Back In Brasil
Its good to be back in Brasil. Paraguay was not quite the cultural mecca I had hoped for, although sleeping at the zoo was interesting to say the least. So I cut across the country, discovered the slightly bizarre mix of native Paraguayans, tall thin blonde Mennonites, ex Nazi party members and Brasilian emigrants, and frankly just kept on going until I got to Foz de Iguacu, which is this tremendous set of waterfalls (catararas), much bigger and more extraordinary than Niagra, and of course where Niagara borders two countries (the USA and Canada, for those who don't already know), Iguacu/Iguazu (depending on whether you are saying it in Portugese or Spanish) borders three - Paraguay (where from the view is quite unspectacular), Argentina (which has most of the falls) and Brasil (which has some of the falls, but posesses the upstream hydroelectric plant, so you tell me who is getting the best part of that deal). Happily back in Brasil, though only just, I set myself up at the Foz HI Hostel, which is a pretty incredible set up for R$10 a day (at current exchange rates, that's about USD$4), complete with bed, pool, fans (its bloody hot in Brasil in the midsummer), nice setting, nightly soccer game, and a great crowd of people, all of whom are of course there to see the falls, and flake out a little bit. Its easy to meet people in hostels, so its therefore consequently easy to not spend all day, every day on one's own which does get lonely after a bit, and can indeed drive one to do mad things like make hour long phone calls home. (Ok, that was in Chile. It cost me a total of $5. It was worth every single penny.) So I spent the first day on the Brasilian side of the falls, which in typical Brasilian fashion was beautiful and relaxing, with a nice Israeli chap named Idan, who would suprise my friend Sarah as yet again I had found a blonde haired, blue eyed Jew. In addition to the sheer beauty and bird life of the falls, great entertainment was obtained by watching people interact with the cotimundi, which are semi-racoon like creatures, only with faces like foxes and much longer tails. They are also day creatures, not nocturnal, but they are as big and as curious and as dextrous as raccoons. And they like food. Well, who doesn't, really? But they are so cute looking that despite the numerous signs and recorded warnings on the bus to not feed or pet the cotimundi because they can become aggressive, as soon as the first pack of cotimundi was discovered people would do idiotic things like feed them, pet them, pull their tails and place their babies next to them in order to get a cute photo. According to the ranger, there is an average of two bites a day, but if people are going to be stupid, then people are going to be stupid. (I was reminded of the story of a woman who wanted to get a picture of a bear licking honey off her baby's hand, so she covered the hand in honey and stood back with the camera. Of course, no one had bothered to inform the bear, so the bear bit off the baby's hand.) This I got to see. Top tip of the day, folks, don't pull a wild animal's tail. They won't like it. And they will bite.

Anyway, the falls were beautiful, and awe inspiring, and there was a lot of water. I was inspired to go swimming, so having taken plenty of photos, I went back to the hostel and did just that, meeting two new guys on the bus back (RIchard and Christopher), which was handy for the next day as Idan was leaving that afternoon. The three of us hit it off like a house on fire (well, they have been friends for years so its not suprising the two of them got along) and got up early for an adventurous expidition of the Argentinian side of the falls along with a Mexican girl named Renata, who was a great foil for the three of us. We went swimming at a great spot under the top half of the falls, where no one else was. The water was the perfect temperature, having been warmed by the sun all day. Yum yum.

I won't say too much else about the falls (I will be happy to show pictures, and they are pretty, but descriptions tend to just involve a whole lot of water going down a cliff, except here the cliff is a couple of kilometers wide.), but I will comment on the sign we saw when we went into Argentina. Before we even got to the border checkpoint, before we even saw a sign that said "Welcome to Argentina", there was a huge sign that had a picture of the Falkland Islands on it and said "Las Malvinas son Argentinas", which translates as "The Falklands are Argentinian." The Argys are passionate about this cause. The Bennys are passionately British. But talk to an Argentinian and they cannot conceive that Las Malvinas is not dying to be liberated by Argentina. Amazing.

So after a couple of days in Foz recharging the old travelling batteries, getting to know Christopher and Richard pretty well, and getting reacquiainted with capirinha, I was offered the opportunity to go to the Pantanal. This is the lower Amazon Basin, and is just chock a block full of animals, so rumor had it, not to mention the opportunity to go pirhana fishing. But it was going to involve an alteration to the old budget, so it required a little thought. Added to our little evening relaxation group was an Aussie journalist named Mel, who had just been to the Pantanal and highly recommended it., not to mention gave me a long sleeved cotton shirt to protect against the sun. It fits like a voodoo charm. Torn, I called my friend Kit, who said "Go. Do. Enjoy." or words roughly to that effect, so I off I went. Turns out Kit knows what to do when it comes to the Pantanal.

Kit has also obviously been reading these emails and paying attention to the adventures I have been having, as I got an email from him expressly conditioning my trip on not being eaten by anything of a lower class than mammalian. Cannibals and yaks were specificially delineated as being acceptable forms of death by consumption, while fish, snakes and alligators were mentioned as being unacceptable. Cannibalism being low in the Pantanal, and yaks existing solely in Asia, I felt confident I could remain a woman of my word. But it took more effort than I first thought. I'll get to that in a moment. Stay tuned, the nudity is coming up!

First I had to catch a bus there from Foz, and this is where I met one of what turned out to be two other members of my little tour group. This was Pamela. It took me all of about 4.3 minutes to decide I didn't like Pamela. Pamela was 67 and English. Now, ordinarily, this would hardly rule out my liking someone, or even thinking that they should go to the Pantanal (this trip was definitely roughing it territory, not plush), as my English relatives are pushing 80 and I dare say could out hike me any day of the week. But Pam wasn't that kind of a person. Pam is the kind of person who complains about everything and everyone, and manages to get someone else to do most things for her, and her being 67 was just leverage in this strategy. We didn't have seats together on the bus, which was good, but she was already annoying me with descriptions about how she had been in Brasil for two weeks and no one spoke English (no, the Brasilians really don't speak English as a second language. If you want to hear English, stay in England), but she would not be bothered to learn Portugese. I'm not kidding here - she had no phrase book and she couldn't even say "thank you", and had no intention of even trying to figure out how to. She asked me if I spoke Portugese, and I said I didn't really, but I was trying. She was then pretty shocked when the chap in the seat behind me (who turned out to be a quite attractive Mathmatics Professor the same age as me), started talking to me, and without a word of English (since he didn't speak any) we carried on a conversation in Portugese for two and a half hours until he got off the bus in Carcavel. The conversation served to remind me of one of the things I really like about South America, and Brasil in particular. It would appear to be rude here if you are a man carrying on a conversation with a woman and don't tell her every five minutes how pretty she is. Or at least that's what keeps happening to me. Not to be self deprecating, but this sort of thing doesn't happen to me in the States. Noooooooooooooooo, what happens to me in the States is the sort of humiliation like being forced to take off my shoes at my OWN goddamn 30th birthday party because some guy can't handle the fact that in my shoes I was one and a half inches taller than I am when running around barefoot at the boathouse. It remains to this day one of the bigger humiliations of my adult life, and one of the few regrets that I actually took the shoes off. Well, things are going to be a wee bit different when I come home. You don't get told by every man you meet that you're pretty without starting to believe it a little. Viva South America! And of course, I have learned the Portugese for this statement, and three variations thereon, having heard it so much. Anyway, so I spent all this time conversing away and having this man actually invite me to come home with him (I declined. All this pretty talk does not go away even after I tell them I am married, complete with ring on my finger. Yeah! All flattery, no threat.), he got off the bus, to be replaced by another guy who spoke a little bit of English, and we yakked most of the way to Campo Grande, much to Pam's amazement. But once at Campo Grande, I was her captive, and it was not fun for me. She complained about everything, and we weren't even there yet. She didn't want to sleep in a hammock, it would be bad for her back. She didn't want to walk far, as she was sure she wasn't fit enough for it (what was she DOING here, I kept thinking?), and when we got off the bus and she discovered that to get out into the Pantanal she was going to spend three hours in the back of a truck, well, let's just say that you were glad you didn't have to sit in the back of the truck with her and leave it at that.

By this time, I had met the third member of our little group, an Argentine named Bruno. Bruno was nice enough, if a bit gormless, and didn't speak much English, but spoke enough that Pam decided (in time honored fashion, but I honestly thought only obnoxious Americans did this) that if she spoke to him slowly enough and LOUDLY (she sounded like she could have been commander of the Quorn) enough he would understand her. I did my best to ignore her while taking in some of the already abundant wildlife which was presenting itself on the way in.

The first thing you notice are the two things you can't miss - the flocks of parrrots and macaws and the alligators, which are sliding into the swamp every ten feet as you head along in the truck. There are plenty of green parrots, and blew macaws, and red macaws, and well, just lots and lots of parrots and macaws. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of them as when they fly, they fly in fast flocks and I could never get my camera out in time, and then in the trees they blend in so very well. There is just incredible bird life in the Pantanal - giant cranes, toucans (these were some of my fave. They fly so fast!), hawks galore, it was just incredible. There is not another word for it. And of course the alligators. We arrived at camp to find two (a big one and a little one) about 15 feet in front of the camp. Amazingly, no one was worried. After a day or so, neither was I. Down there, they are more scared of you than you of them, but still if one came running towards me, I was going to climb a tree pretty darn fast. It never happened.

Camp was good - Pamela would be sleeping in a tent, and I would be sleeping in a screened over hut in which a bunch of hammocks were slung, which meant I would not be sleeping near Pamela. Good. But we then had to listen at dinner to her sudden not wanting to sleep in the tent as she was afraid of the aligators and the snakes and the noises in the jungle. Our guide, Emerson, told her that he would look in on her in the night to make sure she was ok. This seemed to help. That crisis averted, she then tried to make friends with a Spanish couple who was there with us at dinner, having a huge argument with the chap about the merits of the national service system and why England should never have given it up, and then also lecturing him that when he spoke to her he shouldn't swear, and proceeding to lecture him on anything else that came to mind because he was a man, and as such apparently thought and acted all sorts of ways which had he paid better attention during his national service would have been cleared of. This was the point where I left and went to curl up in my hammock, where I slept like a baby, as I would do every night. I love sleeping in a hammock.

The next morning prompted many crises. First of all, the Spanish couple was leaving, much to their relief and Pam's dismay as she wanted to (she says) get to know them better. Secondly, despite the fact that Pam had hardly slept a wink all night for fear of the alligators and snakes and cows (there are many many cows in the Pantanal), the fact that Emerson had checked on her in the night anytime he heard her squealing (she was a big squealer) now had her convinced that he was after her and was going to seduce her the minute we weren''t looking. My Portugese was not up to dealing with this, particularly not at this hour of the morning or this deep into a relaxing vacation, so I headed off to the shower, where I hopped in, pulled the door shut, stripped off and turned on the water to discover that there was a snake there in the shower and it was apparently not thrilled at getting wet. I am not a big fan of the old snakes, so I ran out. I did not bother to put my clothes back on, but did manage to convey the snake in the shower issue to people, mostly by screaming "snake!!!!!!! In the shower!!!!!!!!!!!'". But hey, its Brasil. They have seen boobs before, and besides mostly people were distracted by the snake, which turned out to be highly poisonous. Thankfully, it was caught and slaughtered (which I did feel a bit bad about - all it wanted to do was have a snooze), but I gave up showering anyway. It really didn't matter out there whether you did or you didn't. Its a remarkably dusty place for a swamp, the Pantanal. And besides, apparently being clean attracts the mossies.

There are a lot of mossies in the Pantanal, which is basically a huge swamp (some say wetland, but let's call a swamp a swamp here, shall we?). This can be a problem, but I had highly effective bug spray. I'm a little concerned though, as its started to do bad things to my watch face. And I put these chemicals on my skin??????? We discovered the mossies as we went walking. We didn't walk too far, as Pam is slower than molasses in January. This was disconcerting. I wanted to see some animals. I mean, apart from the snake. So for the afternoon, it was decided that Bruno and I would go with another group, where the guide didn't speak English, but I could cope, and Pam would stay with Emerson. Well, she wasn't having that. So off we went in the afternoon for another walk. A longer, if still ridiculously slow walk. After two hours, Pam, being tired, and having come to a clearing and realizing that we weren't back at the camp, started to shout at Emerson like he was a small child. "You should NOT have brought me here. It was wrong of you. It was very bad."and so on and so forth. I thought the man took it well, although you could see where the patience of all three of us was starting to wear thin. I intervened and said this was probably best left until we got back to camp, at which point we fell in and Pamela started to laugh. This was not my happiest moment, and I was glad to be back at camp where I could sit quietly and watch the sunset nicely on my own. With the two alligators, who I infinitely preferred to Pam.

But the next day is where I came into my glory. As a strategic retreat, we all went fishing with another group. Pirhana fishing! 10 of us piled into a 4 wheeled drive, went over land for miles and miles where we got to a lake with our poles and had at it. Out of the 10 of us, I was the ONLY ONE to catch a fish. In fact, I caught three. Two pirahna (go me) and something yummy which I don't know what its called. The teeth on the pirhana! Sharp wee buggers. They are also adept bait stealers, although some people didnt even get a nibble. I had plenty of bait stolen, until I finally about a half hour before we left, rediscovered the correct knack of when to yank upwards on the line to set the hook into the mouth and hauled all three of my fish out of the water in the space of about five minutes. This drove everyone else nutty, but I didnt care, I was just feeling accomplished. I have been to the Pantanal and caught pirhana. I am a force to be reckoned with.

And so it went on for two more days. Oodles of wildlife and birdlife, exploring on horseback (I did consider where in Kit's conditioning it would fall if I fell off the horse and broke my neck, but it didn't stop me galloping across the Pantanal like a mad thing.) on my horse, which I rapidly named Frango as he seemed to be afraid of everything. But Frango and I came to a pretty good understanding, and trekking on horseback was really great, and plenty of wildlife. My fauna spotting luck is still holding with me - I saw three puma when most people never see one, plus an aardvark, and lots of capybaras (but those are just about guaranteed to be seen, as they are so common), which are the world's largest rodents. They look like fuzzy baby hippos to me. They're maybe two feet high at the shoulder, and are apparently responsible for a lot of plant consumption down there. Plus more cotimundi in the wild, but I still wasn't going to pet any.

Then today it was time to return to Campo Grande, and so we piled back in the truck. This worked for the first hour, and then suddenly the engine would go, and the gearshift would change gears, but the wheels wouldn't turn. I knew it was a broken drive shaft before I even got under the truck to have a look. Nope, we weren't going anywhere, and I wasn't going to make my connecting bus to Rio. Pam, needless to say, wasnt pleased. We sat there for three hours in the noon sun waiting for another truck, but eventually one came. We managed to get to Campo Grande with five minutes to spare to catch Pam's bus, so now she's gone, and just an amusing memory buried deep in thoughts of gorgeous scenery, an almost full moon, incredible birds and animals, and the thought that I can now go have a shower before catching the 10 am bus to Rio.

The Pats are in the Super Bowl. YeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeHAH!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Anne