This was a short sweet visit to Bonito.

We arrived, rather sleepy (this was after the horse riding and snoring incident), after a 3 hour mini bus journey from Pantanal, to our Pousada in Bonito and checked in. We needed to book a tour of the natural spring and river for the next day so with some broken Spanish and a few phone calls to an English speaking guy we managed to arrange this whilst being eaten alive by Mosquitos on the hotel terrace!

After checking out the room, which was huge, quiet and a nice change from the boat cabin situation, we walked into town and found a pizza restaurant recommended by tripadvisor. We'd had enough of the Brazilian all you can eat buffet by this stage. I had another of my favourite Brazilian Caipahana's and we shared a pizza before heading to bed for our 6am start.

The following morning our transport picked us up and we headed straight to the Prata tour centre. Unfortunately some information had got slightly lost in translation and although we arrived at 9am our snorkelling tour didn't actually start until 11am. This wasn't really a problem as there were hammocks and benches in the sun and whilst we were relaxing a toucan was flying from tree to tree really close to us so that was great!

At 11am we were eager to start and I was getting hungry (uh oh)! We donned wetsuits and wet suit boots and waited about an hour for everyone in the group to arrive/sort themselves out and then we were off. We took a short truck ride down to the beginning of a trail through forest and walked for about 1/2 an hour. We then reached the crystal clear waters of the river which is formed from a natural spring 'Rio de Prata'.

Once in the water we were given some instructions about how and where to swim (all in Spanish so I just kept saying 'okay' ... How hard can floating down a river be). Then we were off!! The water was crystal clear and there were loads of huge fish, up to a meter long, like dorado, swimming right next to us!!

The snorkelling went on for about 2 hours and we got some great pictures and videos with the go pro (these really show the clarity of the water). It was interesting to snorkel in a river rather than the sea as the fish were very different and there were tree roots growing into the water at the edges adding some mystique to the experience! At the end of the snorkelling we saw where the spring was bubbling up through the sand and spent some time taking pictures.

Once out of the water we were taken back to the tour centre with wrinkly fingers and allowed to attack the buffet lunch, it was about 3.30pm and having had breakfast at 6.30am I literally attacked it!!!

After we had been driven back to Bonito we headed out for a snack dinner at a bar up the road that was playing live music. We then had another early night as the early mornings we're starting to catch up with us!

The following morning our journey started to cross the Bolivian border and get to Santa Cruz. I will blog about this shortly.

Low point of the snorkelling trip: I melted my kindle cover with the 100% deet insect repellant ... the bloody stuff melts everything but my skin!!

Alice
X