Boston to New York to São Paulo to Campo Grande to Embiara

We are off again to uncharted (by us) territory. Well, that's not entirely true. We've waited around in São Paulo airport before, on our way to Rio during our honeymoon... but we missed the Brazilian wildlife adventures last time around, so we are headed to Embiara, a luxury (as you can get for the Brazilian wetlands) lodge in South Pantanal.

The journey to our destination was a long one. Our flight from Boston to New York was delayed an hour. On top of this we realized that São Paulo has two airports, and unbeknownst to us, the booking had us flying into one airport and taking a 45 minute shuttle to get to the other. Ming was not having that, so she found a way to get American Airlines to give us a flight out of the same airport for free. She didn't even have to threaten to get litigious. The updated itinerary gave us a few hours to hang around the São Paulo airport. I spent them here:

Despite the fact that it was only a one hour time difference from Boston and the fact that it was mid afternoon, Ming and I slept on the short 1.5 hour flight to Campo Grande. By this point, we'd been traveling for almost twenty four hours, but we tried to keep a smile on our faces as we met our driver for the last leg of the journey to Embiara Lodge, a five hour Jeep ride, four hours of which was through a quasi-roller coaster ride of rough dirt roads. Fortunately, we would get to see some animal life along the way. Unfortunately, it was too dark to photograph most of it.

Here's a caiman that we saw scooting across the road. The driver probably thought we were overly-excited as it turns out that these little lizards are commonplace in the Pantanal wetlands.

Along the way, we also ran into several wild pigs, foxes, and a tapir taking a evening swim:

Many of these animals were seen when we took small detours off the road into the nearby fields, ostensibly to avoid getting stuck in the puddles on the recently flooded roads, but we also had a running theory that our driver just enjoyed crashing through the brambles. I would have felt a bit queasy if the drive weren't punctuated by an interminable series of gates at which the driver had to stop, get out of the car, open the gate, come back into the car, drive through, get out of the car again, close the gate, and then continue driving. We later learned there were about 32 such gates. Here's one:

Eventually we made it to the lodge, dead tired, but we were greeted by Stefan and a couple of caipirinhas. Once our stomachs settled, we even had a healthy portion of remarkably tasty lasagna and chocolate-coconot cake before heading to bed and greeting our newest roommate, Harry:

We later learned that Harry had other family staying with us as well. We were about to evict them all when we learned that they serve a very important function: mosquito-eating.