EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, we offer Part Three of a seven-day series on boat-related vacations that leave the steering, cooking and maintenance to somebody else. For more about this series and why we did it, please see the Room 13 blog.

The Rio Negro, I am told, is a river like any other. This is Brazil, so it is full of tropical fish. This is the jungle, so it's an air force base for brightly colored birds. Like the Amazon, which the Negro feeds into, it supports our boat.

But the Negro that I got to know a bit didn't appear to be made of water. Rather, it seemed a river of beer, lightly fermented thanks to the compost of leaves and insects along its banks. Drinking a glass wasn't that tempting during a weeklong cruise on the Tucano, a riverboat run by Ecotour Expeditions. Negro means black, and we get intimate with the river's cocoa richness when we take showers and brush our teeth.Peter MandelIn the foreground sits a houseboat made by locals, while our boat, Tucano, lies at anchor in the background.

Our boat trip into the jungle begins in the city of Manaus, where Plantation owners once tapped nearby rubber trees for their fortunes and gave the town dashes of elegance and art. The Tucano, which is moored here, looks like a model of a Mississippi steamer. A bath toy at first glance, it has room enough for nine elegant cabins that are paneled with forest woods and polished carefully with wax. I would see much from the deck of this boat, and even more from the canoes it dispatches.

There are many ways to get on the water, and not all of them involve sitting in the captain's chair. While we all love our boats, planning a vacation as a passenger this winter will allow you to travel to exotic waters while leaving the hassles to someone else. It's a strong antidote to the dreary, landlocked days some of us have in store.

To lend some inspiration to your planning, Mad Mariner is publishing a story every day this week that highlights vacations both exotic and aquatic - vacations to places like Brazil's Rio Negro.

UP THE RIVER

One of our guides, Edivam Regis, explains our route. We are heading upriver on the Negro because it is wilder and less settled than the Amazon itself. Guide number two, Alzenir Sousa, a local who was born in the jungle, goes to work in the dining room setting up what becomes a quiz about local vegetables.

A table is laid out with alien blobs, which have been picked from trees that we are floating past, and not one of us can guess the names. This red pincushion, says Sousa, contains a lychee nut. Whack! Sousa is correct. This bowling ball, Sousa insists, is in truth a pod of Brazil nuts. Crack! Like a piñata, nuts and shells spill out from inside.

The Tucans we saw on the Rio Negro were colorful and lean, like a beak with wings. The Tucano's two canoes are loaded up at 6 a.m. for our first morning ride. The sky is low and soft. Here, dots of insects buzz low and birds I have never seen make V's in the sky. A screech shoots from a palm where two birds have landed. "Festive Parrots," whispers Regis. "Festive," he says, "because of all this noise." Festive, I think, because they are a party green.

Over the canoes comes a flying rainbow. No body. Just a beak with wings. It is obviously a Toucan, though the guys who sell Froot Loops cereal got it wrong. On the box, the bird is fat and jolly. This guy is arrow lean.

Now come monkeys at the tops of trees and, spectacularly, there is a sudden blast of breath from near the canoe. A river dolphin pops up. It is pink as a sunrise and swims along with us back to the boat.

DOLPHINS OF PINK

That night Sousa tells us a story. It is dark on deck and there is only silence, his soft voice, and stars.

"The dolphin," says Sousa. "There is the gray one. And there is the pink like you see today. Nobody like the pink one. But they respect him. The Indians do not kill him, they do not eat him. This is like eating a person."

You can hear our breathing as Sousa explains. The Indians, he tells us, say this: "The pink dolphin can become a human. He will wear white clothes and a straw hat. He may appear at a party. He may come up on board."

We look around our circle, expecting to see dolphins in our chairs.

Days go by in a blur of animals and fish and trees. With leather puttees in place to ward off snakes, we walk on shore beneath a canopy of wild banana, kapok and cocoa. Sousa slices into a rubber tree, which yields white tears. A wasp nest hangs like a bell. Aztec and bullet ants work on projects. Mosquitoes whine. We slap and scratch.

When we go out in the canoe at night, our searchlight ignites animal eyes along the bank. "See that?" says Sousa. We see pinpricks of white, then shapes of wings. A bird. In another tree there's something coiled. A boa, fat and asleep on a branch.

Regis jabs his hand over the side: he's got a reptile prize, wet in the beam of light. A yard-long caiman. Firmly gripped behind its head, it is still and we take turns touching the skin.

FISHING FOR PIRANHA

Catching caimans is a guide's idea of fishing. For us, it's paddling at dawn with hooks and wooden poles. We putter around, hunting and fearing piranha (our bait is steak). Someone gets a strike. The line is bitten, but nothing is there.Peter MandelThe exotic can appear normal on the Rio Negro. After seeing pink river dolphins and black piranha (caught with cubes of beef as bait) this stunning jungle rainbow came as no shock.

Finally, we find fish. "I've got a big one," shouts Zona Hoffman from Needham, Massachusetts. Her husband stares. She's 68 and has never fished before. But Hoffman is right. She pulls up a black, thrashing piranha. It is maybe 10 inches long. Regis grabs it, flattens its gums and we see the teeth of a saw.

The next day, instead of dangling in bite-sized cubes of beef, we will be the bait. We land the canoe on a white sand beach. It is time for a swim. The water is still India pale ale. And we are wary, at first, of what is hidden in the river. The guides are swimming too. They tell us piranha will not like our size and our splashing. And slowly, like snakes uncoiling, we relax and stretch out.

We dive. We dominate the water. We do our floats and strokes. We are strong, we think. When sunset comes, we towel off, and have our dinner of fish. It is a night of river victory. Of confidence. Once the stars come out on deck we sit in silence in a circle. The jungle seems asleep. There is almost no breeze.

I do not know when I dropped off, but I dreamed of dolphins, gray and pink.