March 18, 1998

It’s midnight March 18th, in the waiting room in Brasilia’s airport. Bright flourescents, dim faces. We’ve been on the road for nearly 36 hours—and we think we’re actually doing pretty well. The crew—videographer Scott Enlow, and NASA satellite experts John Diamond and Greg Kubat, are looking punchy after the overnight flight from Miami (and we’d all started earlier that day from Cleveland, OH, New Jersey and Nashville, TN.) If I looked in a mirror, I’d add myself to that list.

We’d gone through customs in Rio: lots of paperwork, but with careful preparation from our partners at NEON RIO (a film and TV company that specializes in supporting natural history projects in the Amazon—thanks, Flavio Somogyi and Dudu Continentino) all went smoothly—so smoothly, in fact, that we actually had a unexpected couple of hours to make it out of the airport and down the freeway to see the incredible views from Corcovado, the massive statue of Christ, with arms outstretched, which towers high over Rio. Expect some pictures of LFRF playing tourist in a future Journal entry on the Web.

Then it was back to the airport... back on board our jet, and off to Brasilia.