Origami, Sushi, and the Greatest Trains In the World

Origami, Sushi, and the Greatest Trains In the World

Really! Japan has the best train system in...well I haven't been EVERYWHERE in the world, so I'm not sure, but it's definitely got the best trains I've ever been on! I bought a Japan Rail Pass, which is something only travellers (not Japanese people) can get that lets them travel on any train they want, all through the country! It was a really cool pass because I got to go to Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Tokyo and Yokohama, all using the train!

Japanese bullet trains are very clean, and so is Japan! The Japanese are very considerate people, and it is part of their culture to treat everyone politely and keep everything neat and tidy. Besides being clean and comfy, the trains are FAST! The normal "Shinkansen" trains go about 200miles per hour, and the really fast "maglev" trains can go over 361 miles per hour! The superfast trains are called "maglev" because they use MAGnets to LEVitate (that means the train floats along the tracks because of the really strong magnets pushing away from each other).

Now that I told you about all the places I visited, I bet you're wondering what I actually did there. Well, the ship docked in Kobe, which is famous for Kobe beef. Kobe beef comes from Wagyu cows, which are very special. They live life like kings- they get massages every day , they drink expensive Japanese wine and beer, and are fed the best grains.

In Osaka, my favorite thing was Dotonbori. This neighborhood is full of restaurants, arcades, hotels and LOTS of neon lights like you see in New York City! While I was there with my friends, we went to a sushi restaurant where the sushi comes to you on a little conveyor belt! You watch the different kinds of sushi go around and around, and when the ones that you want come, you pick them right up off the belt. It was fun for my friends and I to guess what kind of sushi was coming around!

If you don't know what sushi is, I will tell you. It is one of my very favorite foods! If I could eat sushi every day, I would. Sushi is a favorite in Japan. It is made up of rice and other stuff rolled up with a seaweed called "nori". Now, this might seem a little gross to you guys, but the main "stuff" in sushi is raw fish. I used to not like the fishy kind, and only ate sushi with rice and vegetables. After I tried a few different kinds, I LOVED it! Salmon is my favorite, and I even like to eat it plain, with no rice or nori! Fish with no rice or seaweed is called "sashimi", a little square of rice with fish on top is called "nigiri", and the sushi that you've probably seen, with seaweed, rice and fish or vegetables is called "maki".

After Osaka, we went to Kyoto. In Kyoto, we stayed in a neighborhood called Gion, which is the geisha district. A geisha is a Japanese woman whose job is to entertain and be well-mannered and beautiful. From a young age, a geisha learns how to sing, dance, play instruments, and do things like pour a perfect cup of tea. Geishas dress in silk kimonos, have fancy hairdos, and use makeup to make their faces very white and their lips very red. They are known as the most beautiful and talented women in all of Japan!

My favorite stop was Tokyo. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, and a VERY big city. While we were there, my friends and I went to the Tsukiji fish market for more delicious sushi! I am not kidding you when I say this was the BEST sushi I have had in my entire 21 years of life. The restaurants around the fish market sell the best, freshest sushi because they buy it every morning from the sellers at the market. The Tsukiji market is the biggest fish market in the whole world! I tried different kinds of tuna, and I even tried a little piece of whale!

In Tokyo, we also went to Harajuku, an area famous for its crazy fashions. All the girls looked very stylish, and the street was full of clothes stores. They wear lots of jewelry, wild hair colors like pink and blue, and really high shoes! The girls, called "Harajuku girls" by Americans, are also known for wearing really bright colored clothes. It was fun to just walk around and watch all the people!

I had a lot of fun in all those different places, but the place that meant the most to me was Hiroshima. Hiroshima is a town in Japan that the United States dropped a bomb on during World War II. This bomb, called an atomic bomb, was very big, and did a lot of damage to the town and the people.Now, the people of Hiroshima have made a museum and a Peace Park to remember the bomb and act as a prayer to other countries never to drop another atomic bomb anywhere in the world.

Have you heard the story of Sadako Sasaki? She was a very brave little girl who lived in Hiroshima. She got sick when she was 12 because of the atomic bomb. To help her pass the time when she was in the hospital, she started making origami cranes. She did this because Japanese legend says that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes you can make a wish and your wish will come true! The people in Hiroshima built a statue in honor of Sadako's dream. The statue stands for all children who wish for peace, and is a statue of Sadako holding a big crane in her outstretched arms. It was beautiful, and since I read the story of Sadako when I was little, it meant a lot to me to see it in person.

Japan is an amazing country! It is full of kind, welcoming people, has delicious food and wonderful cities. I had such a good time, and I would go back in a heartbeat. I am even going to try and learn Japanese someday soon!

Now our ship is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, heading for Costa Rica and then Miami. The Pacific Ocean takes up 1/3 of the entire world, so it has taken us 19 days to cross the whole thing! I am about ready to go home, and while I am very sad to end my worldwide journey, I am very excited to see my family. It has been so much fun writing about my travels for you! I hope you had a good time reading about them and doing great art projects. When I get home, I'm going to visit all of you at the library and show you all of the cool stuff I brought back from my travels, along with LOTS of pictures. Thank you for listening!

Ni hao Portsmouth!

Hey guys! I just got back from China! While I was there, I went to Hong Kong and Beijing. Those cities are VERY different. I’m going to tell you a little bit about both:

Remember what I told you about Hong Kong? Hong Kong is actually NOT in China. It is part of the People’s Republic of China (China’s long, fancy name), but Hong Kong people don’t have to follow Chinese rules. My favorite part of Hong Kong was the big light show that covers the entire city! At 8pm every night, all the skyscrapers and big Hong Kong buildings light up in a show with lasers, spotlights and rainbow craziness set to music. It was really cool to see. My friends and I took the Victoria Peak tram to the top of the mountain to watch the sun set. We saw all the buildings turn their lights on and come to life!

While I was in Hong Kong, I got dim sum. Dim Sum is sort of like brunch, but instead of pancakes and bacon, you eat lots of little foods that add up to one tasty meal! I had lots of yummy dumplings and some noodles.

I also did Tai Chi in Hong Kong. Tai Chi is a martial arts practice where you make lots of slow, quiet movements to center your body and help you be healthy. When you get really good at Tai Chi, you can even use it to defend yourself, like karate. Just like karate, though, Tai Chi is mostly about quieting your mind and being healthy, never about beating people up. We learned a couple easy moves, then practiced them with the Tai Chi master.

In Asia, especially China and Japan, tea is very important. I bet you’ve seen your moms or dads drink tea by putting a little bag of stuff in a mug of hot water. Real Chinese tea is made very differently- there’s a whole ceremony involved. Instead of using a bag of tea, you use loose tea, the dried leaves of tea that you pour hot water over to make fresh, delicious-tasting tea. There are different kinds of tea leaves, too: black tea (“regular” tea), green tea, and even flower teas made from plants like jasmine and rose. There’s also a really special tea called Pu’er. Pu’er is special because it comes from fresh, young tea leaves that are picked only from trees high in the mountains of China. I bought a pretty jasmine tea with pretty pink buds. When you puts the buds in a cup, they open their flowers and make delicious flower tea!

I went to Beijing with a few of my friends. I had my 21^st birthday while I was there. I had the coolest birthday ever, because guess where I was? THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA! The Great Wall was built over 2,000 years ago to keep dangerous people out of China. It is so long, you can stretch it from Rhode Island to California, then all the way back again! Astronauts can even see it from space! I got to hike around the wall, and I took lots of pictures. It is amazing to be able to walk around on something that was built so long ago.

I also got to see all of the Olympics buildings. I saw the Bird’s Nest, which is the largest iron structure in the world! It looks really delicate from far away, but when you get up close you see how huge and strong it is. I also saw the WaterCube, where all the swimming stuff happened. It looked like a big square made out of bubbles! There was a fountain in front and water running down the sides of the glass windows, too. I watched the Olympics all the time last summer, so I was really happy to see all the places where the athletes competed.

One thing that made it tough to travel around China was the language. Chinese is really hard to learn, because it is a tonal language, which means the loudness or pitch makes the meaning different. You could say “Yu” in a really high voice, and then say “Yu” in a really low voice, and it would mean two completely different things, like “dog” and “teacup” (it doesn’t mean either of those, I just don’t know any real Chinese examples). This was the only country where nobody spoke any English at all, and it made it a lot harder to do things that are usually easy, like hail a cab or ask someone where a restaurant was. I liked the challenge- it was a good reminder that learning new languages is a really good way to meet new people, and also that you don’t have to speak the same language to talk to each other.

My trip to China was really fun. Ms. Laura told me that you guys are making dragon masks! That’s a really fun project, and there are dragons all around in China! Not real dragons, but lots of gold dragon statues and dragon decorations. In China, the dragon is a symbol of power and strength. I hope you have fun. By the time you do your art projects on Japan, I will be able to come visit you! Japan was my favorite country and I can’t wait to tell you about it in person.

Even Pirate Voyagers mix things up!

Hey guys! I hope you had a great time making Indian art, I bet they all look great! Sorry I just posted about Malaysia even though I went to Vietnam first. I forgot to put up Malaysia before Vietnam/Cambodia. Oops!
I spent the last five days in Penang, Malaysia, which was so much fun! I really love Malaysia, it is a beautiful country. Malaysia is divided into two parts: one part is called “peninsular” Malaysia, which means it is part of a big piece of land, but it’s surrounded by so much water that it’s almost an island. The other part is called Borneo Malaysia, because the rest of the country is part of a big island called Borneo, made up of lots of jungle. I spent my time in Peninsular Malaysia and a little island nearby called Langkawi.
Malaysia is cool because just like the United States, there are a few different cultures that live together. There are Malay people, whose families have come from Malaysia for a long time; there are Chinese people, and there are Indian people. The Chinese and Indian people have lived in Malaysia for a very long time; their families come from Malaysia, and they were born and grew up in Malaysia. Most Chinese and Indian people I talked to said they had never been to China or India, the place their ancestors (that’s a big long word for “really old family members”, like a great-great-great-great-grandpa) came from.
While I was in Penang, I went to the island of Langkawi. Langkawi is actually an archipelago (AR-kih-PEH-la-go), which is a fancy word for “lots of islands close together”. There are about 90 islands that make up the Langkawi archipelago, and they are all full of trees and very green. Most of them don’t have people on them. One of them, Pulau Payar, is a giant beach that takes up the whole island where people can snorkel and see really cool fish and turtles! “Pulau” means “Island” in Malay. To get there, my friends and I took the Langkawi ferryboat, which is a fast boat that takes people on short trips to the islands near Penang. Riding the ferry was fun, but since I live on a ship it was a lot like being at sea! While we were in Langkawi, we just relaxed and went to the beach. It was beautiful there, and we could see lots of small, very green islands around it. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
I ate some really tasty food in Malaysia. Because there are Malay, Chinese and Indian people in Malaysia, there’s also delicious Chinese and Indian food, along with Thai food, because Thailand is right next to Malaysia. I went to Little India one night, and had even better Indian food than I had in India! My favorite Indian food is a bread called naan. Naan bread looks sort of like pita bread, and is very soft and served hot. There is plain naan, but I also had garlic naan, which has either butter with garlic in it or little pieces of garlic on it, and kashmiri naan, which has little pieces of sweet dried fruit on top. All naan is super delicious, but my favorite is garlic naan.
I also had really delicious Thai food in Langkawi. I had a yummy soup made with coconut milk, lots of limes, and prawns, which are big shrimp. I also had the best rice I’ve ever eaten, with soft, delicious chicken and a spicy sauce on top. Mmmmmm!
Malaysia was a lot of fun, and it was nice to relax on the beach for a few days, because even though all I talk about to you guys is the fun stuff I do in different countries, when we’re sailing I have lots of homework. We will be in Vietnam tomorrow morning, and while I’m there I’ll be travelling to Cambodia! I will tell you all about both of those countries in about a week. Until then!

Ahoy from the Mekong River in Vietnam!

I just got back from Vietnam and Cambodia! Both places were really beautiful. Everyone was so friendly, I would love to go back. In Vietnam, there is a big market called the Ben Thanh Market where you can buy everything: food, clothes, shoes, jewelry, kitchen stuff. Whatever you want, it is probably hiding somewhere. It is very crowded and full of shop people yelling “What you want to buy, lady?” My favorite thing that I bought is a big sun hat!

I also saw water puppets in Vietnam. For water puppet shows, the puppeteers stand in water up to their waist (behind a curtain) and work with the puppets while they are in the water. Most of the puppets are fish, or ducks, or even dragons that can spit water out of their mouths! The shows tell different stories about the people who live by the water in Vietnam, and they are lots of fun to watch.

Cambodia was really amazing, too. I went to Angkor Wat, which is a big temple that is over 1,000 years old! All the temples in Siem Reap- the city where Angkor Wat is- are very old and made of big stones which have grown moss all over them. My favorite was a big temple in the jungle. This temple is special because for 400 years, it had no people in it. It was left alone in the jungle. When people discovered it, big trees had grown around the stones in the temple and made themselves part of it! I can’t wait to show you the pictures.

While I was in Siem Reap, I also rode an elephant! I rode on top of it on a little seat called a howdah, which is what the kings and queens of Cambodia rode on in parades. The elephant took us all around the Bauphon temple, which has really cool faces carved into its stones!

I had a great time learning about all the history in Cambodia & Vietnam! Next I am going to the island of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is different because it is part of China, but not part of China at the same time. Technically, Hong Kong belongs to the People’s Republic of China, but the people of Hong Kong don’t have to follow all of China’s rules- they make their own. While I am there, I am flying to Beijing, the capital of China. I am going to see the Great Wall of China, which you can see from outer space! I am also going to see the places where the Olympics were this summer! I am very excited. I will tell you my stories when I get back!

The Wonders of India

Hey guys! It’s been a while since I wrote to you, and I’ve done A LOT! I just got back from India, and tomorrow I will be in Penang, Malaysia. I’ll write to you about Malaysia a little later; for right now, let’s talk about what I saw in India!

India has more people than anywhere in the world, except for China. I could really tell while I was there, because it is crowded all the time! People are always walking around or driving their cars and riding their motorcycles or bicycles, no matter what time of day.

One of the coolest things I got to see in India was the Taj Mahal. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Taj Mahal, but it is a very famous building made completely of white marble. “Taj Mahal” means “White Palace,” and a king built it for his wife a very long time ago. The queen had 14 kids, and the king built her a palace as a present because he loved her so much (and she asked for one). The building is all bright white stone, with different colored stones in flower and swirly patterns all over it. It is one of the most famous buildings in the world, and I’m very happy I got to see it.

I also got to go to Varanasi, which is the most holy city in India. Most people in India are a religion called Hindu, and Varanasi is a very special place for them. Varanasi is home to the Ganges River, which is the reason the city is so holy. Hindu people pray at different temples all along the side of the river. These places to pray are called “ghats,” and each ghat lets people pray a different way. I got to go on a man’s boat and learn all about the different ghats, and some people threw strings of flowers into the river. The Hindu people say that if you do this and make a wish, your wish will come true!

The big city of Delhi was another place I went. That night I explored a market, where I got to watch Indian people going about their normal day. Indians dress very differently than we do in the United States. The men almost always wear tan pants and button-down shirts, which is kind of fancy dress in the US. The women wear beautiful dresses called sarees. These sarees are always very colorful, and decorated with lots of beads and ribbons and pretty designs.

Sometimes they wear something called a “salwar kameez,” which is just like a matching pair of pants and a long shirt with a pretty pattern like on sarees. Most of the time they will wear scarves with their salwar kameez. I bought two salwar kameez, and I will make sure I wear one when I come visit so you can see what it looks like!

A really cool art that comes from India is mendhi. Mendhi is a design that goes on your skin using an ink called “henna”. It is a little like a tattoo because henna can dye your skin, but it only lasts for a couple weeks. Indian women put mendhi on their hands and feet for special celebrations, and especially weddings. The bride’s hands and feet are always covered in mendhi as a wedding tradition. A lot of my friends got it done in the market, and it looks great!

The last thing I’ll talk about is something that you’re going to make yourselves! It is another art that Indians are famous for, and that is called embroidery. Embroidery is when you sew things together in a creative way, and Indian embroidery is full of beads, jewels, and bright colors. The embroidery can be used to make things to hang on the wall, pillows, or even blankets. It is really beautiful to see so many different pieces of fabric and beading put together so artistically. I bet you guys will do a great job of that, too!

Those are the coolest things I saw in India. I hope you have fun making your own wall hangings, and I hope I get to see them when I get home! I will talk to you soon, after I come back from Malaysia!

Cape Town Capers

Hello Online Voyagers!

I had a pretty fun time in South Africa. I went to an aquarium, climbed a mountain, watched a rugby game, and saw some beautiful artwork. Our ship docked in Cape Town, a city in the most Southern part of South Africa.

At the aquarium, I saw the trainers feeding penguins! They fed them whole fish and squid. When I come visit you at the library I will show you my pictures of penguins in the middle of swallowing their food whole! I also saw two scuba divers swim in a giant tank and feed the rays and the turtle. They trained the turtle to hit a target with its head, and when it did, it got its treats. That’s a pretty smart turtle. Have you ever seen a ray? Rays look like big, diamond-shaped fish with long tails at the end. The rays with the long tails don’t sting, but the rays with short tails can really hurt you! If you are swimming and see a ray, just be careful not to touch the tail. Rays usually hang out in tropical waters like Florida and the Bahamas.

The divers were in a tank called the “predator tank”. In case you didn’t know, a predator is an animal that goes after other animals to eat. The animals it tries to eat are called “prey”. There were big reef sharks in the predator tank, and when they got too close to the diver that was feeding the turtle, the other diver had to poke them with a stick! I don’t know about you, but I think that would be a pretty scary job!

My favorite part of Cape Town was climbing Table Mountain. It’s called Table Mountain because- SURPRISE!- it looks like a table, with a big flat top. It was a pretty tough climb, but it was so pretty at the top. I could see all of Cape Town on one side, and more mountains and the ocean on the other side. I love to hike, so I had a lot of fun.

I also went to a town called Stellenbosch to watch a rugby game. Rugby is a game that’s sort of like football and soccer combined. It is very fast and involves getting goals like soccer, but there is a lot of tackling, like football. Nobody wears padding, so it is very scary to watch the players get thrown around the field. It was fun to see a game! There are 15 players on each team, so there were a lot of people running around the field.

I saw some really cool crafts while I was in Cape Town. I saw bowls and plates made from weaving colorful wires together- I bought one, so I can bring it in to show you when I get back- and pretty beaded bracelets made to look like the South African flag. Making beaded decorations is a popular art in South Africa, and the markets had lots of beaded stuff: animals like lizards and pigs, big stars that you could use as lamps, and even beaded spoons!

I did some serious stuff in Cape Town, too. South Africa used to follow rules called “Apartheid Laws” that kept the Black people separate from the White people. The Black Africans were treated very unfairly by the White South Africans, and fought for a long time to get rid of the Apartheid laws. I went to an old prison called Robben Island, where they kept South Africa’s most famous president. His name is Nelson Mandela, and the Apartheid rulers kept him in prison for thirteen years because they knew he would help get rid of Apartheid. He did a great job helping South Africa fix its problems after Apartheid was over. He was a very important person to the whole world, because everyone on Earth is equal, and should be treated just as nicely as anyone else.

I think that’s a good message to end on: Everyone is different and special, but we are all people trying to make Earth as beautiful a place as possible.

Savannah Safari!

Hey guys!

I was just in Namibia, a small country on the Southwest coast of Africa. Namibia has the least people in all of Africa, mostly because the Namib and Kalahari deserts take up a lot of the country, and the desert is not a great place to live. While I was there, I went on a safari in Etosha National Park! It was amazing. I saw so many cool animals!

Here are some of the animals I saw:

The animal I saw the most of was a Springbok, which is a kind of gazelle. They look like little deer with black stripes on their sides. Sometimes, the boy springbok will try and impress the girl springbok by jumping really high, which is funny to see because they look like they’re on a trampoline. Another cool thing about springbok is that they get all the water they need from the plants they eat, so when it gets really hot and dry in the desert and water is hard to find, they have no trouble because they can eat and “drink” at the same time!

We saw another kind of gazelle called an Oryx, which looks just like a springbok, except it has gray fur with long, straight black antlers. I saw another animal that looked like a really tiny springbok, or a baby deer. This animal was called a Dik-Dik, and they are the tiniest antelope. Even when they are full grown they are still not much bigger than a little dog!

I also saw a lot of zebra! I bet you all know what a zebra is (I’ll give you a hint: it looks like a black-and-white striped horse), but did you know that there are two kinds of zebra? There is a Grevy’s zebra, which is shorter, a little smaller and looks like a donkey, and then there is the plains zebra, which looks bigger and more like a horse. Despite looking a little different, both these kinds of zebra play together all the time! The zebra and the springbok like to hang out and eat their plants together, too.

My favorite animal that we saw was a giraffe. Giraffes are the tallest land animals in the world! They like to hang out in groups of four or five and eat the leaves up at the tops of trees. It is really funny to see a giraffe drinking at the watering hole, because they are so tall they have to bend their legs in a really weird direction to reach the water! They take their front legs and move them far over to each side of their bodies, almost like a front-leg split. Then, they bend their long necks down and take their drink.

On our first day driving through the savannah, we saw a herd of elephants! There were about 10 big, adult elephants and 3 or 4 babies! They were all gathered around the watering hole drinking and playing in the water. Elephants can live for over 70 years, which is a very long time for an animal!

At night, we camped in tents. There was a watering hole near our camp site, so we went to see what animals came to drink at night. That night, just at sunset, we saw a mom and baby rhinoceros! There are black and white rhinoceroses in Africa, but the black rhinoceroses are endangered. Endangered means there are not very many of them left in the world. We saw the bigger, more common type of rhinoceros, the white rhinoceros.

The coolest animal we saw is sometimes called the King of the Jungle. Can you guess what it was? If you guessed a lion, you’re right! We saw three lions, two males and a female. They are very hard to spot in the savannah, because the sun gets very hot and they like to relax under shady trees. It is easiest to find them in the morning, when it is still cool and they can wake up and get a drink of water, or at night, when they wake up from their shady naps. If you have cats at home, you know how they like to sleep. Lions sleep for 12-14 hours every day. That’s over half the day!

It was really fun to go on safari. Namibia is a great country! On the way back to the ship from our safari, we stopped at a wood-carving market to buy crafts that the Namibian people made. I got a wooden giraffe statue to remind me of my favorite safari animal.

I’m on my way to India right now! I’ll tell you more about it after I’ve gotten there- next you can look for my stories from South Africa!

Jungle Survival, Wild Style

Hey there, pirate friends!
It’s time to tell you about all the CRAZY plants that live in the Amazon jungle. I went on a jungle trek through the rainforest, and saw lots of really useful and helpful plant life. Here goes!
The first plant we came upon on our hike was a water vine. These thick vines look just like tree branches, but they have a special secret- they hold water inside! Our guide cut off a piece of the vine for us, and we all drank fresh rainwater straight from the inside. These vines are very helpful if you get lost in the jungle with no water; they can even save your life!
The next tree we came upon also had a tasty secret inside- milk! Not milk like you drink at home, but a special kind of tree milk that is also good to drink when you are in the jungle. We cut off a small piece of the tree’s bark so that everyone could see the milk running down the side. It looks just like regular milk, but I have to say it did not taste very good.
After the milk tree, we found a eucalyptus plant. If you’ve ever put minty-smelling lotion under your nose or on your chest when you have a cold (like Vick’s vapo-rub), you’ve used eucalyptus! They actually use the bark of the plant too, but it’s the oil from the leaves that smells so yummy and minty.
The next tree we came to had sap-the stuff that oozes out of the tree from under the bark- that came out looking like juicy fruit gum but dried black. The native people used to burn the sap as a way to cure headaches.
While we were in the jungle we also learned how to make an animal trap out of tree branches, so you could catch a meal if you were lost and hungry.
We also took pictures in front of a gigantic tree- I don’t know what kind it was, but its roots were bigger than me! Another mysterious tree had really big spikes growing all over it. We had to look out for these on our trek, since you definitely would not want to get a face full of tree spikes!
And those are all the useful things I found in the Amazon rainforest! I’m back on the ship now, on my way to Namibia. I’ll tell you a little bit more about Namibia when we get closer. We have to go all the way across the Atlantic Ocean before we get there. Until next time, adventurers!

The Amazon!

Ahoy, mateys!

I just got back from the Amazon rainforest! I told you a little bit about it last time, but I discovered so much more while I was there!

I started my trip in Manaus, which is in the northern middle of Brasil. From there, my friends and I got on a riverboat that would take us up the Amazon river. We slept on the riverboat too, in big hammocks. It took a little getting used to, but sleeping in a hammock was pretty great!

The first night of our trip, we went out in little canoes- not the kind you have to paddle; these canoes had benches to sit on and a motor to make them go. We saw “the meeting of the waters”, which is the place where two of the Amazon’s tributaries meet. A tributary is a small river that flows into a bigger river. The meeting of the waters was where the Rio Negro- which is called that because “Negro” means “black” in Spanish and the river’s water looks black- and the brown waters of the Rio Solimoes- that’s so-lee-mo-izh, it’s Portuguese- meet in the Amazon river. The place where they meet is really cool because you can see the brown water and black water mixing! There is a definite line; on one side the water is the color of coal, and on the other it is brown like Hershey’s chocolate. We spent our time traveling on the Rio Negro, where there are less mosquitoes and more awesome animals!

We saw a lot of different animals on our trip. The first one we saw was the pink dolphin. That’s right, a PINK dolphin. They look just like regular dolphins, but their skin looks like light-colored bubble gum. On our second day on the river, we saw a whole pod of them, three adults and two babies all swimming together!

Another animal we saw was the caiman. Caimans are cousins of alligators and crocodiles, and can get to be over 20 feet long! We went hunting for them in our canoes, but we only found babies. They were about 3 months old and looked just like tiny alligators. I even got to hold one! She was only a foot long, and stayed very still while we held her and took pictures. I bet you didn’t know that most caimans are girls. This is because what decides whether the caiman are boys or girls is the temperature! If the temperature is below 100 degrees, there are mostly boy caiman. But it gets very hot in the Amazon- over 100 degrees- so almost all the baby caimans are girls!

We also went fishing for piranhas! Usually when you go fishing, you bait your fishing hook with a worm. For piranhas, we baited our hooks with beef! That’s right, to catch piranhas, you have to use a burger as bait. It was tough to catch them; they were very sneaky and would eat the meat off your hook before you even had time to reel them in. We finally caught one, and it had VERY sharp teeth! It was about the size of my hand, with pretty blue-black scales.

There was one animal we didn’t see, but we could sure hear! In the jungle, there are howler monkeys. These monkeys are called howler monkeys because- you guessed it- they can yell really loudly! They hang out in big groups and talk to each other by whooping and grunting, and you can hear them from very far away.

While we were in the jungle, we also saw HUGE ants. These ants had to have been at least 10x the size of the ants you see at home. We saw three different kinds. There were really big black ants that were not dangerous, and another big brown ant called “24-hour ant” because if it bit you, it would hurt (A LOT) for a whole day! We also saw big red ants carrying whole flower petals back into their hills. Those ants were seriously strong.

Finally, my favorite animal: a frog. But these were not just any frogs. These frogs were super duper tiny! They were so small that at first we thought they were bugs! They would hop around on the beach right next to where the water met the sand, and they were only the size of my pinkie nail. They had the same color skin as the sand, so they could blend in. The ability to blend in with what’s around you is called camouflage.

In the Amazon, frogs have to be able to protect themselves from predators (the other animals that want to eat them). Because these little frogs had camouflage, it is harder for predators to find them. Some other Amazon frogs are really bright colors! But these are the dangerous frogs. These frogs are usually poisonous, and use their bright colored outsides to warn predators to stay away!

I saved my least favorite animal for last. It was really cool looking, but it was a HUGE spider, and I am scared of spiders. I’m not sure what type of spider it was, but it had big reddish-brown legs and a bright yellow and black body. I took a picture of it and then stayed far away, because just like frogs, if a spider has a bright-colored body, it is probably poisonous.

Those were the animals I saw (or heard) in the Amazon. Next time, I will tell you about all the cool plants!

Pirates In the Caribbean

Hello, adventurers!
There aren’t really any Pirates, but I am finally on the ship, and we are in the Caribbean! We are on our way to Salvador, Brazil (the Brazilians spell it “Brasil”), the 3rd largest city in the entire country! From there, I’m going to fly to Manaus and spend three days exploring the Amazon rainforest. Did you know that the Amazon makes 20% of all the oxygen in the world? That means that when you breathe five times, one of those breaths is from the rainforest!
Right now, our ship is sailing along the coast of South America. Yesterday, we stopped for gas in Puerto Rico. Putting gas in a ship as big as the Explorer took all day! We had a great view off our sun deck on top of the ship.
Puerto Rico is actually a “territory” of the United States. That means that Puerto Rico is part of the USA, but isn’t a state; just a little country of its own that follows some of our rules.
We also passed by the island of Martinique, in the Caribbean Sea.
Even though Martinique is close to the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, it is actually part of France! Most people on Martinique speak French, or their own special island language called Creole, which is a little bit like French and African languages combined.
Next time I write to you, I will have some great stories from Salvador, Brasil and the Amazon rainforest!