On the Road: Week of March 22 (5 am)
Albatrossity – Brazil 2010
way2blue – Logar valley (Logarska Dolina), Slovenia
?BillinGlendaleCA – The Brand Family Cemetery (IRChrome)
Steve from Mendocino – Shape Studies in Black and White 2/2
Mike in Oly – Waterfalls of Western Washington
? And now, a treat from Albatrossity!
Holy cow! One of the perks of doing On the Road is that I get to pick the favorite photo that will show up on social media. For this one, I thought “that’s the featured image!” no fewer than 4 times. Wow. ~WG
Albatrossity
Brazil is a country that is much in the news today, and usually for all the wrong reasons. Pandemic mismanagement, virus mutations, rainforest destruction, and a president whose behavior is making all of that worse. But it is a lovely country, and so I thought I should share some pics from the time I have spent there. I hope to go back someday; we had plans for summer 2021, but somehow that didn’t seem prudent when the time arrived). So for now, these pictures will have to suffice.
I was fortunate to accompany a university Study Abroad class to Brazil in 2010, 2011 and 2013. We visited several different parts of that large and diverse country, but every trip included some time in the Amazon rainforest, centered around the city of Manaus, the capitol of the state of Amazonas. The 2010 trip, in fact, was entirely in that region. Here are a few images from that year’s trip.
Manaus is located at the junction of two major rivers, the Rio Negro and the Solimões. The former is a warm tropical river, flowing from Colombia southward into the rainforest. It gets its name from the fact that it is a blackwater river, acidic and full of tannins leached from the leaves of the tropical forests through which it flows; the water is the color of weak tea, but otherwise very warm and clear. The Solimões, on the other hand, originates in the glacial melt of the high Andes. It is much cooler and full of sediments washed off those mountains. From Manaus you can take a boat trip to the Meeting of the Waters, where the cold sediment-filled Andean river meets the warm clear tropical river. These disparate waters flow side by side for many kilometers, barely mingling. Here is a shot of the river as we approached the Solimões from the Rio Negro branch.
On The Road – Albatrossity – Brazil 2010Post + Comments (23)