Slow boat to Manaus

Hello from Porto Velho, starting point of our 3 day boat trip towards Manaus in Amazonia. Apologies for the lack of updates over the past week or so, but we have mainly been on the road travelling from Brasilia in Central Brazil, to Porto Velho on the Southern edge of the Amazon Rain Forest. We did however get a few days to relax in the Chapada dos Guimarães National Park, which involved some very hot walks, but luckily you were able to cool off at a number of waterfalls with natural swimming pools as seen in the photos below. There was also a clear forest river in the centre of the park that you were able to swim down and look at the fishes and other local wildlife as you go. Good fun even if the mosquitoes were especially vicious.

As you would expect in the wet season, we have had quite a lot of rain of late and because of this we were unfortunately not able to visit the Northern Pantanials as many of the roads were impassable. Brazil has had more rain than normal this season and therefore the wetlands are very flooded. The general pattern is for it to be very, very hot and humid during the day and then the heavy rains will come late afternoon. I have been surprised at how wet Brazil has been (it has rained almost every day and we had 5 days where it rained pretty much non stop), but then again we are visiting during the wet season. Unfortunately very thing in Brazil has had to be fitted around Carnival in mid Feb, so we are not visiting at the best time of year.

Am I looking forward to the Amazon Rain Forest? To be honest, not really. I am not a big fan of forests/jungles as I find them claustrophobic and the Amazon is going to be very hot, very humid and full of insects trying to bite you (the mosquitoes and sand flies in Brazil are the worst I have ever experienced and appear to eat DEET for breakfast!). The boat ride should be interesting, but I get the feeling it is not something I will want to repeat.   

Anthony