Day 211 - Bonito to Campo Grande
Trip Start
Sep 02, 2007
1
212
243
Trip End
May 01, 2008
Campo Grande,
Brazil
Monday, March 31, 2008
Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration... we woke up and wanted to go to the beach.
Well, even that's an exaggeration... we'd been recommended to relax by an area of the river where the locals like to relax!
Malheursement it was cloudy, so we scrapped that idea and decided to have a functional morning before catching a bus further north this afternoon.
We spent some time online, confirming bookings etc and then headed to a bank to change our last few travellers cheques into cold hard cash
Town square
. Oh yeah. After queueing for half an hour in Bank A they told us that they didn't actually change money, so advised us to try Bank B.
Bank B turned out to be a very peculiar place indeed...
The front foyer was all machines, but we spotted a glass revolving door with an armed guard behind it. We figured the cashiers must be through there...
Both of us were denied getting through the bloody door because there was a metal detector built in, so we had to deposit anything metal into a plastic drawer to the right of the door. It was a right old rigmarole, as if we were in an airport rather than a local bank!
Eventually we cleared the security, to discover that there were no cashiers in the next massive room either.
It was turning into The Adventure Game or something, I half expected Mark Curry and Janet Ellis to appear at any time followed by that gurgling pot plant. Anyway, I digress...
We waited for one of the 2 people working at their desks to tear themselves away from their phones and then belatedly set about the business at hand.
The guy inspected our travellers cheques as if he was Moses observing the 10 Commandments or something, so our executive opinion was that the guy had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do with them.
20 minutes of phonecalls ensued and 10 minutes after that he gave us three bits of A4 full of text (in Portuguese of course), asked us to sign them and told us to go upstairs, to the cashiers. Finally!
When we got up there it looked like half of Bonito had the same idea and we were thoroughly disheartened.
We took a number, then saw that there were no numbers displayed anywhere, so were even more confused.
Katie sweet-talked the guy behind one of the counters to find out what the deal was, and he waved us through to jump the queue. Result.
He printed off a load more paper after tapping away for ages, then he gave us a load of money! In fact Katie had to insist to actually sign the cheques, which I thought was the entire point of using them in the first place?! Weird.
We ended up being in the bank about an hour and were VERY glad to get out of there with some money.
We'd decided to take the 2:30pm bus up to the town of Campo Grande and to then get another night bus up to Cuiaba in the north of the Pantanal, so by now we really didn't have much time left.
We did a bit more internetting, to move some money around in an attempt to keep the baliffs from our doorstep, I spoke my Mum which was great and then it was time to go.
We checked out of our nice-but-slightly-odd accomodation, grabbed some food from the supermarket and then walked up to the bus station.
There had been no mention of needing to change buses anywhere en route, but we asked the driver just in case... Yup, we needed to change after about an hour, so it was a good job we checked.
We changed at the right place (after a number of false alarms) and arrived in Campo Grande late at night.
We bought our tickets to Cuiaba when we arrived, had something to eat in a cafe opposite the bus station (which was surprisingly tasty - they even knocked up a cheesey lasagne for Katie) and then we boarded our final bus, looking forward to getting out into the countryside again.
We were intrigued to see what the Pantanal would bring, it's one of those places that I've heard about but couldn't tell you anything about it. Apparently it's a huge wetlands area famous for it's wildlife, so fingers crossed it's worth all the effort and cost! ;)
Lots of love,
Al & Katie xx
