Equateur Flowers

Archive for the ‘Brasilia Travel’ Category

On my birthday, we got up about 5, and caught the 6:30 flight from Manaus to Port Vehlo. Richard, an American expat, picked us up in the supplier’s pick-up truck. The pick-up was filled with furniture to be delivered to the supplier’s wife and there was barely room for our bags. We climbed in, with me in the middle, the gear shift between my legs and headed off. No aircon of course. About two cramped and hot hours down the road, there’s a gentle bump and a repetitive thumping noise. Richard pulls off and we see the front tire sunk flat. Okay, so we find a spare buried beneath the furniture…but no jack. Okay, flag a man down (not as easy as it sounds–we’re on a major highway and folks just don’t stop unless, like this fellow, they feel its their Christian duty), borrow his jack, get the car up and the flat off, put on the spare…but the spare doesn’t fit. Read the rest of this entry »

Since travel by air wasn’t practical, we drove north of Santa Cruz about 6 hours. We worked our way along the road, through military road blocks and across a one-lane bridge that alternated between serving both car and train traffic, picking our way through cattle herds that had travelled slowly in the company of a dozen cowboys 500-1000km from Brazil to start a farm in Bolivia. The mill was only 300km away, and the last 150km took nearly 4 hours, with the last 20km or so taking an hour in a four wheel drive truck. Read the rest of this entry »

On our Sunday in Manaus, we arranged for a tour on our free Sunday, and went piranha fishing. Meeting our non-English speaking guide, Augusto, at 7am, we headed off. We stopped first at the market for some fresh steak as bait. The piranhas apparently prefer it still bleeding. We got in a nice tour boat (long motor boat with fold-down benches and a roof) and began to wander up and down through the rivers and swamps. Later we transferred to a dugout canoe for a even deeper penetration into the wild areas. It was an entirely different type of jungle and absolutely amazing to me that just an hour previously we had been in a modern city. Read the rest of this entry »