Jericoacoara	Spiagge infinite	Pedra Fourada	Dune!	Tatajuba
Lagoa Azul	Lagoa Paraíso	Delta del Parnaíba	Caburé	Il faro di Mandacarú
Vassouras	Lençois Maranhenses	Manaus	Il Rio delle Amazzoni	Ariaú Towers
Fortaleza	Riflessi & tramonti	Photo gallery	Mappe	English version

In order to enjoy a closer contact with nature, we spend three days in the largest wood hotel of the world: it's the Ariaú Towers, an astonishing complex built in the very middle of the jungle that you reach with a 2-hour boat trip upstream Manaus. The hotel comprehends several separated towers built as pile-dwelling structures. We are surrounded by flooded forest and the different towers are connected by very long "catwalks" which have a lenght of more than five miles!

"Ariaú" means "big potato" but I wonder why they chose such a name: even here there is not a single each of dry land, so where the hell can people grow or harvest such potatoes?

We meet Leo, a green parrot that talks and laughs with an incredibly perfect imitation of a laughing baby. He "works" at the hotel bar: you give him a banknote and he takes it to the till! But he is kind of moody, and sometimes he does not feel like doing it, so if customers insist, he tears the note apart and destroys it with his beak,... so if you gotta pay - say - more than 10 bucks, you'd better avoid Leo's service and directly pay to the nice girl beyond the bar!

Staying at the "Ariaú" is not cheap, but I think it's worth because you've got the chance to feel the "closeness" of the jungle much more than any other places. It's the only place in Brazil where we have found American tourists (do they purposedly avoid cheap places, choosing the expensive ones?), but I guess the majority of them is really lazy: they just hang around the swimming-pool and the shopping area, and miss the wild beauty that can be found if you only walk five minutes away from the crowdest hotel places. If you walk ten minutes the silence is absolute; fifteen minutes, and the absence of human activity makes animals feel free to live without any concern, so you can hear all sorts of queer sounds: we look around us and we feel like we are in the Jurassic Park... We might see a Tyrannosaurus popping out those ferns! Boy, we are glad to be safe on these stable catwalks!

One day we join a group of eight American tourists led by Romero a "macho-man" guy who tells us how to survive should we get lost in the jungle - you never can tell, can you? In order to live our survivor experience we need some dry land, which - as I said - it's not easy to be found around here. So we reach a flattish hill after more than a hour of boat. We learn which kind of wood is better to make a fire, how to do it, which fruit are to avoid and which are edible. We even meet the terrible tucanderas ants: they are not poisonuous but their bite is soooo painful. Yet, Brazilian indios sometimes let these ants bite them on purpose because, after twenty terrible hours of pains, their tooth-ache or back-ache disappears. In other words: has your wife forgotten to buy Tylenol? Never mind! Just insert your finger into a tucandera nest and that will do the trick!

Another day Romero takes us to a caboclo village. Here we can see a "rubber-tree", and we meet an old guy who shows us the whole process of the rubber production: a slight cut on the tree bark will make a milky fluid come out; you collect it and put it into a pot and,... that's it: you get a sticky stuff with which you can make almost everything: from shoes to condoms! But I guess this is just a show for tourists, since caboclos wear no shoes and, condom-wise,... well, babies and young kids are everywhere, so forget about it!

And that's it! After almost one month, our trip to Brazil is going to finish. We go back to Fortaleza, from where we'll fly back to Italy. Goodbyes are always rather sad, so we do hope that ours is just an "arrivederci, Brazil!" and «obrigados» for all you gave us!

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