The Pantanal

 OK, after several false starts, this is really the end. Our flight to Sao Paulo was uneventful, and our new friends generously had volunteered to pick us up and show us a little bit around the city, in particular Beco do Batman, or Batman's Alley. This is an amazingly cool neighborhood, and it is now the image I have for Sao Paulo. Here we are with Cesar and Bruna, the talented film makers I mentioned earlier. You can see some of the beautiful graffiti below: Cesar's surbname is Leite, which means "milk", so this image is particularly appropriate for him. The cartoon boy is looking at a herd of cows, and was asking "Uncle?!" We had a great time with those two, who later went off to a "football" match between Sao Paulo and their hated rivals Palmeiras, (which they won). We had dinner at a wonderful little restaurant called the Casca Gastrobar .  Recommended if you are ever in that neighborhood. Finally, just a few thoughts about Brazil, and this s...

 One last drive in the Pantanal. It is about 150 km from Porto Jofrey to Cuiabá, and it that distance you cross 120 small, wooden bridges. One of the very first of which was under construction when we started, so we had about an hour to do some last minute birding. The area looks like this: And the bridges look like this: and this. That is our guide Aynore with me on the bridge. Unbeknownst to us, Tattoo was also trying to get to Cuiabá, and ran into the same problem. So we took a photo op. There was too much to say about that road, so I will skip right to Cuiabá. Little did we know that  Cuiabá is the geographic center of South America And it was only about 1 km from our hotel. So we walked over there and took a look. And a photo. Some of you may recall that we were at the geographic center of the lower 48 US States a couple of years ago. We are really middle class people. After that, we headed over to the Parque Mãe Bonifácia where we spotted this li...

It was an excellent trip, we learned a lot and saw a lot of stuff. here are a few more photos from Porto Jofrey. I will add one more post with the drive to  Cuiabá, diner there and a few images from Sao Paulo. We loved the river trips. There were a couple of hiccups when we got started, but those all got ironed out. There were so many things I had never anticipated seeing in my life. One was a Sun Bittern. But here it is. This is a tapir trail. According to our guide (after he touched the dirt and tasted it) the tapir passed by here no more than five minutes before we got there. There were two snake highlights on the trip. The first I mentioned earlier when we saw an anaconda dropping into the river. The second was our last night in camp, where an anaconda had crawled out of the marsh and settled herself into a tree. This was fantastic.

When (most) people talk about The Pantanal, this is the area that they are thinking about. It is the North Pantanal, in the state of Mato Grosso (the previous posts were mostly in Mato Grosso do Sul. the southern state that was formed in 1977). The capitol is Cuiabá, about which I will talk a little later. And tourism into the Pantanal is a big business. And the business is jaguars. As I mentioned in a previous post, we flew into Porto Jofrey, which seems to be the center of the jaguar tourist trade. Our hotel was nice. There were a series of cabins divided into (usually) two units. A couple of beds, a shower, and air conditioning. everything you would need. There was a dining room that supplied three meals a day - breakfast from 5:00 AM to 7:30, Lunch from noon until 2:00, and dinner from 7:00 to 9:00. The food was good as well. every meal had beans and rice, there was always protein (usually beef, but also pork, chicken, and always a fish) Our cabin had our name on it, as well as...

It is always sad to leave a place, even if you had only spent a a few nights there. But we were scheduled to head up to Porto Jofrey via a small plane (see below) so I thought I would add just a bit more about Baia do Pedras . First, I would say go there and stay if you have a chance. Second, I would try to find Luiz Paiva as your guide (drop me a note and I will forward you his WhatsApp number), and third, be prepared to wake up early. We had the additional great fortune to overlap with the film making duo Cesar Leite and Bruna Lucheze (seen below). They've shared some of their drone and camera videos with me, and I will try to link them in a later blog. But they are a very nice couple who have already seen success in Brazil and internationally. Check out their link above, and there is even a documentary coming out about them on August 18th. I will keep my eyes open for it. They live in Sao Paulo, and were very generous with their time and picked us up at the airport and showed u...