Amazon cruise day 4: Piranha fishing

We fish for piranhas this morning ! It was a lot of fun in the Pantanal and I can't wait to try again in the Amazon. First, we go again super early and then the boat goes into the flooded Forest, we do not fish from the main channel.

It's a funny sight to see us all on a small canoe each facing a side with our bamboo poles out. There is a lot of bait available, we have to take this seriously: we are fishing for lunch.

To start with, the piranhas are as fast and voracious as in the Pantanal, they make very little time of your bait. But they are also much bigger ! Like from 2 times bigger to 10 times bigger! Which means they actually have a mouth big enough to eat the hook. We catch many ! Among which two black piranhas that are huge ! Apparently, these ones can go up to 5kg.

We go to two different spots and bring back to the boat a fairly decent hunt. We shouldn't go hungry at lunch. The other group seems to have just as much fun and luck.

On the boat ride back, a drizzle starts and we made it just on time before the rain. Breakfast is again, huge and delicious.

The morning walks in the jungle are getting slower and slower. Everyday seems to get denser in terms of vegetation. As soon as we reach our landing, we spot monkeys. Alex is our guide for today, he sets off chasing them from below. We spend a good half of the walk nose up trying to find them. We see capuchin and saki monkeys. The latter has a brown -red fur with a super bushy tail, and are fairly big too!

As we continue through the jungle, we see a few tarentula holes and at least disturb one of them to see. Then Alex found us the vine that you can drink water from and we got around to taste it. This was a pretty nice Jungle Walk today again.

I am unsure how we got so tired, both Alexis and I slept through the 4h of nap time. I didn't realize that we had accumulated so much fatigue. But when it's time to get on the boat again, we are refreshed.
We do not see much on this afternoon boat ride, Osmar leads us through very narrow channels again. We attempt at filming dolphins, there are many around us, but they play with us. We film on the left they pop up behind us... Half of the boat is laughing at us. But at least we tried!

We see dolphins every day, you only have to look at the river to spot one within 5min. What was nice about this boat ride is that they used an electrical engine for most of it and we could cruise extremely silently through the channels and enjoy the sounds of the forest. Primarily it was to find more monkeys, but we had no such luck.

As we come back to the boat, Osmar said that we had to go to the dining room a little earlier tonight, that they have a surprise for us. The surprise was a talk about ants, and specifically the giant ones you can find in the amazon Forest. Then they offered us to try the edible ones. As most insects we have already tasted, it doesn't have much flavor, you sense mostly what they have been fried with. It's crunchy and pops in your mouth. Not too bad.

Tonight, there are no night launch excursion, we are starting our sailing back towards Manaus. And surprisingly, no one hangs around the common area, everybody is back in their cabin catching up on sleep. Our little Swiss companion of 9 years old, louis, was so happy to go to bed when I told him nothing else was planned and just ran out of the room. He is travelling with his grandfather, who went to check on him at about dessert time. He reported that Louis had all but passed out asleep on his bed.