The Pantanal

Our last stop in Brazil was The Pantanal on the Brazilian and Bolivian border. Amazing marshlands and flooded forests, due to it being the wet season.

We hired an indigenous guide called Flavio, who was a right chunky monkey with eagle eyes. His knowledge of all the birds (650 different sorts apparently) and animals was incredible and he would just keep spotting things that you would never have noticed. This is us at the end of our trip along with Bianca, a lovely Dutch girl who went on the tour with us. We´re hoping we´ll meet up in northern Peru

Looking back it was more dangerous than we really considered at the time. The wet season meant it was properly wet. The whole area is flooded, up to a couple of metres deep. The horse riding was complicated by the flooding, meaning at times we were up to our waists in water on the horses. At one point mine had to start swimming after I´d had to go over a river, because it hadnt fancied the rickety wooden bridge.

The water was crawling with Caimans too (like alligators but smaller, 2-4m) so the horses get a bit nervey at times. We also got confronted by water buffalo one day. The nice little centre parting hide a grizzly aggressive nature.

We went out piranha fishing on a boat one morning with Flavio and Cesar (caught nothing but was cool feeling them pull at your line, the cheeky chappies).

We also went out on night safaris in combi vans and on a boat. The sounds you hear at night are just amazing. Our favourite sounds were those of the tiger herons (that growled) and the laughing frogs (that sound a bit more like they´re crying than laughing) .

We saw stupid amounts of animals, and birds. Mostly it was birds; lots of herons, cranes, kingfishers, waterfoul, parrots, parakeets, hawks etc. Animals wise; we saw alot Caiman, but also marsh deer and crab foxes, a few howler and capuchin monkeys plus an anteater up a tree. The termite hills were impressive too.

There´s these beaver things called Capyabaras that Nic fell in love with.

She went from being petrified of seeing one to adoring them, if she could she´d love one as a pet. They are the biggest rodents in the world, the size of pigs.

Two scarlet mackaws landed in gardens of our guesthouse one day.

They also have these herons that are 1.8m tall with foot long bills and 1.8m wingspans called Jabirus.

We stumbled accross a yellow footed river turtle on our first night.

Brasilia...not sure what to think

We took 2 overnight buses to Brasilia so when we arrived we were pretty dazed.Regardless though we weren´t sure what to think. It´s a crazy place, built in the 50s by the revolutionary president Kubischenck who put Brazil on the map as a world power, before it fell again. All a bit Utopian and his statue as you will see below is almost communist. But despite being ugly it is an interesting city and the catherdral was one of the most beautiful buildings we have seen inside.

The whole thing is stained glass apart from the white supports so the light inside is incredible

There is no real centre and walking is impossible as everything is designed in super-quadra blocks all self contained and on wings out from the main road of the city. The whole layout is like an aeroplane.

This is the library, we thought it looked more like a Bang and Olufsen stereo!

This was an art gallery while we were there but is just a municipal building ( slash space station!)

The beautiful cathedral represents an upside down chalice.

This was the congress building ( hand not included but I thought it was clever) The sunrises through the H shape in the middle. The bowl represents openess to new ideas and the dome the closed state of congress

I am not good at taking these things seriously, Ed was getting vaguely irritated at me for doing cartwheels through the pictures of the important impressive buildings. I thought it made them more interesting.

We´ll leave tomorrow, the curse of Morro.

Off the coast of Salvador is an island called Tinhare, you have to take 2 boats and a bus to get there and it is so worth it. It is paradise like with deserted beaches and the water is like getting into a warm bath.

Morro do Sao Paolo is the only town and the locals are again very enterprising, turning wheelbarrows into taxi services to offer a luggage service from the port and selling all kinds of decent food everywhere on the beach.

We had some cracking and slightly scary thunderstorms there and you could see and hear them coming in from right out at sea. Because the beaches are so open and vast you could see how varied the sky was. The above photos were taken 1st to my right and then to my left from the same spot as a storm was brewing.

Capoeira is a big part of Bahian culture and is great to watch especially the skilled schools. They dance/fight (best way to describe it) almost martial art like to the sound of the stick instruments at the back. The sound they make is pretty hypnotic.

We intended to stay 2 days and stayed 7 but we finally dragged ourselves away from paradise today. Sadly we are awaiting a 33 hour bus to Brasilia in a grotty port town, very different! Wishing we were on a beach.........

Bahian Beats

Everywhere you go in Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia, there is music, 24 hours a day. There is a very different feeling to in Rio state, much more African influence. Check out this video of these kids drumming in the Pelourinho. The drums are bigger than them in some cases.

Salvador is beautiful and crumbling with loads of colonial style buildings especially in the Pelourinho old town. But it really is run down and there is a lot of poverty.

But we loved the Art Deco style Lacerda elevator that takes you from the Cidade Alta ( high city ) to the Cidade Baixe ( low city) all for 50 cence.

In the Afro Brasilian museum they show the history of Bahia and the African roots all based in slavery. The tradtional Bahian Aunt dress is as above but nowadays the only ones dressing like it want 5 Reais for a picture!

In fact what we found was people wanted to make a buck out of you wherever you went and it got pretty draining. There are people selling these beads above everywhere and I have no idea how they make any money all selling the same thing. Always though under the pretence they want to chat and be your mate and show you around, then they try to charge you for the pleasure! One thing you can say is the Bahians are very enterprising about making money.

The Big island, it as simple as that

After Paraty we headed back up the Costa Verde ( green coast) to take a boat to Ihla Grande ( the big lsland) They are so very imaginative with names here!

Ihla Grande is a real tourist spot here and rightly so, it is absolutely beautiful. With no cars at all it is totally unspoilt.

This was a lagoon called Lagoa Verde we went off snorkelling in for the day. We saw loads of cool things like starfish, seahorses and huge stripey brightly colured fish, even a leopard print like sea snake thing! There were amazing coral reefs too and just the one jelly fish we managed to avoid.

We were well chuffed to meet back up with some good old Northern English mates we had met in Argentina too, Ruth and Rob. So we stayed an extra day and went out to a very bizarre reggae bar. Nightlife is somewhat lacking there to say the least.

The next day thoroughly hung over after too many cheap caipirinhas, we headed off for a mini trek to a beach through the jungle. The island used to house convicts so there are old dungeon ruins there. I wouldn´t want to be in them at night alone especially with the spiders we saw

Sadly it rained so we huddled around one of Ed´s camp fires and went off for hot chocolate, not what you expect in Brazilian summertime!