A production team of five people, including director Graham Booth and producer Honor Peters, traveled by bicycle taxi, motorbike taxi, leaking canoe, riverboat, cattle truck, subway, helicopter, a selection of small planes, minibuses and taxis, and spent more than 800 hours flying to bring Discovery Atlas: Brazil Revealed to life.

Honor Peters writes:

When Leti, an assistant producer, and I were scouting the regatao story in the states of Amazonas and Para, we struck gold in Abaetetuba, home of many of the remaining 50 regatoes. We were taken under the wing of local businessman and head of the chamber of commerce João Basilio, known to his friends as JB. Early one morning, he took us to the quayside and showed us around the market, where boats from miles around arrived before dawn to unload an incredible profusion of forest products — fruit, vegetables, woven baskets and towering stacks of fish traps. JB introduced us to the different regatoes, including the charismatic Caneta, star of our film.

Of course, being a local business man, JB was most keen that we sample the best of everything Abaetetuba had to offer. The town's most important product was a palm fruit called Miriti. The Miriti palms grow in profusion on the islands around Abaetetuba, and the harvest passes through the market and out to the rest of Brazil. It's such an important commodity that the town has an annual Miriti festival, complete with a queen of the Miriti. The fruit is beautiful to look at — the size of a golf ball, with a shiny, deep purple skin of textured scales concealing a thin layer of vivid orange flesh, which in turn envelopes a large pit. But JB felt it wasn't enough for us just to see this fruit piled up on a market stall. It was also imperative that we try it in its most delicious form. This turned out to be a kind of porridge, in which the oily flesh of the fruit is boiled up with millet, water and salt to make a hearty, warming breakfast the color and consistency of lumpy carrot soup. Stall holders on the quayside ladled it into calabashes for the hungry traders to gulp down, and very healthy and happy on it they looked, too. JB was determined that we should try the best Miriti porridge available, so we hunted through the market for a shopkeeper who made it in gleaming stainless steel buckets. Generous helpings were ladled into plastic bags, which were knotted shut, and then we were rushed post haste back to our hotel so we could enjoy it in style. We sat in the hotel breakfast room, and the nourishing, steaming porridge was poured into what seemed like very big glass bowls. Particles of matter rose and fell on gentle convection currents as we looked on, a cold sweat developing on both our brows. We had no choice. It was the local delicacy. We had to try it.

There are really no words to describe the sensations endured over the next few seconds. A sense of terrible desperation and discomfort at the discovery that something made from fruit could be so completely un-fruity — so oily, so starchy, so salty, so completely unlike anything I had ever tasted before. We tried to be brave. We tried to disguise the taste with other foods. We tried distracting poor JB and ladling it out the window. But after a couple of spoonfuls, we had to surrender, trembling and nauseous, and confess that this local delicacy was not exactly to our taste. The disappointment was written all over JB's face. Still, he cheered up when he told us that at his restaurant the cook made a dessert, a cocktail and a fish dish with Miriti, and we were bound to like one of them when we tried them that evening.