If you ever take a boat in South America-for gods sake...take a cabin and not a hammock. We had a nice enough cruise down the amazon to reach Belem, a stop off town for Sao Luis-where we are now. If you~ve ever been on a liveabord think of a small cabin and that was the size of our suite!..an upgrade we paid for alltogether so we could have a party room-somewhere to relax, and celebrate Maren~s Birthday.If I do get the pics on-we~re dressed as vikings as she is from Norway!

To get us through it we drank lots of cachaça and beer and tried our best to sun bathe. We only had to stop once for the police-which was better than our border crossing and $1000 dollar robbing at the Venezuea border (the guide and not us luckily!)

Once we got to Belem we only managed to catch the night bus through good luck and my best pictionary skills ever. We had to get two taxis and the one with our guide, Sema, stormed off to the bus station, leaving our taxi man with no idea where he was going. Our poor descriptions of bus and station in portugues made him laugh-so we stopped at a hotel-hoping that someone spoke English, as we were already half an hour behing the time when we thought the bus would leave. Unfortunately no one did-so I tried my best to illustrate where we were going-happily this did the trick, and we got to teh station just as the bus was about to go.

Journey went well, apart from the part where we screeched to a halt at around 1am. I thought we had hit someone-but looked out the window to see some guy shouting at the driver. I turned around to Sema, who then said-don~t worry girls we~re being robed! Luckily the guy was high, so only smashed the driver around the face with his gun...he gave him some money and we drove off. I~m glad he didn~t see us-as he would have though it was his lucky day. Anyway all~s well that ends well.

Sao Luis is a pretty port town with nice beaches, good bars and that~s all I have to say about that. We leave tomorrow night for Panaiba (sand dunes) and then Jerri..apparently the best beaches on the coast!