In which my Portuguese levels up.

I leveled up in Portuguese today by asking and understanding the answer to the question "Do monkeys swim?"  Answer: capuchins, no; howlers, spider, and uakari, yes, but not often, primarily because it's a bad idea because caimans like to eat them.

Jaguars can also swim, for the record.

Moving on to some impressions from the Amazon...Internet, I have a Confession.  I never really got the Sloth Thing that everyone on the internet has.  Thought they were kind of funny looking, but didn't understand why they made everyone squee.

Internet, I was wrong.  SLOTHS ARE THE BEST.  SO SLEEPPPPYYYY:

SSSQQQQUUUUUEEEEEEEE.

This sloth was rescued from a hawk (who was rather rudely trying to eat it for lunch) by the village we visited this morning.  It's still a baby, so it's not clear how it's going to fare in the long haul, but one can assume it's going to live longer than it would have if the hawk had had its way.

Dinner soon, so I'll give you some background on where we're staying, and more pictures can come later:

We are staying at the Uakari Floating Lodge, on the Mamiraua Natural preserve:

Accurate naming scheme is accurate.

 The first feature of note about the lodge is that it actually floats, on a small tributary off the Amazon.  You'd think this would be obvious from the naming, but it's still somewhat surprising when one first arrives at the lodge and discovers that it is, in fact, in the middle of what looks like a lake.  In the dry season, the water recedes such that the lodge no longer floats, at which point presumably the naming reverts to simply "Uakari Lodge"?  Unclear.

In this respect, our jungle lodge stay makes is not much unlike the Average American Vacation: a cruise!  Floating hotel from which one cannot escape, with preplanned activities and excursions!  Right?

(I've never been on a cruise, I just recently learned that the response to a question I posed earlier---where do Americans vacation?---is apparently "on cruise ships."  Thus, I feel Typical.)

(Not really.)

Note also that, despite the heat, we may not swim, due to the presence of "camains, piranhas, and venomous snakes" in the water (as explained by our registration form).  HOKAY THEN SAY NO MORE.

Because it's in an Amazonian floodplain as opposed to a year-round forest, this ecosystem is quite different from the one Em and I explored in Peru two years ago.  There is of course some overlap in terms of wildlife (the hoatzin have made an appearance, for example, and the howler monkeys are just as loud, albeit far more numerous), but it's nice to have the chance to see such a different type of environment as compared to my previous trip.  Interestingly, they seem to have far fewer birds here (certainly fewer macaws), but WAY more monkeys, which I found a little counterintuitive, given the lack of land.  We also spend quite a bit of time in boats, as you can imagine, touring the ecosystem, rather than walking through a forest, as we did in Peru.

The Mamiraua reserve is unique in the sense that it was designed and intended to include human habitation.  A number of local communities live along the river system, and the founder of the preserve, who wanted to protect the Uakari monkeys as well as the other wildlife here, never wanted to boot them off the land.  He just also wanted to protect the monkeys.  Thus, there is a strong focus within the preserve on sustainable habitation, fishing, logging, economy, etc.  The "intro video" suggested that the locals were observing the negative results of overfishing and so forth firsthand, and thus saw the potential benefits of trying something a little different.  I have seen no evidence to disbelieve the pretty story; the preserve does genuinely seem to have considerable buy-in from the local communities. The idea of a nature preserve that supports human habitation is a cool idea; why should humanity and natural preservation be mutually exclusive?

One practical upshot of this is that many of the guides are from such local communities, and speak only Portuguese.  The primary group leader serves to translate, though she's not with us on every boat trip.  This hasn't been much of an issue, to be honest; the guides carry books with photos/names of the animals, and it turns out *point at monkey in tree* is pretty universal.

We've also been learning a fair number of Portuguese words for animals, like "macacao"  (ETA: "macaco", I need to learn to spell.  H/T to Cat, on book.  A "macacao" would be a comically large monkey) (monkey), which contributed to my ability to learn about their swimming habits (see above).

(Listening in to the afternoon English lessons for the staff is another decent way to learn some Portuguese.)

In other news: by total coincidence, the mosquitos here do not carry malaria.  I've learned that malaria is an extremely localized phenomenon; it's present in other cities/communities in the Amazon, but not here.  Huh.

(having a malaria researcher as a fellow guest is very illuminating.)

Don't worry, they do still carry Dengue.