Sorry for the wait!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this is needs to be a long post...however, I’ve been  busy. This post is basically from an e-mail I sent back home.  Sorry, if it seems a little thrown together.  Dominica is the most gorgeous place I've ever been to (at least based on beauty density).  The island is 16 miles across and maybe 40 miles long, and it has 365 rivers coming off the mountains.  The island was volcanic and is made of mountains almost 5,000 feet tall.  The island just shoots straight out of the water when you see it!  The indigenous name for the island (Dominica has the largest indigenous population in the Caribbean at 3,000ish) is Waiti Kubuli, which means "tall is her body".  The mountains are also the reason the rainforest is still mostly intact because they couldn't grow sugarcane there.

Anyway, I went with some people to Ti Tou Gorge on the first day.  They filmed part of the second Pirates of the Caribbean there. It's basically a slit in the ground with a river flowing through, so, you can swim back a couple minutes (without being able to touch the bottom half the time).  One of our professors told us that the gorge wasn't carved by the water, but was just a large volcanic rock that cracked when it cooled, and then filled with a river.  After getting lunch in Roseau (the capital of 20,000 people) we headed to a place called Victoria Falls (it was an hour drive and another hour hiking up the river bed to the falls).  That was cool because the waterfall is on a circular cliff, so, it falls across the face of one side of the cliff in to a huge pool.  We did all of that independently, and it got pretty expensive (I spent about $50 on all of it) with taxis and guides, but it was still cheaper than going with SAS.  Getting to Victoria Falls was difficult, once we left Roseau every road had long stretches like the palisades along the Kentucky River, except that their roads are steeper and there are more switchbacks.  Building infrastructure in Dominica is probably a lot like building infrastructure in Eastern Kentucky, but if they could improve access to their major sights (which includes marked trails because there aren't many except for one trail that spans the whole island) it would be an awesome place to visit.

The next day Stephen and I were in a group that hiked to Middleham Falls with SAS.  Our guide was 40 year old, who told us to call him Bushman.  The hike to the falls was steep and mildly dangerous towards the end, but he got us all there.  A lot of people did a forty foot jump into the pool below the falls, I mostly watched and took pictures of one the girls I've met while she did the jump (she's from Trinidad, there's so much diversity on this ship!).  I did get in and swim for a while, and I jumped off a spot 15 feet up without any problems, so, it was pretty cool.  On the way out of the forest a rainstorm came through and drenched everyone, it's amazing how much water the canopy in a rainforest catches though because for a while I thought we'd stay dry while we hiked.  After that our group went back to the ship and we ate lunch (it was around 2:00 or 2:30) at a restaurant near the port.  They served pig snout, but I decided to stick with the pastry full of tuna salad.  After meeting with some other people and hearing their stories we got back on the ship to avoid the line that forms the last hour and a half before we have to be on the Explorer.

Dominica was an amazing couple days filled with a lot of sightseeing and riding around in buses or taxis with people.  The places were beautiful, and I think I’ve gotten the hang of travelling by cab.  My main goal in Brazil will be to talk to as many people as I can.  As beautiful as sights can be, the people that take you to those sights are way more exciting.  That’s why it’s an adventure…

P.S. I can’t wait until I can post some pictures from an internet connection in Brazil!  Oh, and location update: We’re sailing up the Amazon River as of a couple hours ago…it’s so wide I can’t see either side, but the ocean water and river are mixing different colors.  It’s kind of cool.