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Hey Guys,
Well we arrived in Campo Grande @ 7am and we´re booked for a 4 day Amazon Jungle excursion in the Pantanal by 9am so pretty productive morning to say the least! We can´t take all the credit since we were mobbed at the bus station, but we choose to go with the Hostelling International guys since the took us to there hostel gave us breakfast, let us use a room for an hour to shower after a long night on the bus so we were impressed. So at 10 we jump in the van for the 5hr ride into the Pantanal, once we arrived at our lodge we pretty much just hung out since it was late and waited for dinner. The Pantanal is the southern edge of the Amazon jungle and is the worlds largest wetland area covering over 70,000 square miles, these wetlands are used for cattle ranching by the local Gaucho´s(Cowboys) in the dry season.
The next morning we woke up to a cold and wet day to start our first activity which was horseback riding, I lucked out on this one too since my head is so big they didn´t have a stupid
hard hat/helmet for me so that was good, not to mention I had the best looking horse! Anyways the ride was pretty uneventful and we did not see too much wildlife except for some Macaws. The highlight of the ride was me getting bit by one of the other horses, luckily there was no damage done. He just came up and gave my thigh a little nip, by the time I realized what was going on it was over.
That afternoon our activity was our boat ride up the river, if the weather had been better this might have been more enjoyable but it was cold and damp😞 The river ride was ok we saw tons of Caiman which are the crocodiles little brother, literally the river is full of these things, also we saw Capybara which are the worlds largest rodents, these things were pretty funny looking, since they look like a giant ginuea pig. We also saw some monkeys along the way but by the end we were frozen and glad to get off the boat.
Day 3 started with some Piranha fishing, which since we had already done this in Equador we weren´t too excited
about, but once we got going we had a blast! We caught tons of fish and it is definetely crazy when you are standing on the river bank fishing completely surrounded by Caiman. We had a lot of laughs, I was the first tourist to catch a Vulture, the stupid bird grabbed my bait while I was taking a fish off Tyne´s line so I had to let go of the rod which he ended up taking to the other side of the river. Tyne lured a Caiman who was hiding below her feet on the river bank which was also pretty funny. After we had our fun of catching everything the river had to offer our guide cleaned up our catch to be cooked for lunch, then since we felt bad for the caiman we decided to feed some of them. This turned out to be one of my favourite activities because we got to grab them by their tails which was kinda sketchy but still really fun. We ended having the Piranhas at lunch, there really isn´t much meat on them and they are full of small bones, so we´ll just stick with steak. That afternoon we were
off for our Safari, we ended up driving further into the Pantanal then setting off on foot for a 2hr trek. The volume of birds we saw was quite impressive and we saw quite a few howler monkeys and an Amadillo which was really cool. The Safari concluded with our drive back where our guide tried to spot animals with his huge pit lamp but mostly we just saw a lot of eyes😊
Our last day of the tour was just a hike around our lodge, which was ok because we saw most of the animals at our lodge. The hike was ok but again just some monkeys and birds, the most impressive birds we saw were at our lodge there were 6 blue Macaws that lived in a tree there as well as two large red and orange ones. These birds were very beautiful, although it was very hard to get good pics of the blue ones as they did not like humans being near them. All in All the tour was good but nowhere near as good as the one in Ecuador, we definetely preferred the dense jungle as opposed to the wetlands.
Anyways we headed
back to Campo Grande that night and were supposed to board our longest night bus yet - 24hrs to Rio de Janeiro!! But we totally lucked out since there was a seat sale on flights for cheaper than what the bus tickets were and since we booked our tour through the hostel they gave us a free nights stay so we rested up and the boarded a plane to RIO!
Until next post take care
Matt & Tyne
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Angela Astles
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You and Birds Matt!!!
Hahaha - I almost fell off my chair laughing about the vulture . . . sadly it's not your first vulture attack while travelling Matt - remember the castle in France where you got bit as a kid? I do!!! Much Love to you both!!!