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Published: March 16th 2009
Last night we entered the Amazon river which is over 200 miles long at the mouth of the river! Quite impresive. Today we docked in Santarem interesting fact about this town it has American roots, as more than 100 confederate soldiers and their families settled here after the Civil War. When we arrived in the mourning we took a taxi into town, and just wondered and window shoped. I wished I had more room in my bag for a hamock they had some really cool ones for only like 10 dollars that people use when they travel by river boats. The river front was crowded with the small boats that serve as the buses of the Amazon Basin. It's the major form of transportation here, and people bring their own hammocks on board and sleep elbow to elbow for 1, 2, 3 days or more, and they show off their wealth and status by how nice their hammocks are.
Later in the day we a took a tour on a river boat, first we went and looked at the meeting of the waters. Basically the Amazon is comprised of two different types of rivers, brown and clear. The brown
streams cary sedimentary rocks and the black rivers cary crystalline rock, because the two rivers vary in temperature, density and acidity they resist mixing together for several miles down stream which forms the meeting of the waters. Here we got to see the black water of the Rio Tapajos enter the brown water of the Amazon. While we were out here we saw some river dolphins, (not the pink ones... yet, just regular old flipper like ones) They were too quick though, so I never did get any pics :-(
After the meeting of the waters we headed down the Rio Tapajos and saw lots of localstons of cool animals, sloths, iguanas, and more birds than I could count. Eventually we stoped and got to fish for some piranhas!! I unfortunatly only caught a cat fish, but in my defense this cat fish also had razor sharp fins! We got to try some of what we caught, it wasn't too bad actually.
On the way back we saw a bunch of floating gas stations, which was kinda funny.
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