Going with the River's Flow

by Victor Cavalcante (Spain)

A leap into the unknown Brazil

One sunny, hot, amazonian day, waking up to the sound of the flowing water, actually being able to see the red "Araras" flying by the wide clouds in the sky, three of them, maybe four. That's how this particular day started. We, and by we I mean Julie, Giorgio, Holly, and I, got ready to go fishing. See we were nine hours boat ride from the nearest city, Nauta, in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon Jungle. We were doing volunteering, from an animal conservation nature. Our responsibilities that day was to go fishing, in order to "kill to birds with one stone", this is for us to eat and at the same time take note of what time of fishes were in abundance in the natural reserve. Our guide for that day was Johny (I'm sure that was not his real name), but that how he presented himself, he was short with a lot of wrinkles, eyes that reflect the weight of time, with a happy smile that even that it didn't have all the teeth, brought joy to those around. Nonetheless, We wanted Segundo to be our guide for this particular task. A young tall Peruvian cloud (literally) that volunteer with children in Iquitos and was now with us in our expedition. The reason for this... Well, the previous night, far from civilization, with just the bright stars as our witnesses, we got ourselves some tequila, and start some card games. As the hours passed and the tequila bottle emptied we decided to make things interesting by adding dares to the mix. So Holly a tall, thin, blonde lady half French half English, whom my personal nickname was "La Flaca", quite beautiful if I must add. Had been dared to go tell the Captain of the ship that had a Siren tattoo to his right arm, that she saw something swimming by the boat, or actually someone, this someone was Yara. Who is are You are wondering? She is a Siren from the Brazilian (& Amazonian Region) folklore that is rumor to sing to men in order to lure them to the bottom of the river and they are never seen again, what does she do with them? Nobody knows... Anyways back to our story. So Holly had to tell the captain she spotted Yara, after a lot of resisting from her side and only having her mind being changed, when there were mentions of her not accepting the challenge would amount to cowardice. She went forward and told the captain. The captain, whose life long dream was to find Yara spend hours looking for Yara and was pretty heartbroken when he could not find her. Due to that incident when we played the next round and was time for Giorgio to do the dare, but because of the time, we decided to go to sleep. Holly was very insistent that Giorgio had to do his dare the next morning when we went fishing. This dare was, push Segundo into the Amazon River... Therefore we band together to convince Segundo to come with us, I must admit that my persuasion skills helped (So did Segundo later on). We go in the boat all of us, stop to fish. Very good day, in a few hours we must have caught 20 fishes, maybe more, including some Piranhas, yes Piranhas. and after a dozen more we decided to go back to take the fishing boat back to the main boat, we get everything ready and Giorgio, this big Italian guy who looks like a bear, shouts out "Segundo!" and as he does this shoves him out of the boat and starts laughing. Seeing her chance Holly pushes Giorgio to join Segundo in the water, he makes sure they both go down together. Seeing this Julie starts laughing. I'm sitting across her looking as she is laughing with joy, look at the water, though how refreshing it appears, look at all our friends in there looking back us, and in a split second took a decision. I tackle Julie as if in a rugby game and we both fall together in the water. All of us started laughing with delight.