Brazil’s Pantenal on a Budget…

While researching our trip to Brazil I stumbled across different suggestions by travellers to definitely visit the Pantanal region of Brazil. To be honest, I had heard very little about the Pantanal before, but after doing some more digging we decided that it was an area we definitely wanted to visit. Luckily it was on exactly the route we were planning to take to get to Brazil in time for a two week road trip with our Brazilian friend Rogerio, so we set about planning our visit.

The first thing I realized when looking at options for accommodation in the Pantanal was that staying in a fancy lodge in North Pantanal was not a realistic option for two South Africans traveling on a budget…Costs were an eye-watering US$500 – $1000/day at some lodges….So I expanded my search to the cheaper, more budget-friendly Southern Pantenal in the Miranda/Camp Grande area, which was a short drive from the border town of Curumba, where we would enter Brazil after our 27 hr ride on the infamous Death Train from Santa Cruz to the Bolivian border.

I came across a listing for Pousada Santa Clara on TripAdvisor which had mixed reviews, but seemed largely to have pleased most guests who were also traveling on a budget. So I contacted the lodge and after some discussion we settled on a rate of $65/day/person including all meals and excursions on a three night package, for their campsite, where accommodation was in a hammock in a shared covered area. By Brazilian standards that was a great rate 🙂 It also included collection from the drop-off point that the bus would stop at, and then transport back to the pick-up point (a total of 45km of driving).

On arrival in the border town of Curumba I managed to get a simcard for my phone after the woman at the cellphone booth took pity on me and used her ID number to unlock my card – it is a nightmare to get a simcard as a foreigner in areas not popular with tourists. We were then able to co-ordinate our pics-up with the Pousada, and a few hours later we were in the Pantanal. Luckily for us there were so few guests that the campsite was not operating, so they moved us to our own private room at the lodge for the same cost as the camping…We got an en-suite room and better food, which would have cost twice the price 🙂 We did not complain…

Our experience at Pousada Santa Clara was that for $65/night/person it was good value, but of course one cannot expect a premium experience of the Pantanal at such a budget rate. We went out on two excursions per day during out stay, but to be honest we only really saw wildlife on two of the excursions – the boat trip up the river ending in a sunset cruise, and the ‘safari drive’ along the gravel road leading to the lodge with a one hour walk into the bush. We also did a horse ride for about 2 hrs, which was fun as Akhona had never ridden a horse before.

We saw many, many birds during our three day stay in the Pantanal, including having toucans wake us up each morning with their squawking in a tree outside our room. I made a special effort to photograph as many birds as I could for my friend Jonathan Lloyd :). This was not an easy task as my only telephoto lens is a cheap 50-230 zoom lens, which is a far cry from the 300 – 600mm f4 lenses bird photographers tend to shoot with. Every dawn and dusk the lodge was also visited by quite a number of red macaws and various other parrots and smaller birds. We even got to see four blue macaws on a distant tree, but I never had my camera out, so never tried to photograph them. We never saw them again 🙁

We did however see lots of caiman in the water and along the river bank adjacent to the camp site each day. We also saw quite a few capybara, as well the paw prints of a jaguar on the sandy road leading to the Pousada. Unfortunately we were not lucky enough to see the jaguar responsible for the prints – they are notoriously elusive and to have a better chance of seeing one, I think the North Pantenal is a better bet. We also glimpsed two wild otters, but didn’t manage to photograph them because a noisy Columbian girl in our boat kept shouting and laughing and scared them away. We had sharp words with her that kept her quiet for the rest of the trip 🙂

For the money spent we found our three night stay at Pousada Santa Clara well worth it. The food ranged from really amazing on two nights, quite good for two lunches and fair for two breakfasts to very basic when we were the only two guests on one of the days. Our guide was friendly and tried his best to find the wildlife, but it was obvious that the Pantanal has changed a lot in the 30 years that this particular Pousada has been in operation, and sightings of certain mammals in particular are becoming few and far between.

After three days of exploring a little pice of the massive Panatanal we were driven to the pick-up point for the mini-bus which would take us to Campo Grande, from where we would catch two busses to get to our next destination – the great Iguana Falls 🙂