Piranha

Piranha

by TravelinJanB, 01/05/2010 22:01

Category: Trip Ideas

We booked a cruise on the Royal Princess with http://www.sunnyhillstravel.com/ to sail down the Amazon for 5 days and then up to Fort Lauderdale. While on The Amazon we made a port stop at Santarem. We chose a tour to explore a small tributary of the Amazon. There are 1000 tributaries emptying into the river.

The river rises 60 - 90 feet during the rainy season and covers much of the islands we saw.

The river also deposits 200 tons of silt per second and is creating more islands.

The pictures are examples of houses along the river.

Many of these will be under water when the river rises.

The inhabitants will need to move into Santarem until the waters again recede.

Each home keeps different animals – chickens – water buffalo or goats – even small pigs. The pigs are great at keeping the houses free of small snakes.

PastedGraphic-3.tiff

Water is hauled up with a long bucket at the end of a pole

attached to a rope. The native people can drink the muddy

brown river water with no harm.

This is used to keep the cattle dry when the river rises and

is in use all the time. The cattle come back every night to their floating 'barn'.

Cowboys in the rainy season use canoes to herd their cattle.

We sailed along seeing iguanas - birds and trees all along the

shoreline.

We stopped for awhile and each of us was given a small piece of board with fishing line and a hook loaded with a hunk of fresh meat. The instructions were to catch a piranha...