Santarem in Brazil is a busy city. There are lots of little shops, busy one way streets, cracked pavements for the unwary, but the place has a buzz to it. From here we took a small boat up the river to see the meeting of the waters. This is where the muddy brown fast flowing cooler Amazon meets the slower, warmer bluer River Tapajos. There is a complete separation of the two rivers for a distance of 4 kilometres and the difference is quite startling to see. There is a complete cut off in colouring as the two rivers flow side by side- brown (technically white water) and clear water. On the way we saw grey dolphins, a pink dolphin (no dorsal fin), a black vulture, kingfishers, cormorants, a 3 toed sloth, a brown hawk, white egrets and a heron. To my eternal regret we forgot to take the binoculars- how stupid is that??

Further upriver the boat moored up and we fished for Piranhas- pronounced piranya . I only ended up feeding the piranhas with my bait and never caught any but the Captain and two others caught fish so we ended up with a red, white and gold piranha hauled aboard for us to see. The trip was good fun but boy was it hot and we were glad to embrace the air conditioning of the ship on our return.

At the end of the evening, we crossed the pool deck to get back to our suite and the deck was covered in bugs! Some of these looked like flying cockroaches and others were huge moths. We don't eat on the pool deck but by the morning the bugs were gone and people were eating their breakfast unaware that they could have been the ones who were being eaten.