We woke up at 6am to have a light breakfast and headed out to pick up some church friends: Beto and his 2 sons, Tobias and Mateos. They followed us in their car, and true to form I soon fell asleep in the car. We arrived to Brotas and drove around a little bit looking for the place we wanted. We soon found it and got all the payments and waiver settled.
After that we got outfitted in water-proof jackets, life-vest and oars. 
We drove in a van to the actual river. Once we got there we got instructions-a basic overview of the commands we would be using. By the way, did I mention all of this is going on in Portuguese? yeah...The instructor told us what to do if we fell out of the raft. I got the basic idea from his body motions and sort of put that together with my past rowing experiences, hoping that would suffice. Let's just say I was planning to hang on for dear life so I wouldn't have to find out. After that we piled into the boat to practice our commands. These were the basic commands we had to remember: frente (forward), re (reverse), piso (floor), segura (hold on), direita (right), esquerda (left). I tried my best to memorize them, the only hard part was I had to listen extra hard while at the same time watching everyone else and at the same time actually DO-ing the commands. By the first rapid I was ready to go. We pulled our boat over to the side and got out. Then we linked arms to make a chain and walked back up to the top of the rapid. From here we all got to "swim" down the rapid. It was so cold it instantly took my breath away. Once we got to the bottom of the rapid we had to quickly swim to the side where our boat was to avoid being swept away by the river. This proved to be difficult what with my frozen limbs, and also for the fact that I am not a strong swimmer.
After that there were a few more rapids to take, along with some fun-we went "surfing" on the rapids. Basically, this is where you row directly into the bottom of a rapid and it sort of pushes you down so that you can stand up and "surf" on the water rushing into the boat. Very cool!
Whenever we'd get to a slow patch of water I felt like we were on the jungle cruise at Disneyland. I kept waiting for the hippo to rise out of the water and our guide to pull out a fake gun. To my dismay it never happened, but it was fun nonetheless.
Towards the end of the trip our guide started to give what seemed to be lengthy instructions about something coming up. When he finished I waited for someone to translate...never happened. So I asked Ernie, "what'd he say?" To this Ernie replied, "don't worry about it, it's a surprise!" This "surprise" turned out to be a 15 foot waterfall-thanks a lot guys!
At the end after we got out we got to eat sandwiches and yogurt while we dried off in the sun. There was also a large jug of "pinga" (alcohol made from sugar cane). I'd heard about it, and figured I might as well try it. It was what is was, but at least now I can say I've tried it.
They made us a cool cd of all our pics, so many that I've made a slide show of it rather than try and upload them all.
On the drive home we stopped in Jau-a really cool mall with tons of shoe shops with great prices. There were so many shoes! I tried on a few, but was more interested in the experience of it, rather than buying, so I went home empty handed.
We got back to Bauru and rested while watching 24. We then decided it would be a perfect night to go to the all-you-can-eat pizza place since we'd gotten such a great workout earlier that day!
The pizza choices were pretty amazing. Here are all the ones I could remember: margherita, fish, mozzarella, mozzarella with garlic, corn, arugula, sausage with onions, hamburger, 4 cheese, this brasilian soft cheese, and ham.
My favorite were the brigadeiro pizzas: Chocolate, banana and cinnamon, chocolate with strawberries, and chocolate with coconut = CRAZY DELICIOUS!!
so basically the eating of yummy pizza was the perfect end to a perfect day of fun. And this is just a picture of Ernie modeling Brasilian pay phones.
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