Next - the Pantanal! Colin and I got a May 18th flight to Cuiaba for relatively cheap, so we decided to see if we could get into the famous swampland of Brazil through the northern gateway. The city of Cuiaba was also the exact center of South America, which is kind of an interesting side-note! There is not too much Cuiaba can brag about besides these two points, as our ventures around the city did not yield much for tourist interest. Our first night we checked into a youth hostel, Pantanal Backpacker Hostel, but we soon realized the owner was having a party for himself and his friends. This wasn’t so bad, but after a couple hours of blaring music and kids banging on our window and doors (all the rooms were right next to the party area) we had had enough and found another (cheaper, and much nicer) hotel online, so we grabbed a taxi to - Hotel Almanara.
This is where we relaxed for the next few days. Since we arrived in Cuiaba just a few days before Colin’s birthday, I needed to plan something awesome for him! While he stayed in the hotel and did some research on possible Pantanal tours (which was not easy - there are tons, and they are all way overpriced due to low competition!) I went out on May 19th to plan his birthday. While I just went to the mall, I took quite a while there preparing Colin’s presents and although Colin knew I was out he began to worry since I was gone all day... as a result of my delay Colin got to have a night out riding around in a Brazilian police car! I had already hopped a taxi back to the hotel by the time everyone had figured out I was at the mall. But I was gone all day for good reason! May 20th.
We had a relaxing morning, followed by lunch at a nearby per kilo place called Alex’s, before taking a taxi to a mystery location! For Colin’s birthday, I had found a place called DaPelle Spa nearby with a great deal on a couple hours of special treatments - including a special foot treatment, full body massage, and a facial with a bright red ‘wine’ mask. He didn’t know any of this beforehand, and he was really excited when we showed up. See in the pictures for yourself! While Colin was being pampered, I was secretly working with the girl at the reception desk outside to acquire a birthday cake for him. It’s really not easy trying to plan a last minute celebration in a new city that has so few English speakers, but we spent ages going back and forth on Google translate planning out his cake delivery to the spa. Once Colin’s treatments had finished we had to stall him a bit with cups of tea and relaxing in the spa area until the cake arrived! The receptionist had thoughtfully arranged for her friend to pick up the cake and bring it to the spa for me, so I slipped into a back room and collected the cake while Colin waited for me to pay for his spa day.
After a trip back to the hotel to change into nice dress, we went out for a special birthday dinner I planned for him at a local fish restaurant, Peixaria Popula. This funky yet upscale place was impressive from the moment the taxi drove us up to it - glass windows filled with moving bubbles and changing, colorful lights covered the front of the restaurant. Once inside, we laughed at the numerous caiman statues standing or in pose playing musical instruments. Everything about the inside of this place was themed for the waters... even the bar resembled a ship! Although I’ve always been a bit suspicious of fish (we didn’t eat much of it when I was growing up) we decided we had to try a piece of Brazil’s famous ‘monster fish,’ one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, the pirarucu. This fish is super freaky-looking... it even has teeth on its tongue it’s so scary! I’m not sure exactly how big the one we ordered was, but they can grow more than 6 feet in length and generally live in the flooded forests of the Amazon region. Soon our fish came - on huge pieces of fish on a giant stick! When I first bit into the fish I was pleasantly surprised! It tasted nothing like fish in my mind - no fishy texture or flavor at all. In fact, if someone had given me a piece without telling me it was fish I would probably have never guessed it was fish at all. It tasted more like a soft chicken, really juicy and wholesome - almost like a steak. Colin said it reminded him of swordfish (which I’ve never tried) so I’ll have to give that a try sometime. Yum! A delicious new experience.
After dinner and a few more photos, Colin received some presents when we got back to the hotel, which I’ll let him take over to tell you about!
Colin:
After a lovely spa massage and surprise dinner, I was excited to get three other presents when we got back to the hotel. This first was a beautifully written card from Francesca. The second was a surprise birthday cake – Francesca told me later that she had picked it up from the spa and bought it back with us, secretly, to put it in the fridge in the room. The cake was amazing – she had even got us some candles to put on it. Well, I say candles, they were actually sparklers, which made me slightly nervous about lighting them in a hotel room! Anyway, we put them on the cake and lit them one by one – they were very pretty, and Francesca even sang Happy Birthday to me! The cake was a real heart attack cake too. Cream, on chocolate, on more cream, on chocolate cake, on dulce de leite, on more chocolate. Delicious! Francesca was still bringing the plates for the cake when I realized I had already taken 3 bites – yummy!
The real surprise was my third present. Warning signs on the box told of danger inside – an exploding box! With trepidation I gingerly unwrapped the box, expecting a pop-out snake or something to appear. Instead, I was delighted to see a hand-made craft box (blue and cube-shaped) that Francesca had designed and put together herself! All the sides of the box unfolded to a flat shape, with three flaps for each side. On each flap was a photo of me, cut out and mounted on various colored cardboard, with a handwritten explanation of the photo. All of the photos were of me during the time of our relationship – some from my last birthday – flying a plane, or on the London Eye, or visiting Francesca’s family in Florida, when we went to Gatorland or went to a gun range! Many of the pictures were from our recent adventures in Brazil, on the Amazon, or in Rio. It was great to remember all the mad, crazy adventures we have both been through together over the last year and a half.
I really love my exploding box – Francesca had spent the whole day working on it – sourcing the materials at the mall, sorting through all of our pictures online and printing them off at a photo lab (or for what passes for a photo lab in Brazil). She even roped the photo lab assistant to help her for hours cutting out the cardboard, and measuring the box with precise instructions to make it all fit together. The box itself has a lid which exactly fits over the top of the rest of the box – it is so well made, and the whole idea was Francesca’s! Thanks baby, I really loved my birthday. We are both going to send the box and my card back to England so it does not get damaged whilst we are travelling! The cake, however, is long gone – slurp!
After Colin’s birthday we still didn’t quite know what to do for the Pantanal. We tried to book a one-day tour, but the company ended up not showing up, so we decided to grab our stuff and head to the bus station for Pocone, the city closest to the Transpantaneira Highway, one of the best places to see wildlife within the Pantanal.
On May 21st Colin and I spent the whole time attempting to research, plan, and book something for our trip to the Pantanal. I realized there is not much information online, especially information warning about certain difficulties. We ended up going to the Northern Pantanal and seeing a ton of animals. I do however have some suggestions out there if you are planning to go and don’t know what to do.
My recommendation for doing a trip to the Pantanal is the following:
1) If you have lots ($1000+ p/p) of expendable cash, you can do an organized tour out of Cuiaba into the Northern Pantanal (down the Transpantaneira Highway) or out of Campo Grande into the Southern Pantanal towards Corumba aimed at seeing jaguars in the wild (but unlikely outside of June-September to see jaguars) and other animals. If you can’t afford to spend at least 3-4 days during these months doing this at a typical cost of $250+ per person, per day - forget this option! Remember, seeing elusive animals takes time and luck, so if you can’t afford to spend the time, the more likely you are to be wasting the money. See jaguars in one of the rescue parks in Brazil or in the wild in Guyana where they are plentiful and spend the big cash on another area of your trip.
2) If you are on a budget and totally comfortable driving in foreign countries/down somewhat crazy roads (remember, stress doesn’t make for a great experience so be sure!) you can rent a car in Cuiaba and drive to Pocone (you can’t rent cars in Pocone) then drive down the Transpantaneira Highway (a highway loaded with tons of wild varied animals all along the road) all the way to Porto Jofre and back, staying in any of the Pousadas along the way or one in Pocone. The drive takes 4 hours to the Highway’s end, 4 hours back so you’ll likely have to spend $250+ on ONE night in a Pousada along this highway unless you make it back to Pocone the same day where you can find accommodation for $45 per night. This would probably be the option I’d recommend if you’re OK with driving from the city of Cuiaba to Pocone, then down a bunch of rickety bridges along the Transpantaneira Highway. To save the most money, do a couple days driving yourself up and down the Transpantaneira Highway and back, staying each night in Pocone. If you leave Pocone early for Porto Jofre, you can do a boat ride down in Porto Jofre and try to see jaguars in the wild on the cheap.
FORGET taking a taxi in Pocone, you’ll only get frustrated and ripped-off, and be on someone else’s time. (You want to stop and take time to look at animals, don’t you?) Moreover, don’t go to Cuiaba or Pocone without a PLAN. The Southern Pantanal has the SAME animals and is MUCH cheaper than the Northern Pantanal! Forget about weather, they are similar despite time of year.
3) If you are on a budget and NOT comfortable driving, you can get a one day tour in Cuiaba down the Transpantaneira Highway to the Mato Grosso Hotel (halfway down the Transpantaneira Highway) and back for $125 p/p OR you can go to Campo Grande and do an organized tour from there into the Southern Pantanal for $50-$75 per person, per day. (You won’t see jaguars doing this, but you’ll likely see most of the other animals you want to such as giant anteater, jabiru storks, capybara, rhea, etc.) Remember, one day tours won’t give you much time to see animals - but to see the Transpantaneira Highway is worth it even if its just one day due to the wealth of animals along it. To get more bang for the buck though, a multi-day tour from Campo Grande is the way to go. But if you plan to go on to Bonito, don’t fret too much, you can spot all the same animals there as well - though they aren’t as concentrated. Taking all this into account, I hope you have a great time if you go! Here was our adventure, which started when we left Hotel Almanara the morning of May 22nd.
Expecting to take a one day trip through a tour company, we got all our bags packed and waited early that morning ready to go - except the company ended up standing us up. Bad luck, but we decided we had enough of sitting around in Cuiaba and left for the Pantanal anyways via a bus to Pocone, the jumping off city. It took 4-5 hours, but we arrived fine and Colin found us a place to stay which seemed pretty nice and was even cheaper than our hotel in Cuiaba. Once we were settled in there, we struggled a bit after hopping a taxi into the city and asking around only to discover there were no cars for rent nor tours operating from Pocone. The only option would be to take a taxi into the Pantanal along the Transpantaneira Highway. Alright, we were up for it! In between me running across the street to order some dinner for delivery to our room, we managed to get our hostel owner to call a driver for us. We agreed and wrote down that we would pay a driver $205 Brazilian Real to take us for one day up to Pantanal Mato Grosso Hotel, about halfway down the Transpantaneira Highway.
The next morning the driver showed up on Brazilian time (this means 1.5 hours late) and we renegotiated with him for $180 Brazilian Real for the day - we had already lost some of the morning which is best for bird-watching so we thought this was fair. For some reason, we ended up being driven around for a while before switching drivers (his friend ended up taking us, who was there negotiating with all of us the evening before) then finally heading off for the Transpantaneira Highway.
As we drove into the Pantanal we were able to see everything come alive with life. When our taxi drove past, birds flew everywhere around us - all different kinds, literally hundreds of different kinds of birds from the tiny cute green parakeets to the massive and scary jabiru storks. Within just half an hour or so of driving we had seen a toucan flying through the air, 4 Hyacinth macaws chasing after each other, scarlet macaws, green parrots and parakeets, green kingfisher, greater and snowy egrets, hawks, snail kites, and a bunch we couldn’t even name. There were also caiman absolutely everywhere, you didn’t even need to look for them – they were almost like pests, there were so many of them lounging in the water-filled swampy holes on the sides of the roads. These holes were originally dug to help built the highway that was going to cross the Pantanal, but because of environmental reasons the highway was halted and the holes left over from the construction became human-created watering holes for Pantanal animals.
Once we got to the Pantanal Mato Grosso Hotel, Colin and I signed ourselves up for a boat journey and a horse ride through the swamp and grasslands. The boat journey we went on straight away, with our boat driver taking us down the river next to the hotel to get a better look at the wildlife. I finally got a somewhat decent photo of a green kingfisher here (which constantly eluded me in the Amazon) and an iguana! There were plenty of other animals along the river as well – monkeys included. We even got to see one of the creepy jabiru stork up close! (I was really scared of them – they have these massive beaks that look like they can pluck your eyes straight out! Pure evil.) These storks are massive birds which can be about the same size as a rhea (around 5 feet tall), although the rhea looks far less intimidating in my opinion due to the jabiru’s black beak which is sharp and up to 14 inches in length. They use these beaks to scoop up fish, amphibians, and even reptiles or mice, which they eat with the help of their bright red neck pouch from which the bird gets its name from the Tupi-Guarani word meaning, “swollen neck.” I think they’ll always freak me out…
The driver grabbed the piranha and showed us its teeth, then showed us the power of its teeth! He did this by taking the fish and holding up plants, showing us how their teeth could slice through the branches and leaves! Once finished, we tossed the fish back in the water and made our way back to the hotel. 
While we really enjoyed the boat ride, it was quite commercial. What I mean by that is the hotel blatantly feeds the animals in order to keep them around the area – an unfortunate fact we didn’t know before deciding to book our tours. We figured it out when we saw them feeding a jabiru stork to get it flying closer to us and the boat as well as feeding the caiman surrounding the area. We got some nice pictures, but I fear what the hotel is doing and the effect on the surrounding wildlife…
Next up was our horse ride – which we didn’t realize was going to be a horse ride until we saw the horses! Due to our limited Portuguese, we actually thought we had signed ourselves up for a nature walk through the forest. Thankfully it was horses instead! One of the local cowboys came with a couple of horses and took us on an exploration around the area. While on the horses we saw huge nests belonging to the jabiru storks (like, massive nests more than 1 meter wide and 2 meters deep) and plenty of birds. There were some capybara around but we couldn’t quite see them through the swamp they were bathing in. The highlight of the horse ride was seeing a few animals that had been attacked by jaguars during the night! (Although Colin remains skeptical and wonders if the cowboys use the mangled animals to impress tourists.)
During the horse ride our cowboy stopped to show us one of the fruits hanging from a nearby tree. He sliced it open and took each of our hands, rubbing the pulp of the fruit onto the side. Nothing seemed to happen straight away – we looked at our hands, they appeared normal. Yet a day later I noticed something on Colin’s hand and asked him what it was. He didn’t know at first. Eventually we remembered what had happened and realized what the cowboy was trying to explain to us. Wait a while and a blue mark or dye will appear after you rub the fruit on your skin… neat!
Once we finished our ride through the Pantanal we were pretty hungry. Thankfully since we bought a couple of tours from the hotel they gave us a free lunch buffet as part of our package. We piled our plates with delicious meats in sauce and strange desserts (there was this pink jelly-looking thing I’m not even going to go into!) and feasted before walking around the hotel to explore the grounds a bit – they had some mounted caiman heads on the walls and a viewpoint tower around the back looking out at the area the jaguars were supposed to roam. It wasn’t night though, so little chance of seeing any of the big cats. We had spent the whole day around the lodge, so we asked our taxi driver to take us back towards Pocone, but to stop along the way for us to take photos and observe the wildlife. We were lucky to have left when we did because we saw a ton of cool animals!
The first spot was a herd of one of my favorites – the capybara. These rodents are the largest on earth and they typically travel in large groups together. We spotted one at first, but within a few seconds we realized there must have been at least 50 of the rodents all around the grass area, bathing themselves in the mud to cool off. It was so awesome to see so many of these cute fat little guys! Their name as well is from the Tupi language, meaning “grass-eater” and they are related to the rock cavies Colin and I saw in Fernando de Noronha. I read on the Wiki that these guys have a really crazy look about them – though we couldn’t see them in too much detail (they were covered in mud after all):
Capybara Wiki: “Capybaras have slightly webbed feet and vestigial tails. Their back legs are slightly longer than their front legs; they have three toes on their rear feet and four toes on their front feet. Their muzzles are blunt with eyes, nostrils, and ears on top of their heads. Females are slightly heavier than males.”
Sounds pretty strange! And despite their pudgy little look, they can run as fast as horses and keep themselves underwater for up to five minutes. Now that’s even stranger…
We drove only a little more before I spotted another interesting animal and shouted out to stop the car. I yelled the name before I fully realized that I was right about what I had seen. Off in the distance, which we could just see with our binoculars, was a large bird standing and looking at us. Another Tupi-Guarani word, this birds’ name “rhea” means “big spider,” because of their strange running style when their wings move like a jogger’s arms, moving alternatively. This bird can be around the same size, but sometimes larger than the scary stork from earlier – and these ones don’t fly. But they look far more friendly with their long graceful necks and large puffy feathers that look like a skirt around their bodies. Once we were back in the car we kept driving until we were stopped by some cowboys in the road. We had to pull off to the side because they had a cattle drive coming through in front of us! It was funny to see how confused the cows looked, and I counted my future cheeseburgers as they were herded into their nearby pen.
Once we got back to our hotel in Pocone, we went to get some change to pay the taxi driver when something strange happened – the first taxi driver, the one who switched on us that morning – showed up out of nowhere. I got the feeling we were about to be hustled… I was right. Despite writing everything down (prices, hours, distance, etc.) the night before, and then the morning of leaving with the drivers, they tried to charge us almost a third more than we negotiated with them. A totally rude and annoying interaction followed despite our evidence – I later looked up and read online that this is not uncommon… people unfortunately get ripped off all the time in this matter by these taxi drivers. As a result of the hostel owner (who seemed to be their friend and in cahoots with the drivers) being rude and demanding as well, we decided we’d be much better off leaving and going back to Cuiaba the same day. I packed up our stuff and we grabbed the last bus back to Cuiaba, getting away from the stress of Pocone rip-off artists…
The next few days were spent in Hotel Almanara waiting for our flight to leave and letting Colin rest as he got sick from all the dust in the Pantanal kicking up while we were in the taxi. Our flight was on the 28th of May, and we were glad to get out of Cuiaba. We did have a bit of trouble trying to get out (our flight was canceled in the small airport with no air-con and we were put on one leaving in the later afternoon instead of morning) but eventually we boarded our flight and arrived that evening in Campo Grande, the Southern Pantanal gateway. We arrived at the Hostel Vitoria Regia, where we were surprised to find we were their first guests – EVER. Cool! For this honor, we got special treatment and goody bags on behalf of the tourism authorities in Campo Grande. With some local crafts and liquor. Now that’s more like it!
There wasn’t much for us to do in Campo Grande outside of head to either the Southern Pantanal or to the nearby snorkeling hub of Bonito. Feeling like we’d had enough of the Pantanal, we decided to do a couple days in Campo Grande and then get ourselves in the water. One of the things we did in Campo Grande was pay a visit via the bus to the Parque das Nacoes Indigenas, where I read there might be capybara (a group of them live in the park) – and there were! Colin and I spent the morning walking all around the park, spotting birds, capybara, and people-watching. Since the park was nearby a mall, we decided to cool off our afternoon with a movie (The Hangover 3 was playing in English!) and a bite to eat in the A/C. We had our bus to Bonito booked for the next afternoon, so we could relax.
The afternoon (May 31st) we left for Bonito we walked down to the location of the train station to find some food stalls, but nothing looked great so we searched until we found a per kilo place instead. Before we knew it we were off to the bus station, then on to Bonito!
Talk to everyone again shortly!
Francesca
No comments:
Post a Comment