A day of rest... mostly

Today we slept in.  The vacation has been somewhat of a whirlwind up until now, so it was nice to take a break and get a full night's rest.  We couldn't let the whole day go without an excursion, however, so in the afternoon, we jumped in the truck for a game drive.  It wasn't long before we saw some peccaries sharing a pond with a few capybara.

There was even the obligatory deer nearby.

We saw a black skimmer getting his afternoon snack.  This guy flies along with its mouth flapped open in the water in hopes of scooping up any fish or insects near or on the surface.  The individual pictures are not of great quality, so here's an action sequence.

Some birds were hard to get a shot of altogether.  I had to resort to other methods:

We drove on...

Before long we stopped.  I wasn't sure exactly why, but Stefan and Sam both knew something I didn't. In particular, the birds were sounding agitated.  We didn't see them, but here's a video of their squawking.

Stefan's theory was that there was either a puma or a bird of prey bothering their nesting area.  He hopped off the truck to scope it out.  Unfortunately, the commotion was about forty yards into some dense forest, so we never did figure out what startled the birds.

With everyone back in the vehicle, we set off again, this time for the river.

We had crossed this bridge coming to Embiara, but it was so dark at the time it barely registered.

We jumped off the truck and crossed it by foot.

We had Stefan take a picture of us.

And since we had two expert guides of the Pantanal exclusively to ourselves, we had Sam take a picture of Stefan taking a picture of us.

There was a dilapidated gate that we had to open and shut to access the shore area for our photo op.  I suppose "dilapidated" may be too generous a word.  It was really just a tangle of barbed wire attached to various bits of rotting wood.  Actually, perhaps "gate" is too generous a word.  It took Sam, Stefan, and Ming a full five minutes to piece it together.  They pointed out afterwards that it might have gone faster if four people worked at it, but I thought it was more important to document the process with the photo below.  They'll thank me if and when somebody comes around asking whether we left the gate open.  I can show them irrefutable proof that we did not!

The sky was getting dark and I was getting hungry, so, with the gate irrefutably closed, we uncrossed the bridge and jumped back on the truck to head home.