Brazil – Pantanal

On our last trip to Papua New Guinea, Sheila and I had talked with some people about the Pantanal – an area (mainly) in Brazil where you can see jaguars hunting along the river. So we made that our next trip. With some research, we also found Bonito – an eco-tourism area that sounded interesting.

We spent a few days in Rio, doing fairly typical tourist things (except for a detour to the hospital for reasons). I’m not a big city fan, but it was nice enough.

The Pantanal was amazing – more than we had expected. Jaguars, caimans, capybaras, giant otters, and so many birds. For three days we traveled in a boat up and down the Cuiaba river viewing wildlife. The river was very, very low this year – our guide said the rainy season never came. (We were traveling during the end of the dry season.) Then we spent two days at a lodge in a different part of the Pantanal.

Bonito was … fine. If I lived in Brazil, it would be totally worth visiting – and most of the tourists were, indeed, Brazilian, so the tours were in Portuguese. Obviously, I don’t object to people speaking their native language! But I wish there had been a few English-speaking tour options (like there was in Rio). And I don’t think our tour operator should have included a 45 minute lecture (in Portuguese, of course) on snakes. The scheduled activities (and all activities are scheduled – they are very careful not to overrun the area with too many tourists) were a bit repetitive.

The pages below are from our trip – they may be a lot for a casual viewer. So I put some of my favorite pictures on a slideshow.