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Published: March 25th 2008
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Mosquitoes. I have never seen so many before in my life! The Pantanal district can be a miserable place for gringos with white, susceptible skin, and Pete and I used an entire 250ml bottle of insect repellent in three days! Upon arrival in a tiny no-horse town we collected our bags from the bus and within two or three minutes (no exaggeration whatsoever) we were all covered with more than 20 bites each. I had enough foresight to stash the repellent in my daypack, so we made plenty of friends in a short time. I have never put Aerogard in my ears or between my toes before but I suppose there's a first time for everything.
A cheesy (but practical) open-air safari jeep was waiting for the bus and about 12 travellers (including Anne and Thiago from previous travels) climbed aboard. Once the jeep spluttered to life and started moving, the mosquitoes scattered for the time being and we had a chance to meet the people we would spend the next three days with. We were lucky to arrive on the same day as half a dozen other really fun people, which really made the trip worthwhile, especially Martin and
A Capybara
Pete making friends with the hostel's tame capybara. Valli, two funny blokes from Germany. It would otherwise have been a loooong three days of rice, beans, rain and mud.
Our first activity (a stay in the Pantanal seems to involve plenty of touristy scheduled activities) was a boat trip down the river with our assigned guide, Johnny. Johnny was a local guy from a nearby Indian tribe, so he was quite knowledgeable about the wildlife, perhaps a little too much so. At our first close sightng of a caiman (a relative of the alligator) he chased the poor thing and it nearly jumped in the boat with us! We then saw some giant sloths, and Johnny told us that they were 'very dangerous, they kill you but don't eat you'! We remembered that when we stopped in a safe, apparently sloth-free area for a swim. The mosquitoes and sloths were a little too much for us so we had another bath in repellent and sat in the shade.
Torrential rain overnight kept us awake for sometime, but the worst was to come in the morning. The white shorts I bought for the New Years' Eve celebration in RDJ were soaked in rainwater that had seeped through
the timber and years of insect detritus, and they were irretretrievably stained brown. I held hopes of finding a señora to bleach them for me until Pete talked some sense into me and told me to put them in the bin. It was a sad day. Luckily nothing else was affected, otherwise the damage bill would have been orders of magnitude higher if the iPods or sleeping bags were affected. Note to self: use dry bags in rainy weather!
The next day was our big day for wildlife-spotting. First up was an (very) early morning jeep safari, where we saw heaps of caimans, toucans, hawks, capybaras, deer and a giant anteater, which looked a lot like a misshaped border collie from a distance. We then started our jungle walk with Johnny, and after much complaining from everyone about mosquitoes, Johnny said he knew about a bush remedy. He picked some fruit from a tree and cut it open. We were all instructed to dip our pinky fingers in the fruit pulp to keep the mosquitoes at bay. All it did was stain our skin deep indigo for weeks, and Johnny admitted the next day that it was 'bullshit'! At
least we could tell our group from the other boring group staying at the hostel, we had blue fingers!
The fun didn't stop there on the jungle walk. Valli, who was lagging behind, started screaming frantically and flapping his clothes. Apparently a nest of wasps had attacked him, but nobody knew for sure if he had provoked them or not (we have our suspicions, but no admission was made). He was in quite some pain until he was distracted by the sighting of monkeys. Johnny started talking to the Howler Monkeys sitting far above us in the trees. Testosterone in the group took over and all the boys started grunting and howling at the monkeys. Boys will be boys I suppose. Others waiting in the car some distance away had no idea that most of the noise was generated by humans and not monkeys.
But the highlight of our trip was still to come. We had seen so many weird and wonderful animals, but none were so fun as the donkeys we rode around the paddock the next morning. As far as tourist attractions go, we saw nothing of note at all, although Anne thinks she saw a
bird. Donkeys are hilarious, firstly because they fart when they trot, which never stops being funny. But the best joke of all was to ride up behind someone else's donkey and give it a good slapping, surprising the poor rider! We tried to have a race back to the huts, but donkeys are incredibly lazy and the whole thing was a bit of a non-event in the end... though for the record I came second.
After a shower to wash ourselves clean of the wet-donkey-smell we were ready for our last scheduled activity, piranha fishing. It was much easier than it sounds, because piranhas don't attack like they do in the movies, only if they smell blood from a fresh wound do they start attacking. Everyone, including me caught one, although Pete grew frustrated when he was the only one without a catch. He eventually he caught his share at the 'sweet spot' he found in the river. I don't know if I'm really very good at fishing, the only piranha I caught was missing and eye, so it was obviously disadvantaged to start with. Johnny then prepared the fish for us and we ate our catch for dinner
The Last Supper
Us with Anne and Thiago that night. Although a bit bony, the piranhas were tasty and quite delicate.
By day four however, we were ready to start the next part of our trip, although it was sad to say goodbye to Brazil, a fun, vibrant and sunny country full of wonderful people. Although I might add it was not so sad to say goodbye to mud and mosquitoes. We jumped on the safari jeep for the last time, motored back to the main highway and waited amongst the mosquitoes for the connecting bus. As luck would have it we ran out of insect repellent just as the bus arrived to take us to Corumbá, near the Bolivian border. Perhaps it was a sign to move on from the wetlands.......
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