Conclusion to Amazon adventure

Finally I am writing the conclusion to my Amazon adventure.  It was time to leave Itatuba and fly back to Miami.  This was a small town so we needed to take a small plane to a bigger city and then fly to Miami from there.  The plane was scheduled to leave at 9 AM so we got to the airport at 8 and checked in and did the usually stuff.  After waiting for an hour they told us the plane was late but had us go through the metal detector and wait.  Right before I went through I realized I had my trusty multi tool in my backpack, you know the one that survivor man told me to never get caught without.  So here I am, I don’t speak a lick of the language and I am carrying a knife through the metal detector.  Just then it occurred to me, Newton was standing unaware and I still owed him for my trouble with customs on the way in, so I took my knife and put it in his carryon without him knowing.  I went through first and had no problem and then turned to watch him.  He made it through fine but his bag did not.  They opened it up and took out the knife.  I didn’t understand any of the words but I could tell they were not happy with Newton for trying to sneak a knife on the plane. 

After a few hours of waiting they told us the plane would be here at 9 PM, only 12 hours late, so we went for a walk and got some lunch.  We came to Brazil in the dry season so I had been there 8 days and had not seen it rain.  This evidently was very uncommon but on our walk it started to rain, we ducked into a little market and it was over in a half hour but in that time more water came down than in any half hour I had ever experienced.  I literally thought cars might wash away but as soon as it stopped the water was gone, no big puddles or anything, it just runs down to the river.  So we go back to the airport and wait some more and they tell us 9 AM tomorrow we can load the plane.  So back to the hotel and start the process over, up at 7, to the airport by 8 and then they did something great.  Instead of making us wait, they immediately told us the plane would not be here until 9 PM.  On the one hand this meant our plane was delayed 36 hours but Raury, the geologist from Australia that we had come to meet, offered to take us out on his boat on the Amazon for the day.  We had already checked our bags so we did not have a change of clothes but we didn’t care, just wanted to see the Amazon from a small boat.  This boat was like a large canoe with a motor, there were no boats like the boats we ski behind on the lake, in fact if you could get one of those boats there it would be the greatest playground ever.  Picture a river with some spots where you can not see the other shore that is always pure glass and no other boats for hundreds of miles, a water-skiers dream. 

Raury told us he wanted to take us to the waterfalls, it was a couple hours up river and we may run out of gas but we wanted to give it a shot.  On the way we start to see a couple of dolphins jumping around the boat, it was just like a boat in the ocean with the dolphins playing around us but this was fresh water.  During one of my many hours spent watching the discovery channel I had seen a program on fresh water dolphins but here they were just out of arms reach jumping in fours or fives all around us.  As we went on we made it to the waterfall, my concept of a waterfall is a river falling hundreds of feet down a cliff but there a waterfall is really some small rapids.  We tied up our boat and got on shore, my first thought was of the Crocodiles but Raury assured me they don’t like the fast moving water.  I felt pretty good about that since he grew up down under.  The thoughts going through my head were that I may never get back to the Amazon and I would always regret it if I did not get in and swim.  Now remember we had to fly out later and I didn’t have a change of clothes, the humidity is such that if you get wet, you don’t dry out, so swimming with clothes was out of the question unless I wanted to fly in an airplane for many hours while wet.  So I did what I thought was the best, I whipped off my clothes, underwear and all, and jumped in.  After about ten minutes Raury said, “don’t piss mate” in his Australian accent, and then he proceeded to tell me about the parasite that is attracted to the ammonia in your urine and swims up your junk and sinks in three barbed hooks curving down so you can not pull them out.  My first thought was that he was just messing with me but as I began to believe him I wondered why he didn’t tell me not to piss ten minutes earlier when I first felt the urge and let it rip.  My wife was not very happy with me when I first told her this story, anyway after I got out he said, well at least we know you didn’t get anything bit off by the piranha but it will take up to four months before we know if you caught the parasite. 

I waited four months to write this so everyone would know weather to laugh or cry and am happy to report a clean bill of health.  The doctor said I was lucky I was not a very good fisherman!