The following morning I met up with the rest of the group, and we set off on the long journey to the Ecological Expeditions camp in the southern Pantanal. There were just five of us on the tour - myself and two British couples. They were Sean and Jo from Birmingham, and Gary and Michelle, two students from Belfast who, thanks to their out of date copy of Lonely Planet, had greatly underestimated the cost of travelling in Brazil and were facing serious money problems.
We arrived at the camp at about 4:30pm, and there was nothing planned for that first evening, so our three-day tour had already turned into a two-day tour. What did I say about getting what I paid for? After dropping our things off in our sleeping quarters (hammocks again) and taking a brief look around the camp, we walked down to the river just beyond the perimeter of the camp to watch the sunset. We then relaxed in our hammocks until dinner, which was actually pretty good (a typical Brazilian buffet of chicken, spaghetti, rice, beans and salad), after which we all got an early night. It was a surprisingly cold night too, considering it was 35C during the day.
The next morning we were woken early for breakfast, and then set off for our first bit of wildlife spotting, which was on foot, although we first had to be driven for about half an hour in a jeep to the start of the walk. In the vehicle with us were a group of three Chinese tourists who'd arrived the day before us, and one of them was carrying an extraordinarily large camera lens. I'd never seen anything like it - it was nearly a metre long. I don't know why he didn't go the whole hog and bring the Hubble Space Telescope along with him as well.
Actually that kind of camera equipment might have been useful, because it was pretty hopeless trying to take pictures of wildlife with my tiny point-and-shoot camera. Anyway, even from the jeep we saw some animals, including a hawk and some otters, and there were some good views of the Pantanal wetlands (below).
Where we went for the walk was a lot drier, as you can see here. We walked around the grassland with our guide, Gabriel, for about 2½ hours, and we saw quite a few more creatures, including macaws and monkeys (I can't remember what kind), and we also had a very close encounter with a caiman, as you can see below.
It's currently the dry season in the Pantanal, and the water was either very low or completely dried up in most places. Gabriel told us that this walk is a very different experience in the wet season, when it sometimes rains non-stop for days, and the water level can be up to three metres higher than it is at the end of the dry season. During the wet season we'd have been wading through chest-deep water, which can be a bit risky, as Gabriel explained. He told us the story of how on one such walk, an Australian tourist was bitten on the leg underwater by an anaconda, which then started to wind itself around the man's body (anacondas aren't venomous, but they're constrictors, so this is the way they kill their prey). Gabriel managed to get the snake to let go by stabbing it with his knife, and in the end the man was lucky to survive with just a nasty wound to his leg.
After the walk we returned to the camp for lunch, and then after a few more hours' lazing around (the best use was definitely not being made of the little available time), we set off for our second and third activities, which were a boat trip followed by piranha fishing. On the boat trip we saw plenty more wildlife, including more otters, a family of capybaras (the largest rodents in the world), and also a frog that hitched a lift on our boat.
But beating all of that, we spotted a jaguar, which Gabriel told us is a very rare sight (he said he sees on average about one jaguar a month). It was only visible for about twenty seconds, and was quite a long distance away, so I completely failed to take a photo of it. However, Jo did manage to take a video of it, and for what it's worth, you can see it below. I should warn you that the video's pretty shaky and not exactly professional quality, but it's better than I managed, and I think it does at least prove that there was a jaguar there.
Shortly afterwards, Gabriel stopped the boat to allow us to do a spot of piranha fishing. I didn't catch anything worth keeping (I clearly had beginners' luck in the jungle in Ecuador), but some of the others did, and we ended up with five or six fish that were prepared for dinner that evening.
The following morning we again set off early for our final activity, which was a jeep safari. Calling it a jeep safari makes it sounds like we were driving around the wide open plains following animal tracks, whereas in fact all we did was drive up and down one very long, straight road and look for any wildlife that happened to be sitting by the side of it. In fairness that's all it's really possible to do in a jeep in the Pantanal, because you can't go off-road on that kind of terrain. Anyway, we did see a few more animals, including some toucans, a kingfisher with a fish in its mouth, and hundreds of caimans. The reason there were so many caimans in one place is that they live in water, and there's not much of that around at the moment. Gabriel said that just a few days after we were there, that river would also dry up, so they'd be forced to move on, possibly into the Paraguay side of the Pantanal.
We were back in the camp for lunch, and that was pretty much the end of the tour. We just had a couple more hours to kill before we caught our transport back to Campo Grande. I'd say that overall it was a reasonable tour. It was very disorganised (for some reason Gabriel didn't seem to be able to tell us until the very last minute which activity we'd be doing next), but I think we did see as much wildlife as we could have expected to see, and with one very big bonus, which was the jaguar.
I've now entered Paraguay, so this marks the end of my time in Brazil, at least temporarily, because I'll be coming back when I go to Iguazu Falls next week. I've spent six weeks in Brazil, which have been by a long way the most expensive six weeks of my trip (I don't want to know how much money I've spent on bus tickets). But it's been worth it, because the highlights (Jericoacoara, Rio de Janeiro, Ouro Preto, São Paulo), as well as the people I've met along the way, have definitely made Brazil a contender for my favourite country in South America.
No comments:
Post a Comment