My grass bed had been comfortable up to the point when the sky decided to cry, just a few tears but enough to make me crawl underneath the Iveco. The morning activities were; everybody prepared some kind of food for breakfast, 2 tables were placed in between 2 vans underneath a plastic cover that had been tightened at the roof of each of the 2 vans. Within 20 minutes, the table turned into a self-serve breakfast bar of a 3 to 4 star hotel. The table looked very nice and the food looked delicious, too bad that my stomach did not think the same and left my eyes and my brain suffer for the next 20 minutes until the brunch was over.

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Everything felt like Sunday, family Sunday, Picnic Sunday; it actually was Sunday and we decided to walk down to the waterfall and do some washing, swimming, refreshing. The fever was coming back again and I forced myself to walk the next 2 kilometers down the hill to the river and the waterfall, straight to the end of the recreation area and straight into the river to cool my body and wash myself. The water was perfect, not too cold and crystal clear, slowly running and my spot was perfect, knee deep, a stone to stand on and a tree to sit on.

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The recreation area was not too busy and the locals did their best to impress us Gringo’s with their performances, their jumps into the river just where the waterfall hits the water. We sat lined up on a tree and were watching the little chubby one, the little skinny one, the mid-size well-trained one, the older tall one jump forward, backward, from the stone, from the root and finally from up the tree into the water. They must have known perfectly well the depth of the river; still their skills were amazing up to unbelievably dangerous when the mid-size well-trained one climbed high, high and higher into the tree and jumped backwards from kind of 5 meters into the water of maybe maximum 2 meter depth.

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The only thing the river did not have was a comfortable place to lay down and I wanted to lay down, I felt another wave of fever coming  and wanted a comfortable place to rest. I walked back to the entrance and lay in the grass in the shade of the vans. Less than 30 minutes and the others were back as well, Yonathan needed to work on the motor of his van and Christian needed to prepare his van for their journey; they had decided to go back to Manaus and try to take the ship to Belem that was scheduled to leave on Wednesday. Everybody was busy in his routine, mine was resting and hoping the pain would disappear and the fever lower.

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In order to be 100% prepared and have all documents Ana wanted to go to the center of the city to find a cyber and print out the insurance policy. Claudio joined in; we all tried to hitchhike down to the center and actually already the third car stopped and we had a lift all the way to the main square. The cyber was open and both Ana and Claudio went in, I bought a bottle of Coca Cola and waited outside on the main square on a bench. The time was up but the paper was out and we quickly had to buy 1 sheet at the supermarket. Done. As easy as it had been to come down to the center the more difficult it was now to go back, actually impossible. After an hour, I decided to split the group, leave the group and walk back, up the hill, along the houses with the Sunday evening church ceremonies and their music. The church music was all over the city, more present, more frequent and much louder than party music on a Saturday night. A quick dinner, it was late and everybody was tired and everybody went into their van, except me, I went under the van.

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