by Mary Jo
I'm madly trying to finish this year's book, Once a Laird, so I'm invoking Wenchly Privilege to rerun an older post. Since currently travel isn't happening, I thought it would be fun to go with one of my earlier travel posts, and cruising on the Amazon seems delightfully distant and exotic. So here we go! (The colorful straw frogs to the right were centerpieces on the dining room tables.)
These days when we talk about Amazon, we're probably referring to the mega-selling online site, but after visiting the real Amazon, it was easy to understand why Jeff Bezos chose to name his company after the mightiest river in the world.
The longest river in the world can be disputed–just exactly where do the headwaters begin?–but everyone accepts that the Amazon River is the largest river in the world.
Statistics abound: the water flow is greater than the next seven rivers combined. The world's largest drainage basin by far. The estuary at its mouth is 150 miles wide. The Amazon Basin includes parts of nine different nations. No wonder it's sometimes called the "River Sea."
The Amazon is a distant place of jungle and danger, myth and mystery, and Sean Connery movies. Naturally the Mayhem Consultant and I wanted to visit. <G>
For several years, I eyed an Upper Amazon cruise offered by the partnership between Lindblad Expeditions and the National Geographic Society.