Wednesday July 7

July 7

I rose early to be at breakfast at 7 am which, by the way, was again a delight. I then joined a canoe trip tour for reconnaissance of the surrounding archipelago. The lodge is located at an archipelago counting about 400 islands; there is another archipelago in the vicinity counting in excess of 800 islands. All this in the Rio Negro. The river here is enormously wide and I don't think I got a good sense of its width yet. I thought I see the other bank of the river (and thought that was wide, lol), instead it is archipelago next to archipelago. Life clearly has to be lived in and on boats.

The water levels are never the same: they are either going up or going down. So, there is no normal water level. This area of the Rio Negro is currently experiencing its dry season; it started just this month. Thus the river here will be losing 4-5 inches per day to evaporation. One can actually trace the highest level of the waters on the tree trunks. So far, the river lost about 50 cm after the highest level of 2010.  The year 2009 showed an all time high water level at roughly 2.5 a 3 m higher than that of 2010. A high water level can be a sign of more deforestation since more water turns into runoff on the nearly bare soils. Even so, the water is high and we found ourselves canoeing with the paddle and machete through pretty much what could be termed tree canopies. That's what the archipelagos are at this point: flooded islands with waters standing about 6 m above ground, at some places more.

There is an enormous amount of palm trees here which is the work of a certain fish species. When the palm trees stand under water their coconuts will ripen, their color will turn from green to yellow and then they will plop into the water. The fish get attracted by that plop and they come in droves and eat up the coconut leaving the Very hard and heavy core wherervere they spit it out. Once the land eventually dries up, the core has a chance of sprouting giving rise to a new palm tree!

I was subjected to a long speech in Portuguese some of which I actually understood. Well, the history...I could make out names like Pizarro and the like. I, however did not know that Jacques Cousteau did a lot of rersearch here. It was he who taught the people here that the pink dolphins arr friendly creatures intersted in contact with humans. Before that people killed these gentle creaturrs. Cousteau also did some other groundbreaking work here which I will elaborate on another time.

The palm trees are heavily armed with spikes so that animals don't get to their precious cargo: coconuts. We were also shown a tree the bark of which can be made into a tea. 
When women drink this tea, they do not get pregnant. If they drink a lot of it while pregnant, it will cause an abortion.

I spent the afternoon watching the Spain Germany semi-final game with for me disappointing result. However, the Spanish were better, I think,
Of course I was the only one rooting for Germany (the Urugayan family commiserated)--we all made unhappy noises at different times. Amazing how one can bond here via sports. And we all agreed: it would have been nice to have a South American team in the final--now it's just Europe. Apparently Spain won the European championship so that is what people predict as the outcome.