Pampas: Its all about the Free T'Shirt

So the first part of the pampas was an extremely bumpy and dusty experience, probably the most dusty of our drives to date in SA. We spent 4 hours driving to Santa Rosa where we would take a dugout motorized canoe down the pampas. 6 of us plus two guides, a cook and the driver crammed into a 4x4 which slammed and bumped over potholes, and constantly weaved across lanes to the flatest sections of the road. Justine seemed to have the luck of the draw and got so covered in dust we were able to write ¨Clean Me¨on her t'shirt. You will have to take our word for this because someone erased all of their pampas pictures on their camera and we don´t have that photo anymore. (BY ACCIDENT!!! And he apologized a lot)

We stopped for lunch at a tourist restaurant which gave us a taste of the gringo´ised spectacle to come. This restaurant had animals that it was keeping because they were ¨sick or injured¨but were clearly there for tourist show. They had a wild pig, a tucan, parrot and a few other exotic animals mingling with tourists feet for show... Really neat to see a tucan up close, but hard to see animals being kept like this merely for gringo interest.

After that we were soon packing up our canoe in the searing heat and on our way down the pampas. The pampas is like a wetland area, with small rivers moving through mostly flooded grassland and some forest area along the rivers. The major draw of the pampas is the fact that it is still teeming with life, despite the amazing number of tourists that visit it.

What did we see.... what didn´t we see? Well, we didn´t see any Capaberas (although we missed them twice by about a minute), the worlds largest rodent, kind of resembling a beaver sized guinea pig. We saw wild tucans, capuchino monkeys, howler monkeys (just like from Survivor folks, early morning wakeups and all), birds of all shapes and sizes, turtles, aligators, caymans, tarantulas, a cobra, a Yopi snake, anacondas, piranhas, and yes, pink FRESHWATER dolphins.

The tour itself is extremely structured and tailored to people who are less of the bushwhacking type. There were lots of moments where the only conversation would be about who had the most Mozzie (mosquito) bites or if the food was good or not. But these appear to be the key issues for gringos on the tour (The mosquitos were there, that was a fact, but bad??, no I would say most places in Canada have it worse).

We spent one night searching for aligator eyes in the dark, which turned out to be really easy because every 100m or so of the river there seems to be an aligator or cayman. Of course, our guide caught a young one, and although it was for show he was actually quite knowledgeable about the aligator in question.

Time was spent bushwacking and slogging through thigh deep swamp in search of an anaconda. Somewhere between the fact that you are looking for something that is probably under the water you are trudging through, the fact that this water also contains man eating caymans and piranhas and add in that we have all seen way too many Hollywood movies.... from this perspective it seems like a crazy thing to do.

You could also swim with the Pink dolphins, which we opted not to do.. once again same water ...although our guide assured us that the dolphins take care of their young ones and don´t let aligators or snakes into the water near them... But you just can´t stop the imagination, and the water right now is rising and thus has a lot of sediment, and is so black that you can´t even see your hand a few inches from the surface. Besides the dolphins are more swimming away from the tourists than with them.

Early mornings for us were noisy with 6am wakeups from howler monkeys in nearby trees, their screaming sounds like a stormy wind stereotypical to horror movies, the kind that snows people in their houses in the movies for a week. Days were noisy with people complaining about mozzies and lack of cold beer.

The combination of bug spray and sweat leave you feeling completely and utterly dirty. Shower water is straight from the black river, and the toilets only flushed sometimes. Caution must be used at all times; on the way to the W-C Justine came close to stepping on a Yopi snake, one of the more dangerous snakes of the pampas.

If you can ignore the gringos complaining and just sit back and enjoy the non-silence of the bugs, animals and otherwise mysterous noises of the pampas, while watching the black river with its never ending supply of plants floating by, there is something wonderfully exotic and spectacular about the planned and enacted events.