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Posted from: Krinu
We've arrived at the Kayapo village of Krinu. It's my first time staying with an Indian tribe. We got here at dusk, a magical time for the light, catching the straw and wooden huts on the outskirts of the vast dusty circle they're arranged around. It's an impressive space.
Posted from: Maraba
Bruce joins the government anti-slavery unit on a raid...
Posted from: Maraba
So I turned 35 in the third most dangerous city in Para State. Twenty deaths per weekend apparently. I dread to think what happens in the first and second place town! We were hoping to celebrate my birthday at the local Forro dance. But every time we asked someone where the best forro in town was, they'd shake their head and look away. Strange, we thought. Still, we persevered. We were determined to dance.
Posted from: Maraba
Nothing like lunch with a cowboy to take women's lib back a few centuries...
We had a 10-hour drive ahead of us - along the Transamazonica, a 2,300 km long dirt road that stretches between Amazonas and Para state. It was meant to have been paved but like many ambitious constructions in Brazil, investment abruptly came to a stop and things have just remained as they were for the past 36 years.
Posted from: Altamira
There's a real buzz around town at the moment. One thousand indigenous Indians have just arrived on a fleet of beaten-up buses for a massive protest against a proposed dam on the Xingu River. It's amazing to see all the warriors in full tribal costume hanging around town. Both men and women carry machetes or clubs, and as we discovered on the first day of the protest they are not afraid to use them.
Posted from: Altamira
We've just spent two weeks filming in Altamira, a cattle and logging town on the Xingu river. The day before leaving we had the afternoon off and we set out on a group shopping trip, making an instant beeline for the best cowboy shop in town. The shop had a full size plastic horse on the pavement outside and inside was packed from floor to ceiling with everything you need for life out on the range. The shelves were brimming with stirrups, spurs, lassos, saddlebags, chaps, boots, hats and buckles and the whole place had a comforting smell of dust, leather and polish.
Posted from: Altamira
We are filming in an area called The Middle Land in the Brazilian state of Para, a lawless frontier zone where the battle for the Amazon is at its most intense. Land-grabbing is rife here: false documents, intimidation and violence are the methods used by the land-grabbers, who force communities off their land at gunpoint and lay claim to their territory. The winners in this conflict are some of the wealthiest landowners in the world, pulling shadowy strings behind the gangs of 'pistolieros'. The losers are the forgotten poor, thrown off their land, ending up in slums on the outskirts of towns and cities.
Posted from: Altamira
We've been filming soy ports today, used by some of the largest cultivators of soy in the world. The cultivation of soy in the Amazon has been blamed for being one of the biggest factors in the deforestation of the Amazon. It comes a close second to cattle ranching.
Posted from: Altamira
It was looking grim. Heron, our French Sound Recordist, has the most wonderful sense of humour. He has kept me in stitches for days. It was looking grim because at this moment his humour had been replaced by a growl that only a Frenchman can growl. All I had done was sink our crew 4x4 up to its axles in sand - having just crossed a river via some bits of wood cunningly disguised as a bridge.
Posted from: 2 hours drive from Altamira
We had an amazing day's filming yesterday. We flew by helicopter over the forest with IBAMA, the Brazilian environment police, looking for evidence of illegal logging activity from the air. Forty minutes after take-off we were staring down at a beautiful tract of pristine rainforest, chequered with large rectangular clearings where illegal loggers had plundered mahogany and other protected hardwoods. Dirt tracks cut gashes through the landscape, leading down to the Xingu River where the logs were shipped out to be milled and planked for export.
Bruce discovers an illegal logging haul with IBAMA
Find out more about deforestation.
Posted from: Altamira
Bruce treks on horseback to another farm...
Posted from: Altamira
We are in cattle country. In this part of Brazil, vast areas of rainforest are being cleared to make way for cattle pasture, as thousands of entrepreneurs flood into the area taking advantage of cheap land and good rainfall to make very healthy profits. The cattle industry is booming here, making Brazil the biggest exporter of beef in the world.
Posted from: Near Santarem
We're travelling down the Amazon River. It's dusk and pockets of sunlight shoot out from the clouds. As we travel downriver, we see the ribeirinhos, the families that live at the edge of the water, in their small wooden houses, always two or three cows and never less than five children running around.
Posted from: LBA Research centre, 2 hrs north of Manaus
During one of the Seven Days, God decided to get to grips with planting trees. He spent most of the morning sprinkling a few here, and planting a few there. He covered most of the world with them. Then He looked at Wales, and decided to make it even more beautiful by fiddling a bit with the coastline around Pembroke. On his way over, he dropped the half-used packet of assorted tree seeds all over the Amazon. Hence the Amazon has more than its fair share of trees - in fact, one hectare of the Amazon contains more species than the whole of the North American continent.
Posted from: LBA Research centre, 2 hrs north of Manaus
It's 7:30am and I've already had one of the most exhilarating and terrifying experiences of my life. If I do nothing else today I will still go to bed with a feeling of accomplishment. I could probably be a bum for a whole month and feel no guilt. I have enough adrenalin in my veins that if I was so much as to sneeze right now my constitution might go into overdrive and start fitting with anaphylactic shock. I know that's medically inaccurate but it sounds good.
Posted from: LBA Research centre, 2hrs north of Manaus
Finally we'll spend some time in the jungle. There is nothing like to be feeling all the heat and humidity amongst the trees, getting dirty observing and being observed by other creatures. I LOVE IT! My friends some times make jokes calling me the jungle queen. I wish!
Posted from: LBA Research centre, 2 hrs north of Manaus
Very exciting, we are hitting the end of our journey and this morning we've headed north of Manaus to a Biological Reserve, called Cueiras. It belongs to INPA (National Institute for Research in the Amazon). Here the LBA (The Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia) researches the interaction between the Amazon forest and the regional and global atmospheres.
Posted from: Largescale Biosphere and Atmosphere (LBA) Research centre, 2 hrs north of Manaus
Rigging the ropes for a 45m climb
Bruce is with two 'arbonaughts' (expert tree climbers James and Ollie) from the UK, trying to get a rope into the tree so he can spend the night up in the canopy.
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Bruce Parry, presenter of the 大象传媒's Tribe, travelled the length of the Amazon to film a major new series for 大象传媒 Two, shown in autumn 2008. You can relive his journey online through exclusive blogs, video and much more.
