No boat, no plane, no motorcar...

We woke up at 5:30 again for our second day of activities -- though the this time, we'd be traveling on foot. We put on our hiking shoes and followed Stefan through the gates.

There are two benefits to walking in terms of animal spotting: 1) you are able to sneak up on animals slightly better (though in the Pantanal, where the animals are still skittish to the big, clumsy human creatures, this is still pretty near impossible), and 2) you are able to scale down your focus and pay attention to the insects and plants. Stefan mentioned that he and Sam have joked about having a "two meter bush walk," where you focus solely on the flora and fauna that are present within a two meter span -- I think it's a valid idea!

For example, here's an antlion, which we pulled out of its sand pit trap using a twig:

Here's a series of leafcutter ants going about their business:

But insects can only keep Ian's interest for oh-so-long. We soon moved on to birds. Some cormorants drying their wings in the tree breezes:

A trio of red and green macaws in flight (yes, that is their official name -- not to be confused with the blue and yellows):

While it's true that we mostly saw birds and insects on the bush walk, we were in prime jaguar and puma territory. Stefan often leaves the lodge's camera traps on these paths to catch them on their night prowls.

As we continued on the walk, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by increasingly loud rumbly growls -- take a listen:

You might think the source of such noises must be quite close -- but you'd be incorrect. These are the sounds of the black howler monkeys, considered by most to the the loudest land animal in the world. They can be heard clearly for up to 20 miles! (according to wikipedia). We think we were listening to a monkey across the forest -- check out the black blob near the top of the center tree:

As we started our return to the lodge, we ran straight into a group of peccaries. They did not enjoy being disturbed and found us threatening -- clicking their jaws at us in warning.

I admit that I was getting a little tired by this point -- upon being told that we still had roughly 20 minutes to go -- and feeling more drained by the moment due to the intense sun...I wussed out and asked Stefan to call Sam to pick us up on the safari jeep. Good thing though -- because otherwise, we would have never spotted an entire family of howler monkeys above the road on the way back! First we spotted the male, peeking out from the trees:

But he soon moved away.

Luckily for us, his movement caused his entire family to follow.

Since they moved to another tree along the path, we got to watch the entire migration:

There was even a baby howler monkey amongst the family -- the picture doesn't quite do it justice:

Here's a few final shots of the patriarch before they moved on beyond our sights:

And as a final sighting for the morning, there were a few Hyacinth macaws in the trees by the lodge:

After a well-needed nap, another steller lunch (the food at the lodge is ridiculously tasty), and another nap (we slept a lot during the day), we headed out for some horseback riding in search of giant anteaters.

The horses were at the farm -- because Embiara was in fact, a working ranch, with hundreds of bulls, dozens of pigs, chickens, and so on.

This was the first time I'd ridden a horse -- suffice it to say that my mount was NOT graceful. Alas, there were no pictures of this!

I think I looked okay once I steadied myself on the horse.

Our horses were pretty tame -- they generally just followed the horse in front on them:


Unfortunately, we did not see the giant anteater on the trip (there was one that regularly paced the grounds of the farm), all we saw were birds - luckily, they were pretty birds:

It was a nice ride -- I could see how a person would get really into horses....though may not the riding helmets - those were pretty hideous.

A final shot of the horses in the light of sunset -- que bonito!

And with the sunset, so ended another day.

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.