Equipo Williams

We were recently on a tour of the Pantanal and I would like to remember it so I’m writing about it now.  We were on the tour for only 3 nights, 4 days, but had an amazing time. Although it was over 100° there every day I think I preferred this to the Amazon. The Amazon was very adventurous ,but on this tour, Syd and I got our own room.

We also saw a lot more wildlife in the Pantanal. There were way cooler birds in the Pantanal like the Jabiru, Macaws, and Toucans. We saw many Hyacinth Macaws, which are the largest Macaws in the world. They live in pairs and are a beautiful sapphire blue. My dad really wanted to get some good pictures of them, but I don’t think he did. I only think we saw one or two Toucans in the Amazon, but we saw at least 20 in the Pantanal. They say Jabiru are the symbol of the Pantanal because one, they’re really cool and two, they’re pretty abundant. Jabiru are storks that reach up to 5 feet tall and have a wingspan of over 9 feet.

We also saw at least 300 capybara. They were always on our lawn, eating grass, but luckily never jumped into the pool. Since we were on a wildlife tour, we woke up at 5 am every morning to try and see some animals. One morning we lucked out. We saw two different kinds of anteaters: a giant anteater, but also a smaller one that apparently climbs trees. I really don’t understand why the giant anteaters have such bushy tails. If someone knows, please tell me, because I would actually like to know. We also saw a bunch of caiman and learned “what does the croc say?”. The females are silent, but the males make a sort of grunting noise which was very funny to listen to.

Now, let me tell you about the monkeys we saw. At the first lodge we stayed there were some monkeys eating mangoes off of a mango tree, and a bird scared one of them to the end of a branch. Then another monkey scared it, and it fell onto the ground. A bunch of the monkeys we saw were mamas with babies on their backs. We also saw howler monkeys, which I think might be the loudest mammal in the world but we never heard them actually “howl”. We also spent a lot of time looking for jaguars, but only saw footprints. The footprints showed us that a tapir was walking, looking at the ground and finally looked up and saw a jaguar about 1 m away from it sleeping. Then the tapir turned hard and ran into the woods. We think the Jaguar followed and ate it.

In the first lodge that we stayed at, Syd and I had our own room with two twin beds, which made us feel very independent. But, compared to the second lodge, it was nothing. At the second lodge, I got a queen size bed. This was nice because I got a lot of space to sleep and could “get away” from everyone else. There was a pool with a waterfall at this lodge which made the pool Marriott class fancy. So, naturally, we went swimming every day. It was also fun to play foosball at their games pavilion. The other great thing about this hotel, called Pousada Piuval, was the meals. Unlike our Amazon tour they had different options every meal. Although I enjoyed the Ararinha jungle hotel, I hope that we get more hotels like this.

At this lodge we were also able to go horseback riding, which was of course, my favorite part of our tour. I rode a tan horse who didn’t really care what I told him to do. He did, however, get extremely competitive and fast when Mama’s horse tried to pass him. Just as we were coming back from the ride it started to thunderstorm so things got pretty exciting. We ended up running to our room half soaked. All in all, the horse ride was very nice. The funny thing was that they kind of just put you on a horse and let you have it.  On our horseback ride in the US it took them an hour and a half just to put us on horses. For background information, that was how long the entire ride took us. I really hope we get to do more horseback riding on this trip.

I’m back from the Pantanal now but I kind of wish I could stay there longer. I think that for the amount of time we have in South America everything still feels very rushed. We also spent at least seven hours a day in a car looking for wildlife. It got kind of annoying when we got back to the lodge and José, our tour guide, told us we were leaving in 10 minutes and would be out for another three hours. All the sitting around was very good for my knee. I bet it will be completely healed in a couple of days. I know some people were worried about that and I wanna put that worry to rest. All in all, our Pantanal tour was wonderful. I hope some of you guys will read this and decide to go there.