We got off of our cruise ship onto a small boat for a half day trip on an outlet of the Amazon river for a closer look. It was truly memorable.
This is called the meeting of the waters, and happens in a lot of spots along the Amazon river. This is where the Tapajos river feeds into the Amazon. We saw a ton of dolphins here, but they were too quick to capture in a photo. The most interesting were the pink dolphins, which were huge.
There were horses and cattle wading in the water everywhere. I imagine they find higher ground at night for sleeping.
We passed this family on our journey. Homes were few and far between, and always up on stilts. This farmer was very proud of the caiman he had freshly caught.
We passed this gorgeous river hawk. It reminded me of the one who lives along our driveway at home.
We saw a few sloths lounging in trees along our route. This one made me giggle. Our captain turned us around for a closer look and he didn’t like us staring at him. Rather than move, he slooowly grabbed a branch and moved it in front of his face. Dude, we can still see you….
Look at this gorgeous iguana! He couldn’t care less that we paused to admire him.
We stopped for about 30 minutes to fish for piranha. We used raw beef as bait (of course). Check out the teeth on this thing!
Our tour boat did quite well. There were white, black and red ones caught. These were all returned to the river as they only do catch and release fishing. These fish do attack and kill people on occasion, particularly during the dry season when food is scarce. We were happy to see them up close from inside our boat.
The trip back to our ship was gorgeous, back through the dolphins and next to where tons of soybeans were being loaded onto cargo ships.
