Day 10. The Big Tree.

In the morning we woke up and got straight back on the boat and rode it for about two hours to our starting point. This gave us sometime to have a lesson and discuss some of the things we had seen the past few days. Once we arrived in the next community we trekked out towards one of the biggest trees in the forest. When we got there we took a ton of pictures and videos and even did the wave around the tree holding hands. I forget how many people it took to go around the tree, but it was quite a few! On the way back, our guide for the day showed us how to weave a basket out of palm leaves. We also saw things like bullet ants, leaf cutter ants and a huge moth that landed on Isaiah's backpack. The trek wasn't very far today again because we had to get back for a BGAN call. The very end of the hike was on a dirt road that led us to a school building next to a pavilion. After the 3rd and final BGAN we answered some questions that had been submitted onto the website. It gets kind of tedious because the same questions are being asked again and again like "what are you eating" and "what animals have you seen". After that we had to wrap up our Gatorade questions with an overall topic of hydration and what you will take back from this experience. I had a hard time with this because I didn't drink that much Gatorade at all. I put about one scoop into my bottles in the morning just to say that I had Gatorade (just not a lot of it... :) ) Even without the Gatorade I felt like I had enough energy to get me through the hikes. I did rely on the Gatorade bars though. I used the bars as my lunch and energy booster and they were perfect. They always settled my stomach if it was growling in the middle of the day. I don't think I'll start drinking Gatorade in the near future, but Im going to for sure invest in some of those bars. After the all the technical stuff was done we had to wait for Hannah and Shirley to get back. While we were waiting we had to say bye to the Bomberos who took such good care of us and became great friends. It was sad to see them go because they were with us from the start and although we couldn't always tell them what we wanted because of the language barrier I felt like they always knew what we were thinking. It's crazy how talking with your hands can help a conversation along. We got some pictures and they even gave us a Brazil flag to keep. Truly great people and we were sad to see them go, but they hadn't seen their families in over a week so they needed to go home. Once we got all packed up we headed back to the boat showered up (or rinsed off atleast for me) and brought our hammocks out to the last community we would be sleeping in. They made us fish and rice, of course but also they had a select few pieces of chicken that was delicious! Some good conversations happened over dinner and it was sad knowing that the expedition was coming to an end. After dinner we strung up our hammocks for the last time and dozed off. We were able to sleep in a tad bit longer today because we weren't trekking anymore. The next day was going to be dedicated to taking pictures and travel back to Santarem.