Moving on to the Pantanal

It takes a bit of effort to get to the Pantanal. We had a 7-30am pick up to take us to Rio’s domestic airport..the one we’d seen from Sugar Loaf Mountain. We said our fond farewells to our lovely guide Raquel and got checked in. We then had a wait until our 1 hour LATAM flight to São Paulo, then a 4 hour wait until our next1 hour flight to Campo Grande. This is the nearest place to where we would be staying that you can fly to.

The views on the flights varied between great vistas of Rio itself, the beautiful beaches all down the coast and then vast tracts of agricultural land. The landing in São Paulo was spectacular….flying in amongst the hundreds and hundreds of skyscrapers. It is the 4th largest city in the world with a population of 21.6 million. This places it behind only Tokyo (37.4million), Delhi and Shanghai. New York comes in at No 11 and tiny London is 37th with a population of 9 million.

Unfortunately during this journey we both started to feel rather unwell. Jane had a dodgy tummy and I started feeling incredibly cold and appeared to have a fever. We both felt extremely lethargic and had completely lost our appetites…we couldn’t even face our Premium Economy class snacks on the 2nd flight! Jane’s theory was that it was caused by the 3 Caiprihanas two nights ago. However, I’m of the opinion that it was the fault of the surly pirates and their never-ending plates of meat and fish…although to be honest I’d only had one tiny bit of meat, a piece of sausage and the vegetarian mushroom option.

Whatever, it made the journey a little uncomfortable and we couldn’t wait to get into our hotel in Campo Grande for the overnight stay. Luckily, Campo Grande isn’t the ‘wild west’ town I’d imagined in my head. It really seemed like quite a nice place and our hotel was extremely modern. Phew!

After a good nights sleep we were picked up at 7am for the four hour drive to Caiman Lodge where we were staying. Our driver spoke no English but was a very good driver. The road here is a huge straight line! The road is quiet but every now and then we needed to pass big trucks or at one point a motorbike drive out of about 50 bikes.

We both just slept as still not feeling right and the views out of the window were very monotonous. After 2 hours we stopped at a ‘service station’ for a loo break and a quirky gift shop/cafe. Unfortunately we weren’t really in the mood for souvenir shopping.

Eventually, after another hour and a half, we arrived at a turning onto a red dirt track that said 36 kilometres to Caiman Lodge. Now this was a bit more promising….we bumped along slowly making uncomfortable progress and finally arrived just in time for lunch.

Would it all be worth it?