Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Amazon River

We spent the last three days sailing up the Amazon River. It’s a wide, mellow, brown, muddy river. It’s the largest freshwater river in the world flowing through the largest tropical rainforest in the world. The Amazon River has a flow ten times the size of the Mississippi with a watershed almost the size of the continental U.S! Every day it dumps 1.3 trillion gallons of water into the ocean. We are going 1,000 miles inland to Manaus, Brazil where we will get to explore the Amazon.

Shortly after we entered the Amazon from the Atlantic some Brazilian dignitaries and U.S. Ambassadors came aboard and sailed with us to Manaus. They gave talks and panel discussions about the Brazilian economy and other things. To be honest, it was pretty boring so I didn’t listen to most of it. The best part was the night before port the two U.S. Ambassadors to Brazil joined us for a game of Mafia in the faculty/staff lounge. Now, that’s good stuff.

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