There was a hammock room here so half the group decided to grab a hammock and practise sleeping in one in advance of our Amazon boat trip.
Not seeing the benefit of practising, I stayed in the tent, a decision I questioned once I went to bed on the first night, shone my head torch into the river I was pitched next to and saw a dozen or so Caiman eyes refecting at me. Eek.
My tent.....caiman filled river!
This was before he wandered up a bit higher......and Angela and I quickly wandered off
We took to the boat one day for a river safari, seeing lots of species of birds, capabara (the big rodent) and plenty of Caiman.
Tom caught a piranha......to feed to......
....this fella
At the end, we went Piranha fishing and ate our haul as part of dinner the next day. The Piranha we caught weren't huge, so quite a bony and not particularly meaty fish, I thought they tasted a bit like cod. Pretty good.
Here fishy fishy fishy
Vanessa eyeing up her food
So, our first night was spent relaxing around camp, only to be surprised by Mikkel (read earlier instalmants) appearing carrying a 4 foot caiman! He had clearly been a man with a plan (nutter) as he was wearing the welding gloves we use for fire building/poking and the caiman had string wrapped round it's mouth. Even the camp staff grabbed their cameras for this one!
My nieces will be horrified to know I skipped the horse riding, being more of a quad/motor bike kind of a girl. But later we went out on a 6 hour safari, driving round the pantanal, spotting more wildlife, plus a trek into the forest.
Our guide plucked some fig-like fruit from a tree, which, when cut, had the insides of a white passionfruit. It was used by local tribes as a a natural bug repellant and although invisible when applied, we were told it would stain blue so tribes used it for body decoration too. Most of us ended up with a blue mark on a hand or arm plus a blue finger but Duncan seemed to end up looking like a cat with a Hitler moustache, so got some strange looks for about a week after, until it wore off. It's lucky we move a lot! The closest we got to seeing a jaguar was several paw prints, but we did see (and hear the growls of) howler monkeys, capabaras, pigs, coaties, tucans (hurrah!), bright blue maccaws, tarantulas and a lake with hundreds of Caiman. Then back to camp for a Brazillian BBQ.
mummy howler monkey with baby
Big pussy cat paw print (jaguar)
See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil?
Yep, them there are all Caiman
Funnily enough, I didn't feel I needed a closer look
maccaws
Nabbed from Lisa's visit to a bird sanctuary a few days before, but you get the idea. Aren't they cute?!?
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