New house

This post is a bit out of sequence I'm afraid, but I'm going to have to go in a moment and have no guarantee of when next I'll get internet access, so here's the latest...

Cutting a long story short, we finally took the plunge and bought a house. It was over our original budget (nothing new there then), and not precisely what we were looking for (ditto), but we both loved it the minute we saw it. After some strategic toing and froing and some reasonably hard bargaining, we got the price down from R$290,000 to R$200,000 with an air-conditioner thrown in(!). I don't have any pics yet, but will endeavour to post some in the coming weeks or months. For those who like google earth, you can get a clear picture of the site (it shows the original house, bottom left, and oubuildings, right) at 3 deg 1 min 36.11 sec South/60 deg 4 min 30.04 sec West. It belonged to a vet, and the outbuildings are actually kennels. A new house was built on the site of the old one, and a swmming pool (yay!) added in 2003. We hope to move in tomorrow, so more on this later.

We've also placed an order for a small 6m powerboat (bote - as per awful pic), which should be ready by the end of the month. We've had no luck so far with the floating bar - there are currently no available boias or floats in the area we want to place the bar (3 deg 49 min 13.13 sec S/60 deg 22 min 17.95 sec W), meaning they would have to come over 100km by river from Manaus. Eek. Still looking, but if we don't find something this month, the water may be too low for us to get the boias across, meaning a delay of almost a full year. Keep you posted.