Porto Jofrey

July 02, 2023

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 our guide's name. We would become intimate with Aynore over the next three days.

We started our first boat ride that afternoon. "2:00 PM sharp!" we were told. We did not really know what to expect.

But we were at the dock at 2:00 PM sharp, and our guide along with our river pilot (Whose name, we were told, was "Tattoo" and that meant "Armadillo" He was a charming, is taciturn, individual)

The boat looked just like this:

And just like that, we were off.

Each tour was pretty much the same (and not in a bad way!) in that we raced up (and once, down) the river to see what we could see. Remember, these are called Jaguar Tours, so it seems that the overall goal was to see, well, jaguars.

Below is a heat map of where we took photos. You can pretty much assume that more photos meant we saw something interesting, but not only jaguars. We were sort of different in that way. Sure, we wanted to see the big cats. But we also wanted to see birds, reptiles, and pretty much anything that was interesting and extraordinary.

For example, back at camp, there was a nice little herd of capybaras at the lodge, and it was fun to see exactly what would they might have on their back at any time:

and also at the lodge were an endless number of caracara, which I noted earlier:

One of my favorite birds. If you have not yet done so, I would recommend you read the book "A Most Remarkable Creature" by Jonathon Meiburg. It is all about Caracaras. There are many species (most closely related to falcons) and are very, very smart.

There was also a lodge centric Jaribu Stork, who didn't want to be our friend:

even though it was friendly with the local fishermen. I guess it had to do with who was feeding whom.

Then every night a large flock of hyacinth macaws came home to roost in the trees near our cabin. It was always around dusk, so it was hard to get good photos.

I will come back to the lodge wildlife at the end, since we did have a pretty impressive visitor the night before we left.

Both Aynore and Tattoo had an amazing ability to find different animals as we were riding on the river. As we were heading out the first day, Tattoo spotted an anaconda, about 10' long, dropping into the river from a steep bank. That was very, very cool.

And Aynore spotted these probiscis bats all lined up on a tree:

We also spotted these giant river otters (four of them!) cruising down the river. Later, we would see another couple harassing a jaguar on the bank. We sort of have a video of that, but it is not really worth posting. It is a good memory for us, though.

and we had caiman coming out of our ears!

They really were everywhere. These are the Spectacled Caiman, or yacare caiman. Not the huge Black Caiman you see further north.

We saw so many birds it was hard to count. (our little wildlife book that Luiz gave us has 191 birds identified. We marked off 109. That is a lot of species) But we loved all the Kingfishers. There were four species endemic to the area, and we saw three of them.

And the, of course, the jaguars.

We had nine different sightings, with seven different individuals.

I didn't get photos of every sighting - Doreen did better than I did, but here are three pretty good shots.