Monday, April 25, 2011

Back to NB

Up early again, pack up, a quick breakfast and we are on our way to the airport. We share a taxi with one of the girls from our trip to the airport. We run into a few people from our trip either leaving or continuing on to more adventures and say our good-byes.

We are in Miami right now, waiting for our connection to Montreal. We will overnight in Montreal and take the early flight to Moncton tomorrow and then back to work and reality tomorrow afternoon.

It has been a lot of fun, not somewhere I would go back to I don't think, but I'm glad we did it. We met some nice people, saw lots of new things, and experienced the most heat I ever want to. This style of trip is not really for us, 30 people in a group is just too many, there were some people we never even met, and I hate following along a guy with a sign with 30 other people in airports, maybe it reminds me too much of the Tauck Tour days in Banff.

Who knows what is up next, this was a good tour to meet lots of people that travel to many different places, I don't think anyone picks the Amazon for their once in a lifetime trip, so many have been all over the globe. Next up is Andres pick for the big 50. We'll see where that takes us.........

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Back to Lima

2AM wakeup call and 3AM departure for our 1 hour 40 minute drive to Iquitos to catch the plane back to Lima. What was a very good trip ended on a bad note with lots of people so disappointed in this departure time. We all felt we had lost a day on the trip by arriving to the amazon on the night flight and leaving on the early flight. There are only 2 flights a day and they really should co-ordinate them together. They tried to tell us we would have more time to spend in Lima, none of us were taking this trip to spend time in Lima, so it was a disappointing end.

I think we are here too early since no one is here at all




When we arrived in Lima 5 of us walked around together, Andre and I said we would help a woman whose debit card was not working try to get that sorted out, and 2 other tagged along. I love doing things like this if you don't have other plans, we ended up in 2 different banks, and finally she was able to get some money out. Just the different ways people line up, having guys with guns in the banks, watching the locals go about their daily business, great to watch. We had loaned this woman $100.00 on the ship and she so wanted to pay us back before we left, I told her I trusted her to send us a cheque. Anyway we now have somewhere to stay if we ever go to Santa Barbara. One of the guys said he would never lend money, can you imagine being in a foreign country and not having any money! Anyway it all worked out fine, and Ingrid now has lots of money to spend on souvenirs, she is off on the second portion of the trip going to Cuzco and beyond.

From here we went to a local restaurant for lunch and ceviche, their local speciality. I am still not fantastic health wise so order pasta, but Andre has the ceviche and says it is good, the presentation is beautiful.





Back to the hotel for a nap and then the 2 of us get a taxi into town to the water fountains. This is so much fun, it is a large park with water fountains all over the place, and 2 huge ones that change their jets/spray to music and lights, it was very pretty. I think we saw 4 brides and a lot of graduates getting their pictures done, is really was pretty. The locals certainly take advantage of this spot, I don't think we saw 20 tourists while we were there, and hundreds of locals. The funniest were what we called the lawn police. There is no walking on the grass and every time someone stepped on the grass the lawn police would blow a whistle, which meant we heard lots of whistle blowing. You also walk under one of the fountains, it is a half circle/arc/tunnel that you walk through which was fun. The most fun was watching the kids in their area, they have a circle with about 60 feet diameter made up of smaller circles with spaces in between. Well the jets would go off to the time of the music and you were never sure when it would start. The middle was “safe” and you would not get wet. Lots of laughs and squeals as the jets would start and grow and stop, you would think you were safe and it would do one more squirt, we spent quite a bit of time watching this, the laughter was contagious.























We were picked up by taxi again and asked him to take us back to the old part of the city to take some pictures at night of the presidential palace square, he dropped us off and just circled around the park while we took some pictures. The area is much prettier at night than it is in the day.






Back to the hotel and we are just too tired to even think about eating, off to bed as we have another early wakeup call as we leave for the airport at 7AM.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Giant Lilly Pad & fire

This morning we were allowed to sleep in until breakfast at 8AM. They had birdwatching up on deck at 6AM, and going to bed by 8:30PM of course we were up there at 6AM. The mornings are unbelievably peaceful here. Very rarely do the dugout canoes that have little motors on them travel at nighttime and we have always been tied to shore at night so no motors from our ship. We have not seen any other tourist boats all week, and only a couple of barges have gone by, so little traffic it is amazing on such big rivers.

We saw our first storks this morning, and more parrots going by, so amazing to see parrots in the wild.

















Porcupine


After breakfast we went to visit the Amazonian giant lily pads. I have seen these before in Kew garden in London, but nothing like seeing them on the Amazon. There were literally hundreds of these on the river, many in different stages of flowering. The flowers last 72 hours and go through 3 different colors until they die, and the lily pads themselves live for 6 weeks. Again we were met by locals in their dugout canoes selling their crafts, again Andre and I have no money on us, we will never learn.

Just before we arrived at the lily pads a small boat with an outboard motor from our ship arrived with the 3 people that had stayed behind for this excursion and they came along for the rest of the morning.















Come to find out there had been a fire on board and they were forced to evacuate. The passengers did not know what had happened, and the crew handled this amazingly. We knew something was up because when we got back on board our cabin hadn't been made up while we were out, and this was the first time this had happened. The fire started in the engine room, and we heard that the locals came to help in their dugout canoes, on the way back to the ship from our excursion Andre noticed that one of these little canoes had a pump on board, I guess he was one of the ones that came to help. The couple with the room closest to the engine room are in a bit of a mess. They have had to move cabins to one of the guide’s cabins, and their clothes have been washed once and don't seem to smell so bad. I don't think they will ever get the smell of smoke out of their suitcases, so their clothes may smell terrible again tomorrow. I am so glad this happened on the last day, all of the false alarms during the week, I wonder if this was brewing all week. I don't know how well I would have slept had this happened earlier. Andre has a pair of sneakers that I think are ruined from the fire extinguisher material, we left our sneakers on deck when we finished excursions and the crew would wash them for us, he forgot to pick his up the night before so they may be finished.

Anyway now off for our afternoon excursion after all this excitement. This afternoon we are fishing for piranhas, you are given a stick with fishing line on it and a hook with a little bait. You shake up the water a little bit with he end of your stick and then basically just try to set the hook when you feel a bite. We were having a competition between the 2 skiffs on who could catch the most for supper. Our skiff caught 7, and the other skiff caught 13 in 1 hour. We certainly had a lot of laughs. Andre was doing catch and release, he caught 4 that he got up in the air and they jumped off. I had lots of nibbles but couldn't get the hook set. The teeth on these things are really scary, I would not have wanted to fall in!







Back to the boat for supper and you wouldn't have known there had been a pretty big fire except for a little smell that lingered. Lucky for us our cabin was on the bow, and the engine room was on the stern so we had very little smell in our room.

This afternoon we also arrive to where the Ucayalli and Maranon Rivers come together to form the Amazon River. Really not too exciting except to say that we have been to where the river starts. We were surprised at home fast the currents were on all of these large rivers, and so much erosion, there were many dead head logs and trees in the rivers that made travelling in the dark dangerous and we rarely did this. Normally we were simply tied up to a large tree for the nights.








Our last supper together on board and it is an early night because we have a 2AM wake up, yep 2AM, yuck.