Jump into Spring

The rare scarlet macaw

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Brazil and Peru
Former GORP editor Marcus Wohlsen once visited the Amazon on his spring break. "The most powerful impression that comes back to me is just how overwhelmingly lush the rainforest was—literally buzzing with life everywhere you went, and the vegetation impenetrably dense," he remarks.

During the spring, snowmelt from the Andes floods large expanses, creating channels called igarape. Freshwater dolphins follow river fish through the channels, eventually reaching interior lakes. And in the jungle lakes, stained black from fallen leaves, the dolphins will playfully swim with humans. The dolphins are called pink dolphins, and frequently they are, but sometimes they tend toward gray. They're smart, at least as smart as the well-known marine bottle-nosed dolphin. These animals were the subject of a book by Sy Montgomery called Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest. You can read about it, but why not do it for real?