Amazon Expedition – Day 6

Blog wrfitten by Alizee

When I woke up this morning, it was just as if I was still dreaming because I was lying on a hammock in the Amazon jungle! It is such a great feeling to wake up in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of crazy people around me sleeping in hammocks. I could smell the fire we made last night to cook our sausages. Then we packed our equipment to come back to “civilization”.

We went to the Foundation FAM in Novo Airao after walking a few hours while it was raining cats and dogs. At the Foundation, we attended Cristina F. Tofoli's speech introducing her Institute for Ecological Research IPE. Their mission is to develop projects for sustainable biodiversity conservation all around Brazil. It was really great to meet people that also care for the future of our planet and feeling that we are all acting together and helping each other to realize our aims. It would be great to set up some Pangaea projects with this Foundation in order to reach more people's lives and to raise awareness in the Brazilian Communities about preserving the forest.

Then we visited a workshop where the indigenous used their technical knowledge to make decorative objects such as sculptures, jewelery, boxes…
They also taught us how these communities were naturally coloring the wood in red so we took this opportunity to paint our faces and I painted my hair which gave me a punk look!

Before having lunch, the young motivated adults from the Foundation joined us on the boat for a few hours. As I've lived two years in Brazil when I was young, I could understand what they said but I still had some problems with communicating. Anyway these exchanges are really important as we learn how to express ourselves with the language borders and in this way, I think we can understand much more from the other communities because we stay open.

In the afternoon, our boat was at anchor near a small tourist attraction with dolphins. We knew that we had to pay to see the pink amazing dolphins but as all of us wanted to have this experience, we proposed to the staff from this attraction to come to visit the boat and this was a good deal. It was the first time I have ever seen a dolphin.
Their body shape is so beautiful and I love the noise they do to breath when they come back to the water surface. I was lucky to touch their skin which feels so sensitive and soft. I was pretty surprised because I was expecting it to be much more hard and rigid. We were not allowed to swim with them but just having the dolphins near me, opening their mouth to try to catch my fingers was a REAL experience.

After swimming in the Rio Negro we came back to the boat to leave Novo Airao to begin our sailing trip to reach Sao Gabriel Do Cachoeira.