The giant anteater strolled through the tall dry grasses towards us, his immense snout sniffing the ground in front while his huge bushy tail swept the dust behind.
The wildlife was truly amazing- André Raine
Tiny eyes peered out from coarse brown hair, intent on one thing and one thing only – ants, ants, and more ants. With a few more snuffles and wuffles he was gone, back into the swaying grasses from where he came.
The apparently dry and arid landscape in which the anteater sauntered was Brazil’s Pantanal, which at 140,000 square kilometres, is one of the largest wetlands in the world.
Situated for the most part in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the wetland is also shared with Bolivia and Paraguay.
During the rainy season, 80 per cent of it is flooded, creating a vast expanse of wet grasslands, lakes and rivers.
Visiting the Pantanal in the dry season, as we were doing, was a very different experience as the waters recede leaving smaller pools and canals dotted amid cracked mud and flat expanses of grassland.
The dry season is also arguably a better time to visit if you are there for the wildlife, as birds and mammals congregate around the remaining water sources, making viewing easier.
Getting to the Pantanal had been a fairly lengthy process, involving a 24-hour overland trip from Bolivia in a decrepit rusting school bus (the brochures showed a large air-conditioned sleek machine, the reality anything but).
It was driven inexpertly by a Bolivian who, rather alarmingly, kept asking people at intervals where Brazil was.
When we finally crossed the border we found ourselves in the town of Corumba, a town with a faint air of desperation about it and rumours that it was a centre for drug trafficking.
Tour companies vied for our attention, each more insistent than the first. I became increasingly annoyed at shouts of “Hey gringo, you want Pantanal? We have good trip, better price.”
We eventually found one company that was marginally less irritating (and cheaper) than the rest and soon found ourselves piled into a minivan and on the road again.
We passed out of Corumba, over a huge roller-coaster of a bridge, and straight into the heart of the wetlands.
Arid scrub was interspersed with verdant waterways and water hyacinth-choked channels, where palms were dotted with chattering parakeets and bushes peppered with hundreds of egrets, spoonbills and herons.
In every pond, pool and river, thousands of caiman cruised or basked, yellow eyes watching the van unblinkingly. After several hours we stopped by the side of the main road and switched over into a safari-van style contraption.
Then we were off down a side dirt road, heading deeper into the Pantanal.
After several misadventures involving deep mud and obstinately stuck wheels we arrived at the lodge and set up our small, battle-weary tent.
With the sound of the Pantanal in our ears (a mixture of nocturnal bird calls, the buzz of insects and the grunts and croaks of frogs) we drifted off to sleep.
In the morning we were awoken by a large blue hyacinth macaw, which was busy unzipping our tent. The bird was semi-tame, coming into camp each day to amuse itself by breaking into peoples’ belongings and helping himself to the contents before flying off to join a resident flock nearby.
He was a truly magnificent parrot, being a startling cobalt blue with bright yellow patches of skin around eye and beak.
And what a beak! Designed for crunching its way through fruits and large nuts, it was massive with a huge hooked upper mandible. This made parrot play-time rather perilous, and his delighted chomping on my fingers nearly resulting in their untimely removal.
Over the next four days we explored the Pantanal by foot, horse-back and jeep.
The wildlife was truly amazing. Each morning, flocks of parrots flew noisily overhead (including the aforementioned hyacinth macaws) while clustered around the water pools were flocks of ducks, herons, waders and large horned screamers.
Jabiru storks stalked the muddy waters, probing the depths with massive, fearsome black bills and puffing up their featherless black and red necks. Birds of prey circled languidly overhead or perched on trees, peering intently, ever on the look-out for unwary morsels.
Little mobs of coati (South America’s answer to the racoon) trotted around on the ground with erect tails or clambered about in the branches, joining troops of curious brown capuchin monkeys.
Burrowing owls watched unblinkingly from their holes in the ground, dwarfed by the huge gangly forms of greater rheas – large flightless birds that look a little like ostrich.
During the evenings we also encountered tamandua, a more diminutive cousin to the giant anteater, which peered about myopically and sniffed the air with vague suspicion, while the bustling armoured forms of armadillo barrelled about nearby.
From every available pool and stream lurked Pantanal caiman. These small (well, relatively, as they reach up to three metres long) crocodiles lay motionless and half submerged, eyeing us appraisingly as we made our way by.
They were not in the least bit concerned by our presence and would occasionally haul themselves out of the water and trundle past us, water glittering on their scales as they treated us to some very toothy grins.
While walking on foot led to close encounters of the reptile and anteater kind, one of the best ways to traverse the grasslands was on horseback and so every afternoon we would saddle up and head off with a gaucho or two.
The gauchos, South American ‘cowboys’, rode their steeds with languid confidence, ploughing off into the distance while we struggled and cursed behind.
I had been handed the reins of a surly-looking white steed named ‘Bin Laden’. Bin Laden eyed me with pricked ears and lips drawn back to reveal large horsey teeth. His tail flicked aggressively and his hooves stamped the earth, sending up little plumes of dust.
We never really got on, Bin Laden and I, each day a test of wills which I invariably lost – returning to camp in the twilight a beaten man and, sad to say, painfully saddle sore.
Still our forays on horseback gave us a better idea of the vastness of the Pantanal, as despite our many hours of trotting (or clutching feebly at streaming manes) we barely made a dent on the immediate area, let alone the Pantanal as a whole.
Eventually we left the Pantanal behind, juddering our way towards the city of Curitiba in the back of a truck driven by a very drunken Brazilian.
We tried to ignore the maniacal weaving of the vehicle and the occasional shower of glass as he clipped the side mirrors of passing vehicles. The Pantanal had been everything that we could have hoped for, apart from the lack of vast expanses of water (which I’d imagined central to a wetland).
Perhaps we would just have to return one day in the wet season, to experience South America’s largest wetland in all its aquatic glory.