After ten days in the Amazon, Alex Gallafent headed back to Boston. During his stay in Brazil he visited the Manaus opera house, and a fish market in the city's center. He flew to Urucu, an oil and natural gas facility some 400 miles west of Manaus. Alex also talked with a representative from SUFRAMA, the organization behind Manaus’s free trade zone, the principal motor of the city’s growth in the last few decades, and met with a member of the Amazon’s indigenous communities. Check out his videos below and stand by for his radio reports soon to be heard on The World!
Follow his whole reporting trip at theworld.org, where you'll find his blog, photos and videos. Also... read live updates from Alex via twitter (see twitter box right).
Alex Gallafent at the Cuieiras Biological Reserve in the Amazon
A passenger seat view of the approach into Urucu, an oil and gas facility in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon.
Guitar shop
In Manaus, Brazil, disadvantaged teenagers learn to make guitars from sustainable Amazonian wood.
Amazonas fish market
The fish market in Manaus, Brazil is a riot of sound, color, swishing knives and.. well.. fish.
A ride to the Cuieiras Biological Reserve
Brazilian scientist Alessandro C. De Araujo drives through the Amazonian rainforest to reach canopy tower K34 in the Cuieiras Biological Reserve near Manaus.
Amazon creepy-crawlies
A couple of critters on the road to the Cuieiras Biological Reserve, outside Manaus, Brazil. First, an armored spider. Then, a long earthworm.
An audio snippet:
Dan Nepstad is a tropical forest ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center. Here he remembers his first encounter with the rainforest.
So, that’s that. I fly back to Boston today (Wednesday), arriving in the early hours of Thursday morning. I’ve been here ten days, but it feels like much longer - and much shorter. The day...
A trip to the moon today. I was at Urucu, an oil and natural gas facility some 600km west (and south a bit) of Manaus. It sits above massive reserves of natural gas, and smaller fields of high-quality...
Just a short update tonight, I’m afraid. I’ll be up again in about six hours to go to the airport. Not to return home - that’s on Wednesday - but to catch a flight to Urucu. It’...
Amazonas State has a big ticket project to curb deforestation. Trees aren’t cut down here to the same extent as they are in, say, Mato Grosso (where soy is a passport to profit) - but even so Am...
I’m trying to get stuff out as soon as possible, but video production is slow, slow, slow. At least, it is if your laptop has a habit of seizing up and your expertise is negligible. (These thing...
I’ve been trying to formulate an accurate (albeit subjective) answer, but it’s a tricky one. The truth is that it doesn’t really smell of anything, or at least of anything that I can...
Here’s a nice moment from yesterday, when I met a group of local musicians. (I’m being secretive about them at the moment so that I can save some good stuff for a Global Hit on PRI’s...
I’m here in the Brazilian Amazon for PRI’s The World and the BBC World Service. But BBC colleagues are currently in another extraordinary place: Chomolungma. Sagarmatha. Mt Everest. (The...
[Thursday note: the people have spoken. Trout mask replica it is and shall remain. By the way, I learn that one of the principal sources of food for your average tambaqui is fruit that falls into th...
Just a little thing, something that was playing in a cab here in Manaus. You should recognise the song in seconds. Apologies for the scratchy audio - a problem with the settings on my mini recorder, n...
Here’s how it goes. You get the Brazilian cellphone. You get the cellphone to work. You get the cellphone to work with Twitter back in the States. And then you go and visit somewhere where there...
Just back at the hotel from my first interview of the trip. It was with Marta Cunha, Amazonas coordinator for the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a civil society organisation affiliated with the Catho...
Turns out I’m not the only US-based journalist in the Amazon. (It’s OK, I didn’t really think I was.) The NY Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof is in Ecuador. He’s got a g...
Today’s goals were pretty modest. Get my bearings. Get a cellphone. Get some clean clothes. But really, the day’s been all about getting online. So much of the rationale for this trip is r...
I’m so close. Coming in to land at Manaus - a couple of hours ago - it was a game of ‘imagine the rainforest’. I knew in advance that the Miami-Manaus flight arrives past midnight, s...
Here’s three minutes with Chris Woolf, News Editor for PRI’s The World. Chris oversees the various ways the show keeps tabs on its reporters when they’re out in the field.
Mobile po...
The other thing about lists (and there must be a law of lists somewhere) is that they seem to be self-sustaining. I’ve written so many lists in the last week, trying to think of everything I nee...
Clark is the Technology Correspondent for PRI’s The World. He’s also responsible for our weekly Tech Podcast. I’m taking a fair bit of recording gear to the Amazon - stay tuned for a...
I start taking my Malarone tablets tomorrow. I’ve not taken them before so I hope I don’t suffer any adverse reaction. I know people have had trouble with other anti-malarials, but this on...
I leave for Manaus on Saturday. I’m not an expert on Brazil or the Amazon. I’ve never been south of the Equator (this trip will just tip me over the edge). And I hope to bring something me...
I’m relatively new to the reporting game, and one of the curious relationships you find yourself trying to develop is the one you have with your fixer. A fixer, basically, fixes things. Not in t...
Manaus is a city of two million people, sitting slam bang in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. Manaus is the capital of Amazonas State, Brazil. I sat down for a chat with the Governor of Amazona...
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