Amazon - Day 4, part 2

I'm not going to go through everyone we met, mainly because I can't remember them all, so I'll just mention a few of the people we saw.

One of the first houses we came to had a football goal outside made from branches, Steven walked over to the house and spoke to the woman at the door, he then called us over and said we could have a look inside.
Like most of the houses we saw in Puerto Nariño this one had a small communal room which you entered in to which is pretty much empty and off of this you had a few more rooms. One of the first things I noticed inside the house which was quite surprising was the wall, it could have been any bedroom wall of a teenage boy anywhere in the world. You travel half way across the world, fly in to the amazon, take boat to a small town of indegenious people who live a simple life and what's on the wall inside there modest wooden house, a poster of Davaid Beckham! After asking if it would be OK to take a photo inside the house I did, and as you can see, as well as pictures of women in underwear and Michael Jackson, there's a poster of David Beckham!

It was also here we found out that the things that the indeginous people had been selling are really made here and we found out what their made from. The eldest woman of the house later insisted on showing us all of the trees and plants where each part of the jewellery comes from as well as what every other three is used for, such as natural remedies for just about everything.

We carried on to the next little “village” and found a man making things out of bloodwood which as you'd imagine is a red wood that when polished looks likes it's been heavily varnished. This again helped to ease the thoughts I'd been having about the wares we'd seen for sale over the last few days, they really do make them and selling these things is an important income for these families.

At lunch the day before, we'd tried something called farinha which we were told is made from Yuca, it's about the half the size of rice and is rock hard! It made from ground yuca which is then toasted. I'm not fan but Marcela loved the stuff, in fact fish and farinha make up a lot of what the local people eat. The next place we stopped was at what looked like the largest paella pan I've ever seen above a fire (see photo, it looked something like this). Stephen took us over to it and we said hello to the family around it, Stephen then explained that they were making farinha. Whilst there one of their children came back snacking on a big bunch of grapes, Stephen grabbed a handful and gave us some, unlike normal grapes though these don't come from a vine but from a tree that he later showed us, despite this they look and taste very similar to normal grapes.


Our next stop was to the local nursery, we knocked on the door and waiting for a reply, the teacher opened the door and stood in the doorway, she was surrounded by about 15 children all clinging to her legs, they all had a worried look on their faces. Slowly they relaxed and went back to what they were doing. The reason for their behaviour was explained to us, when they saw me they assumed I was the doctor that visits every now and then to give them their injections!

We then headed back to the same restaurant we went to the day before for lunch, We had nothing planned for the afternoon but Steven said the day before that he'd take us out in a kayak so we arranged to meet up later on in the afternoon. After lunch we headed back to the hotel and had a sleep