The Pantanal

Oi from Brazil! (Oi means hi, but it still feels odd to say it!)
I´m writing from a town called Campo Grande about 7 hours by bus into Brazil from the border. We arrived in Brazil on Monday morning, got to the border by taxi, did the border formalities and then spend about the same amount on a taxi into the town as we had on both of our bus tickets from Santa Cruz (and probably more than the equivalent jounrey in a London blackcab)! Brazil was expensive when I was here 2 years ago but now it´s ridiculous. Clealy it´s a good thing in many ways- their economy is booming and they are very happy to point this out, aware that the same isn´t true in other countries. It´s annoying for us though!
We tried to find a tour agency we´d emailed but in the 4 or so years since my guidebook was written they´d moved twice and apparently now don´t exist! We found another though and an hour later were on a bus ready to start our 3 day tour. We were picked up in the middle of nowhere by a jeep and driven about an hour into the Pantanal, stopping on the way when the guide saw snake tracks and decided to walk, barefoot, into the bushes to see if he could find us an anaconda!

We stayed in a bigish place with space for 25 or 30 tourists. We slept in hammocks, which I love! Every morning or evening we did something and we stayed for 2 nights and left yesterday lunch time. It was amazing, we saw so much, way more than you could ever hope to see in a rainforest. The first afternoon we went for a walk (in flipflops, in a place full of snakes and insects, apparently it´s best as they make less noise). We saw lots of monkeys playing in the trees, an anteater, lots of weird rodenty things, including the capybara which is the biggest rodent in the world, deer, lots of birds- toucans, macaw, parrots. I will upload pictures in Rio or Salvador. The next day we went out on a boat and saw loads of caiman, iguanas, even more birds and capybara. We then went piranha fishing (I´m a bit bored of fishing now, but am an old-hand with a bamboo rod and a bit of bait!) and swimming in the river with said piranha and caiman! It´s perfectly safe and was so nice as it was really hot. Much less muggy than the Amazon though and I only got 2 bites, compared to the hundreds in Peru! On the last day we saw giant otter too and an anaconda came into our camp which was exciting. Overall it was a grest experience, it´s a magical place. Parts of it look like a swamp, other bits could be the English countryside :-)

I practiced lots of portuguese too which was nice. My vocabulary is a bit smaller than it was but I´ve stopped speaking Spanish!

We left yesterday and spent a night in Campo Grande and in a couple of hours we head to Rio- our final bus, 24 hours and then we´re done! Can´t believe we´re almost there, I wasn´t 100% sure how we were going to manage when we looked at the Pacific in Lima and realised next time we saw it it would be the Atlantic 1000s of miles away. Unfortunately the bus costs loads, probably about the same as the other 7 or so put together!