Enjoy Belem, Brazil [180 Day Cruise Around the World]
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TRANSCRIPT:
We have just stopped in the first city of Brazil called Belém! Belém is about 75 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, up the one of the Amazon River.
There are many rivers and tributaries that do make part of the Amazon region and Belém is one of the first major cities that is outside of the Atlantic Ocean, going into the Amazon.
Now, I was so surprised about this city when I came upon it - there are massive amount of skyscrapers and I think they said they had about a one million and seven population in Belém, and we had a choice:
We would either take a city tour - with all of this amazing architecture, not to mention, the colonial old towns where they have amazing theaters and churches and all kinds of fantastic architecture. Not to mention one of the largest markets in northern Brazil!
We had a choice of either going to do a city tour OR going into the Amazon.
Well, we chose the Amazon, because we're supposed to be, you know, going to a tribe and seeing how their way of life is.
We chose to see the tribe in the Amazon, and along the way to this tribe was about an hour on this ship. We had guides that gave us all kinds of great information about Brazil.
One of the things is that Brazil is this seventh largest economy in the world, which was news to me, and also there's about 210,000,000 people that live in Brazil!
That's about two thirds of the United States, there is a very large population in Brazil that I was not aware of either.
The other thing was on this river that we're on from low tide, high tide is a difference of 10 feet!
So that was kind of a mind blower for me. I never been in a place where the difference in the tide was so high - that I can remember.
One of the reasons we signed up for this tour is we wanted to see the tribe.
Now I'm going to show you some pictures where there was a lot of houses, and some houses were on stilts and they had docks and everything. That's how so many people originally lived.
After a time they had villages that had gone away from the shore even though there are quite a few people still living on the water.
So, as we all got off the boats, we got in groups and went around with guides and they took us to this one family, and there was this 75 year old Brazilian that was showing us around his house, showing us around the woods.
At one point, he was climbing into trees, bare hands, bare feet, didn't wear any shoes!
Then we came across an Açaí tree, which is a palm tree.
There are 1,200 different varieties of palm tree in Brazil and the Açaí, which I didn't know anything about, that berry, twenty years ago, but they started exporting all around the world and especially to the United States since kind of as a household name now.
We all know that the Açaí berry has a lot of nutrients and antioxidants and so what happened is this fellow that was showing us around his house, he climbed up and Açaí palm.
Now, I didn't know much about them, but they're very skinny about the size of bamboo. So, he climbs up about two thirds high and he has to climb onto another tree to keep him from falling over because the tree starts bending! These berries are being harvested only about twice a year, I think it was February and September.
However, they've been able to genetically modify some of these plants so that they can produce berries throughout the year.
There happened to be a tarantula, that was out in the forest, and they gave all of us who wanted to a chance to hold it.
Plus they showed us how they made charcoal.
They put together some mud over a log, and they'd put the wood in the log with a couple of little holes on the top where they could burn the wood and make charcoal.
They use so many different trees, plants, and herbs for medicinal purposes.
When we all got back from the tour in the villages, we came back to the boat and boarded.
We tried to leave, but we couldn't.
You ever have a day, you wake up in the morning and you have an idea what's going to happen and then it just doesn't turn out the way you expect?
Well, this was one of those days - we'd all boarded the boat and we're heading back to the ship, but the boat was too heavy with all of the weight and the tide had started going down about an hour and a half earlier.
So they asked about 75 of us to get off the boat, which we did.
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In closing, my wish for you is that you will love abundantly, protect your health, and be adventurous for life. You are beautiful. Let your light shine, Aloha!
~ Kari