The Daily Rod's more vociferous readers will recount many a yarn about animals over the last 5 or so months. There were the tigers in Bannerghatta National Park, 'roos and emus in Werribee, not to mention the domesticated menagerie at my cousins' place in Melbourne - throw in a night safari in Singapore and a couple of aquariums and it's fair to say I've seen my fair share of God's creatures.
It is a whole different ball game, however, when it's you going into their back yard.
This is the Pantanal - the world's biggest wetland, and one of the most ecologically diverse places on the planet. Covering at area just shy of 200,000 square kilometres (about half the size of France), the Pantanal goes from basically bone dry to fully submerged every year, and as a result boasts an ecosystem (or indeed multiple ecosystems) that almost rival the Amazon basin in their diversity. Alongside the 40 million alligators that call the place home, there are over 1000 species of bird, 300 types of mammal including crazy creatures like giant anteaters and capybaras, probably a few billion mosquitoes, and enough piranhas in the water to feed the 5000 a few more times (as well as 400 other species of fish). Our Pantanal experience was launched out of Campo Grande early on the Wednesday (24th) morning, 24 hours after we'd arrived in the city and bailed on joining the previous day's departure ("bailed" being a fairly accurate way of describing saying "yes", only to have massive time constraints cause stress levels in my young co-traveller soar to levels that would not be fun for anyone to deal with...) - something that worked out nicely as it gave us a much-needed opportunity to do absolutely bugger all for a day. Come Wednesday though, it was up and out - a 4 hour van ride to the edge of the Pantanal region, and another couple of hours from there to our campsite in the middle of the wetland abyss. First impressions were excellent - about a kilometre down the trunk road (glorified raised dirt track) that runs through the Pantanal, we reached a wide river, and were usefully told "the bridge broke, so you've gotta take a boat across". Certainly one of the better off-the-cuff remarks you're ever gonna hear (and very much true, as illustrated by the photo below).
To give some idea of what I mean by "the middle of the wetland abyss", getting to our campsite from the trunk road involved a half an hour walk - but not your average stroll with backpacks and all. No, this was a trudge through the water - when I said the place gets "fully submerged", I was including all paths that aren't the trunk road. A good kilometre through slimy, orange-tinted water was our welcome to the area, but once at the site we were introduced to the hammocks that would be our beds for the next two nights. To say I was delighted is somewhat of an understatement - I love hammocks, and for three years have had the ever-nagging regret of not having anywhere decent in our house to hang the one Simon had brought me back from his South American travels in 2007. A swim in the river before nightfall and dinner was all that came between first introductions and getting properly aquainted with my swinging bed - and it was an excellent night's sleep (although perhaps not for Anna - the fact that it wasn't flat and moved were apparently issues for her).
Waking at 6am is not something I do for fun, and is - at best - a struggle. Not so here, as every creature in a 10 mile radius simultaneously starts squawking, crowing, screetching, yelping or otherwise making such a din that even yours truly, who has slept through burglar alarms in Sevenoaks and fire alarms in Oxford, was up in a flash. And just in case we'd forgotten what an amazing natural environment we'd rocked up into, we were greeted by two macaw parrots - complete with lush red, blue and green plummage - rocking up for their morning feed. Cameras, obviously, were out in force... and one day those photos might appear on here (UPDATE: over 2 months later, here they are...)!
The day was spent on 4x4 safari - Anna and myself joined by three Swiss-Germans; Demian, Karen and Felix - and although most of the day was actually spent sitting around by the Rio Paraguay doing sweet FA, we did see all sorts of the Pantanal's creatures, from toucans to black howler monkeys, kingfishers to jabiru storks, and a fair few of those 40 million 'gators (see below). The latter were seen in force on the shores of the Rio Paraguay itself - I lost track of the number we saw splashing out of sight as we cruised by on our "boat safari". Our boat provided a fair bit of entertainment, what with the engine stalling every 50 metres or so while the inane driver sat shouting absolute nonsense to himself or anyone else - including the lads on a fishing boat we pulled up next to. The humble catfish, for reasons understandable only to those who have partaken in spontanenous "South African socials" over the years (a domain presumed exclusive to a select band of Juddians, but possibly broader), has a near legendary status in a particular social circles - purely down to its name. Seeing one of these fine specimen in their catch, a cheesy photo was nay-on compulsory (again, it will eventually appear!). Meanwhile, crazy boat driver took the liberty of jumping in for a swim, while we went off for 30 minute trek around another wetland field in search of an anaconda. Sadly, she didn't want to come out and play, but we made do with another few hundred mosquito bites for our trouble.
Before and after all this river-based activity, we'd been sitting around at a bar of sorts (basically a shack with a few chairs) on the north side of the Paraguay - where we'd set up shop for lunch. Anna had made herself useful offering her services in the kitchen, and chopped all the vegetables that went into the meat stew while generally befriending all the locals with her beautiful Spanish. Meanwhile, the Swiss guys and I sat outside drinking beer and dozing. For whatever reason (assumed to be laziness on the part of our guide), we spent a ridiculously long time at this little riverside village - and aside from swimming in the river there really wasn't anything to do. Anna's culinary sojourn paid dividends for me later though - I swanned into the kitchen after the boat safari to find she'd befriended some Bolivians who were visiting the area, and who had caught themselves a veritable school of piranhas that they were now cooking up. No sooner had I walked into the room did I find myself with a plate of freshly fried piranha and rice in front of me - despite having quite literally no idea what was going on, I was happy as Larry with an extra meal between lunch and dinner! Piranhas, for interest's sake, may eat meat for fun, but sadly hide it away in their bodies behind a bone system akin to a particularly overgrown set of brambles. Much like eating a crab from first principles, it was a lot of effort for - in quantity terms - minimal reward.
Part the reason we spent so long in this godforsaken hamlet was, as it turned out, due to the 4x4 van that we'd arrived in having broken down (or something to this effect) somewhere between dropping us off and picking us up again. Thus, getting picked up at 5pm turned into getting picked up at about 8 - and it was pitch black darkness that we bounced and rumbled our way through for an hour before getting back to camp for dinner. Having befriended Swiss people, however, there was no way I was going to bed without a game of Ligretto - possibly the funnest card game ever made, but for some reason only known about in Switzerland.
Our time in the Pantanal was "3 days and 2 nights", but the reality of this was more like "1 and a bit days and 2 nights" once you factor in the lengthy journies to and from Campo Grande. Nevertheless, the 6am wakeup allowed us to squeeze in a couple of hours walking trek in the wetland forest (mosquitoes in extremis, though hardly surprising when strolling through hot but shaded forest that's knee deep in stangnant water), a ride in a van/car a few kilometres up the trunk road (9 of us in a vehicle that looked roughly like a 4-door, 4-wheel version of Only Fools and Horses' Trotter-mobile - 3 boys with feet dangling off the back, inhaling gallons of fresh dust kicked up off the dirt road), and a half hour of piranha fishing that saw Anna show her true calling in life - first time fishing, and she caught a whopping 3kg mega-piranha that was, genuinely, massive. A few minutes later she caught another piranha - relatively small compared to the whopper before, but still a great catch - and thanks to a few other catches from the Swiss guys we had ourselves our lunch to fry back at camp.
It's one natural world to another for us though - after the hours of travel from the Pantanal back to Campo Grande, we make it with mere minutes in hand to hop on our overnighter down to Foz du Iguazu - the Brazilian side of the mother-of-all waterfalls.
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