The Amazon!

I landed in Manaus in the middle of the night and found a cozy corner of the airport to get a little bit of sleep before I headed to the dock to catch my boat.  I fell for the biggest tourist trap the moment I stepped out of the airport doors.  Apparently in Manaus there are two taxi companies, the white taxis and the black taxis.  The plan was to get a taxi to the doc, a simple ten minute journey, no big deal.  I walked out and There was a nice man standing there and he asked if I needed a taxi, I thought wow this was really easy, score one for me! He lead me to his taxi, a nice black one, very clean.  Little did I know, black taxis were for the rich and important and my little ten minute drive ended up costing me $R58 about $35... On the way back at the end of the trip, it was $R17... Anyways I made it to the port a little over two hours before my boat was to depart and I was able to see the tail end of a party going on from the night before ... Yes in they party until after the sun comes up, and even after as you go farther north! When it was time to board the boat I was welcomed with coffee and breakfast, and shown my living quarters for the next four days.  After a tour of the boat, there were only three rooms and I was told it was just going to be me and another traveller! There were more men working on the boat than travellers! There was the captain and the captains mate, our tour guide, and the chef... I felt very special! Once the other traveller, a man from Germany, boarded the boat we disembarked and sailed away along the city's edge to the meeting of the waters.  This place is very cool as two different rivers, the Rio Negro and the Amazon River, both having different pHs, different water temperatures, and different velocities, and different colours, run into each other but stay side by side.  You look to your left and you see the brown water of the Amazon River, you look to your right and you see the black waters of the Rio Negro, a very cool sight.  After lunch, where I ate my first fish as its eyes were staring at me, we headed to our first trek into the forest to see the giant lilly pads that grow within the forest.  Over the next four days I was able to swim with pink dolphins, catch and then eat piranhas, hunt for alligators with my camera then touch them, spend the morning walking through the rainforest where I saw my first tarantula, poison flowers and a tree that looked like an anaconda... My heart stopped in that moment.... I spent the night in a hammock sleeping in the rainforest, and visited a family, a village, and an Indian tribe to see how they all live and adapt within the Amazon forest.  My first night was quite cool as we had to make an emergency stop and find a hiding spot among the rocks to dock the boat as a rainforest thunderstorm, pelted us.  It was intense but I was so happy to be witnessing the storms of the Amazon.  The last stop on the trip was to see a rubber farm to see how rubber was harvested and produced, the lifeblood of Manaus during the last century.  A European would buy the land and hire the Brazilians to work the farm.  Learning about what it took to make rubber and the intense heat and working conditions... It was a rough job. Once we docked the boat, I had a few hours to kill before my flight left later that night and so I travelled downtown to the famous opera theatre in Manaus, known across the country.  It was a beautiful building created by the Europeans but using Brazilian influences.  I walked around the area a little bit more visiting a few more notable buildings in the area, stopped for dinner and ice cream, and took the white taxi to the airport to catch my flight home.