Mamori continued

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So we pedalled behind the boat , or trying to keep the space between uthanks the motorboat as small as poss but most times we were a bit behind... Nonetheless our skills improved, I have to say mine box I be never pedalled in my life and by the end I could control the boat!! I reached the boat which was stopped and Jo told me that I had to save a bird that they found in the bush. So I went in with the boat trying to get the bird which was doing rounds trying to escape me, but finally I caught it .Deposited on the boat I was free to pedal away but not for long becauseowe we're at the clear and we needed to go baas to have the longed for shower.

I had been holding it all the way to the lodge,because it wanted to fly away, at one point it extended its neck and tried to bite me, but i think it understood that we were not going to hurt it and stopped fidgeting in the end.

We finally arrived at the lodge where some of us sprinted to the showers!!!Stupidly me and Joanna deciced to wash our clothes because we were going to go to another adventure and we wanted to have clean clothes, but it seems our luck with the unwashed clothes continued as , the day that we went to semi civilisation it started to rain, almost non stop!

As we have decided before we went to the lodge the plan was to get clean, eat lunch there and then go piranha fishing,and then cachaca drinking while caiman spotting😊 ah well most of the group got lucky with the piranhas and got more than one. we had an impressive amount in the end! I think about 9! yay it was way cool but for me it sucked because the one i caught had to be thown back into the lake because it had to grow more!!

Sooo after that it was my personal favourite part!!!We went to a sort of supermarket for the area, small shop for us Westerners for supplie, the cachaca. Our guide poured us a drink, and i had asked him, bottoms up, he replied yes, so i went ahead, it seemed tht i was the only one, then Jo gave me hers, and u can understand what happnd next! Someone got tipsy... then I decided that i wanted to drive the boat, and like we did with Aniko, I went straight at the back, and M did not tell me to go, but offered me a seat to drive the boat!!! He showed me the butons and stuff, things that i can barely remember now, apart from the notion that you have to hold and move the sort of steering wheelstick right and left to keep on going straight. Needless to say i did not drive much was just holding the wheel, they wuld be crazy to allow me to drive anything in that state, which wasnt bad but still i wouldnt have been able to.

After that we went back to the lodge for our dinner, and then we had some pool competition and more wine to drink, offered to us by the very kind and chaming owner of the lodge and company. He showed us, and by us i mean Aniko how to play pool, she was amazing , could have beaten him if she had more practise!We had a nice chat i think up until 12ish or 1 o clock and then we had to go to sleep because we were going to go caiman spotting at about 4 o clock.

All the group sans the guides were up at 4 o clock, all dressed up and stuff, and went out to search for the guides, no one was there , usually it was them who came to find us. we kinda went around the lodge premises to look for them but no one surfaced so we went back to sleep. I need to mentioned that head guide did not have a watch or an alarm clock, because he said that he sleeps lightly, and at cases where he needed i watched i had given mine to him.So there was no way for him to wake up.

It appears that he had an excuse😊 that it seemed like rain and he did not want us to go in the rain. Ah well we went for our last ride and sadly did not catch any, but we came really close to catching one about 3 times.We went back for lunch and some sleep and then it was time to go. We both did not want to leave the lodge, we could have stayed another day there , if we had expressed our desire to one another, which we didnt , it was better like that anyway, we had to see Manaus as well!

Reaching Manaus was a struggle due to the rainfall the previous day. The roads were full of mud, and we had close to what seemed to an extreme mud ride to the normal tarmac. It seemed that the younger driver was better than the older guy who was driving , and so he was allowed to drive us back , because we would have stayed there for quite some time.

Manaus as a City is not that impressive, its pretty vast, and heavily populated, but it had the Teatro Amazonas, a wonderful building around some very cute houses, looked kind of colonial. We sort of rested and then we were off to Cuiaba and the Pantanaal!!! More adventure!!!

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