Portal Do Pantanal Cuiaba

Day 67 - 14/03/09 Arrived in Cuiaba just after midday after another restless night on a bus. Caught a local bus to the city centre and tried to find the only hostel in the city which proved to be rather difficult. A local guy saw me sweaty profusely with my heavy backpack and holding a useless map, he offered to help me find the hostel. The lonely planet map i was using was completely wrong he said. He rung the hostel from his shop to find out it's whereabouts and then he ...

... and ready to carry on our adventures we soon hit the Transpantaneira, the infamous road which is only 160km long & mostly red gravel, as someone had the foresight to consider how wise building a road that was under water for most of the year actually would be. Thanks to this dirt trail given relatively easy access, it's dotted with Estancias and Posadas as the Pantanal is predominantly privately owned land. Our first night accommodation was on a rustic Estancia complete with it's ...

PANTANAL Ankomst Cuiaba etter en times flytur. En liten tjokk dame prikker oss paa ryggen i ankomsthallen: " Hello! You want to see animals? You want to go on guided tour? I give you good price!"Osv osv.. Tilslutt havnet vi midt oppi en meget hoylytt krangel hvor tre operatoerer kranglet om oss!! De rakker ned paa hverandre og vi trekker oss unna for aa spise litt. Puh - hyggelig ankomst! Men ...

... of towns named after presidents, each with their own prison. What does this mean for the retired presidents? Everyone gets his own town/jail when they are deposed?I guess it beats execution! Soon we arrive at our first major river crossing, 12km later we're over the Rio Parana bridge. Emu and ostrich farms abound now, alongside brahman cows and we can't forget the scenery in the sky as a flash of yellow orange caught our eye and we saw a couple of toucans improbably clumsily ...

... down side of bushwalking was my collision with a nest of baby ticks. The suckers (literally) attached themselves to my ankles, and cleverly disguised themselves as grass seeds. It took me two days to finally get them all off. A couple even jumped ship onto Cameron! We really had a neat time in the Pantanals, except for a few problems with the un-eco friendly habits of some of our guides. We emailed the company about these concerns, and received a positive reply from the manager.

... expect lots of mosquitos, so we absolutely covered ourselves in mossie spray and I even rocked a bit of an eskimo look with my hoodie & cap. Word.



We retraced our steps back out towards the horse stables like yesterday, but instead ...

... Katie's was a bit more athletic without being tempremental, so we were pretty happy.



With the other group and guides we made a total of 8 people, but I got the feeling that they didn't normally take this many of the horses out at one time ...

... fell in the mud, which was bad luck, particularly as the airline had lost her suitcase so she only had the one set of clothes with her!

I guess it was good to get some exercise so we walked back to the boat, ducked under the bridge and then it was a 5 minute ride in the boat back to the lodge.

We chilled out until lunchtime and then had more time to kill until our next expedition at 4pm.

Our afternoon activity today was piranha fishing ...

... was called Fernando and I've no idea what the driver was called, but they both seemed pleasant chaps, and Fernando's English was excellent.

We chucked the bags into the back of their Fiat space wagon thing and headed off towards our 'lodge', where we'd be spending the next 4 days.

The ride there wasn ...

Uma excelente estratégia que podemo desenvolver na universidade é uma campanha do site Sua Escolha.com. Geralmente costumamos colar cartazer em várias partes da universidade, fazemos os sorteios, pesquisas, distribuimos artigos do site Sua Escolha.com, evangelizamos e etc. Tal evento gera uma visibilidade no movimento e dá oportunidade para que pessoas usem a internet para pesquisarem mais sobre Deus e sobre a vida.