The Amazon

I've always wanted to visit the Brazilian Amazon river and rain forest and just before Christmas Marsh and I got the chance. We stayed in the city of Manaus at a hotel on the banks of the Rio Negro, a great tributary to the Amazon, and during the day toured the rivers and city.

Everything there is vast. Thick green jungle, rivers so wide you often can't see to the other side. Though not the longest river on earth, the Amazon River is the world's greatest river. It flows for over 4,000 miles from the Andes to the Alantic where it dumps over a fifth of the earth's fresh water into the ocean out of it's 200 mile wide mouth. Nearly sixty miles from shore you can still pull up a bucketful of fresh water.

The million plus city of Manaus sits surrounded by rainforest at least a thousand miles from anywhere. At the turn of the century rubber plantations brought it wealth and we saw traces of the old art nouveau grandeur in the beautiful opera house, but mostly it's a crowded, gritty port city teeming with huge produce markets and small shops full of colorful clothes, caged chicks and duty-free electronics.

These are just some of the 1, 500 different kinds of fish you can find here; piles of them just sitting out on counters ready to be purchased. Appetizing, don't you think?

The majority of the people in Brazil are very poor and their homes are often pieced together and make-shift but somehow they find a way to make even the simplest shacks colorful and bright.

The huge rivers are the freeways, and the buses are these boats that shuttle up and down the river all day long.

When the new temple is built in Manaus, there will be a dock for patrons to park their boats. This temple will be a great blessing to these faithful saints. Right now it requires four days by small boat then 3 days by bus to reach the nearest temple in Recife. Members often sell all they have to afford the journey. This will be a beautiful temple for them.

Near Manaus two powerful tributaries, the Rio Solimoes and the Rio Negro, come together at a place called the Meeting of the Waters where they eventually merge to form the Amazon River. The two rivers are so opposite in density, velocity, acidity and temperature that for 6 miles they flow side by side without mixing, one creamy and the other dark, like oil and water. The pink dolphins that thrive in one river can't live in the other. Even seeing it with my own eyes, it was hard to believe and awesome to behold.

One afternoon we traveled up the Rio Negro to a floating restaurant where we had a surprizingly fabulous buffet lunch and then walked back into the jungle to see the spectactular Victoria Amazonica lilly pads that can grow to be 6.5 feet wide.

As we traveled further up the river we passed floating houses built alongside the banks. Serious little children in tiny canoes paddled furiously out to meet us bringing snakes and sloths, alligators and monkeys. For a few coins they would let us hold them and take photos.

I loved all of it and if we ever get the chance to go back I hope to travel farther up the rivers and deeper into the jungle where we can see more of the native people and animals and maybe catch a pirahna. Odd, how as I see more of the world I realize how very little of it I've actually seen, and how very big it really is, even as it grows smaller through technology.

Happy New Year!

We hope you had a great Christmas and we wish you all a wonderful year to come. This picture is taken in our apartment with Sister Papworth (Sarah Gordon's Papworth's mother-in-law). She is a wonderful and talented sister missionary who is teaching Brazilians how to play the 'piano.' so they can provide music for their wards. Our tree is strung with strands of popcorn and adorned with little white hand-carved doves and Brazilian lace angels and snowflakes with a few shiny red plastic ornaments and glittery butterflies thrown in.

Christmas time is summer time here and it's hot. In the shopping malls full of people in skimpy tops and sandals you hear piped throughout the shops American versions of 'I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas' and 'Frosty the Snowman" and not a snowflake to be seen. But there is a sweetness here to the celebration of the birth of the Savior. Out the windows of many homes and buildings you see blue-eyed, wire-rimmed Santas perched on ladders or climbing ropes (there is no central heating in any of the homes here and Santa can't go down a chimney, so instead he climbs in through a window). But along with the Santas you find creches and nativities everywhere and Christmas Carols played in the stores.

Christmas Eve at midnight is something to behold. Brazil knows how to party and they LOVE fireworks at any time. So they put the two together and the city erupts in a blaze of lights and noise unlike anything I've seen or heard anywhere else. From our living room window 17 stories up in every direction the city sparkles and flashes like thousands of flashbulbs going off in a dark auditorium. They shoot out of the poorest favellas and from the roofs of high-rise apartment buildings. These are BIG fireworks. It's so loud you can't sleep and so exciting you don't want to. It goes on intensely for an hour or so and then sporatically all throught the night. And they're just warming up for New Years!

We spent this Christmas at the Missionary Training Center (CTM) with our missionaries. It was unlike any other day at the CTM. This was a day to keep the missionaries busy and happy and not too homesick. The dress for the day was P-day clothes. We watched movies (you guessed it, 'The Other Side of Heaven'. That is a movie you should watch with 400 young and vibrant missionaries) ate a lot of popcorn, put together puzzles, played Pictionary and basketball, stuffed ourselves with snacks and drinks and ended the day with a great talent show with everyone back in their 'missionary' dress. We have a Polynesian elder from Hawaii in our Branch of about 40 missionaries and he taught his district the Maori Hakka slap dance (Sister Wishart, you would have been proud). They performed it with gusto in white shirts and ties to the sound of cheers and whistles. There was a lot of talent and good spirit there and it was a wonderful day. To top it off we got to talk to our kids and family when we got home late that night. It was one of the rare times I was grateful for the 5 or 6 hour time difference. Next year we will be in the States with all of you wonderful family and friends that we love and miss so much, but I will always be grateful for the chance we've had to celebrate Christmas and the New Year here in Brazil with our wonderful Brazilian and missionary friends.