Walking bare foot through the swamp without seeing where you step, swimming in waters full of Piranhas and Alligators are just a few of the less common things you’ll get to do as a city person visiting the Pantanal, the largest wetland on the planet. Of course once you learn a little more about it, it doesn’t seem so suicidal anymore. The Piranhas leave you alone as long as you don’t have any open wounds. The alligators, although sometimes larger then humans are only interested in eating fish and supposedly there are no real dangerous animals that you could step on when walking through the swamp. It is still a weird feeling the first time you get into the water right at the same spot were a day before the Piranhas within 10 seconds ate all the meat of the hook while fishing for them. I made a tour by boat, horse and car. The horse trip was pretty funny becuase for the largest part of the way the horse is knee deep into the water. The boat trip was ok as well and reminded me of my boat trip down the Amazon. Although you see some other animals on occasions, you see mostly alligators and birds; I mean lots of lots of birds. I stayed in a Posada right by the river so the setting was nice but you get a lot of mosquitoes and bugs when the sun sets. You even get visited by frogs that seem to enjoy it in the bathroom. I stayed two and a half days there and then headed back towards the border.
Arriving there I had to find out that the situation with the transportation in Bolivia hadn’t changed much, I couldn’t get a train ticket for the faster train on the same day, so I had to spend the night in Corumba and then take the slow “death train” on the next day. It took about 22 hours to get to Santa Cruz.