Pantanal

Ok, this one is pretty cool. I’ll do the commentary first and then dump all the best photos at the end.  So skip there if you want to show absolute contempt  for my journalistic efforts. I’ll respect you more for it.

We took a flight to Cuiabá, a place tourists generally only go to to visit the Pantanal, which It is a vast tropical wetland area in Brazil and is notable for it’s incredible biodiversity including jaguar, puma, caiman, macaws and capybara, to name a couple.  Oh and it’s 80% submerged for half the year and filled with piranhas.  Personally I’d never heard of the place until Chan saw an article about it in a magazine a while back.  Here’s an image I borrowed from Wiki:

We booked a tour with Joel at Ecoverde after reading around, as he is in Fodors, Lonely planet et al and makes a point of organising small tours of 2-8 and has a reputation for being a good egg.  Our guide, Djalma (you can check out his photos here) had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local flora and fauna, be it behaviour, habitat, morphology, evolution, scent, scat or even just the best way to provoke an otter into fighting you.  More on this last in a minute.

Shown here trying to see if I’ll eat some random plant he’d just found, as you get your laughs where you can find them in the bush.

After we were picked up from our hotel, we joined the rest of our party: a Swiss bloke and a German couple.  So there was an opportunity to practise mein Deutsch. I had to try and describe an armadillo to them later on.  Take a memo: it’s either Gurtelteir (belt beast), or –my favourite- Panzerschwein (tank pig).

The tour was 4 days/3nights and involved us staying at two lodges at either end of the Transpantaneira highway between Poconé and Porto Jofre.  It’s 147 km of dirt road and 122 wooden bridges, some of which were in a decent state of repair.  Some weren’t there at all.  We travelled in our ‘safari truck’ which consists of some benches welded onto the back of a pickup.

It did make for a good view, and I have spare vertebrae anyhow.  We drove to our first lodge, which was on a working fazenda, where we took a ride about the local countryside by horseback.  I have never before ridden a horse and my bottom is more or less recovered now, a week later.

 
Born in the saddle, these two

I think, after 3 hours(!), that my horse and I had developed a relationship of mutual respect and affection.  That’s what I took the perpetual bit-chomping and ankle-nipping to mean.  He also made a point of not drinking water when I led him to it.  Such a joker.

“Listen, I’ve got a job to do and I’m gonna do it, but if you look at me crosseyed I will fuck your shit right up.”

We came back from that, went out trekking in the bush, saw some bits and bobs and Chan got bitten by fire ants. They have a special tree they live in with hollow branches.  They all emerge when you disturb it to fight you off – which was interesting and horrifying at the same time.

The following morning we got up at shit o’clock to go looking in the woods again.

Spot the ninjas

We spotted some capuchin monkeys, or they spotted us, I’m not sure which.

A bit later, we jumped in the boneshaker and got back on the Transpantaneira.  Even though the name implies that the road crosses the entire flood plain, because it’s Brazilian it actually stops in Porto Jofre, which is only about halfway across.  This is a good thing as the completed road would’ve knackered the drainage pattern and messed everything up. So what they’ve ended up with, with this half-arsed road to nowhere,  is one of the great wildlife-viewing areas of the world. Ditches on either side of the roadbed have become favourite feeding grounds for kingfishers, capybara, egrets, jabiru storks, giant river otters, and caiman.  You absolutely cannot move for caiman.

These guys only eat fish and occasionally each other.  So we discovered it wasn’t unusual to find them chillin’ with the capybara.

At some point Djalma gave us the ‘managing expectations’ speech in that, while there are a ton of animals in the Pantanal, nothing is guaranteed.  Everyone’s here to see Jaguar, but there’s a good chance they won’t.  They’re not scared of us, but you don’t get to be a successful apex predator if your food can see you.  The ‘bonus’ list of things to spot were: jaguar, giant anteaters, giant armadillos, tapir, giant otters and puma.  But today was Chantelle’s birthday so we kept them peeled.

The first really cool thing we saw was a family of 30 or so capybara crossing the road.   They have the ‘don’t give a shit’ look nailed, by the way.

“We’re crossin’ here, bitches”

The bridges on this road are something else. When we were there there was only a week or so left before the wet season started and the use of the diversion tracks around the most battered bridges becomes not an option.  A good 20% of the bridges were a bit of an adventure.  Here’s our driver and Djalma doing a bit of ad-hoc maintenance:

“This plank’ll do; the truck can’t weigh more than 3 tons”

Some were more of an obstacle.

This route we’re taking here will be underwater in about a week.

Anyhow, we saw a family of storks in their nest, with junior trying to figure out this flying thing.

Then, as it was starting to get dark, Djalma noticed some giant otters in the distance.  He got out and started to call to them.  Evidently the haste with which they came to see us was not due to their inherent friendliness so much as it was to give us a kicking and see us on our way.  He was making the noise of another otter calling, and they are particularly territorial. Take a look.  I particularly like the raspberries they blow when they realise we ain’t all that.   The occasional jerkiness is me swatting away mosquitoes the size of albatrosses.

“Go on; fuck off!”

Unreal.

Very eventually,  we made it to our other lodge in Porto Jofre.  When I tried the taps in the bathroom and the water came out brown, I assumed rusty pipes or something.  But no, that was pumped straight from the river, so the showers resulted in a different definition of ‘clean’. The electricity we had came by way of a generator so was switched off in the afternoon.  In both lodges the food was simple but good, and there was always cheap Skol beer available (not that Skol, they might not have clean tap water but they’re not savages).

It did look a bit like an internment camp.

We were here to make use of the river, as many animals come to the river to drink, eat or find their prey eating and drinking.

There’s probably a dodo or something out of frame on the right.

We were on the water for about an hour when we saw the tell-tale signs of something interesting:  a load of other boats clustered with cameras out and trained on something on the bank.  I heard them before I saw them: a roar that called to the caveman in me to get the fuck right out of Dodge.  It was only a pair of jaguars! The guides conferred and we ascertained that this pair had been in an altercation with another two and had come off somewhat second.   They emerged from the grass and the male was obviously limping, but looked like he was walking it off.

O .  M  .  F  . G

We sailed around for a bit, found some black howler monkeys, who, like the black bear, aren’t always black. Because fuck convention. 

We sailed a bit more and…found another Jaguar.  This one was a female, hunting alone.

“Shhh, I’m huntin’ wabbits.  heheheheh”

Okey doke.  Doing ok for jaguar so far.  We turned around, sailed for a bit, and then found the original pair sleeping it off. They are cats, after all.

 
“You should’ve seen the other guy”.  “That’s nice, dear”

We sailed around for a bit more, finding a horde of Capybara. These are supposed to be a bit tricky to find too, by the way.

Just to make an absolute mockery of how hard these guys are to find, after lunch we found another female jaguar stalking the water’s edge, looking for prey. Djalma pointed out that you could tell she had a cub somewhere by the swollen teats.  Mums in the audience will sympathise, no doubt.

 

Capybara are cute, but Chan noticed one on its own downstream, and never has so much ill-fortune been projected onto a giant rodent.  Fortunately for him and unfortunately for our photo-op, she circled back around to her cub, who was nearby somewhere. The capybara did the clever thing.

“Fuuuuck Thiiiiis!”

We made our way back up-river and there was another goddamn jaguar.  By this point I’m convinced they’re as common as pigeons.  He was moving around in the reeds when we got there and while we were all sat there like lemons, waiting for him to emerge, we noticed he was up on a ridgeline to our right, watching us indifferently.

“What are you and how do you taste?”

Then he went for a wander:

So that wrapped the day up.  We got up at 5am the following morning we went for a last drive in the dark, where we saw a local owl and then briefly saw a tapir but it was scared off by the Swiss bloke shouting.  After breakfast we went for a final walkabout. It’d been quiet until we were almost done, when we went around a corner and saw this chap:

  

We thought at first it was a jaguar cub, but it turns out it was an ocelot.  It’ll do.

So we got back on the truck and made our long, long way back.  Just as we were rocking up in Poconé for our change of ride, the rainy season happened in our faces.  The streets changed from bone dry to inundated in 5 minutes.  It was bizarre.

 

It was an adventure, to be sure.  And we saw the big puddy tats.

Here’s the photo splurge for the tl;dr crowd: