Dear Friend,
I’m in Beautiful British Columbia this week. Working on a few new posts for you soon featuring more of South America, including Iguazu Falls, Machu Picchu, etc., but as I am on the road and have a wedding to attend, etc., it will take me a couple of days to publish. To thank you for your patience, here is a photo I took a couple of days ago at Garry Point Park in Steveston, a suburb of Vancouver, Canada. I used to walk my dog here back many years ago when I used to live in this corner of the world. This is a photo of sunset, with the grasses of the marshlands lit up a golden hue, and the famous North Shore mountains in the distance. Hope you like it.
Think you’re up for an Amazon adventure? Children swim in the Urubu Tributary
Last night I had the occasion to meet a friend I had come to know through Instagram thanks to our mutual love for travel and photography. This friend asked me to tell my “Top 5 travel stories,” which, along with requests for my “Top five (or ten) travel destinations,” is one of the most common questions I get asked. I am sure many of you have been asked something similar in your experiences; these aren’t easy questions to answer. Nonetheless, I will give it a shot in a series of my top ten travel stories to date.
One story that I get asked to repeat a lot, however, is my story about my time in the heart of the Amazon in Brazil. The subtitle for this story is really “Why you shouldn’t go to the Amazon and go to the Pantanal instead.” And my story, I feel, makes a compelling case for this argument, but it’s a little long so you’ll have to bear with me!
A brightly-colored spider seems to warn predators to stay away. Amazonian wildlife watching tends to consist of looking under leaves and rotten logs.
The Amazon, easily the world’s most famous rainforest, conjures images of adventure, romance, and danger, as well as visions of wild animals such as pink dolphins, jaguars, piranhas, and monkeys. The reality of the place is far different from the romanticized narratives we may have floating in our heads. The Pantanal, the world’s biggest swamp land (nearly the size of France), with its more open expanses and waterways, is the place to go to view “jungle wildlife.” The Amazon at its heart is a complex biosphere of intermingled life, extremely difficult to unlock and unravel during a short visit. Most of the wildlife you see here is the micro kind: wedged into rotten tree bark and under wet leaves; you only see the larger animals at great distances: in the canopy 200 feet above you or on the riverbank across from you. And the conditions are nearly unbearable at times.
Over the years, I have been so fortunate to meet so many amazing people on my travels. This has been the greatest gift of travel for me, and I think about my times with these wonderful people all the time. From time to time, I’d like to share some of these tales with you.
It was December of 2012. I was in Florianopolis in the south of Brazil. We were on the deck of a beach house at Santinho. The moon and the stars were out and it was a bright night–so bright we could see the whitecaps of the waves breaking on the beach. I had a drum between my legs, and recalling my high school concert band experience and my mother’s tutelage from when I was a child (she went to Jiulliard back in the day), I was focused on getting the rhythm right. My beautiful friends’ father looked at me and said in Portuguese, which his daughters translated for me: “No, with more feeling!” In a moment that was straight out of a cheesy movie a shooting star swept across the southern skies and soon we were saying our good-byes, and I had more than a little bit of moisture in my eyes.
