Maurice woke me up this morning “quietly” getting ready to leave the room around 5:45am, so I just decided to get up, too. By 7am I had climbed to the top of Belvedere, the name of the observation tower at our resort. Moe was up there, too. But a sign enumerating the rules for the tower includes “Silence!” so I just nodded at him.
My hope was that I’d find a reliable cell signal up on the tower above the tree canopy. I was not disappointed. Full on 3G! Pages load in only 20 seconds! I knew I should be blogging about the 3 new July Charitocracy nominees, but when I set out to start that, I realized I still needed to blog about the June winner. 4 blog posts to do, and 4 days before the July Top 10 would be selected, the same day I fly home. So I had my work cut out for me! [Future Benj says: “You failed to mention to readers who don’t know you, Benj of yore, that you and Jessica run a nonprofit where donors pool their small donations and vote on the best charity to win it all each month. As little as $13/year to join in the fun!”]
In between our two excursions today I banged out all 4 blog posts. What usually takes me 20 minutes to write each took an hour, since I was working with my iPad on a slow connection instead of my Mac on a fast one. But I got it done! June winner (Together We Rise, for those keeping score at home) posted to Charitocracy blog and cross-posted to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and mailing list. Nominee posts for RAICES, Pan-Mass Challenge, and Mission 22 written and scheduled for the next 3 days. 😅
The excursions I was working around were canoeing and dolphin searching. The first was especially fun. Eric was back paddler and I front paddler for our canoe, dubbed Team America by our guide, who was paired with Moe. There was also a Team Germany, an older couple, and Team Brazil, two middle-aged vixens as Jessica would have called them. We were all racing around through the flooded jungle in our traditional Amazon river canoes and squat heavy wood paddles. (The water here is about 30m higher than it will be in October.) Eric and I were showing off by slaloming around obstacles at full speed.
After we got off the canoes and back onto the speedboat that brought us and the canoes to this part of the river, we had the opportunity to swim for a while. Everyone except Team Germany partook. It started raining. It felt really great! The funniest part was each of us trying to climb (or be dragged) back up into the speed boat. It was not graceful.
The other excursion was a boat ride out across the archipelago in search of gray and pink dolphins. This would have been exciting on Day 1 in the Amazon. But on Day 11, we’ve seen these dolphins almost every day. It’s hard not to see them.
I won’t even mention that I have dolphins in my back yard at home in OBX. (Oh, snap. I just did.) However, the highlight of this excursion was the boat ride back and forth. This was the first time I was taken on shortcuts across islands in a speed boat. The captain wasn’t particularly careful about it, either. We were banging into and bouncing off trees like it was jungle pinball. We barely fit, and we’re getting branches in our faces. But it was pretty cool, having only done this in slow kayaks and canoes previously.
At dinner there was a tarantula watching us eat from the interior edge of the thatched roof.
Just chilling out, doing his thang. NBD. That’s pretty much the attitude of Amazon wildlife, and I can fully relate.