3 buses, 1 metro, a walk and an offroad truck later .... And we were in the Pantanal

Turns out that as narrow as Brazil may look on a map it kind of takes a while to get from the East of the country to the west - who would have thought.

But wow it was worth it. We had been told that the Pantanal was effectively like the Amazon but you saw more animals - that and it is not actually a jungle but a wetlands. We stayed in a Fazenda or Farm and went on several different excursions and saw shed loads of animals. The best way to describe what we saw and just how amazing it was is to look at the photos below.

Loads of parrots! The red one was really tame though and got grumpy with Harriet because she was doing the laundry where he wanted to walk! Also saw this blue one which is really rare!

Armadillo, Capybaras (largest rodents in the world) and a million monkeys.....

Sincere apologies for Matt's arty, farty sunset photos. Count yourselves fortunate that you only have to see two, there are nearly a hundred replicas, turns out that the new camera has a fast shutter speed so now he can actually take the same photo a gazillion times.

Probably the rarest and most amazing animal that we saw was the giant otter - there are between 2000 and 5000 left in the wild. Not exactly scared either, very curious and stayed really close to us!

There are around 35 million Caymen in the Pantanal! So it obviously made sense to get as close to them as possible!

By swimming with them! We swam in the river off a beach which when we arrived had caymen on it, to scare them off the guide dive bombed into the water, shortly followed by ourselves!

We also went Piranha fishing which was amusing, you literally put a bit of meat in the water and it was gone! Turns out that they were hungry, we decided against swimming with the piranhas, we caught quite a few as a group. I was a bit rubbish but eventually caught one which was deemed fat enough to eat, Matt seemed to be a natural and kept hoisting them out of the water and then playing with them! The guide was not that impressed with Matt for trying to hold it up and poising with it!

 He also used them to feed the Caymen in a bid to get the 'money shot' (his words, not mine). Below is Matt making "subtle" splashy movement to mimic the movement of a Piranha in an effort to make a Caymen snap its jaws for a photo, meanwhile I was having a not so silent strop on the river side.