After a gruelling 27 hours of travelling and 4 airports, I arrived in Manaus. A 20minute boat ride and one brief dolphin sighting later, and we arrived at the Eco lodge, where we were greeted with welcome drinks and shown to our room. After some lunch and a shower, I headed out to start my first tour of the trip – to see a local Amazonian tribe.

The tour began with a 45-minute ride down the Rio Negro on a two-storey boat. The scenery was stunning. It’s hard to express the scale of the river, especially when you consider that it is just a small tributary of the Amazon itself. Where exactly the river ends and the land begins is difficult to tell, as the trees at the edge are partly submerged. On past a strange contrast of ram-shackle huts and expensive condos, we finally arrived at a small patch of shore slopping steeply up into what appeared to be dense forest. A few meters through the trees though, and I found myself standing in a large wooden hut, with a dried-grass roof. Inside were a small tribe of authentic Amazonian people. Dressed in grass skirts, with red face paint forming dots and lines across their faces, they proceeded to demonstrate a series of traditional dances with traditional musical instruments. For the final dance a few of the men in our tour were selected, adorned with elaborate headgear made from grass and feathers, and asked to join in. To my dismay, although not total shock, not long into the dance, the tribes men came over to select some women to join in as well, and before I knew what was happening, I was being dragged to centre stage to join in with the dance, which seemed to consist of a mixture of a conga line and the hokey-kokey. If you had told me this morning if I would have been getting up and dancing a traditional tribal dance, I would have thought you were crazy.

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