The Clark Family's Amazing Adventures

Sometime around 5.30am or 6am, lying in my hammock, I opened my eyes and noticed a brilliant pink sky as the sun rose.

I slept some more then woke and dozed a bit. No idea what time it is as my iPhone is locked safely in the cabin with Martin and the girls and I don’t have a watch. Ben was still sleeping soundly… He seems to have the hammock sleeping well sorted, lying diagonally and looking super comfortable! He has to be woken every day for breakfast and it’s hard to get him up!

I decide to head up to the cabin – it’s 7.30am, and find Lara has crawled up to join Martin in his top bunk during the night! The thing in her foot seems to have changed and moved but at least not bothering her and so around 11am as we approach Santarem and get a phone signal we start to Google skin parasites!!

Martin once had a chigoe(?) in his foot on a Raleigh expedition in Guyana which lays eggs under your skin. Googling of course gives a list of slightly scary possibilities including scabies. There is a hospital and medical centre in Santarem but it’s not clear how long we will dock there – probably only an hour or so.

We end up nearly 3 hours in Santarem, watching goods being loaded and unloaded – some of the onions are unloaded, a huge satellite dish is loaded!

… And we try to post my first two days of Amazon diary via an email which doesn’t work properly, grrr … Most of my text is lost forever and only the beginning and the photos get posted and I can’t fix it before we lose the signal again – so I sit on deck in the shade and do my best to rewrite them – I’m sure less eloquently. If you read my Amazon Day 1 post and thought it ended a bit abruptly in the waiting hall at Belem docks you can go back now and read the full post for Day 1!!!

After having cheese & ham toasties for lunch for a change, we eat some delicious crunchy apples bought from vendors who came on board. Leaving Santarem we cross the ‘meeting of the waters’ of two rivers – one brown one black.

We watch life on the riverbanks, play cards, and it’s soon time for dinner, watching sunset and a full moon rising!

Martin and I decide to spend the evening catching up on our budget and expenses so load all our receipts into a spreadsheet ready to upload to the cloud! It looks like Brazil has been more expensive than we hoped but we are getting more budget conscious I think as we go and we’re headed to lower cost places too!!