Too hot to be outside by 9.00 am.
A quiet day at sea today, good thing too. I found out why I was not feeling well after the Dune Buggy ride yesterday: my back and shoulder muscles were sore from holding on so tightly to the safety bar when we were flying over the bumps yesterday.
They are noticeably sore today but not in the same way as yesterday. Unfortunately Fellette does not believe in doing massages, but I did get a bit of a kneading today and it felt great.
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Today at his noon talk, the captain gave us a bit of a run down on insects while in the Amazon. He told us that at night, after tomorrow and until we leave the Amazon area seven days later, the ship will be turning off most nighttime outside illumination to reduce the attraction to flying insects. He also asked us to close our window drapes to eliminate insects on your patio or deck in the morning.
I wondered when I heard his announcement if there is anybody onboard who has a phobia about flying insects.
When we were in the lower Amazon 11 years ago, without a cabin that had a balcony, we saw scores of very large and strange insects on the promenade deck in the mornings. I don't know if it will be worse a few hundred miles upstream or not.
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Tonight is a Gala Night, the Black and Gold Ball will be held at 10.00 PM for those night owls. Jim and Gail are having dinner with the captain in the Pinnacle Restaurant so that takes care of them nicely, and free wine as well. I am sure they will have some interesting stories to tell after their dinner.
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I finally got my computer online this morning, or I should say the girl in the Neptune Lounge did. I will still continue to do the blog with my iPad as it could get complicated. However I think that I will go online with it and see what it wants to do regarding all those messages that came and in the last 8 or 9 weeks.
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Tomorrow we are anchored in Belem, another big city that had its boom in the late 1800s as the world started to use rubber in an industrial way.
Did you know that the rubber tree only grew naturally, in Brazil and Brazil was the sole source of rubber in the world. UNTIL, a Britisher stole some few hundred thousand rubber tree seeds and shipped them to Malay, where they flourished. That was the end of the Brazilian industry. When the Japanese invaded Malay in WWII, the Brazilian industry started up again and the US Government gave $100 to Brazil for every Brazilian that moved into the rubber plantations, to help supply rubber to the US for the war.
Shortly though, Mr. Goodyear developed synthetic rubber, and things turned around. Older folks will remember the 'Rubber Drives" that we had during the war.
One last bit of Trivia: Did you know that the word 'Rubber' came from the fact that a glob of natural rubber was used to eliminate graphite lines on paper, from lead pencils.
All you had to do was 'Rub it".
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Sorry, no pictures today, I looked for a picture of a bug in my photos but could not find one big enough. Apparently there is a phenomenon in the Amazon called Gargantuan, which means big as heck. In the zoo at Manaus there is apparently an Anaconda that is is just under 50 feet long. Not on my list!
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