What do you do when Life gives you lemons?

Rent motor-bikes.

After our dejected return to Poconé, we spent most of the evening trying to figure out a way to get back out to the Pantanal for the day Thursday to try to enjoy what little good-weather time we'd have in the area. After discovering that we weren't going to find a car (which would have to come with driver) for less than R$200, we started getting creative. The result? The discovery that both Sascha and Arthur, as holders of German car-licenses, thus also must have motorcycle licenses. R$100 and about 8 hours later (about 6:30am) we were back on the Transpantaneira, 4 of us and 2 backpacks on 2 2-wheeled vehicles, finally feeling in-control of our own destinies.

Of course we should have known that by "two new, excellent motorbikes", what the renter-guy actually meant was "one dirtbike appropriately constructed for offroading, yet which will be making very strange sounds by the end of the day; and one, well, scooter." That's right... off-road scootering. And no one could have made it look better.

We had an awesome day, however - which totally made up for the few essentially "lost" days we had before. We rented canoes for a couple hours and paddled up and down Rio Claro, did some pirahna-fishing (which included discovering Arthur's impressive knack for catching a damn big pirahna, and rather than getting it in the bucket placed in the boat for that purpose, bouncing it off the side of the bucket to fly off the other side of the boat), saw an otter do some fishing of its own and generally enjoyed the Pantanal's wildlife.

Last night we got our tired selves back to Cuiabá to stay in an ...interesting hotel next to the bus-station, so that we could be up in time to catch the 7:30am bus to Chapada do Guimarães - a beautiful highlands also relatively nearby. Today was spent seeing waterfalls, swimming in waterfall-pools and jumping off of and around waterfalls, followed by experiencing an impressive feat of off-road taxi-driving (city-taxi + a decently long road mostly composed of sand = a taxi-driver who certainly earned the R$100 we all at first thought was exorbitantly expensive for the trip) to arrive in Cidade das Pedras ("City of Rocks"), which was fantasticaly beautiful, to say the least (I'm feeling at a loss for extreme adjectives at the moment).

So the adventure continues tomorrow with some more time around the Chapada and then a 4:30pm flight from Cuiabá to arrive in Belem (at the mouth of the Amazon River) at about 1am.

Bring it on.

If it wasn't for bad luck...

we'd have no luck at all.

Average temperature in the Pantanal in July: around 30C
Temperature on Monday, when we arrived in Poconé, the "gateway to the Pantanal": around 35C
Temperature from Tuesday morning when we left Poconé for the Pantanal through Thursday at about 12:00pm : 8-14C
Temperature Thursday at about 1pm when we got back to Poconé after having finally given up and decided to head back out of the Pantanal because it wasn't worth paying R$115 a night to do nothing but be cold: 25C

If it happened in a movie, I would have scoffed at the impossibility of such perfectly BAD timing.

And what did we get for our time and (therefore) money?
Arthur got a cold.
Sascha got a lot of sleep.
Daniel got a stomach ache because all he did for 2 days was sit and eat out of boredom.

Ok, that's not being totally fair. We did also get to see some crocodiles, birds, and random other wildlife; ride some (cold) horses; fish for pirahna and play cards. But man, just the ride out of the Pantanal in the cab, when the sun finally had come out, gave evidence to what amazing wildlife we should have been seeing with our time there.
We all also had the thrilling experience of living with a constant of at least 4 layers of tshirts on at all times, since none of us had packed expecting such cold, and since the (delightfully rustic) lodge we were staying at had been built with the expectation of a climate which almost never drops below 20C-ish, and thus has no need for a single room capable of being made warm. Pretty much the only two ways to be warm were to be in the shower or in bed for an extended period of time.... but oh was there hell to pay when leaving either place!

So, back in Poconé waiting for Divine Intervention to tell us what to do until our flight to Belém on Sunday (where I hear it also never gets cold), since clearly we have absolutely no control over how this trip is going.

The Next Part of the Journey Begins

Matt and my week in Rio (and Ilha Grande) was... incredible! Unfortunately I have neither time nor patience to recount every story in great detail, nor upload pictures, but I'm sure you can all imagine the kind of fun we would have. And I'll get the pictures up when I'm reunited with my computer in 3 weeks.

I just packed Matt off in a cab to go catch his flight (tear...), and am getting everything arranged to begin my 3 week whirlwind trip around Brazil - starting tomorrow!

First stop: Cuiaba and the North Pantanal! I'll try to update relatively regularly with how the trip is going!

Now to go enjoy what remains of my last full day in Rio!