnaval.

Christofer