The Clark Family's Amazing Adventures

My friends are going to start at school in Reception class this week and I’m starting world school! I wish I could see them!

We looked at my books the other day and got things ready. My friend emailed and told me she is getting new school shoes. I’m having flip flops and my new dress that I got in Morro do Sao Paulo.

I have been practicing my numbers all the summer, writing them in the sand and on the and practicing them when we play cards and now I’m doing letters.

Look what I did on the iPhone with Zoe
I did all the things on my own to put in the boxes. Can I show you now?

(Zoe : it was words that end in ‘at’ and ‘en’ – and she had to match up the picture with the word. She did them nearly all on her own)

Zoe finds the ‘word family’ app on Mum’s iPhone again and they snuggle with Dad on the top bunk in our cabin so Lara can show him what she can do…

Here’s what I had to do and every time I complete one I get a dinosaur!! See? I’m starting to do phonics with mummy like at school too and I know that ‘a’ is for ant crawling up your arm! We have seen plenty of ants – they’re very big in Brazil and they can bite.

I really like living in Brazil but I’m starting to worry about forgetting about England!!

Tomorrow we’re going to be in Manaus in the heart of the Amazon. If I was back home, I’d be going back to school tomorrow instead! I’ve been making loads of friends along the journey so far but I’m still missing my friends back home and I wish I was going to see them all tomorrow for the beginning of Year 5!

You can see on the map in my photos how far we’ve travelled in the last 5 days – about 1500km or more from Belem and we’re planning to travel all the way through Peru to Equador by boat.

When we have been on the river so far traveling up from Belem you can’t really see any wildlife except for a few river dolphins but I keep missing them they pop up and back down so quickly!

When we are in Manaus we will be able to go into the jungle and then we should be able to see some really interesting wildlife including two toed and three toed slothes, piranhas, more dolphins and monkeys.

Meanwhile, here are some photos of wildlife we’ve seen so far in Brazil – a ladybird without spots!? A Boa Constrictor lounging above our heads as we sat and had lunch in a beachside cafe! And some mystery shots! Can you guess what they are?

We’ve been in Brazil for the whole of the summer holidays and now we’re travelling along the Amazon. We have slept in the boat for 5 nights with one more to go. We will have gone over 1500km when we get to Manaus.

On our last day in Morro do Sao Paulo we had to pack carefully for 3 flights and a 6 day river trip and we sorted out the school books as we are going to start World School when everyone else starts school back home. I wish I was there to see everyone but I’m having a great time!

Did you know we’ve been to three islands? Ilha Grande, Boipeba and Morro do Sao Paulo. I really liked all of them. In Morro we stayed in a lighthouse hotel – with a lovely swimming pool with a funicular that goes up to it! The lighthouse is there behind me on the balcony. The real lighthouse to warn boats is up on the hill!

This year, I’m going to read some of the same books that everyone is reading in Year 3 back at school. I have got ‘Flat Stanley’ with me – an actual ‘Flat Stanley’ not the book, which is on my Kindle! That’s because Miss Place gave him to me so he could travel with me in my backpack and visit some of the places we’re going to!

For those who don’t know, Stanley is a boy in a book who gets squashed flat by a pin board and posted to California to visit his friend! Miss Jane read that story to us in Year 2.

I took Flat Stanley out to see Rio de Janiero! Here are some of the photos of him with us in front of the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Flat Stanley balancing on top of Sugarloaf Mountain!

Can you spot him hiding in the bushes? And can you see him lounging in the hammock when I’m getting the books sorted out for home school in Morro?

We are now out of regular WiFi and are having to use Data Roaming on our phones to access email and the web. Luckily we only have an occasional mobile phone signal as we pass towns on the Amazon so we are not tempted to use it more as it is expensive and it feels strangely good to be completely uncontactable!

We are on Vodafone and they charge a reasonablish £5 for the first 25Mb with a 24 hour use time (UK midnight to midnight). We have managed to stay under this limit until now by mainly doing just email and checking the data used very regularly but today with a 3G signal in Santerem, one of the biggest cities on the Amazon, my iPhone used up 10Mb in 10 minutes when I didn’t think I was using data. 5Mb over the limit and £15 spent at the rip off rate of £3/Mb. Almost as much as we spend on food in a day on our boat! Then Mo did the same and went 15Mb over, cost £45!?! We are going to have to be very careful, all part of the learning experience.

I have heard that iPhones are notorious for running up big bills so maybe we have been lucky so far? What we both did differently was turn on 3G at the same time as data and maybe this was the problem, one to watch if you are traveling.

Vodafone still have the best tariffs for roaming compared to other operators, the others are even more expensive.

What we should have done is buy a MiFi device that uses a local SIM card for data and gives you a local WiFi network you can connect all your devices to. We had no idea we would spend over 2 months in Brazil and this would have been a good investment! (Vivo looks like the best network for data if you happen to be in Brazil.)

I wake at 3am when Ben comes up to use the loo and have a chat, then at 5.30am when Zoe comes up to tell me we docked and people left and arrived and that they have a new hammock neighbour! We take pictures together of the almost full moon as it sets.

I had been thinking about the fact that the kids are free to wander the boat which is pretty small and well contained and I’m especially relieved that no-one abducted or murdered my kids as I slept soundly in my top deck suite and they shared the hammock deck with 150 locals!!

After breakfast, a lazy morning laying in hammocks, showering, snoozing back in the cabin, children running around busying themselves with friends, can crushing, making rope swings… It’s hotter today! Well we are less than 2 degrees south of the Equator. We reach a wider part of the river and after a lovely lunch of chicken meat rice and chips, need to lie in air con cabin – What a luxury! Visiting the public loos and showers briefly, I notice the hammock area near the public loos has been vacated and I consider how lucky we are to have the luxury of suite no 6!
It worked out an extra £160 for the suite for 7 days – best money we’ve spent in a while I think!

We’re now in the widest river I’ve seen, I’d guess its a few km across. It feels hotter and you can’t walk barefoot on the sunny part of the deck – it burns. The kids flag and complain of the heat but they shower in the cabin and feel better then soon after they put on the deck showers and everyone is happy again!!!

Supper is getting a bit boring – meat rice and spaghetti but perfectly adequate – we order two between us and eat the lot but have discovered that cheese and ham toasties are available all day in the bar – so topping up with those is a treat. Another brief stop at a small town sees more passengers leave and new ones hop on. Suddenly a new hammock is up, verging on uncomfortably-close to one of ours! But we can imagine the boat being alot busier and a lot more cramped having read of people stringing their hammocks above yours!! Can’t quite imagine that!

Zoe crashed out in the cabin tonight with Lara. We’ve spotted an odd raised line on Lara’s foot that seems to been part of a bite. Need to keep an eye on that as it looks a bit suspicious as if something could be burrowing around under her skin?! Can’t Google it without any signal which is frustrating.

I headed off with Ben to sleep my first night in a hammock, really not too bad, although hard to get a comfortable postion strategically placed so your head or elbow isn’t bumping with your neighbour and the end of your hammock isn’t bumping too much with the hammock in the overlapping next row! Fun to play a word game with Ben before sleep…. It’s quite bright as the lights stay on but draping a sleep sheet over the bar in the right place works, the air con works a bit too so quite a good sleep, disrupted only by a middle of the night stop for some to depart and others arrive and the occasional need for a reposition when some part of my body feels a bit numb!

I woke a couple of times to the sound of heavy rain and quietly chugging engine. It was cold with our air con switched on. We turned it off eventually but were pretty hot by morning with Lara and me snuggled on the bottom bunk.

There’s no porthole so it was amazing to open the door at 7.30am and see blue sky, river and jungle rushing by outside!

Wow! What a day!!

More

We boarded the Amazon Star at about 6pm after a day and night of travel from almost half way across Brazil and almost all day waiting for our boat.

It was a bit of a marathon wait! We’d arrived in the docks about 10am direct from the airport to find no boat and no-one who knew anything about our being booked on a boat More