At sea 3/3 Amazon River 3/4

It was a nice day at sea with the wind and swell coming from the south.  Since we were headed mostly WNW there were some bouncy side to side conditions, but nothing serious.  As usual we kept busy with lectures, games, trivia (we won), and we watched a movie in the suite.  There was the usual King Neptune Ceremony on the pool deck when we crossed the equator.  We enjoyed another Indian cuisine dinner arranged by our Aussie friends Graham and Jane.

Our trivia team

There has been a problem for about the last ten days with getting the satellite newspapers received and printed.  We have also been unable to get the news channels on the tv as they have had no signal for the last few days.  All contact with the outside world is via the internet or telephone.  For those of you old enough to remember the tv show "Laugh In", the comedian Arte Johnson has been on board the last two segments.  Most people do not recognize him. 

Noel with Arte Johnson

The ship officially entered the Amazon River during the night.  The river is about 200 miles wide at this point.  We awakened this morning to water the color of coffee with a lot of milk in it.  There have been trees and debris floating by as this is the rainy season and  a lot of junk gets washed into the river.  Two river pilots will be picked up this afternoon at Macapa.  This is just a technical stop and no one goes ashore.  We have been asked to conserve water since the ships desalinization equipment will not work while we are on the river.

We never realized how large the Amazon rain forest is.  Parts of it are in countries other than Brazil and the whole forest is larger than the continental US.  There are 3000 rivers throughout the forest.  Our technical stop was a couple of hours to be certified to continue.

Macapa where we anchored for about two hours while waiting for clearance to continue