Hi everyone...just in Manaus now after 4 days on a boat, another 5 days to go. Oh joy!!! Love to all xx

Well...there is nothing quite as surreal, but equally amazing, as living on a boat sailing down the Amazon river! Our first boat trip was a bit of a disaster. We had shelled out A LOT of money in Peruvian standards for an 8 hour speedboat journey to the tri-border betwen Brasil, Peru and Columbia. After getting up at 4am to get the boat, an hour in the lovely contraption and it decides to break down. Of course no one says anything, and we pull up and sit there for a couple of hours before one of the passengers gets sufficiently angry to call the boat company up. Turns out the manager of the company was chiling by our broken down boat, on his jet, listening to music and having a beer...of course! So after a 3 hour wait, we eventually get transferred to a second boat, without enough chairs, and sit out the 15 hour journey that it actually took for us to get there! So we arrive to the border, down the Amazon river, in the middle of the rainforest at about 11pm..always fun! Still, it wasn´t all bad, and we had met some friends in the meantime, a hilarious (and constantly drunk) Irish Andrew, a couple from Chile who were really lovely, and helpful in their Spanish, two English lads with Miguel, a Spaniard, and two very loud and bubbly Americans!

The border itself was such a bizarre place! Across the river from each other, Santa Rosa in Peru. and Tabatinga in Brasil (where we stayed...in a dodgy hotel with no toilet flush or light, lovely!) were both a bit run down, a few shacks on stilts on the water with smelly markets. But it was all we needed and we found some local joints to eat the ubiquitous fried chicken, beans and rice for cheap! Leticia, in Columbia, and literally just down the road from Brasil, was actually really lovely, developed and by far the safest of the three (everyone we have met who has been to Columbia LOVES it and says its one of the safest places in south america right now...on the to do list!). The relations are incredible between the three countries here, and you can go into all three by boat or micro without getting any papers stamped! So we were illegally in all three countries...all in one day. Quite an achievement when you write it on paper!

We did everything we needed to do, got the boat ticket, got all our passports stamped, stocked up on food, and very cheap alcohol (cachaca, the local brasilian rum made from sugar cane, was just over a pound and pretty lethal!) and so decided to spend the day in Columbia. Went to a local bar, to be greeted by two locals who were passed out licking the floor at 11am...bizarre! Everyone speaks both languages and uses all three currencies so its a bit of a strange place!

After a good 5 hours of waiting around for police checks and beurocracy, we eventually got on the boat for our 4 day trip down the Rio Amazonia to Manaus in Brasil. The boat itself was pretty insane. There were us gringos and then about 300 locals, all crammed into two tiny decks of hammocks. You were literally sardined in, I could touch the family of three sleeping in the hammock next to me whilst i was sleeping, so needless to say there wasnt much privacy! The toilets with a shower were run on river water, and the food was chicken, rice and beans everyday, but it was a pretty amazing experience, travelling with the locals (even though they did come up to us and ask why we would choose to do this instead of fly?!)

It was so incredible to wake up every morning to the sight of the Amazon floating past you, with its pink and grey dolphins and just constant banks of thick dense green trees. The top deck of the boat had a small bar, where loud Brasilian music was pumped out constantly, and a group of local men got drunk from 7 in the morning...not anything were not used to in this continent already (although i did get pretty wound up by the fact they just throw their empty cans in the river. grrr..... i suppose they have bigger problems to think about than the environment at the moment, but still...). It was quite fun at nights to relax up top, listen to some crazy samba music and have a few drinks with the guys we had met. Needless to say with a combination of an Irishmen and two over friendly Americans, it often turned into a party, but to be honest there wasnt much else to do anyway!

Apart from that it was literally sitting in your hammock and reading every sentence of every magazine and book we could get our hands on. I don~t think ive ever spent so many hours staring at something before, but sitting with your legs over the side of the boat watching the Amazon sail past was pretty much all that was on offer. It was really nice to have to relax, not have any sights to see, anything to rush around and do...very different from the usual travelling lifestyle.

Of course it would be novel if those four days were it. But tomorrow we have another 5 to come! We arrived in Manaus at night...an incredible place. It is a HUGE city, and named ´The Hong Kong of the Amazon´. Its so strange as you have spent days without seeing civilisation, have just passed the meeting of the water, and are still, literally in the middle of nowehere in the Amazon, and out pops masses of lights...this incredible huge city with cars, skyscrapers, cathedrals...the lot. An incredible achievement considering its location and it seems such an irony compared to its surroundings. So we camped up for the night (actually in a hire-per-hour love motel but it was the cheapest place for the night!) and are heading off again tomorrow morning for another 5 days on a boat, with...well not much to do! We´re hoping to get to Puerto Vuelho in about 5 days, and from there we want to take a 2 day bus journey to our next destination - the Pantanaal, the Worlds largest wetlands (and an amazing place for wildlife).

Of course, things could easily change, the boat will only go if the captain can be arsed to get out of bed, and we have no guarentee that it wont break down (it looks a lot smaller and dodgier) on the way, but fingers crossed I will next be updating you all from there! As for our new gringo friends (been nice to have loads of people around again), they are all on, as usual, a lot bigger budgets than us and are flying to their next spots in Brasil. Makes sense as we have over the size of europe to cover in a few weeks...perhaps a little ambitious, but brasil is VERY expensive (think UK prices for lots of things) and we have VERY little money left, so more sailing it is for us! But if the trip is anything like our last boat on the Amazon im not complaining...its such an amazing area of the world, fantastic thunder storms (yup, in hammocks, not great) and amazing sunsets, i could think of worse ways to spend 5 days!