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Outside Magazine June 2003

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The Pantanal
The Wilder Amazon


	A Pantanal piranha (Corel)

THERE'S NO EASY WAY into the Pantanal. We'd hopped a Varig shuttle from Rio de Janeiro to S‹o Paulo, then flown almost 600 miles west to Campo Grande. Because I didn't want to risk my family—wife, seven-year-old son, and mother-in-law—flying on a bush plane to the ranch, I'd arranged for a truck and driver through a local outfitter, Delgado Tour. Luciano Barros, who met us at the airport, confessed he had never driven to the ranch. But his boss had handed off the job and a crude map.

"I have a mouth," Luciano assured me, in Portuguese. "I'll just ask directions."

I bought the best map I could find at the airport gift shop. In the midst of the void, I spied a faint red 40-mile line running to the ranch. This was August, the best time of the year for a road trip.

From Campo Grande we made good time to the village of Aquidauana, where we found a washboard road leading north into the Pantanal. We saw rare pampas deer and ostrich-like rheas along the desolate route, but we only encountered a handful of motorists, all outbound. By nightfall, that thin red line we were following had disintegrated into sandy tracks. We blundered on for hours, passing through the cattle gates of anonymous ranches, scattering cows, coatis, and caimans, before we got stuck.

Then, a miracle. By standing tiptoe on the truck cab and raising his cell phone, Luciano finally reached his boss. Shortly before midnight, a truck from the fazenda rumbled out of the gloom.

"I've worked here three years, and three people have come by car," ranch manager Paula Rego told me when we arrived, nearly 12 hours after leaving Campo Grande. "All the tourists fly—even the people who live here get lost."

The next morning broke with the chatter of a half-dozen cobalt-blue hyacinth macaws, the world's largest parrots. Beyond the horse paddock, a troop of capybaras, pig-size aquatic rodents, emerged from the tree line and settled serenely into a wallow. Down by the boat landing, several dozen caimans basked in the rising sun.

As our piloteiro, David Albuquerque, maneuvered an aluminum fishing boat along the tannin-stained Rio Negro, we saw toco toucans and jabiru storks. More capybaras materialized from the forest, while the caiman count approached three figures. That wasn't all: Paula told us that camera traps had photographed three jaguars near the ranch.

Our swamp savior, Elio Antonio "Picole" Martins, later took us on a three-hour, 15-mile circuit of the northern and eastern sections of the fazenda. Wheeling his truck along rutted savanna trails, Picole found giant anteaters, monk parakeets, and a pair of crab-eating foxes. Near a remote salina, a brackish water hole, the tracks of ocelots and lesser anteaters dimpled the shoreline. After watching a tapir feed on the algae covering a lagoon, Paula led us to a giant egret rookery, where the twilight screamed like a million soccer fans.

The next morning, there was no hope of sleeping in, not with the racket made by flocks of nesting monk parakeets. After a breakfast of papaya, pastries, and bracing coffee, it was time to explore the back forty by horse.

Paula took us across the ranch's grassy airstrip, where a wind sock hung limply in the heat. A squadron of hyacinth macaws glided into a grove of acuri palms behind a whitewashed house, now the home of former owner Don Orlando de Castro Rondon.

Longtime employees like Pedro "Japan" da Costa, who was born under a tree behind the big house, back in the thirties, could recall a time when the pantaneiros embarked on six-day cattle drives to the slaughterhouses in Aquidauana. But by 1999, falling beef prices, reduced government aid, and advanced age had convinced Don Orlando to sell out. Once a passionate jaguar hunter, he now saw his fazenda as a model for conservation in the Pantanal. In a deal that allowed him to maintain a modest home, CI bought out Rondon.

After fording the swift Rio Negro, Paula rode along the banks of an old channel, pointing out a tapir's tracks and the skittish prints left by a drove of white-lipped peccaries, a favorite jaguar victim.

While Fazenda Rio Negro has survived for more than a century in relative harmony with the Pantanal, other areas suffer development pains. Cuiab‡ discharges the untreated sewage of its 800,000 people into Pantanal tributaries, which also carry mercury from gold-mining operations near Poconé.

Compared with the Amazon, however, the Pantanal remains healthy. Steeled by the annual cycle of wet-season floods and dry-season fires, the marsh demands badass Darwinism: In a place where 30-foot snakes eat 120-pound rodents, there's no room for the unwary.

The day of our departure, we took two canoes and headed upstream, following a pair of giant otters for several hundred yards, then landed near a bend in the river. The lurking caimans ceded the beach but hung ten yards downstream while I took a wary dip.

"Don't worry about piranhas," David advised. "They prefer still water."
,Br> Fishing with a bamboo pole and a scrap of beef, however, my son pulled a piranha from the water. Time to get out; I'd seen enough feeding frenzies on TV.

Then the clouds opened and heavy rains pelted the parched earth. Our return promised to be another gripping adventure. Back at the ranch, Picole drew a map; at each cattle gate he indicated one direction: Segue. Continue.

"What day is your flight back to the States?" Picole asked.

"Sunday night," I replied.

"Then you have three days to get to Aquidauana," he said with a little smile.

No problem. Luciano still had his mouth and his mobile.

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