The Pantanal

A 3 day tour of the Pantanal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantanal) didn't impress me as much as I though it would. Sure, sure it has some great wildlife, and tonnes of alligators and beautiful birds but I left slightly disappointed. Maybe it was because it was wet season and all the animals we spread out, maybe it was because I got a little distracted by the mosquitoes that were SERIOUSLY EATING THE FOOK OUT OF this slightly chubby white man, but mainly I think it is because of Moremi. Call me a boring git for comparing one wildlife adventure with another and relegating the latter to a lower position but Moremi in the Okavanga Delta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okavango_Delta), northern Botswana (where I was about 7 year back) had fooking lions roaring all night and elephants and zebra and springbok and Kudu and hippos and hyenas looking at you from the undergrowth as you nervously pissed into the bushes holding a torch and big stick. Different experience here in Brazil, beautiful birds everywhere and so many alligators we got bored of seeing them but the largest deer I saw could only have reached my knee and there was not a dangerous mammal type predator to be seen. I wonder about the evolutionary reasons for this and the differences it made to the cultures of the indigenous peoples, relating it to the accounts of the first people from Europe to land in this continent, but mainly it thought of it as a weak man's Africa. (yes i am aware how terrible this sounds).

Still great times though, floating down a piranha infested river in rubber rings during a tropical lighting storm is not a memory I'll forget, especially as we went fishing the next day and I realized just how many deadly fish had previously been exposed to my great white arse bobbling by overhead. and i learned how to gallop on a horse (by accident and probably to all those who've rode horse it would be called a trot, but it felt bloody fast and was pretty pretty good fun).