We re-entered the Atlantic Ocean during the night and the
water has changed from the muddy brown of the Amazon to the blue-green of the
ocean. While we’ve shared a lot of
things, there are a few that we haven’t shared. So today’s entry is a
conglomeration of odds and ends!
Stopping in Parintins a couple days ago, we had 2 exciting
adventures. First was Rick’s haircut. If you remember from early in the cruise,
we consider finding someone to cut his hair an adventure that allows us to
visit with the local people, even though we can’t communicate too well. We left
the boat and started walking up the street, stopping people to ask directions.
Since neither of us speaks Portuguese, I would take a clump of my hair and use
my fingers to act like I was cutting it and then point to Rick. We walked half
a mile or so, stopping 5 times for directions and arrived at the barbershop
shown in Picture 1. The shop was about 8 feet square, with no door or windows.
The barber used clippers and then a straight razor around his neck and charged
us the equivalent of $3.50. Rick, being a big spender, gave him the equivalent
of $5.00!
Following the haircut, we went to a cultural program
provided by the ship. Every June, tens of thousands of people descend on
Parentins (100,000 population) for 3 days of music, theater and dancing,
celebrating the Boi-Bumba Festival. The performers enact the kidnapping, death
and resurrection of an ox—a metaphor for the agricultural cycle. There are
elaborate costumes and headdresses and nonstop music. We had the junior version: 1 hour, where the performers
never stopped singing and dancing. The energy was amazing. Pictures 2-5 show
some of the costumes and action.
To get to Parentins in June, attendees would travel by boat
like the one shown in Picture 6. Those are hammocks strung up on the decks for
sleeping (you would bring your own) and you would either bring your own food or
eat that prepared on the boat. There is air service between the larger cities,
but it’s cost-prohibitive. This is the economical way to travel up and down the
river at all times and we easily saw 100 of these boats. One of the locals
described it by saying that the first day everyone is having one big party. By
the second day you want to kill everyone else on the boat. By the third day you
want to kill yourself!
Picture 7 shows the current water level. As you can see, the
level is high and many areas are flooded. Huge amounts of debris are floating
down the river. Picture 8 shows some that has accumulated at the dock in
Parentins. A lot of the debris comes from banks that have collapsed after being
undermined by high water.
We did manage to have 2 more days of jungle hiking near
Santerem and you saw many of the animals from those hikes in the last blog
entry. Picture 9 shows what hiking through the jungle typically looked
like. Our guide would carry a
machete and would often have to clear branches and vines so we could pass.
On the last adventure, as we were returning to the ship, we
were stopped by a downed, very large tree, as shown in Picure 10. We were stopped
for about half an hour, as men using machetes and axes (no chain saws!) chopped
the tree to pieces to open one lane. We were impressed by the speed. It would
have been opened no quicker, with more efficient equipment, in the United
States.
We visit Devil’s Island in French Guiana tomorrow.
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