Travel Tales: Beautiful Bonito

After escaping the pantanal, I caught a bus to Bonito. Since the bus arrived pretty late at night, I decided to spend the first night at a hostel. The next morning, I walked up the main drive in town and checked out several hotels. I found a nice room at the hotel Paraíso das águas and decided to spend the next few nights there - it had a queen size bed, a private bath with a hot shower, and even a TV! There was also a swimming pool (too cold) plus a hot tub and sauna (nice). All for $30 USD a night, including breakfast.

I spent a couple of days just hanging around town, visiting the public parks and talking with people. I loved the phone booths in town.

<Benigni takes on another toucan and survives this time.

Another phone booth. Normal phone booths are the green domes across the road.

During two days of my stay, I went on organized day tours. One of the places I visited was Boca da Onça (the mouth of the jaguar).

This jaguar phone booth in front of my hotel wanted a martini in its mouth!

The water flow was extremely light, since it was the middle of the dry season. Since the waterfalls were less than impressive, I got a 50% discount on the price. Not bad.

This is one of the smaller falls.

There were pretty good trails here - a combination of wood boardwalks and compacted soil or gravel. When I signed up, I was advised that there were 866 steps. That didn't seem to daunting over a 4 mile walk. About midway, there was a rest stop where we could use the bathroom, buy food or drink, and just hang out and rest for a while. I took a little stroll around the area and saw this monkey (and several more that were too far away to photograph).

Near the end of the 4 miles, we came to the main falls. I can imagine how impressive it would look during the wet season.

At the base of the falls was a pool of cold water to swim in. In the summer it might have been nice, but it was just too cold for me to even think about swimming.

At this point, my guide informed me that the section of trail with 866 steps was coming up. What? Yep, there was a series of staircases that would take us to the top of the falls. He said I had the option of walking 2 miles back to the mid-point, where a truck could pick me up or to walk the steps. I decided to walk the steps.

I'm not sure how wise of a choice that was. My leg muscles were throbbing by the time I was done. The set up was quite nice. After several flights of stairs, there was usually a landing with a bench so you could rest or take in the scenery. I finished the steps about 5 minutes later than everyone else, so they had already caught their breath when I arrived huffing and puffing. A minibus was waiting for us at the top of the stairs to take us to lunch. We went back to the resort there and had a nice lunch, relaxed on hammocks, and could swim in very cold water with big fish. I took a nice nap on the hammocks, flirted with the guide, and practiced my Portuguese with anyone patient enough to try to have a conversation with me. We were back in town around 6 pm, so I took a HOT shower and a nap before heading out for dinner and to listen to live music.
Another tour I took was to visit the Cachoeiras Rio do Peixe (the waterfalls of the river of fish).

Again, we had the opportunity to swim with the fish and splash around under the waterfall. I stuck my foot in the water and decided it was too cold for me. One man on the tour swam under this waterfall, and ended up scraping a layer of skin off his back. It bled for the rest of the hike.

While most of the tour was enjoying the water, I wandered down the trail a little bit alone (we weren't really allowed to leave the group) and saw some monkeys and macaws quite close.

We saw more waterfalls, and had some areas that we had to cross the cold river in knee deep water. This confirmed my decision not to submerge my entire body.

The trail looped around back to the farm where we had a nice lunch and then got to watch the owner feed some of the macaws that hang around the farm. It was quite nice to see these birds closer than what I saw them in the pantanal.