The last two days while in the Amazon

Wednesday
I woke up with the most mosquito bites I can remember having in a very long time. Honestly, I hadn't even remembered what a nuisance those things were. During breakfast I found out about what I missed last night. Everyone commented on me falling asleep so early. Hahaha. I didn't realize how early it was when I did…nor did I think I would literally sleep until the following morning. Oh well. Clearly was exhausted… Took the usual commute to work (everyone load up on canoes). However, it was raining. I had grabbed my roomie's plastic clear poncho so for the first time in my life, I unwrapped what looked like a humongous garbage bag and willingly pulled it over myself. It was the dumbest look ever… totally not attractive. It also proved mostly ineffective because after sitting in the canoe for the longest 15 minutes of my life while we creeped on…. the wind kept pulling it up and my face was getting wet and I wasn't able to see anymore hahaha. When we got to the school it slowed down but we had to walk from the pier to the school and that was a journey through wet clay and mud. We definitely tracked a lot of stuff all over the place haha. Anyhow, we got to finishing up the touches of green and white. Then we worked on painting the outer walls of the school yellow which was diluted sooooo much that it was runny and the original yellow became a botched kinda peachish color. Very interesting to say the least. So we worked with that. Once the weather cleared out, the guys and the locals begin removing the previous parts of the bridges. All that was left standing was the original foundation. Some folks helped measure out the size each plank needed to be cut into. Then we each got to hammer it down (for the sake of symbolism). The group picture we eventually took was something our professor said he would blow up in Hong Kong and send a copy to be hung in the school. The day proved to be a much more relaxed day and Richardo did a lot of singing for us. He knew a ton of Michael Jackson songs and was more than willing to share it with us. Shakira was another popular artist. He whipped out a guitar and sung a few Portuguese songs as well. I was kinda getting annoyed with the professor though. He didn't do anything! But no more comments about that. You had to be there to get the point I am trying to say without saying! That night we stayed awake for some time. Not too much voluntarily in the beginning… but rather because of nature. Yes, it poured that night too and our hammocks got rained on. ahahaha. So we were all trying to figure out what we would do… whether we would have to sleep in the dining area or what… but the crew replaced our wet ones with dry hammocks…plus once the rain cleared up and they added more plastic bags to the roof, we were set. However, we used that time to play a bunch of card games like UNo and T-rex which was hilariousness! Then we also play a few rounds of Mafia… we also did some of those mind-games… like "crossed and uncrossed, i can take a trip from, black/red magic…" Alec and Elizabeth and Russ was trying so hard to make it obvious for me to guess the rule for the green glass door party or "black/red magic" I couldn't understand it for nothing. Then, we kinda didn't want to sleep since it was the last night but everyone else was already drifting to their hammocks so when we finally walked in it was pitched black and silent. I got the giggles and couldn't stop laughing. I was also banging into Alec whose hammock was next to me on my left, Elizabeth was to his left and the professor was to her left. Me laughing had the hammock rocking…so I was bumping into him and he was bumping into Elizabeth who was trying to stop him, who was trying to stop me because she didn't want to bump into our professor….man that would been awkward! Anyways, I couldn't stop laughing and Alec couldn't stop laughing…and you know how you try to whisper but you can't because you are laughing so hard…. I felt like in all our efforts to be mindful we weren't being very mindful and honestly, it was beyond us to help it. hahaha. Finally, we calmed down…and tried to go to sleep. It was harder though since the hammocks were a little damp (slightly drizzling again). And I had new mosquito bites :( But I fell asleep and that was that!


Thursday
Woke up to Abby telling folks about her hallucinations thanks to the malaria medicine she is taking. Mine is Doxycycline which just makes you more sensitive to the sun (so minimal sun exposure is recommended), but I just spent the last few days in the heat so go figure. Prior to that, there was Dominica and I've been okay so I guess it depends on the person. The medicine she was referring to has been doing just what she described. It is a side effect and not only has my roommate Mandy experienced some crazy dreams but our mutual friends as well. To listen to them is entertainment in itself. Seriously. hahaha. Anyhow, yeah, woke up and it felt surreal that our journey had so few hours until we would be departing to head back to our ship……..but oh how we were ready to come back to the shipppppp!!!!! Even though our hammocks got switched out and replaced with dry ones, it was still drizzling a bit at some point during the night. Our stuff was damp and it was uncomfortable sleeping. I had the most difficulty that night finding a comfortable position for sleeping plus I was finally worried about bugs since I guess I felt invincible and was delusional about the effectiveness of my heavy deet spraying the first two days I got to the Amazon…not a good call. hahaha. Have a ton of mosquito bites… it's a nuisance scratching your knuckles…. some rather odd place for a bite, but guess the mosquito was satisfied.  But yeah, it got cold (as usual) during the course of the night because we are right above the water…so that wasn't a great combination. There was some confusion about what time we would leave and head back to the ship. On ship time was 3 pm and we would be leaving Manaus at 5 pm sharp. The lodge lady was talking about us leaving at 11 and we quickly disagreed….. was she crazy? The length of time it took just to get there would make us all late and we would probably arrive sometime by disembarkation time. I tell ya, no one but Americans seem to have that sense of urgency. We tried to explain this but we ended up leaving at 9. Our group was pushing for 8 am so that we could possibly do a little bit of souvenir shopping. The other group wanted to leave at 9 --somehow they ended up winning. We ate breakfast, and had more than enough time though since we were all packed and basically sitting around… Folks were buying the hammocks they slept in as a memory element or even the Amazon Tupana tee shirts the staff wore (minus the "boss" ,"guide", "coordinator" or other job descriptions on the back haha). Then we start loading on the boat/ferry thing. We assumed that everyone was on because we had only discussed it a million times…. Midway through our slow ride drifting down RIo Negro, the other group realized they left 3 girls who happened to all be staying in the same room. Womp Womp. We had to turn the boat around and head back to the lodge. If you knew how slow it was going already only to have to return and then remake that trip, you would have groaned too. The other thing was whether we would drop by the school. We originally wanted to save time and go to the school via canoe as we had done the first 3 days while the other group was eating breakfast etc. Especially since the bus had to meet us on the other side (where the village was anyway). But nope. We were stuck with waiting it out. So we come back to the lodge after we had yelled and waved goodbye and folks start clapping when these three girls start coming down the steps towards the pier. The fact that there was a bit of waiting while one of them ran back in the room didn't help the way we felt about them in that moment either to be honest hahaha…. like how did they not notice they had gotten left? If it had been our ship and they missed the MV Explorer….shame on them. They would have either had to go back home someway somehow or fly to the next country and catch up with the ship. What was even more interesting was how transportation in the Amazon was already limited then add the language barrier, who knew whether or not they could even obtain the means to get out of the jungle… but moving forward. We headed towards the village. The bus was doing better (hahaha), we really didn't know if we would have a functional bus but we hoped so. We loaded our things and then walked towards the school. There was a few kids around but mostly the adults. We showed the second group what we had painted. The transformation was nice and seeing the bright colors from a distance was instantly gratifying. We also got to present the money after two SAS talked about their reflections of the experience… and the headmistress gave her bit which was translated by Nigel. Finally we piled up on the bus and got to traveling. Stopping for bathroom breaks was annoying because we just wanted to get there already…and the allotted ten minutes became a whopping 20 minutes when half of the bus kept emptying out to check out the stuff in the convenience stores…or in fact, if everyone was in line for the bathrooms. Fast forward to when we got on the last boat just before arriving to the ship, we got on it and there was food waiting for us..that was lovely. Then just before we pulled up near the ship, it started pouring…however, we were able to see the point where it was pouring and where we originally were (where it wasn't). That was a wild experience… wish I could have taken a picture. I had heard of that - where one side of the street is raining, the other isn't… but we literally saw the dark clouds and the rain was ridiculous. We had to pause for a bit because they wanted to make sure it was safe to continue since it was hard to see what was right in front of us. When we got back, it was happy happy joy joy… I could barely contain myself! This brings me back to the beginning of the post when I originally started it…