I know its been over a week since my last entry but here goes a quick recap (just about to head off to the airport, again!) of our experiences since leaving Bonito!

After alot of false starts (people wanting luggage out of the trailer, people needing to pee & people forgetting stuff at the hostel) we made our way into the pantanal. We arrived late afternoon, met our guide & before we even had time to find ourselves a hammock each we were whisked off on a 2 hour walk around the lodges grounds. This included, jungle, swampland and numerous fields. We were told to wear shorts & sandles as we were going to get a bit wet & mucky. I must have trodden in almost every kind of poo! Croc's, horse, monkey, water pigs - you name it we had to walk through it...............rank!

During the walk we spotted all the above animals alongwith some macaws & pantanal stalks. As we arrived back to camp the sun was setting and a thunderstorm was rumbling in the distance & we were treated to an amazing lighting show.

Every night was spent sleeping in a hammock (i managed not to fall out, yay!) but they were in a hexagon shed thing with a roof but no real sides to it, just mozzie netting. So at night it was absolutely freezing! I have never before in my life been so cold! The generator turned off at 10pm, so from then until 6am we had no lights either, so going to the loo halfway through the night regulary turned into some military operation lol! Every morning we were woken at first light by the lodges rooster. Nice!

The second day most of the group (me & helen included) went horse riding for a few hours. My horse had attitude, everytime I tried to pull the reins it pulled them back & just did whatever it wanted - not good when your walking through the jungle trying to avoid low hanging branches lol! Helen's horse was even funnier it looked stoned, didn't move until the guide came along and hurried it along - so helen spent most of the ride just trying to keep her horse awake!

That afternoon we took a jeep ride around the pantanal, saw the usual animals & birds but also stumbled across a giant anteater, who was crossing the road in front of us. It was massive & the freakiest looking animal I've seen since being here.

Having completed the three day endurance test, that is the pantanal we hot footed it back to civilisation at 6am on the friday (we weren't eager or anything lol!). Our escape back to Rio wasn't to be that easy though................

...........arriving at campo grande airport we were greeted with an indefinate delay (due to the sao paulo air crash a few days previous). I'd been keeping the plane crash a secret from helen (& told the rest of our group to do the same) or there was no way I could see her agreeing to get on board the plane. So trying to keep her from hearing why we were delayed kept me busy & her frustrated that no one was apparantly telling us anything. The delay caused us to miss the connecting flight to rio in sao paulo, so we got stuck there for hours too. Finally got back to our hotel in rio a little after 1am saturday morning. Forgot to mention that our landng into rio that night was also aborted at the last minute - (which obviously confirmed helens fears about air travel being the stupidest & unsafest transport going) - we then landed in a completely different airport in rio. The pilot blamed a tail wind but I'm not so sure he'd got the right airport in the first place lol!