Brazil is Brazilliant!

We went to Brazil! And it was really fabulous in all aspects.

I can’t wait for the summer of 2020 when I return in order to share, as a guide for Backcountry Journeys, the wonderful Pantanal region with our guests. 

Our inaugural Backcountry Journeys adventure to find and photograph the jaguars of Brazil’s Pantanal seems like a long way off. I’m too excited to wait, so I’ll share right here, in this blog space, what we experienced on this trip. Hopefully, this will help answer any questions that interested folks might have as to some of the things you’ll see and do if they were to purchase our trip, and also add some fuel to the stoke fire for those convinced already that jaguars and Brazil are definitely for you. 

I wrote a short piece leading up to our departure. If you’d like to read that one. Just please don’t forget to come back when you’re done. 

Danielle (my fiance) and I left Phoenix en route to Brazil with a brief stopover at Dallas Ft Worth where we would board our 777 overnight flight into Sao Paulo. From there we had a regional flight to Cuiabá, a city of over half a million people. Due to a long layover in Sao Paulo, we arrived in Cuiabá late on day two of our travels, and we were extraordinarily tired! 

Sleep would be coming soon though as our guide, Flavio, and driver, Jon, were waiting for us at the airport to deliver us to a nearby hotel. Shower, WiFi, food, and bed. 

Transpantaneira Highway
The following morning we set out early down the dusty Transpantaneira Highway, in a southerly direction towards Porto Jofre. We wouldn’t arrive in Porto Jofre on that day as we had a planned stop along the way in order to take in the amazing amount of wildlife that exists in the region. Plus, it is a LONG way down that bumpy, dirty, rough road that also has over 140 wooden bridges (most are usable) along the way. Better to spread out the drive with a few nights along the way. Besides, the eco-lodges along the way are most certainly a part of the experience. 

The Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, covering over 70,000 square miles. That is a huge number, but what exactly does it mean? Well, it means this area is about the size of Washington State. It sits in the center of South America, mostly in Brazil but does spread into Paraguay and Bolivia, as well. The Pantanal has the highest concentration of wildlife on the continent. 

Each year rains fill the Pantanal’s giant basin, creating a vast flooded landscape in the process. Water slowly drains into the Paraguay River, the lagoons shrink leaving behind sparse small ponds filled with fish, snails and other food sources for a staggering number of waterbirds, caiman and other wildlife that flock to these areas.  On a good day, one can see upwards of 100 different bird species along this highway, and we felt that we saw at least that many birds as we made our way deeper into the Pantanal region.

A common source of confusion is between the jaguar and the leopard. Leopards are found in Africa (think the Backcountry Journeys Botswana tour) and Asia, whereas jaguars are only found in the Americas. A clear difference in morphology is the jaguar spots, which are larger more exploded and usually have small dots in the center of the larger spots. Another difference in the two-similar species is the size; jaguars are much stockier, their limbs are shorter, the head is broad and muscular, and they are an overall more powerful cat. 

The next few days were spent much the same way. We’d spend all day on the boat with Flavio and Jon, hunting for jaguars and whatever else we could spot. Looking for clues. We were extremely successful, spotting many jaguars. But spotting jaguars here is not like going to a zoo, or even like finding wildlife on a safari in, say, Botswana. There is still a thrill in the hunt with regard to finding these big cats, which to us was really cool! 

Our second morning on the river produced when Jon caught word over his radio that a momma jaguar and her cub had just swum across the main channel of the Cuiabá River. Jon hit the throttle and rushed us back to the spot we had only recently passed by just in time to watch the mother and her cub climb up the river bank and disappear into the brush. A momma with only a single cub is a momma who has probably lost a cub, as it is typical with jaguars to have liters of at least two. Adult male jaguars are known to attack and kill male cubs, perhaps this was the fate of this momma jaguar’s second baby. 

Later on, near the end of a cold, dark day on the river, just after I declared that we should head in early due to poor weather, we spotted a jaguar on the bank of the river. Very close to us! We followed this male for quite some time as he carefully moved down the river.

A dead caiman that we had encountered earlier in the day was floating nearby, the stench was in the air and this big guy could definitely smell it.

A group of vultures had the carcass surrounded as it brushed up against the shore. After appearing to have caught the scent of the dead caiman, the cat sped up, making his way much more quickly towards the carcass. The vultures retreated but stood on nearby tree branches as an audience for what came next.

The jaguar dropped down off the bank to the river and grabbed the caiman carcass in its mouth, ripping it through the brush in an attempt to pull it up off the river and into the forest. This task proved more difficult than he’d probably have liked it to be and a lot more time consuming than he had budgeted for. Good for us as we had several minutes and lots of facial expressions and movements to photograph as attempt after attempt failed to get that caiman carcass moved through the thickets. He disappeared for a bit where the carcass was sitting but the brush was being shaken vigorously. We assumed the jaguar no longer wanted to wait for dinner and so he just started eating a bit. Sorta the same way your dad might have ripped off a bit of the Christmas turkey before it was served.