Greetings from Boa Vista,

Note: I tried to buy a non-gem quality diamond, thinking they might be really cheap here at the source. The experience fascinated me because the frontier security measures involved gun toting "cowboys" and a structure with deliberately confusing maze of hallways into the office where the boss produces a folded piece of white paper revealing a couple dozen dirty little rocks. How much for that little pea size rock? More than a thousand dollars! Humph! So much for my diamond buying experience.

The hotel manager where I stayed spent an hour telling me about ancient Indian myths: how the first man came about and how they learned what to eat from the monkeys.

Two buses left for Manaus every morning, but everyone insisted there was no ground transportation to the interior of the Amazon rain forest. As I had flown into this remote part of the country at the northern fringe of the Amazon jungle, a bus ride back to the very center of the rain forest sounded like my kind of adventure. I found the bus station and watched as a several dozen intrepid young back packers climbed aboard the two buses; they always travel in a multi-bus caravan for security and safety reasons as breakdowns are common and there are few services along the twenty hour route to the interior. The next morning I did the same for one of the most eventful rides of my life.

During my stay in the frontier town not far from the borders with  Venezuela and the Guyana a bunch of miners massacred a tribe of Indians who had been trying to get the government authorities to stop them from illegally gold mining on Indian land. One young woman discovered the killing and managed to run for two days to another village where she had relatives. The atrocity went unreported for quite some time as the people feared reprisals... something not uncommon in this wild part of Brazil.

Need to elaborate and polish this story... From memory 8/4/2012

 

Peace

Fred L Bellomy