A few days ago, I woke up to find a surprising "Friend Request" in my Facebook account. Twenty years ago, I was a Rotary Foreign Exchange Student in Brazil. The request was from one of my "sisters" in the first family I stayed with. I've always regretted that I'd fell out of touch with the people that I met when I lived in South America. I see the request as a chance to reconnect with some of those people, and am very thankful that the opportunity presented itself.

This is a camping site, though, right? The contact reminded me of a camping trip that I took when I was in Brazil.

This is a twenty year old memory, and when I went to my journal, it wasn't very helpful (wish I'd been a more prolific writer back then).

I'd only been in Brazil for a couple of months. My language skills were conversational, and I was approaching fluency. I recall knowing that we were going "fishing" and a large group of guys piled into a bunch of vehicles and drove for about 8 hours. The vehicle we were in was a "Veraneio" and it was probably the first "SUV" I'd ever been in.

Anyway, the drive took something on the order of eight hours. All I knew was that we wear heading somewhere called "Pantanal." Turns out, the Pantanal is an amazing place - 68,000 square miles full of largely undisturbed habitat. It's a flooded grassland that is home to everything from piranha to crocodiles. During the trip, we fished for piranha -- they're unsurprisingly easy to catch. We started with some bread and rolled it into little dough-balls. The balls were put on hooks attached to the end of bamboo rods. Essentially, you drop the baited hook into the shallows and small fish eat it. You watch and then snag the little "bait fish." Once you have a few of those, you can cut them up to catch slightly bigger fish (e.g. piranha), or hook them whole and go for the really big fellas. For dinner the first night, we had tons of small (6-8 inch) piranha over the course of a few hours. There were a few men who took the time to gut them, then slice them into pieces. The pieces were fried, making the bones brittle enough that you could chew them.

The part that I remember clearly from that trip was when my "grandfather" - an elderly japanese-brazilian - decided to head off to the weeds to go to the bathroom. As he was coaxing his bladder into cooperation, a lizard (or so I thought at the time) came walking up the bank of the river. Di-Chong, as I called him, was just starting his business, when the 4-foot-long crocodile got to within a few feet of him. I think they surprised each other, because when he stomped his foot to scare away the animal, it stood up on all four legs and hissed. Fortunately, the event turned out to be a non-issue. Di-Chong zipped up and turned around. The crocodile bolted, and we enjoyed the rest of the evening sitting around the campfire, playing music and weaving fish-stories for future generations.

The other pieces that I remember from the trip is bathing. The people I was with -- most of them with a strong Japanese heritage -- felt it was important to bathe every day. At home, not really a problem, but on camping trips I usually forego my daily shower for an occasional swab-down with a washcloth. Since we were near a river, it might make sense for someone to hand me a towel and a bar of soap and tell me to go ahead and take a bath. Imagine my surprise when someone does this and points to the spot in the river where, only a few hours before,  we were fishing for Killer Piranha From Outer Space -- or something like that. The soap and towel came with a warning -- don't take off my underwear or pee in the water. Fortunately at the time I didn't have enough Portuguese to understand exactly why, but I picked up enough information about some sort of worm going places that I didn't want it to go that my bath was both quick and largely uneventful. I do recall the little "bait fish" I mentioned earlier nibbling at my bare skin while I was in the water. A little unsettling the first time, but once you get used to it, not alarming in the least. They're just little fish, after all. Perfectly safe.

Oh... a few hours after I finished my bath, we realized that there were several crocodiles in the brush near the side of the river.

So, the "fish story" that gets spun out of this trip: When I lived in Brazil, I once took a bath in man-eating-piranha-infested waters, swam with the crocodiles, and watched a man get nearly eaten by a twelve-foot croc.

Ed and Cho would be appalled.