Most villages in the Amazon are only reachable by boat. Rivers function like roads and highways throughout the region. Novo Airão is old and big enough to be connected to Manaus by a real road, but that road ends here.
We had our usual morning breakfast with great fruits and juice, cake and tapioca. After it, we left and walked to a restaurant nearby to meet owner Marilda and her daughter. Marilda has recently become a celebrity, appearing in papers and television news for making friends and protecting twenty pink dolphins that come to the back of her floating restaurant daily.
Many local legends have pictured the dolphins as devil creatures and there are a lot of negative superstitions surrounding these animals. For this reason, many people don’t like them and some kill dolphins just to it as bait. So Marilda’s work is very important. It teaches people that these are gentle creatures and that they should be respected.
We met the dolphins and fed them some frozen fish. In the beginning I was a bit afraid since they are pretty big. But once I fed them a few times and got to touch them, my fear was gone.
The sun was setting when we reached Madada, the furthest destination of our trip.
The water had a perfect temperature for a swim right off the boat. I had a life-vest on and just floated on the water for a long time.
On one more canoe ride, our guides pulled out flashlights to spot the tree edges. If they saw two shiny red lights, it meant that it was a Caiman. We didn’t ride away from them in fear but instead, we got closer. This is called nighttime Caiman spotting and is a big attraction offered by various excursions in the Amazon. We came very close to one but my mother got scared, yelled, and the Caiman swam away.
When we came back, we stayed out on the deck for a while, just listening to the sounds of the jungle animals. And this is how the jungle at night sounds like:
