BRAZIL 2001 In 2001 I made a solo trip to Brazil to see the wonders of Rio de Janeiro and the dark jungle of the Amazon. I travelled from Munich airport to Paris Charles de Gaulle, to Rio de Janeiro. The flight was very long and boring, although I did manage to watch a couple of films on the aeroplane. I watched Serendepity and Heist and Harry Potter (in Portuguese so I didn't really understand what was going on). It was really humid when we landed and I certainly felt like I was in a foreign country. Here I am, at this point I was very excited and being very silly. I had booked this reduculous holiday where I was intending to go hiking in the Amazon and fishing for piranhas etc. It wasn't clear to me at this phase that I would actually be doing those things and would be quite terrified. The hat I'm wearing was a piece of wall decoration, but it seemed a waste to just let it hand there indefinitely. The room in the background (not that you can see much of it) is where I was living in Germany at the time. The main point to remember here is that I was not really prepared for the trip that I was about to make. I had very little in the way of waterproof clothing and I didn't have a mosquito net. The insect repellant that I had purchased was totally useless (the mosquitos were ACTUALLY LAUGHING at me when they saw it!). I did manage to travel light. The bag that is on my back is the larger of two rucksacks that I carried with me, the second was just a small day pack. I didn't take the hat with me.... Below you can see the guys I was hanging with at the youth hostel. I only really remember John (the guy in the white T-shirt to the left, Ingrid (just to the right of him) and Genevieve (the girl to the right). Im the dude to the far right :-) I still stay in contact with John, he's the sort of guy that'll see a tin can on the beach and actually do something about it rather than just leave it there for someone else to clean up. He did just this on Ihla Grande (an island nearby to Rio) and it really made me think. And here we have the famous statue Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer). You take a train to the top of the mountain where you can watch the sun set. The statue has one arm slightly larger than the other to take into account the wind (although I can never tell which one it is) Here you can see the "meeting of the waters" and is where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimoes join (just outside Manaus) forming the Amazon (which is the biggest river in the world). The Rio Negro is highly acidic and is black as a result (foreground), the brown water (background) from Rio Solimoes is not and is a deep brown colour. If you decide to travel up either of these rivers you have quite a trade off to make. Do you travel up the Rio Negro where the water is a little too acidic for too much to survive and see relatively little wildlife? Or do you travel up the Rio Solimoes and get the wildlife .....and the mosquitos. The river is so large it looks like the sea from the port and the illusion remains even when you're right in the middle. My own experience with the mosquitos while I was at a hotel in Manaus. I was sure I was going to catch Dengue after these bites (luckily I didn't) and I wasn't able to sleep for days with the itching. My back shown below was like swiss cheese and the walls of the hotel room were covered in mosquitos that i'd killed and my own blood was spread out around them. Clearly they'd had a party on my back while I was sleeping. The following biological samples were collected by a Swiss botanist. If you look carefully you can see a pickled anaconda skull, a giant bat and lots of snakes and eels. There's a huge beetle in one of the jars too, and a tarantula. Its like something out of Indiana Jones. Here is the camp, which I build with the help of my friend Francesco. He was my guide in the forest and he taught he everything from fishing to building shelters to catching grasshoppers to use as bait. Well, the trip was fantastic, I learnt a lot and got quite a tan. I can now build a cabana (a shelter made from large forest leaves), catch piranhas and count to 10 in Portuguese. If you get the opportunity to visit Brazil then you should. You'll have a great time.