Friday, March 30, 2012

Southern Brazil: A Trip To The Wild


Our trip to Brazil was amazing! It was book-ended by days of sun, sand, and sea, and finally, after 1.5 years, we were able to go on our honeymoon!

We arrived in Rio de Janeiro to 29 degree Celsius weather, and for the first time, I found myself in places that I just realized there were famous songs about that I'd grown up with. 

There's the wealthier district of Ipanema Beach, just like the song The Girl From Ipanema,
And of course that very famous Copacabana Beach!





I have to admit though, coming from the 7000+ islands of the Philippines, my husband and I were not as impressed with the beaches that we saw in Brazil.

But Brazil is a huge country, and to see a lot of other places worth seeing meant a dozen plane rides, or countless hours on a bus.

By the end of our trip, or major journeys between places to see had reached a total of about 62 hours! Yikes!

From Rio de Janeiro, our first stop was Paraty, a beautiful old colonial town by the coastline. For my Filipino readers, it looked like a cross between Boracay’s D’Mall, and Intramuros. Very beautiful place, truly idyllic! It was a wonderful change from Rio’s hustle and bustle, it was much quieter here, and I felt like I was finally on vacation and relaxing.




It took about 20 hours on the road to get to our main attraction in the south of Brazil, as we travelled inland to Iguacu Falls – much grander than Niagara Falls. Here I am afraid words will fail me. I’ve got a couple of great pictures out of about 40 shots of the place, but there will be nothing like being there yourself, seeing such a magnificent wonder. Nothing. You’ll have to go there yourself to see and feel how grand this wonder of nature is. The fun part was – we took a boat ride into the falls, and got doused by one of the falls! It is a collection of about 275 falls if I remember right. Grand, and magnificent. Must see it for yourself.




I had been dreaming about going to another inland town called Bonito ever since we picked up our copy of Lonely Planet: Brazil. The place promised snorkeling in the river! Now, my husband and I had done a lot of snorkeling throughout the Philippines, off of many islands, but I had never gone snorkeling in a river before!

We spent two days going through several rivers – the first was Rio da Prata, where the crystal clear waters were teeming with a bevy of all sorts of fauna – there were the large, black pacu fish, that were always stuffing their faces with dried yellow leaves; the large, golden, sharp-toothed dourado fish that my husband fell in love with; the blue-gray elephantine snorty-nosed fish, lots of other little fishies, and my beloved orange-tailed piraputanga. The latter were really peculiar – they loved to stay by the river bank, so when you swim past them, there they would just all be there, all lined up firing-squad style, watching you, sometimes right in your face, all placid, and calm, and not worried at all that a big, clumsy oaf of a fish like you is crossing paths with them. What a delight!

Our second visit was to Baia Bonita, which presented to us a calmer river, and our first stop, just before it bled into the moving river, was something that seemed unreal. The sun had come out, and the green on the river bed was only 6 inches away from my face, as I fell onto the water, held afloat by floating vest and wet suit, lest I spoil and deface this beauty. Piraputanga right beside me. Right in front of me. Within arms reach. It was magical. I look ahead and behind the rows of piraputanga, are even more rows of piraputanga. And blue, just clear, perfect blue, it seems almost as if I were hallucinating. Everything is so picture perfect that my senses can barely believe it. Before we come in, we see the sign “Natural Aquarium,” and once I am inside, I fully realize why it’s called that.





God made this, and I can’t believe it’s real. It’s like swimming inside a gigantic aquarium, where the flora and fauna were especially chosen for your viewing pleasure. How can this be real?

From Bonito, back to Campo Grande, and from there, off to another main trek – the Pantanal. We weren’t going to make it all the way up north to the Amazon with only three weeks, but the Pantanal is much like the Amazon, according to the books, also allowing you to see a lot of animals in the wild.

And see them, we did! Great red macaws, and blue macaws, green parrots, howler monkeys, the shy coati (they look like raccoons, but have a longer snout), two jaguar-skinned anacondas that were beautiful and yellow-black in the sunlight, loads of caiman lizards, and, of course, my favorite, the very cute capybara (the world’s largest rodent). He was so cute! He reminded me of a hippo and horse at the same time, only smaller. He loved the water, and so we saw him during our boat ride, there, sitting by the river bank, hiding amongst the thick vegetation.









We also went piranha fishing, and though I didn’t catch one, and we had to fight off hordes of very angry, very nasty, extra large mosquitoes, my husband was the first to catch one, and catch a beautiful one he did. Its skin shone like an opal gem in the sunlight, its fins flapping in despair, trying to escape, wanting to swim back to safety. My husband couldn’t stand the look of sorrow in the fish’s eyes, and our guide came over to gut his throat.

We ate the caught piranhas for dinner. Deep fried, with some lime.

There was horse-riding the next day, and it had been ten years since I’d ridden a horse. Once I was on and we started walking, it felt marvelous, magical even. Not a machine under you, but a living being, a creature who can run and roam the earth freely, and you sit atop him, this magnificent creature of the earth. You can feel his power as you both walk the fazenda together (much of the wild is privately owned by farm and cattle owners, called fazenda in Portuguese, and hacienda in Spanish).

At our fazenda also lived two tamed peccaries (they have bristly hides, and look almost like the wild board, minus the tusks), and a gaggle of Chinese and European geese. They were quite entertaining!

And that was it. At least, the highlights really worth telling, and I’m afraid my one paragraph has turned into several pages.

By then it was time to travel back to Rio de Janeiro again, back to the city, time to leave the wild. We saw the famous Cristo Redentor up close, and went atop the famous Sugar Loaf to see the famous view of Rio from it during our last days.







And now I’m back. With a tan. Thank you, sun, sand, and sea.

Makes a few more chilly days in Prague bearable.

1 comment:

Doxy said...

Wow, Lily! It looks like you really had an amazing trip. Your pictures are gorgeous. I would love to go to Brazil some day. Just for the rainforest, I think. I've seen plenty of nice beaches before! I adore the living aquarium. I want to see that!