Rare sightings.......

Today was indeed a day of rare sightings.......

We began with a hearty early morning breakfast, having benefitted from the extra hour sleep due to the time change.  (We hadn’t realised that we were in a different timezone until this morning and that did explain how we’d somehow amazingly arrived ten minutes early to Cuiaba when we'd left Brasilia 50 minutes late.) 
Louis has found a new bird to replace the cockerel that troubled him in the early hours at REGUA. He’s called it the "Hooheehoohee bird", which broadly resembles its early morning call.

Our boat ride gave us a three-hour encounter to remember with caimen, capybara, monkeys and birds of many colours and sizes (mostly huge!) along a glass river to the backdrop of beautiful green forest.  Look out for more "Animals we have seen" blog entries from Louis and Frankie.

You got so close to animals that we’d previously seen only from a distance, that after a couple of hours, you went from 
“Let’s hope we can see a caimen today” to:
“Ok now let’s see if we can see a capybara with a bird on its head, a large caimen with its mouth open in the foreground, and a blue heron swooping past with a fish in its mouth.......” 

Afterwards, we had a few hours to ourselves, lazing around by a little pool reflecting on what we’d witnessed together.  Then later in the afternoon, Alyson gave us our riding helmets and he took us to get our horses.  The boys had been on a horse briefly at friends in Canada a couple years ago, but only to go around in a circle a few times.   So we were a little concerned as to how they’d get on with a two hour ride.  They turned out to be much more relaxed on the horses than we were.  And their bottoms probably weren’t as sore either. 

Our guide, Jing Jang, took us through beautiful forests and wetlands, and the horses were (thankfully) very obedient. at times, we followed fresh jaguar prints with a sense of great anticipation. No doubt the boys will probably remember when the horses wee’d and poo’d more than the various “interesting sights” but it was a lovely time to share together. 

But despite close ups with a huge caimen, and the improbably large jabirus right in front of us, these were no match for the rarest sight of them all...

Louis and Frankie, unprompted, reading stories on their kindles!

5 Sept 2012