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    On the Amazon: Diary of an Irish Emigrant
    On the Amazon: Diary of an Irish Emigrant
    On the Amazon: Diary of an Irish Emigrant
    Ebook75 pages45 minutes

    On the Amazon: Diary of an Irish Emigrant

    By Keir Farrell

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    About this ebook

    Two Irishmen, one canoe, the Amazon rainforest. What can possibly go wrong?

    Find out in this true short-story prequel to the 'On the Amazon – Diary of an Irish Emigrant' books.

    When I was persuaded to take newly-arrived Frank on a simple sightseeing canoe journey into the Brazilian Amazon, I believed I had everything under control. All we had to do was buzz around for a few days on the river, admire the wonders of the rainforest, and head home for a cold beer. When we lost our water and sank the boat, it got a little more complicated...

    'It's not my canoe, amigo' recounts a trip I made not long after first moving to the Amazon. I was young and inexperienced... and I had Frank. Frank came to Manaus looking for an easy escape from a not entirely successful career as a salesman in Belfast. His detailed plans covered drinking and womanising in great detail, but largely ignored the challenges of finding a job and learning the language. He was good company on a visit to a bar. On a trip into the interior, maybe not so much.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKeir Farrell
    Release dateJun 13, 2016
    ISBN9781311752451
    On the Amazon: Diary of an Irish Emigrant
    Author

    Keir Farrell

    Keir Farrell was an accountant in his previous life in the UK. He has now spent 26.31% of his life in Brazil, teaching, translating, writing and showing people the wonders of the Amazon while trying to avoid an untimely death.If he can sell enough books, he still hopes that someday he will make it back to civilisation with his wife and son.

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      Book preview

      On the Amazon - Keir Farrell

      On the Amazon

      Diary of An Irish Emigrant

      It’s not my canoe, amigo.

      by Keir Farrell

      Dedicated to Naice and Aaron

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      On the Amazon series

      Author’s note

      About the author

      Acknowledgements

      Copyright

      Chapter 1

      The Anavilhanas

      2° 58.260’S 60° 37.053’W

      ’

      ‘So what do we do now?’ Frank whispered across to me, before vomiting over the side of his hammock. ‘God, I dunno what’s wrong with me.’

      ‘You’re dehydrated, you tosser,’ I told him. I was not in the mood to be any more gentle. Although his dehydration and sunburn were entirely his own fault, I was lumbered squarely with the problem of how to cope with the situation.

      ‘Oh yeah? Shit. How come?’ He groaned and turned to face the other way.

      I ignored the question. He would be asking the same thing again the next time he came to life, and I had other things to worry about.

      It was now completely dark – dark as only the rainforest can be on a moonless night. We were lying more or less uncomfortably in our hammocks. These had been slung on the veranda of a hut in a settlement of caboclo ribeirinhos on the Negro River. The term ‘caboclo’ describes someone of mixed Brazilian Indian/European blood, and a ‘ribeirinho’ is simply someone who lives by the river. We did not want to be here, and had stopped at the village only after Frank had become ill and we ran out of daylight in which to navigate our underpowered wooden canoe.

      If we did not want to be here, it had become equally clear that we were not particularly welcome, and our continued presence was being tolerated only for the prospect of the use of our canoe for fishing. I did not like it, but I felt powerless to do much about it. Frank was immobilised, and I was negotiating alone with five or six drunken, aggressive guys who insisted that I either lend them the canoe or…well, or something.

      ‘The canoe will be okay,’ they kept saying. ‘We will catch a lot of fish, and you will be free to go.’ They wanted to know what my problem was. ‘Qual é seu problema, gringo?’ they kept repeating, looking angrily at me and waving their arms. They were not remotely interested in my protestations that the canoe was not mine – ‘a canoa não é minha, amigo’, I had insisted – maybe because their notions of property were different from mine, maybe because they were drunk and it suited them. It was, nonetheless, quite true. The canoe and motor had been lent to us by my friend John Harwood, and on our short odyssey up the Rio Negro, I had already contrived to sink it once, and to lose John’s beautiful brass compass in the process.

      Now these people were demanding the use of it to go fishing on the river all night, so that we would be ‘free to leave’. And what the hell did that mean, anyway? The whole group of guys walked across from the table near the tree where they had spent all night so far. I levered myself out of the hammock and stood up as they approached. The smell of cheap rum was strong, and one of them carried a half-empty bottle of the local cachaça in his hand.

      Decision time.

      Chapter 2

      I first came to live in the Amazon when I was young, free and freshly divorced, and still had

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