Advertisement
Published: April 4th 2011
Edit Blog Post
The Pantanal, one of those things that I am glad I did, but will never do again. The pantanal is a swampy area full of animals and lots of insects. We decided to do a three-day two-night tour. The first day it took us a while to get out there and we didn’t arrive until dinnertime. When we got close to arriving we learned that the pantanal has been flooding and we had to take a boat to our campsite. This consisted of fitting ten people in a tiny boat and having a guide try to push us through the water. When we finally arrived on our island we had dinner then went out for our first adventure, a night boat ride. During this ride we saw many different kinds of animals including alligators, or caimans as they call them here, deer swimming in the water, and many different type of birds. Also our tour guide spotted a baby alligator in the water and snatched it up with his bare hands!
The next day we headed out for our day trek, but they forgot to mention to us that because the pantanal has been flooding we would be hiking in waste
deep water with the alligators right next to us. As you can imagine we were all a little worried we were going to get eaten by something out there(The pantanal is also home to giant anacondas and jaguars). It turned out we were all Ok and we saw may different types of animals on our hike. Some of these animals include wild pigs, monkeys, more alligators, lots of birds, and some other animals that I have never seen before and forgot their all their names. Strange mammals is what we will call them. Or rat/pigs, anteater/bears, and things of this sort. Also lots and lots of mosquitoes. After our hike we went back for lunch then took another boat ride, again seeing many animals. During our boat ride our guide took us to a swimming hole to cool off. Only a couple of us got in the water but it sure did feel good, despite the threat of piranhas coral snakes and other deadly creatures.
On our last day of the tour the water was really rising and our little island we were camping on was getting smaller and smaller. This also raised the problem of all the spiders and
insects were moving in closer and closer to us because there was no land for them to be on. A large scorpion was discovered basking under someone's hammock. We were happy to be leaving that day, first of all because we were tired of the mosquitoes and spiders but also everyone else that was planning on staying another night was getting evacuated. There as nothing else to do in the pantanal because there was to much water. The ride back was an adventure in itself. The road was so flooded that the truck we were in was half way covered most of the time. Also there were bridges that were completely underwater and starting to break but we had to trust that they wouldn’t break and push on through. We made it out only to find that all the other tours had evacuated the same day and the only bus for 5 hours ws full. So we waited on the side of the highway in the blistering heat, followed by an intense swarm of mosquitoes as the sun went down, for the next bus to come. Thank god someone was selling beer in the middle of swampy nowhere. We had
a great time but were very happy to leave.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.172s; Tpl: 0.02s; cc: 11; qc: 52; dbt: 0.1177s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb