The Amazon

We are in the Manaus airport right now, waiting for our 6 hour flight to Salvador, back on the coast. We have just spent the last four days at an Eco Lodge in the Amazon, and it was amazing! Every day, we saw new and gorgeous things, and we had so many powerful experiences. While there is only a few minutes before we start boarding the plane, I wanted to start telling about our experiences here.

We arrived in Manaus 4 days ago, and we had the opportunity to see some of the city. Manaus used to be the rubber capital of the world, and it was built big and powerful by the rubber barons of the late 1800s. There are some incredible old buildings here, baroque in their opulence. The opera hall is fantastic, with gold leaf and hand painted frescos. Interestingly, because the level of the river here fluctuates so much, the old part of the city is built up and away from the river. In fact, you can barely see the river at all from there. Manaus is built at the confluence of the Negra River and the Amazon, and it is the point of the famous *meeting of the waters.* The Negra river is miles across at this point, and the water is warm and dark and moving fairly slowly. The Amazon is colder and faster, and a light cappucino color. The two rivers keep their water separate but in the same river channel for miles. It is an amazing thing to see, and we had the opportunity to go out in boats to actually touch the water. We could feel the difference in the temperature just with our hands! It looked like a coffee cup with dark coffee and milk being mixed in.

We also had the opportunity to visit the river market in Manaus, which is built along the river shore so that boats can come up the river and bring the latest fish and animals and produce to sell. The market buildings were long halls with art nouveau roofs. Inside there were small booths with local people selling everything from fish and meat, to live birds, to hand carved beads and seeds, jewery, empanadas and fritters, bottles of wine and liquor, herbs and spices, live animals and birds, basically, just about anything anyone might want to buy. This was not much of a tourist market, but it was all the more interesting because of it. We did have several studens buy blow dart guns here, which the local people were happy to demonstrate quite decisively. Those blow guns really do work!

More later!