Boat ride and game drive

To beat the heat, the lodge likes to start breakfast around 6:00am and get to the day's activities by 6:30. Having gotten in relatively late the night before, we were impressed with ourselves for actually making it to the breakfast table on time. Or so we thought. Little did we know that it was daylight savings time. Fortunately, Stefan, the guy in charge of the lodge was in the dark as well. This worked out slightly less well for the couple who was catching a plane out of the area that morning, but seeing as how it was a 5-seater and they were the only ones charted to go, I doubt they missed it. With them gone, we were the only guests at the lodge, and we had two guides, Stefan and Sam, to ourselves.

The recommended activity of the morning was a boat trip down the Rio Negro (a little smaller than the Amazonian version). The theory here is that the proximity to water would keep us cool.

We used an electric motor on the way down river to keep quiet. The trick worked, as we quickly spotted a Neotropic Otter feasting on what looks to be a freshwater eel.

Next up, Caiman. These guys aren't nearly as vicious as they look. They eat fish and usually lurk in the water with just their eyes showing. As soon as one gets close, though, they dart underneath the water, where they can hold their breath for half an hour or more.

Here's a random photo of a river bank Ming took. Stefan says he has previously seen the other otter species here: the Giant Otter. If you look very closely at the photo, you'll notice that they are not in it.

The bird life on the Pantanal is spectacular, but there are too many names to keep track of. This bird is relatively common, but interesting nonetheless. According to the birdbook I just flipped through, this is a Grey-necked Wood-Rail.

Another common sight is the Yellow-billed Cardinal:

There are supposedly 19 different types of herons in this part of Southern Brazil. We saw a couple. Here's the Cocoi Heron in mid-flight.

This next bird is the Rufescent Tiger Heron. Pretty impressive neck.

After drifting down stream for a couple of hours, we hopped off the boat, where we tried to sneak up on a few Caiman.

Missed it:

Got 'em:

It was getting hot, so we boarded the boat and chugged back up the river using our gas engine.

The world's largest rodent, the Capybara, wasn't phased by our rumbling:

This is a rare shot of one actually moving:

Most of the time, they are just lying around.

After a while, it occurred to me that these creatures are the likely inspiration for the Wumps of Wump World. For the uninitiated, Wump World is the hipster's Lorax. It was a children's book espousing environmentalism before Suess made it cool.

When we got back from the game drive at 10am we took a nice long nap before lunch at 12:30, after which we took an even longer nap until 4:00 for the game drive.

It wasn't long before we got close to some animal life.

One of the first things we noticed is that the animals in this portion of the Pantanal are fairly skittish relative to the similar excursions we had in Africa. The reason for this is that Embiara is a family owned farm-turned-lodge that doesn't have the traffic of a major African safari-type establishment. The up-side of this is that you're getting a much more realistic sense of nature. The down-side is that this means you don't always see the animal you want to see. For example, Jaguars have been known to roam these parts of the Pantanal, but we pretty much knew coming in that the probability of running into one was miniscule. In the northern portions of these wetlands, on the other hand, Jaguars are pretty well habituated to the presence of humans (mostly due to baiting done a while back, a practice which has since been largely abandoned.) So those are your choices with respect to eco-tourism: 1) see what you want to see in a somewhat artificial environment, or 2) miss some of your favorites in favor of a more natural habitat. Of course, you could go with option 3, which our guide Stefan does: spend 6 months of the year in the natural habitat of your favorite wildlife and see what comes around. A few weeks before we got there he apparently ran across a mother Jaguar and her cubs playing along the very beaches we passed in the boat this morning.

For the game drive we had padded, open-air seating attached to the bed of a truck. The engine likely scared off much of the wildlife before we got close, but there was still plenty to see.

Sometimes the nest is more interesting than the bird. Here's a shot of the nest of some oropendolas (bird not shown).

These little locusts were everywhere... and actually not that little.

Peccaries and feral pigs are almost as common. The easiest way to tell these creatures apart is that the former has no tail.

Feral pigs are about the only mammal (other than cows I suppose) in these parts that aren't protected by law. They were brought here by portuguese settlers a while back, and have been digging up the soil and overpopulating the area ever since.

It's difficult to enforce any wildlife protection deep in the wetlands. Despite its illegality, farmers have been known to shoot Jaguars who threaten their live-stalk. Of course, the cats only go after cows when the rest of the animals have been driven out of their territory by the farmers. We've seen similar stories in South Africa and New Zealand. Funny how humans tend to turn the circle of life into a spiral of death.

Anyway, we saw some foxes coming down the road in front of us. Also in this photo you can see a small stretch of the miles and miles of fence that criss-cross the wetlands.

Most of the animals are able to get right through the fences. Except for the cows...

As the sun set our game drive, and our first day in the Pantanal, came to an end.

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.

Sydney

A disclaimer: We tend to always run a few days behind real time while travel blogging, meaning that the first few days of every trip are usually spent finishing up the blog entries from the last trip. As such, our three and a half days in Sydney will be condensed to a single post -- and the specific details may be a little off. Lucky for us we have pictures to remind us of what happened.

Since we'd gotten quite behind on our blogging - and because our late afternoon flight to Sydney was JUST early enough to make a major excursion impossible, we decided to spend our last day in Cairns sleeping in, eating Chinese take-out, shooting pool, and - mostly - blogging.

We did make an excursion to visit some famous Cairns residents, the Flying Foxes (a.k.a. fruit bats).

They mostly hang out in the trees, but they're particularly spectacular when they take wing.

They are most famous however, for something else...take a look, or rather, a listen:

After returning our rental car, we were off to Sydney! We got in pretty late, so we limited our activities to exploring the area right outside the hotel for food options. Ian found some Indian take out (very exciting for him) and we called it a night.

Our hotel was pretty centrally located to many of the tourist attractions, so we set off the next morning on a self-guided walking tour. Our first stop was the Sydney botanical gardens. I'm sure some of the plants were rare, but we really didn't know what was what, so here's a flower:

There was some bird life in the garden as well.

The botanical gardens led to the waterfront, and, therefore, to the star attraction of the city: The Opera House. I'd previously convinced Ian to sit through a performance with me (I mean, come on, it's the Sydney Opera House!), so we purchased tickets to the next evening's performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni.

After grabbing some lunch at one of the waterfront restaurants. Our clearest memory of this meal was the persistence of the seagulls in stealing french fries. The family next to us left theirs unattended for about 2 minutes, and sudddenly it was a mad cacaphony of wings beating, gulls shrieking, and the restaurant owner shooing. It was pretty hilarious - wish we'd gotten pictures!

After lunch, we caught a ferry ride to Manly. Manly was very quaint, lots of little shops and ice cream parlors and cafes. But mainly, it had some nice walks...

 

....to some great beaches:

 

Ian was particularly taken with the man-o-wars. These guys float wherever the current takes them, and the tenticals can sting the bejesus out of the careless swimmer. I say "these guys" because what you see in the photo below is not one animal, but colony of small, highly specialized individuals coming together to form a single entity.

Even cooler, according to Ian, was watching the crabs play "tug-of-man-o-war":

As the sun started to set, we headed back to the ferry. We'd been told that the sunset from the ferry, with the Opera House in the backdrop, was one of the prettiest ways to capture the iconic Sydney "shot." Here's our best attempt:

It'd been a pretty full day, so we headed back to the hotel.

The next day was our last full day in Syndey, and we realized that we still had quite a bit of souvenir shopping to do. This is what happens on a lot of our trips -- we try to avoid buying too much stuff early on since that means we'll have to carry it all for the rest of the trip -- so family members and friends often get presents from the last stop of the trip -- luckily, Sydney had some great shopping to offer. Even more luckily, the mecca of souvenir shopping (Paddy's Market), was very close to Chinatown.

I decided to stop at a few places for some snacks. This place was apparently quite well known to the locals (I thought the cream puffs were just so-so):

Ian was happy to get some bubble tea.

After filling up our backpack with souvenirs, we headed back to the hotel for our much anticipated evening out. First, there were more Opera House shots:

We had purchased the "Gold Package" for the performance, which included a guided tour of the Opera House, dinner at a fancy restaurant on the waterfront, and drinks before and during the performance. We took full advantage of all of the above. Here are some tour shots:

A dinner picture (we were told this was one of the best restaurants in Sydney)...

 

And a drink picture...

After a great evening out, we still had some sights awaiting us after the performance -- the waterfront was pretty spectacular after nightfall:

And with those last few shots, our Australia/New Zealand trip had come to an end. The next day, we had an early flight out of Sydney back to the U.S. The three weeks had really flown by!