A Day in Bonito
This was not a vacation where we lounged around in bed all day. It was a vacation where we woke up early and kept going until dinner. We did get to sleep early most nights, though.
This is an image of our little cabana. It was quite nice, and isolated from everyone else. But that Sunday night we had the entire facility to ourselves. The restaurant wasn't even open! They did have a snack bar, though. We got hamburgers and a beer.
A quick word on breakfasts - every hotel had a breakfast buffet, and they were pretty good. They had a real automatic espresso machine, and Doreen got a cappuccino that she added filter coffee to because the cappuccino was so sweet. I got the filter coffee from the big carafe, which was always strong and delicious. I had to add hot milk as well. Then we had fruit, scrambled eggs and some sort of bread or pastry. It was usually quite good. The eggs were better than they had any right to be. And at every hotel.
We got up so early because we had tickets to the first entry to the Cave of the Blue Lake, or Gruta do Lago Azul. It was about an hour's drive, but we made it there with time to spare. Theo was a fast driver on these bad roads.
They made us wear masks in the cave. I am not sure (since we don't speak Portuguese) if this was a covid hangover, or because of the fragility of the calcite formations undergound.
But we wore them, none the less:
It was a pretty steep walk down, but it was all on stairs and with a wire handrail, as seen below. They told us there were 330 steps. I did not count them, but that seemed correct.
Typical Karst formation cave, with nice stalactites visible all the way down.
The only light came in from the opening to the cave.
The water was very blue. In my limited Portuguese, I could tell that the guide was telling a story about how the water was rich in magnesium, and if you swam in it or drank it, you would get really bad diarrhea.
It took about an hour to get down and back. We were the first group down, and ran into another group as we were heading up and yet another group on top.
Each group had different colored helmets.
Next, we drove to the Rio da Prata for a five hour snorkeling adventure.
The drive was fun, we were able to see more rheas, as the views were all great.
The best thing we saw were the giant anteaters.
We saw two, but we only got photos of this one. Just like in Wild Kingdom!
The snorkeling seems to be the highlight for most folks coming to Bonito. The Rio da Prata is crystal clear, sort of chilly, and has some fantastic views of fish. But it does last for five hours, which is a long time if you are not used to that sort of thing.
They provide you with wetsuits, (and admonish you not to pee in them), booties, snorkels and masks. They make it very easy, and you just swim downstream. As far as I can tell, there are no piranhas, or at least none big enough to take a bite out of you. No caimans, (that we saw, anyway) and the most inconvenient thing was the family with an 8 year old and a 10 year old who kept kicking people in the head.
We did not have our phones, or our clothes, so they took photos for us.
You can see the ones we bought below. The one above is me in the dressing room, before my phone was stuffed in my shoe.
Below is the photo before we got into the water. Doreen was more eager than I was.
The last adventure of the day was the Buraco das Araras, or the Hole of the Macaws.
We arrived as just the right time, and for second to last tour of the day. Sunset around here is around 5:00 PM, and with dusk coming on, the macaws all start to head back to this enormous sinkhole.
It is hard to take a photo of, but this is about a half kilometer across, and probably 300 meters deep. As the sun was setting (you can see the shadow below) there were tens, maybe hundreds of scarlet macaws flying in to the hole.
Doreen got some good photos with her 10x optical zoom on that new iPhone she has
They would cling to the cliffs. It was great.
Then we went back to Bonito. It was a full day, and a lot of fun.
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