Well I may be headed home as soon as Monday to see my daughter who is in the hospital. Although she is doing somewhat better we do not yet know the cause and I really should be there now. That means cutting two days from Manaus and two days and a customer visit in Rio. What is difficult is getting the airlines to give me information or clear guidance on what my options are. I suppose in the worst case I can go on stand by flights and prepare for potential nights in various airports.

There is nothing odder to starting your Saturday than having to fend off two macaw parrots and a green amazon parrot who wanted my breakfast apparently more than I. I think we all settled this dispute amicably with splitting the rolls and papaya portions.

Today I went to an Amazon Indian village a ways up the river from here. It was a real exciting experience. I even got to eat some of their dinner from their fire (not chicken, and did not taste like chicken) and smoked a really weird cigar made from tree bark. Amazingly after the Amazon Indian cigar and excitement of the visit I fell asleep while still sitting up in the canoe like a zombie. I got many photos and trinkets from the visit. Some of the photos will have to be edited before posting because many Indians do not wear clothes on parts of their bodies. Unfortunately I could not buy any spare cigars from them to take with me. I did however get them to pull some strange faces when I let them look at their photos onscreen and then zoomed on to one of their faces in a photo. It must be pure torture for them to not get television, phone calls or email . For a brief moment I thought of showing them the power of the Tablet PC with a cell phone data card and signing them up for a free hotmail email account but I decided not to as they don’t have electricity to recharge the batteries of the Tablet PC. On the way out I could have swore they chanted “we love AutoCAD 2005”.

After getting back to camp we went for a three hour hike into the jungle. It started raining heavily after all this is the rain forest and not the sunshine forest. We learned quite a bit about the plants and trees including many used for medicine. We even found some trees which has sap that is extremely flammable. I even ate a pal grub worm after my guide said to eat it as it tastes like coconut. Well the grub did not taste like coconut but more like soap. I can at least mark that off of the list of things I wanted to do in my life. I took some photos of some huge bugs including a multi colored rhino beetle and a 4 inch long grasshopper. I figured I would have to get photos of these otherwise some may blame this on those Amazon Indian cigars.

Well I better go as I need rest as I have a trip to the main Amazon River in the morning as well as some piranha fishing and once again I will be taking my digital camera and my HP TC1100 Tablet PC with a cellular connection for documenting the days events. I have something that sounds like it is large on my roof and need to investigate.

I will post new photos most likely in the morning as the cellular data card is not that fast at uploading.

Ciao,
-Shaan