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friend, and I made it through in 45 minutes. Well, we'd been there many times and it has to be said we were the world's worst art lovers.
One more Dave Coleman story. We were on a Seabourn ship going up the Amazon and we stopped in Belem, Brazil. We didn't know it, but Belem was a tough town with a very poor population and lots of crime. Smart tourists research these things, Dave and I just hopped off the ship and started walking. We always walked in any direction hoping to find adventure or at least a coffee shop.
So we walked for awhile and we noticed there weren't a lot of people on the sidewalks. It was very quiet. Suddenly we were surrounded by four guys, one of whom had a rusty old kitchen knife about 10 inches long. When I later told the story on stage, that knife turned into a razor-honed machete. They started going for our pockets and Dave was fighting them off. I realized this was a really bad idea and told him to just give them the money and we did. Then, like smoke, they vanished.
A few seconds later a woman drove up and said she saw what had happened. She drove us to the police station. They asked us what the muggers looked like and we were useless. We had no idea what they looked like. We agreed they weren't Asian. The police rolled their eyes.
The lady gave us a ride back to the ship and once there we discovered we weren't the only victims. Other crew members had gotten robbed, with some of them forced to lie on the ground while the muggers took everything they had.
Ah, but there was one bright spot. On board the ship we had a security officer who was kind of a dick. He was a retired British cop and he bullied the crew. Definitely a dick. Well, he was standing beside the ship taking video and a guy raced up, ripped off his gold watch, jumped into the river and swam away. It's not often you root for a thief, but this one had a lot of fans.
Let me be clear. I worked the ships for twenty years and loved all the ports, even Belem. I walked everywhere and only felt threatened two or three times. You can get mugged in the U.S. just as easily as any other country in the world, so take a trip. See the world. It'll blow your mind.
On another trip up the Amazon, Paul McFarland and I found a guy with a boat who promised to show us piranhas and black caiman crocodiles. It was a great tour. We fished for piranhas and that is a whole new ballgame. You know how you normally fish? Where you sit quietly in the boat and try not to spook the fish? Piranha fishing is just the opposite. You bait the hook with meat and then swirl it around in the water. The piranhas attack and you yank the hook out with a piranha attached and flip him into the canoe. Then you dance around trying to get