February 18th (Amazon Day1 Part1)

Monday, February 18^th (Amazon Day1 Part1)

So there is obviously close to no distinction between Sunday and Monday, since I had practically no sleep in between the two days.

After rolling down the stairs to the gangway, I met Izzy and Rachel. We waited, but Katharine didn’t show up at all. I went to find her room, but completely blanked out on what room she was in so I went to the purser’s desk to check and ran again to her room. I knocked but no one answered. We kind of freaked out that she had gone out and had never came back to the ship, but the sign in said that she did. So we called her room and yay, she was sleeping and she just couldn’t get up in time. We all left, completely zoned out and had a swarm of cab drivers trying to get us to the airport. One guy even pointed to Katharine and said “Amiga! Amiga!”

When we finally settled on a driver, he wanted to charge us 80 US dollars. We got it down to 50, and although we knew we could’ve gotten it down maybe another 5 or 10 we were just too tired to even care.

The guy wasn’t a creeper or anything and he seemed to be good and up at 4am in the morning.

The ride to the airport was about 40minutes, and we saw a lot of things.

First there were the two major car accidents where cars were completely wrecked in both, with glass shattered all over the place. It was really nerve wrecking especially since we had seen a few cars drive by that were weaving through the lanes at an unbelievable speed. We also passed by a lot of favelas, which are the slums in Brazil, which we didn’t really see much of in the small area of Salvador. There were clusters and clusters of houses that were dark and desolate.

At the airport, we were a bit surprised to find a good amount of people and even a few open stores. The tickets we got were interesting. They were basically a wad of receipts, literally, on those smooth pieces of paper.

We attempted to stomach some chicken nuggets and juice, and then headed to security. To save time, we didn’t check any bags in and had our backpacks with us. They had a problem with something in my bag. Uh oh.

It turned out to be this multi-tool thing that I had packed. It didn’t really have a knife, but it did have some sharp things in it. It also had this screw driver thing with 6or so spare heads that had different kinds of tools on it. The spare heads were stored in a way that it made it look like a row of bullets or something, and I freaked out for second there when they took it out. I thought someone had planted some weapon in my bag! So that was funny in hind sight. They did have to take it away though, since I had no bags I had checked in and I had no way to bring it with me.

So I parted with my multi-jungle tool (it’s what it seemed like to me) in Salvador.

We were all excited, but exhausted at the same time so it was clear that the only thing on our minds was to just fall asleep on the plane.

It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable flight, but we made it through the 3hour flight to Brasilia where we had a 2hour layover. As we descended, the landscape of Brasilia spread before our eyes. It looked a lot different from Salvador. The colors we could see were the green of the trees, the red-brown of the dirt and roofs, and the white of the houses. It seemed much more structured and geometric.

When I stood up to get off the plane, I saw that my water bottle had leaked onto my lap and it had made a water stain that looked like I peed on myself. Seriously, I have an issue with liquid and planes. When I flew to Chicago from Tokyo before leaving for sea, I spilled tea all over myself in the first 20minutes of the flight.

So the first thing I needed to do was change my pants.

After that, we were stuck in a really small terminal until our flight left. There was one place to get food where Rachel and I attempted to buy food and things to drink.

I got this round bread that had cheese inside and it was sooooo good. The funny thing was we thought that we had both ordered bottled water, but for some reason only Rachel’s was bottled and mine was in a plastic cup thing with a lid on it. What???

Oh well.

Something really interesting I noticed in the airport in Brasilia was that there were almost no Afro-Brazilians. Like I had written in my previous entry, if you keep your eyes open the disparity between the rich and the poor are evident in a lot of places. The airport really was completely different from what I had experienced in the streets of Salvador. Everyone was dressed so nice and neat, many with designer bags and sunglasses. The fact that they had enough money to actually travel on an airplane also showed their wealth.

When it was time for our flight to board, we were tired of sitting and waiting. There was a long line into our gate, so we waited until the line got short. When we attempted to go in, we were turned down. Again, what???

Turns out that the gate was for people boarding the flight that was supposed to take off before us. It’s so funny when you have not a single clue what they’re yelling over the PA system. They’d probably done a million announcements saying that the gate was accommodating people who were supposed to be on the other flight, but of course we had no idea. It was time for our flight and we’d simply assumed that whatever gate was filled with people was ours. Haha for clueless tourists.

So we boarded our plane a bit later than what it had originally said. Again, we tried to cram in some sleep.

The flight this time was shorter than our flight to Brasilia. When we started to descend, I saw the thick forests of the Amazon and the rivers weaving through it.

Here, I have to explain about the meaning the Amazon holds for me.

After the frenzy of Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego (both computer games that were really popular in the States when I was in elementary school), I had gotten a game called Amazon Trail before going back to Japan. This was a game where you canoe down the Amazon River while taking pictures and gathering information about all the wildlife that you encountered in the forest and the river. For food, you would fish. There would be major villages along the river where you could trade for things like machetes, harpoons and medicine. Your goal was first, to make it to the last village with the herbs and jewels that were requested by the king (which you got from trading and wandering in the jungle). You also wanted to try to get a picture of all the animals, plants and birds that existed in the Amazon. This game was actually pretty hard, since you had cannibal tribes capture you, weird diseases, and piranhas eating you.

So I had played that game with fascination for a long time. It was literally my childhood dream to go to the Amazon.

Now that landscape was right under my feet.

How exciting is that.