Breakfast, then anaconda hunting. Translation: three hours of wandering thru the pampas (read grass and swamp) in “wellies” looking for a snake. Heather, part of the hard drinking couple from England (they’d both have a beer around 10am) almost stepped on one. Luckily she screamed, so we could all run over and catch a glimps of the four foot snake before it tried to escape into a bush. I say "try" because our guide did his best to keep it from getting in there… until we all told Juan it was fine and he could let go of the anacondas tail. That was pretty much the excitement for the three hours. The rest of the time we had to keep ourselves entertained by watching other members of the group get stuck in the mud and loose their wellies, soaking their socks and most of their pants in the process. Toward the end of the walk we found, what one of the girls, translated as an ant eater, but I swear Juan said it ate termites. Finally, as as the grand finally, we got to witness Heather and her new husband Stephen almost die of heat stroke (it couldn’t have had anything to do with the case of beer they had the night before, or the few they had had in the morning… I’m sure they were perfectly hydrated)
Returning to camp… what to do with the three or so hours of free time? Lunch, read, wash my one pair of pants, which are now covered in some type of pitch black mud, my “wellies” having not really done their job all that well. I also chose to wash my long sleve shirt, having been wearing it for 24+ hours not , watching it go from white to dust colored with rust colored stripes (from the canoe paint) This means I’m now wearing a tank top and my skirt… its that or walk around in my rain pants. Well, I should have chosen the rain pants, cause guess what, it started to rain. Not just that, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees (in the jungle in a skirt and Im freezing… how does this work)
A group vote decided that swimming with the dolphins was out… way to cold to get in the water. So piranha fishing was moved up a day.
And what did I learn… I suck at fishing. Now, I was pretty sure of this before hand (having had some not so inspiring experiences with a very small, very ugly, cat fish in Iowa when I was 5) but this just proved it.
Using steak for bait, I pulled one piranha to the shore only to watch it flip and flop its way back into the murky water. This is apparently the way to catch a piranha. Even though you are in fact using a hook, the idea is not to “hook” the fish. The idea is to have the fish grab onto the steak, then you pull it ashore as fast as you can. This is something I do not have a talent for.
Luckily, Quentin from Belgium, seemed to be a natural, catching 8 or 10 of the four inch long fish . Oh, we were going to eat well tonight!
Yes, you can in fact eat these fish. While there isn’t much meat on them (I don’t actually think I found any) they are tasty. Just fried whole you can eat everything but the head… had to do it, cause when else am I going to get to eat piranha? Just add it to the list of odd things I’ve eaten on this trip. Cant wait to swim with the pink river dolphins tomorrow.
