The Amazon

I'm in Brazil. I'm sailing up the Amazon in a river boat. I'm in Brazil... I keep repeating that to myself over and over again and no matter how many times I say it, I can't comprehend it. My life has become something out of a book. Or a movie. Something you dream of constantly but somewhere in the back of your mind seem to accept that such adventures don't actually happen in real life. So you can't blame me for believing that I'm about to wake up back in Boulder, school five days a week, two jobs, barely enough money to pay rent... And yet here I am. The past four days have been more of an adventure then I ever could have imagined. I lived on an open air river boat with twelve other students and a crew that became our family. We slept in hammocks as we sailed up the Amazon river. We hiked three hours through the rainforest, visited a local village and played soccer and drew pictures with the local kids. We camped out in the jungle and roasted chicken skewered on sticks that we found and ate it off of palm leaves. We actually slept in the middle of the Amazon rainforest with all sorts of terrifying creatures from your nightmares, with nothing but our hammocks, but hey, it was the most unbelievable night of my life. We bathed in the river. We swam with pink dolphins. We fished for piranhas out in the pouring rain with bamboo sticks in a little canoe. I actually caught the biggest piranha you've ever seen, which we brought back to our cook on our little boat who prepared it into a gourmet meal for me. We went back out in the canoe at dusk to spot caimans - a smaller species of alligator. I actually held one. We visited an indigenous tribe who were kind enough to preform some of their ceremonial dances for us, and then invited us to dance with them.

I'm in Brazil. I'm sailing down the Amazon in a river boat. Forgive me for laying out nothing but the bare-bone facts but to go into depth of what I've experienced would take an entire novel. Maybe I'll post everything on here once I write it all down, maybe not, depending on how long it is. But ask me someday and I will tell you the complete story. It's a good one; I promise.