As we arrived in Brazil we arrived in the old border town of Corumbá.One of the first impressions we had when entering the portugese speaking Brazil after beeing so used to Spanish was that everybody suddenly seemed to be speaking Spanish with a very thick Dutch accent. This was a bit funny, but also quite hard to understand.

Corumbá is today a small city on the border of Rio Paraguay at the border to Bolibvia. Even the citys railroad, which had once been known as the "train of death" which had connected Brazil and Bolivia had been closed down. Now the city was mostly famous for its tourist access to the Pantanal and its shady reputation as a dangerous smugglers town. In the old days it has, however, been a triving river port. It was even claimed that over a hundred years ago it had been one of the worlds biggest river ports. Today the only trace of this was some nice buildings down near the river.

We spent the day mostly relaing here after our troublesome journey to reach Brazil. In the evening we went down to the river side to enjoy the sunset and have a great pizza dinner. Here we also first got aquainted with the mosquitoes of the pantal which would gradually eat us alive over the next few days. It was great to see the party spirit among all the people crowding the parks and terraces leading down to the river. It was saturday night and summer holliday and people were dancing and dringking and enjoying the coolness of the night. But due to the guide books comments about the city we were a bit nervous and went home to sleep early.

The next morning we started out on a treeday trip into the Pantanal to see another fantastic nature area. The Pantanal is basically the worlds biggest swamp. It is an area roughly five times the size of Denmark which every year is flodded by several meters of water when the rivers swell with the water from the annual monsuun in the mountains and jungles upstream. The area is thinly populated and though a very large part of the Pantanal is used for cattle ranching there are also still many wild lands which contain an amazing range of wildlife.

Our trip to the Pantanal started with a two hour bus with a public bus. The bus, which we had noticed was of a much higher standard than we had gotten used to in Bolivia dropped us off at a small police station by a side road in the middle of nowhere. Here we waited for a couple of hours until a SUV came from our Fazenda and drove us the 25 km down the side road to the camp where we would be staying. We quickly found that the car rides was one of the best possibilities to spot wildlife. ON the trip down to the camp we allmost ran down a whole herd of maybe 20 black Pekkeri (wild pigs) which were crossing the road in fromnt of us. We also saw the ostrich-like Rhea and deer as wella as a number of eagle like birds of pray before even getting to our camp.

We then got to our camp which was a simple two-storrey hut with an open eating area and kitchen on the ground floor and a large one-room domitory full of hammocks upstairs. In the area around was then a few deck-chairs, sunroofs with more hammocks and a small bar shed centred around a lawn where we could relax during the day. In the first afternoon we went on a boat trip and tried to fish for phiranas but we did not catch any. It turned out that it is difficult to catch phiranas and caiman at that time of year because everything was flooded and the water annimals therefore tended to hide in the deep vegetation where we could not get to them. Even though we did not catch any fish we still enjoyed the fishing trip because we saw several black howler monkeys and a coati (racoon-like mammal) and a family of capybaras Capybaras are the worlds biggest roodent and look like a cross between a pig and a guinee pig. We also saw a lot of different birds, especially eagles, hawks and king-fishers.

As we returned late in the afternoon we also really began to feel the mosquitoes and it became a habit to always be covered in strong recently applied mosquito repellant. THe repellants we got there where generally more than 15% DEET but even then we had to reapply it every hour or so. Our guide even told us that two weeks before we got there it had been much worse.

As we woke up the next morning and got down for breakfast it was clear the the water around our camp had risen a lot during the night as most of the lawn which had been dry the night before was now flooded. Our first activity of the day was a safari in a big open truck and saw a lot of caiman, a few capybaras, more black howler monkeys, deers and rheas as well as a many more birds. Close to the main buildings of the Fazenda we also saw a tame Ara which was sitting and eating on the roof.

Even though we saw a lot of animals it was clear that this trip was very different from our stay in Cuchini the week before. The stay in Cuchini had been very luxurious with everything being done to please just us, we had been the only guests there and Cuchini had been located far from any other habitation sorrounded by their own private reserve. In the pantanal our trips were on big trucks or big boats with 10-15 other tourists and on the trips you would see several oter boats. It seemed on the truck safari that on much of the road there would be a truck from one of the fazendas passing every 10-20 minutes so there was not much quiet for the wildlife.

When we came back for lunch they also organized that we could swim in the river. They took us a few hundred meters up the river using the boat and then we floated with the stream back to the camp. However it turned out that it was a mistake to go swimming as both Rebecca and I got a sore throat that afternoon and rebecca got severe stomach pains for two days. Our guide was very sure that it definetely was not due to the river water, however, he seemed too sure to be convincing and it seemed the most likely cause.

That afternoon we had a horseriding trip around closer to the fasenda where we saw a lot of birds and got quite close to the storks. Parts of the trip we had to ride through water that came well up our tighs, but we got a bit away from the roads so that was nice.It seemed , however, that all the bouncing up and down was not very good for Rebeccas stomach and she had to go to bed when we came back. It was a bit of a pity because even though we did not see much on the evenings boatride we had a very nice campfire later in the night were we sat and watched the stars and our guide pointed out the Southern Cross to us.

The next morning the water had risen even higher and the only dry place was the terrace on the ground floor of our hut. And the caimans were sneaking up to luck just at the edges of our camp. We were definetely getting a feeling that we were sinking at this point. Britney, a wild piglet which they had adopted also seemed very upset about the situation as she ran around the camp squaling londly and trying to find her favorit staff members.

The last activity which we had on this morning was another boat trip (since hiking would be very wet) there we got to see the capybaras again as well as black howler monkeys and a few swimming rheas (it was very rare to see them swimming, our guide had only seen that once before) as well as a lot of birds.

After lunch this day we left the fasenda to qontinue our journey and on the trip back up to the highway, which we shared with a Lonely Planet and Rough Guide writer, we saw an amadillo. We had planned to go straight to a place called Bonito, a few hundred kilometers to the south, but there was no busses going there that evening so we took a bus to a local city called Anástacio instead. On the way there we were very lucky to see a giant ant eater. Normally the giant ant eaters are quite rare in the southern Pantanal and they are very beautifly with their huge sail-like tail so we felt quite lucky to see one.That night we slept in a little motel which had an extremely helpful owner who drove us to the bus station and helped us get tickets for the bus the next day.

A few days later we met a few Polish people who had stayed one nught longer than us at the fazenda one day more and they told us that that night everything had been flooded and they had had a big party where everybody got drunk and the next morning they could not find Britney, the adopted wild pig or their adopted wild bird and they thought they had been eaten by the caimans.