The Eyes Will Have It in Brazil’s Lush Pantanal

It was the blackness that made the brilliant eyes so captivating. At the end of my flashlight beam, like glowing embers on a sea of black velvet, the fire-orange eyes of a thousand caimans reflected back at me.

Under a starry sky, the field stretching out before me seemed to practically grow caimans--enormous toothy reptiles that are often mistaken for alligators. Every sweep of the flashlight lit up scores of eyes, some not 20 yards from the raised dirt road where I stood.

The eerie sight of the caimans was just one of many unforgettable sights that greeted me at seemingly every turn in the 150,000-square-mile wetlands at the center of South America, an area called the Pantanal.

Although lacking the fame of the Amazon, the Pantanal is home to at least 1,100 species of butterflies, 400 species of fish, 650 species of birds and 80 species of mammals. According to the World Wildlife Fund, only East Africa’s savannas offer more in natural richness, both of flora and fauna.

Pantano means “swamp” in Portuguese, but in fact the Pantanal is not a swamp at all. Rather, it is the world’s largest wetland--a single, low-lying ecosystem formed by the dozens of rivers that flow into the mighty Paraguay River.

Depending on the season, the Pantanal is either flooded or drying out. During the dry season, from May to November, vast expanses of savannas are exposed. During the rainy season, from December to April, the rivers swell and deep mud and washed-out bridges often halt traffic on the Transpantaneira.

Rolling across the Pantanal is like having pages of the National Geographic come to life around you.

Exotic birds dart from spindly trees. Caimans plunge into waters that are milk chocolate in color. Giant anteaters lasso termites with their footlong tongues. Fishermen under broad straw hats sweep rivers in dugout canoes, catching 20-pound catfish and filling baskets with piranha.

In spite of its fantastic beauty, the Pantanal has been a great unknown until recent years. Lack of roads kept the Pantanal’s wildlife-rich inner delta, an area about the size of Britain in central-west Brazil, out of reach to all but the most zealous explorers.

It was in 1974 that an elevated dirt road--the Transpantaneira--was completed, linking the Pantanal’s interior with its northern boundary at the town of Pocone. Still, it wasn’t until just three years ago that tourists outnumbered scientists visiting the area.

I flew to the nearest city--Cuiaba--in late June during the dry season, when wildlife in the Pantanal can best be seen. With a bottle of local rum, three cameras and a guide, Luiz Roberto, who could identify what seemed like a million animals, I set out for a weeklong adventure into the New World’s largest breeding grounds.

After an hour’s drive past 10-home villages and miles of parched, rugged country, we arrived in dusty Pocone and loaded up on soft drinks--ammo against 95-degree days.

Just outside Pocone, a carved sign hung over the road announcing the beginning of the Transpantaneira, and it might well have included the message: “Where city dwellers become nature lovers.”

No sooner had we begun our journey into the heart of lightness than we slowed to cross one of the 123 wooden bridges on the Transpantaneira, which stretches 90 miles from Pocone to Porto Jofre.

From our Land Cruiser we peered into ponds on both sides of the bridge, and to my pleasant astonishment, we spied the first of hundreds of caimans we would see in coming days.

By day, literally millions of Pantanal caimans take sun beside waterways and marshy pools. At dusk, they submerge to feast on piranha and an occasional land animal ambushed while drinking at water’s edge. Whether seen by day or by night, the toothy reptiles, some up to 10 feet long, are an impressive sight.

A few minutes past the bridge we came upon a towering tree that wore its leaves like crowns on its highest branches. About two-thirds of the way up the tree, where the trunk finally flared off into branches, two jabiru storks--white birds measuring a full four feet tall with scarlet collars, black hoods and six-foot wingspans--had built a nest the width of a desk.

On a nearby branch, a crested quero-quero --a hawklike bird named after its sound--”I want, I want”--eyed the nest’s eggs. Should the storks, who mate for life, abandon their nest even for a minute, it would spell certain death for their offspring, Luiz said.

In the miles that followed, we came upon kingfishers, yellow-beaked toucans, roseate spoonbills, American wood storks, tiger herons, spectacled owls and more than a few macaws.

Without even leaving the truck, we also spotted marsh deer, two giant anteaters and dozens of capybaras--web-footed rodents the size of wart hogs with guinea-pig faces and bearlike coats. There were other animals, but simply to list them does not do justice to the pleasing emotions they evoke when seen in sweeping savannah unspoiled by man’s often-destructive touch.

We spent our first night at the Hotel Pixaim, a 10-room lodge with bath, good food and a friendly staff. Typical of the Pantanal’s hotels, this one was clean and comfortable though lacking in luxury.

Built on stilts at a bend in the River Pixaim, the hotel rises above a marshy area popular with caimans. At night, amid the sounds of crickets, bullfrogs, owls and monkeys, I could sometimes hear the rustle of caimans beneath me.

The next morning, like most of my mornings in the Pantanal, began with Luiz and me racing out to a vantage point he knew to watch a breathtaking sunrise.

Before the sun broke, the siren of a million crickets would be joined by a cacophony of birdcalls. Monkeys entered the ruckus with howls that reached a crescendo. It was like a movie soundtrack played at full volume, quieting as sunlight swept the plain.

The rest of the day would be spent cruising the Transpantaneira or paddling around in a canoe, which took us down narrow waterways far from the road and into lowland rain forest.

Gliding quietly in a canoe allowed us to slip unnoticed beneath leaning trees bustling with howler monkeys and common iguanas. In front of the canoe, dorados and pacus --fish often weighing 20 pounds or more--heaved themselves out of the muddy water to announce their presence, while scores of birds, many with long, elegant wings, flew an arm’s length above the river.

One day, Luiz and I took a canoe out with an old Pantaneiro who could spot monkeys in trees before I could see them with my 200-millimeter lens. He pointed out a clearing where a jaguar had been, and once we paddled to within 20 feet of a family of capybaras before the giant rodents ran off.

Often I’d see what appeared to be the head of a snake poking out of the water, only to be told it was a snake bird--a semi-aquatic bird whose head resembles a bushmaster when the bird comes up for air.

On occasion, with Luiz translating, we’d stop and chat with locals. One, a young biologist, was most anxious to criticize sport fishermen for depleting the rivers’ stocks; most ignore fishing limits, he said, leaving the area with hundreds of animals caught in a single weekend.

On our last night in the Pantanal, Luiz and I drove back to Pocone, then headed east about 30 miles to the tiny village of Porto Cercado, where we climbed into a motorized canoe that would take us upriver to Cabanas do Pantanal, an 18-room lodge accessible only by boat.

In the blackness of the moonless night, our canoe shot across piranha-filled water ringed by caiman. Our boatman flicked on a flashlight every so often during the 20-minute ride to warn other boatmen of our presence.

On the shores, dusk had turned the ivy-covered trees into menacing silhouettes, and fireflies flitted off and on like grandma’s white Christmas lights. It was Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” minus the pirates, at a wind-whipped 30 knots.

The hotel would have met Hemingway’s approval. Its ceiling sagged, and the walls were boards of bright wood decorated with colorful maps of the Pantanal and photos of the area’s wildlife, including jaguars, ocelots, anacondas and, of course, caimans.

Behind the bar were jars containing cachaca --clear and punchy Brazilian rum. Each jar also contained an oddity such as a root or piece of bark, stuff that when aged in cachaca is said to produce a concoction that will increase potency, produce arms of steel and so on.

The hotel’s bedrooms were nothing special, but there was a gorgeous lime-green tree frog clinging to my shower wall and, perched on a ledge near the ceiling, a small snake giving the frog a good look.

That night, like most we spent in the Pantanal, we drank cachaca in a fire’s glow and recounted the day’s exotic sightings

Monkeys playing . . . fish leaping . . . exotic birds in flight . . . scenes as memorable as the field of caimans that peered into my flashlight a few light years from civilization.