A closer look at a hacked-open Brazil nut pod. Stuffed inside each pod is 12-25 Brazil nuts, each in its own shell.

The nuts are high in oil, and will burn like a small candle if lit.  In addition to eating, the nuts are used for cooking oil, lamps, soap, and livestock feed.  We ate some, which were of course delicious.

We ate a rather enormous fish for lunch, a sort of freshwater bass.  It was delicious, as were all the meals at the Dolphin Lodge, tasty and satisfying after a morning walk through the jungle.

A couple of hours after lunch, we set out by canoe to try and capture a glimpse of the rare and elusive pink dolphin at Juma Lake.

We stopped briefly along the riverbanks to say hello to Mo's neighbors, who were building a new church.

Still venturing towards Juma Lake, at the convergence of two small rivers, Mo suddenly killed the motor again.  "Shhhhh....right there...."  He pointed towards a small wake, a disturbance in the water ahead.  "There is a pink dolphin there." 

We waited silently, drifting near the banks, excited at the prospect of seeing such a rare species of dolphin.

Suddenly, to the side of us, a pink dolphin surfaced unexpectedly.  I whirled to snap a photo.  It was the only time we saw a pink dolphin, so although the photo wasn't spectacular, I felt lucky to have seen it at all, much less photographed it.

The pink dolphin, or boto rosa, is a rare freshwater species of dolphin that lives in the Amazon rivers. A traditional Amazon River myth holds that at night, the pink dolphin, called an encantado, shapeshifts into a handsome young man who seduces and impregnates girls, then morphs back into a dolphin, returning to the river.  True story, or some guy's particularly creative explanation for knocking up someone's daughter?