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!

Sarah Palin covers what McCain is lacking

Sen. McCain chose his VP running mate, the Governor of the state of Alaska Sarah Palin. What most presidential hopefuls do is pick a VP that gives them something they are lacking. For example, Senator Obama has only been a Senator for 2 years, so to make up for his lack of experience he picked Joe Biden who has been a Senator even longer than McCain (now that is old!).

Just for fun lets see how well McCain did at picking a VP with qualifications he is lacking. Lets start with family values, Palin is the mother of 5 with the last one being born just a little over a year ago. She found out before the birth that her newest baby would have a handicap and let everyone know she considers it a blessing from God that He would trust her with one of his special children. McCain dumped his wife that had cancer for a 20 year younger, better looking wife. That is definitely covering for something McCain is lacking.

Next lets look at the game of politics. McCain is considered a master politician who is willing to make deals that he doesn't believe in but that may advance his career. Some examples of this are campaign finance reform, blocking immigration reform, and agreeing to a global warming bill to cap emissions. All of these bills were sponsored by McCain and cosponsored by democrats to advance his career. Palin ran against a Republican Governor who wasn't ethical or conservative enough, she lost and he tried to end her threat by offering her an important position in the republican party in Alaska, she didn't take it and beat him in the next election. No deals, no politics, just ethics.

Finaly, McCain is not a conservative, in fact he is exactly the type of guy that my lifelong democrat grandfathers would have voted for. The only difference is he would have been running in the democrats party. Governor Palin is the most conservative person that has run for President or Vice President that I have seen in my lifetime. She believes in and implemented in Alaska a low tax low spending fiscal policy, she is a member of the NRA who likes to hunt and fish. She believes in pumping more oil to lower gas prices and is as pro-life as it comes. She told the Federal Government to keep the money for the bridge to nowhere because she doesn't believe in wasting any money.

I would say McCain did a great job covering his weaknesses but the question remains, why would any conservative vote for a guy with this many weaknesses? If you can hold your nose and vote the lesser of two evils, more power to you, I for one can't do it, neither Obama or McCain will get my vote in November.

Bubba's Amazon Adventure part III

Now I am to the part of the trip that I will never forget. We got on a boat in Santarem and took an 8 hour boat ride up the Amazon River to a town called Itatuba. As you can see, the boat was a little suspect. It did have lifejackets for everyone which gave me comfort until I thought about the possibility of having to use the lifejackets! We got on the boat at about 4 in the afternoon and pulled into our destination at a little after midnight. During the day it was kind of cool but really you could only see the water and occasionally we got close to one shore and got a look at the jungle but after the sun went down I took out my flashlight and just scanned the shoreline. Eyes were reflecting back at me from the trees, ground, and water and I tried to guess which animals were looking at me. Of course I thought they were all monkeys, jaguars, and crocodiles, but in reality they were probably just normal animals like a bird of paradise, bush baby, or anaconda.

The next morning we went on a single prop Cessna 200 miles into the heart of the jungle to look at a gold mine. Being the heaviest, I was put in the front seat with the pilot, this gave me the opportunity to see hundreds of miles in every direction. First the propaganda you have heard about the rain forest disapearing is as true as the one about the moon being an alien spaceship. I could see for hundreds of miles in every direction and there was nothing but jungle. The whole trip I was thinking of survivor man, I brought my trusty multitool pocketknife and I was devising my plan for which direction I would head when the plane went down. We landed on a dirt runway that I guessed could not have been more than 100 yards and was full of potholes. It was however uphill which I am sure helped us slow down before going into the jungle.


The camp at the mine was incredible, here we were hundreds of miles from civilization, if my wife was there she would say thousands of miles from a Costco, and they had these 500 sq foot tents with wood framing that had computers, the internet, and a kitchen that was more functional than the one in my house. The construction of these would impress the best general contractors America has to offer. They grabbed a chainsaw and if they needed a 6x6 board 10 feet long they cut it and it looked like it was produced in a factory and delivered.


As we walked around looking at the mine site, we had to watch our step as the local Brazilian miners have been working this spot for years. What they would do is dig a hole about 3 foot by 3 foot that would go down sometimes 300 feet. There was a log with a rope coiled around it to lower the miners down and pull up the ore. Once the ore was brought up, they would pan it and once again showed us the gold they found, amazing!


After watching fish in a pond try to eat birds flying close to the water I was upset I didn’t bring a fishing rod but we had to go as the pilot was not certified to fly at night. I thought about it and was glad I was not told this until after I was already there so I couldn’t chicken out. We were asked to lean forward on takeoff as the runway was downhill with a pond and steep hill on the other side of the pond that we cleared by about 4 inches. I want to go back and spend a couple days camping, fishing and exploring but the one day I did have was unforgettable.

Manmade Global Warming?

Are you as sick of paying more than $4.00 a gallon for gasoline as I am? It could be worse, my Dad drives a diesel truck and that cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.90 a gallon. What can we as individuals do about it? The answer is simple, it is a philosophy change and no I am not talking about not using air conditioning and buying expensive hybrids, what we can do to fix things is to stop believing the propaganda being thrown at us about manmade global warming.

I know, I can hear you now saying, but there is global warming, all the scientist and smart people say there is, and besides what does it have to do with the price of gas? First we need to connect the dots, the price of gas goes up when the price of oil goes up. The price of oil goes up when smart businessmen think it will cost more for oil next year than it does this year, these are called futures and if your business depends on oil it makes sense to pre buy the oil you will use next year now, therefore guaranteeing a price. So why do these smart businessmen believe oil will cost more next year than this year? Again it is pretty simple, we as a world are using more oil each year than we are finding. So we have two options, use less or find more. While using less sounds great and makes us all feel good it is not realistic, China, India, and Brazil just to mention a few are countries that’s oil consumption will increase more than any savings you and I could accomplish. So the other option is to find more which brings us back to global warming.

Let me correct myself, it is not really find more, you see we already know where more oil is, a lot more. There are billions of barrels in Anwar and off the shores of our coasts but we are not allowed to pump that oil in short because we believe in manmade global warming. Why do I keep saying manmade global warming instead of just global warming? Al Gore told us that our CO2 emissions are what is causing global warming. You see throughout history our planet has naturally warmed and cooled in cycles that are God made and not manmade. Proof of these natural cycles are the ice age and the dust bowl. But Al Gore and the propaganda pumped into our TV’s, movies, and schools say that we are to blame for the 0.8 degree temperature increase in the last 100 years.

There are many scientists who do not believe in manmade global warming. In fact there was just a major conference in New York City of thousands of scientists who do not believe in manmade global warming. Some of the best and brightest, PHD’s and weather industry leaders were in attendance and in agreement. NASA recently had to admit that its numbers were wrong and 1997 was not the hottest in the last 100 years like it had previously reported and 1934 was. In fact 6 of the hottest 10 years in the last 100 were in the 1930’s, an era called the dust bowl because so much ground vegetation died that when the wind blew in the Midwest there was large amounts of dust kicked up. In fact many of these scientists that attended this conference made the case for global cooling of more than 1 degree in the past 10 years. They said that the ocean temperatures, the main factor in global temperatures was colder now than at any time in the past 100 years.

The hardest thing for most people to understand is the “evidence” we have for global warming. You see, manmade global warming proponents have made it so any weather event is “proof” of global warming. If it is a hot summer, that is global warming, if it is a cold winter, that is global warming. A drought or a flood, lots of hurricanes or tornados or none, less ice in the Arctic or more ice in the Antarctic pretty much anything that happens is “proof” of manmade global warming.

Al Gore said in his movie that he would like to see gas at $5.00 a gallon because it would force us to conserve and cut back. The political policies of most of our politicians are artificially increasing the price of oil by not letting us pump the oil we already have found. I for one do not believe in manmade global warming and if you would like to see gas at a reasonable price again, you may want to study out the facts and see if you really believe in manmade global warming yourself. If you come to the same conclusion I did, together we can fix the price of oil by voting out all the politicians who are stopping the production of oil in the name of manmade global warming and are causing the higher gas prices.

Bubba's Amazon Adventure 2

So the second day in Brazil we went to a city named Maraba, it was about 30 miles from a mine called Serra Palata which translated means naked mountain. Actually, when I said this to a guy who spoke Portuguese he had no idea what the words Serra Palata meant so maybe this is made up. Anyway, I was told it was named this because the mountains have no trees on them, after being there I came to the conclusion that no trees means something different in the Amazon than it does in Utah.

We ate at a restaurant on a boat on the river. We ordered at about 7 pm and the food was delivered at about 9:30. In my 10 days in Brazil I came to realize that this was the norm, you sit down and talk for hours at a time every night, so food delivered 2 ½ hours after you order is no big deal. I will say that every night was perfect temperature and beautiful so maybe that is why.
As soon as the sun went down the bats came out. Not a bat here or a bat there but thousands and tens of thousands of bats. They were all following the same path, over the roof of a house towards the river. I was standing on the river’s edge but on a boardwalk about 20 feet above the water. The bats were coming straight at me and then turning at the last second to miss me on both sides. As soon as the bats made it over the railing above the river they dropped straight down and skimmed the water. It truly was one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

The next day we go to Serra Palata, the road there was amazing. This was a highway but every half mile or so you had to stop and dodge the potholes big enough to swallow the truck. At one bridge we crossed they put a stop sign in a hole that if you ran over would let your truck fall in the river I am not exaggerating there was no asphalt or anything, just a huge hole that went down to a big river. So we get on the dirt road and instead of being jammed into the backseat of the truck with three other guys I decided to ride in the back. As we pulled into the village I noticed that there were no buildings that would meet code or be considered livable in the US. Interestingly enough, almost all the “houses” have satellite dishes and they all point almost straight up because of the proximity to the equator sorry, just an interesting little detail that really has nothing to do with the story.

As we drove into this extremely poor village, the men started running out and yelling something. I found out they were saying, “It begins”. They were thinking now that the Americans were here we would start the mine back up and give them a job and life would be fine. So we ate lunch at the only house with a cement floor and the nice women fed us more food than they probably eat in a week. I again having more guts than brains told Newton (our Brazilian guide) that I would eat anything a Brazilian would eat. So my plate got loaded up with quail eggs, armadillo, deer (look like big dogs) but nothing all that crazy. I was worried that it may turn out like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with monkey brains and spiders and eyeballs but I did give them enough time to prepare those things so I got off easy.
The woman cooking and serving us lunch kept just piling on the food. It was hot and humid and we had been hiking and checking out the mine and property and I wasn’t in the mood for a huge lunch. I started saying I’m full, no more, but it was in English so it wasn’t working. My next thought was to use the international sign language of the ok symbol. I didn’t just do it with one hand, I did it with both while smiling and looking her in the eyes. I later learned that the ok symbol is not “international”, in Brazil it is similar to flipping the bird, only worse. The circle your fingers form represents the place food exits your body. So here I was giving this nice old lady that cooked and served me an amazing lunch a double flip off while smiling at her. The funny part was I can remember her taking a double take at my double flip off but being nice and acting like she did not notice it.

(Upper left) exploring the property (Upper right) an old miner working the land (lower Left) the gold we watched him pan

Tiger Woods, media darling

I am writing this in response to my brother Joe who wrote an excellent post on his blog. You can go see it by using the link to his site on the left of my site. This year’s US Open was the most compelling entire tournament I have seen in a while, maybe ever. I will admit I am biased, I rooted against Jordan and I root against Tiger. I respect the obvious talent but resent the media acting like all tournaments are foregone conclusions. After Tiger won in 19 extra holes ESPN did a top ten amazing shots by Tiger in just this US Open. It made me wonder if he had ten amazing shots in just this tourney, why did he have to birdie the last hole in regulation to tie? And why did he have to birdie the 18th playoff hole to stay alive? Did Rocco have 10 AMAZING shots?
Tiger is on a quest to break Jack Nicklaus' major championship wins record and he will probably do it, he has 14 and needs 19 to own the most wins. He has been winning 1 a year for the last 3 and has at least 5 more years of peak golf if his knee holds up, but hold the phone on anointing him the greatest ever. While the media did that long ago, check into Jacks record, check out how many top 10's and 2nd place finishes in major championships Jack has. Jack has 19 second place finishes in majors compared to Tigers 2. If you put 1st and 2nd together you see Jack has 37 to Tigers 16. I know what you will say, but doesn’t that prove how great Tiger is, if he is close he wins. Actually Tiger has never, I repeat never come from behind to win a major. Jack showed up for almost every major for over 15 years and finished either 1st or 2nd. That is dominant, and with those facts you will have to come to the same conclusion I did. Jack is number 1 and no one else is in the ballpark, not even the media darling Tiger Woods.

Bubba's Amazon Adventure

The following will be my stories of the Amazon adventure. What was I doing in the Amazon you ask, the quick and easy answer is looking for gold, but I looked at it like Reepicheep in the Chronicles of Narnia, it was an adventure that needed to be taken. If you don’t get my reference, read the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis it is an excellent book for kids and I could even understand it.
My adventure starts with the plane trip to Brazil, we flew into Belem, which is a city on the Amazon River in the state of Para in Northern Brazil. Now if you don’t count Mexico, Canada or a quick cruise in the Caribbean I have never traveled outside the country. Newton, our Brazilian contact and translator convinced me to take an additional bag and bring him a cell phone, modem, and computer monitor. He called me a mule but I have no idea what he meant by that. So the plane lands in Belem at 4 AM and I have to go through customs. Everyone else in my group filled out the form and walked right through, but they grabbed my bag and took EVERYTHING out. I think the guy spoke English but was not about to let me off the hook by talking to me IN English. An hour and two latex gloves later I was through customs and in Brazil! I promised myself I would get Newton back before the trip was over and you will have to read a future blog to see how I did it, let me just say it is good.
Stay tuned the next couple of days to hear about my international relations blunders, 8 hour boat ride down the Amazon, 200 mile trip into the depths of the jungle, and things I didn’t know about creatures that live in the jungle and Amazon River.