Campo Grande (gateway to the Pantanal)

Again our overnight bus arrived really early in the morning, about 05:30. The cool thing about this though (especially when it's on a comfy bus on which you can get a decent sleep) is that it gives you plenty of time to sort out accommodation, or whatever else you need to do. It also means you can safely ignore any touts that approach you, while at the same time taking their information leaflets to give you a general idea of what's on offer.

So after Sarah checked out a few local hotels, and I checked out the local tourist office, we worked out that we didn't really need to stay in Campo Grande at all, as it's really just a staging post for trips into the Pantanal (our entire reason for coming here in the first place), and doesn't have much to offer tourists in it's own right.

The Pantanal is the world's largest wetland area and is famous for various animals (jaguar, anaconda snakes, capybara - the world's largest rodent, which any David Attenbough fan will be familiar with), but mostly it's famous for it's profusion of birdlife.

So I then checked out three different tour operators, thinking it might be similar to African safaris. It turns out the operators are purely brokers for accommodation outfits inside the Pantanal itself, and so all the operators basically offer the same thing, differing only on location really. After a bit of tooing-and-froing I decided to go with a one-man show who seemed very genuine and was prepared to haggle a bit. His name was George (his company Eco Pan) and he turned out to be a great choice, as he took great care of us, and everything he told us turned out to be true (although my first choice place, Santa Clara, was full).

So our safari of the Pantanal included a free night in Campo Grande (all the operators offer this), which allows you to set off early the next morning. George escorted us around the corner to our hotel, which turned out to be a really lovely place, with a great breakfast. At this stage it was late afternoon, but it was a great relief to have everything all sorted out without us having to leave the environs of the bus station that we'd arrived in earlier that morning. So after a cool dinner sitting on a raised separator in the middle of the road outside the station eating 6 different types of skewers (chicken hearts (yum!), BBQ'ed cheese, beef, etc) from a really smiley, chatty, entrepreneurial 20-year old local guy that George had recommended, it was an early night and a quickly gobbled breakfast before catching the 06:30 bus into the Pantanal proper to start our tour.