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.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário