Strong swimmers

Like some fellow Bloggers I have been on a break during the Christmas holidays, but felt like it was time to come back. I have missed writing so I am just adding a quick entry before leaving to celebrate the New Year in Scotland. A far cry from the cold, windy, Scottish countryside I still have more stories to tell from my humid Amazonian travels.

Before going to the Amazon, and knowing little about what diverse and immense beauty the region contained, one of my incentives for going was to swim with dolphins in their natural habitat. On my last full day in the Amazon I entered the waters of the Rio (river) Negro, with more than 10 dolphins, and swam amongst them, feeling their bodies touch mine as they swam past.

The dolphins that occupy the river are called botos de cor rosa, pink dolphins. When they leapt out of the water, to catch the fish I was holding in my hand, they appeared to be grey in colour as it is the dark colour of the water that makes them appear pink. There are two methods of feeding them. Firstly I entered the water and standing on a platform, with the water at waist height and fish in hand, I waited for them to leap up and take it out of my hand. It felt like they were almost throwing themselves at me as the weight of their large bodies crashed into mine. All they wanted was the fish, they were not trying to harm me, in fact they are gentle giants with poor eyesight and for this reason their bodies met with mine.

It was then time to fully enter the water, I was first fitted with a buoyancy aid, before entering the dark waters again. The moment my body was submerged in the river I was surrounded by the dolphins, all looking for food. They swam between my legs, raised out of the water brushing past my arms, and with mouths open once again took the fish from my hands. After 10 more minutes of feeding the buoyancy aid was removed and I was free to swim the river and dive with the dolphins. Swimming under the water I could clearly see the size of these gentle creatures, and running my hands along their bodies their skin felt like a hard-boiled egg with its shell removed. What a truly beautiful creature.

A tribal evening

In April Educação Condutiva - Com Amor celebrated its first birthday with a play performed by the students. After much debate it was decided that the children would present a short play about the different origins of the Brazilian population. The population of Brazil is divided into four categories not actually of origin but of colour, skin colour. These four are negro (black), amarelo (yellow), vermelho (red) and branco (white). These four colours represent the different races within Brazil, and as at the time we had four children, each child represented a different race. During the play each child took its turn to present to the audience and so the history of Brazil and the arrival of each race to the country was told.

I learned a lot about the formation of the Brazilian population whilst preparing for the play, so here is a short summary. Brazil was first occupied by Indians (vermelho, red), native Indians living in tribes using nature's products to feed, clothe and house themselves. Next arrived the Europeans (branco, white), mostly wealthy Portuguese who created large coffee and sugar plantations, whilst turning small fishing villages into large cities. They used their money to buy African (negro, black) slaves, bought to work on the plantations. Finally people arrived from the Far East, mostly Japonese (amarelo, yellow), and so the Brazilian population was constructed.

During my first year in Brazil I had encountered many different Brazilians of differing skin colour, but I had never had the opportunity to observe the life of the native Indians that to this day still occupy the Amazonian rain forest. Upon my arrival in the Amazon I was informed that this would be possible and grasped at the chance to visit an Indian tribe. Before I set out on a dark Sunday night to watch their daily night ritual, I was concerned that perhaps I would not enjoy the experience, and would feel like it was not genuine, but a show put on for tourists. I almost did not go, but as I arrived into the small clearing deep in the forest I soon realised that this was not a show but their daily routine, and I was purely an observer.

A young boy was blowing on a horn, inviting us in as the tribe members prepared food for dinner, apparently unaware of our presence. We sat down a little distance away as it was explained that what we were about to see was not due to our presence, but a ritual they performed every night before eating, to give thanks for their food. As the food continued cooking over the fire, the members of the tribe gathered together and within seconds began dancing. Women, men and children danced whilst singing in a language that I did not recognise. The dancing was led by a boy who held one of his hands in the air for the duration of the dance, on his hand was a wicker glove that was crawling with biting bullet ants. As a boy turning into a young man it was his responsibility to lead the tribe, whilst enduring the pain of the biting ants. Young girls played instruments as they danced, never making a wrong step. The dancing lasted about five minutes and just as suddenly as it had started it stopped, the food was removed from the fire, and the tribe started to eat, us too.

Let's go fishing

I had never fished for piranha before I went to the Amazon, but I did spend many days as a child fishing for trout with my dad. I was born in the Lake District, a beautiful rural area in the north of England, and I spent all of my childhood and adolescence growing up in its breathtaking landscape. To this day my parents still live there in a house on a hill overlooking the Eden Valley, with a view that money can not buy. Looking out of the living room through the floor to ceiling windows, the green valley lays spread out for miles below with fells in the distance on both sides. To the left lies the "sleeping elephants", fells that when the sun shines resemble a herd of elephants laid flat out, their lined, dry skin clearly visible. And to the right stands the many fells that surround Lake Ullswater and its neighbouring lakes. I really could not have been more fortunate as a child as the beauty of the area provided many activities to keep me occupied, one of these activities was fishing.

My dad has always had a great interest in fishing and it was one of the few activities in which me and my three siblings accompanied him. Our favorite place to fish was on the River Eden in a place called Bluebell Wood. I do not know to this day if this is the actual name of the wood, or in fact me and my siblings invented the name due to the number of bluebell flowers growing there. It was a well established wood with tall trees, closely packed together creating a large shady area underneath. At a certain time of year the ground of this shaded area was a carpet of blue and lilac as the bluebells hung delicately from their from their long thin stalks. The slightest breeze caused the bells of the flowers to shake, and so the carpet appeared to be moving. And it was here that we sat upon a broken tree on many a sunny afternoon, rod in hand, bait in the water, waiting not always so patiently for a bite. Sat in a boat on the River Negro, again rod in hand, waiting for the piranhas to bite, I remembered this happy childhood memory.