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Published: August 15th 2007
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When we first started this trip, we fully expected to lose things. Most importantly, we wanted to lose our too-structured, over-stressed, over-worked lives. But we also knew that we would lose the occasional jacket, ipod or sunglasses. The thing that we did not want to lose by any means were those things that could not be replaced, like our memories and our pictures. Which it why I was so upset when we lost our camera in Macau and thus, all our New Zealand and Australia pictures. And then this website went offline and we nearly lost all our blog entries. Thankfully, we didn´t. Mostly due to the hard work of my friend, Wayne, who managed to recover the entries from the ether. Anyway, this is a long way of explaining that this is going to be a lengthy entry and I´ve learned my lesson to back up all my files.
Poor Niagara
Upon first seeing Iguazu Falls, Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly lamented, "Poor Niagara."
We agree.
How do you even describe a place where you take 200 pictures in a day and can´t bear to delete any? And anyway, no picture or pictures can quite capture the majesty
and wonder of this place. It was the same with Machu Picchu and Milford and Doubtful Sounds. Each of these places made us feel like we had been transported to a different world.
Like the family in Land of the Lost. Or Jurassic Park.
Iguazu Falls is a gallery of waterfalls--some wide and thundering, others narrow and elegant--running along the side of a mile or so long canyon. It´s in a tropical climate so the canyon is lush and green. Then there are the resident rainbows that appeared in every picture we took. It was really beautiful.
What was not so beautiful was the unusual cold spell that we brought with us from Buenos Aires. I admit to experiencing a small amount of satisfaction hearing Peter scream bloody murder when he discovered the hostel he had booked for us didn´t have hot water in the mornings. And even greater satisfaction when I discovered that they turn on the hot water for evening showers!
And, of course, the 20 hour bus ride there was just peachy. The bus driver decided that he needed to play all of the music videos from the ´80s during our trip. It
took me 2 days to get Wham´s "Wake me up before you go-go" out of my head.
Pissing Off The Natives
Our first stop in Brazil was the Pantanal. What is the Pantanal?, you may ask. We asked the same thing.
The Pantanal is the coolest place you and I have never heard of.
It´s a wetlands half the size of France. Half of it is in Brazil and the other half is in Bolivia and Paraguay. The wildlife viewing is spectacular. Unlike the Galapagos where the animals are just sitting there waiting for their photo op, though, you kind of have to crash through the jungle to see the wild pigs, tapirs (largest mammal in S. America), monkeys, caiman, giant guinea pigs (lucky for them there aren´t any Peruvians around or they´d be bbq), giant otters, snakes, and about a million birds. We did a couple of night walks through the bush and it was great in a I-hope-I-don´t-step-on-a-snake kind of way. We even spent an extra night trying to track down jaguars, (according to our guide, we had a 60%!c(MISSING)hance of seeing one) but ended up only seeing an ocelot, which is kind
of like a giant, ferocious looking housecat. For a city girl, it was a whole new kind of living.
Anyway, the point is that it´s usually pretty difficult to get the animals to come to you. Unless, of course, you speak their language.
So, we´re in a canoe in the middle of a large lake trying to fish for pirahna with our guide and two German tourists. Let me tell you, those little bastards are smart. I mean the pirahna, not the Germans. In theory, the piranha, having smaller brains than we, were supposed to eat the meat we had hooked to our fishing poles and thus, get caught. In reality, we would bait the hook, put it in the water, feel the line jerk and tug as they fed, and then pull up a totally clean hook out of the water. The bastards! It was more like serving the pirahna lunch than fishing.
That´s when we saw the giant otters. And they were giant. About the size of a seal, but with incisors at least 2 inches long. Our guide starts making this noise.
Bwaaawaaawaaawaaaa. At first, we all look at each other like,
Okaaay, Santos Caimans
These guys are really scarey, especially when they´re in hiding and only their snout shows and a tell-tale movement of water. At night, their eyes glow red when you shine a light on them. has lost it, we´re stuck on a canoe in the middle of a pirahna infested lake, and they are in a feeding frenzy below us as we speak. Greeaat.
But then, a bunch of other otters start circling our canoe. It was like an otter biker gang. They began to shriek,
Bwaaawaaawaaawaaaa. This roughly translates into "You sh*theads! We´re going to f*ck you up! Who the hell do you think you are?!" Basically, they thought we were challenging them to a rumble on the playground after school. It went on for a while. The five of us would scream,
Bwaaawaaawaaawaaaa. And the otters would swim furiously around our canoe, hissing and spitting,
Bwaaawaaawaaawaaaa. I felt like I was in the middle of an episode of "When Animals Attack!" and Westside Story. Eventually, we began to lose our voices and they figured out we weren´t really otters out to poach their territory. It was an anticlimactic ending to what could have been an epic inter-species battle.
But now we know how to piss off a giant otter. That´s one for the resume.
Also, our guide in the Pantanal was a crack-up, he would bounce into his samba routine
Stork in the Pantanal--One of Many
These storks stand about 4 feet tall and have a wing span that is about 8 feet wide. When they take off, you hear this "Whooomp, whooomp, whooomp" like a miniature helicopter. at all times of the day and night, pick-up large dead snakes, or do one of his crazy ass bird or mammal mating calls, all starting at 6am. Needless to say, he quickly learned which of us were not morning people. The saving grace for Peter was the copious amounts of great coffee, though after seeing the state of the guide, he avoided the four spoons of sugar that Santos added to his espresso cup. Peter was also quite happy with his multiple Caipirinha's (the local jungle juice).
Twitching
Our next stop in Brazil was the Amazon jungle. I made sure to plan this part of our trip as I did not want to allow Peter to go cheap on our accomodations in the jungle. Cold showers are one thing, but sharing a tent in the middle of the jungle with snakes, spiders and all sorts of poisonous creepy crawlies is not something I was going to let happen. So I booked us into a nice jungle lodge in the middle of a 1700 hectare private reserve abutting a much larger national park in the Southern Amazon. We only had electricity from sundown to 10:30 and shared the
Crazy Caterpillar in the Amazon
You know this one is poisonous because it has no need for camouflage. grounds with a tarantula and some coral snakes (poisonous) among other things that we didn´t spotted. There were a surprising number of toucans, macaws and monkeys in residence near our lodge and in the trails we hiked. And about a million bugs, some of which were wildly technicolored and others that were just bastards. There is a really horrible picture of what my back looked like after I had a run in with some sand flies and ticks. I´ll spare you.
But the most bizarre animal that we encountered was the twitcher. I didn´t know what they were either. Twitchers are birders who have
pagers that alert them to rare bird sightings all over the world. They then get on a plane to try to see these birds, most of which are not all that interesting to look at. Anyway, these twitchers would get up before dawn every day (waking us up in the process) to try to catch a glimpse of some bird called the brown headed, beige chested, boring tree bird or something like that. According to Peter, only the British could have come up with this hobby and these kinds of names. It makes you want
to sleep in.
All in all, it has been a wild couple of weeks in Brazil. With Rio and Salvador coming up, it will only get wilder.
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hui
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hate u both
i'm in seattle for a conference and reading your blog and looking at the pics MAKES ME JEALOUS! SIGH! i'm glad you're having fun while the rest of us slave in the real world :( can't wait for the next entry!