Number 29.
Lontras!!
Floating down the Sucuri River, we watched the fish through the second clearest water in the world.
I was also nervously looking for snakes, as we had just been told that ‘sucuri’ is the Portuguese word for ‘Anaconda’.
“Lontras!!”
At this Portuguese word, my head instinctively lifted out of the water and through my snorkel goggles I could see a swirl of beautiful fur playing in the water by the river’s edge.
I ducked back into the water, and for one brief wonderful moment, I could see the two of them playing.
Then in a whirl of white water, they were gone.
All my life I had dreamed of seeing these in the wild.
“You’re so lucky!” shouted the guide from the boat. “I’ve been a guide here for 20 years and I have only seen otters 5 times!”
Welcome to 140 Word Tales
140 words. Is it enough to really capture the essence of a story?
While others appreciate twitter and the immediacy of tweeting, to me 140 characters rarely seem sufficient to truly convey the weirdly wonderful and the wonderfully weird world in which we live.
However there is certainly something refreshing in having to distill a tale down to its essence. Stripping away the unessential, until the brevity and the clarity lets the narrative breathe.
Maybe in 140 words we can convey the quintessential core of the anecdote.
So, let's see what I can tell you about real events from my life. All the 'who, what, where, why, when'; all the emotions; all the strangeness, the silliness and the significance; all within 140 words.
Welcome to 140 Word Tales.
