Riding in the Pantanal, Santa Clara Posada    

With all those parrots and parakeets it was always a noisy morning. There was wildlife but also around the posada there were life size and giant size reproductions of local animals. A jaguar and cub.

A toucan and another bird whose name I forget.

A mother pig and her piglets.

Geese walking through the posada.

That was all before breakfast and after breakfast it was time to go riding. Shannon saddled up in the paddock.

A picture of me in the saddle.

And then it was off across the farm and nto the Pantanal.

We were accompanied by a pig that thought it was a horse. It lived with the horses and even ate the same food. It even refused to eat the pig feed that it was given. And it would walk out with the other horses even day, in the morning and the afternoon and despite its short legs, it would stay in line and keep up the same pace.

A view of the string plus pig.

A selfie of me plus pig just behind.

Another pig like animal having a drink from a tap. It had a habit of hanging about the tap until someone switched it on for it and it would stand in your way as you went pst until you turned it on.

It was time for a boat trip along the river, leaving from the same place that we had been fishing a few days before.

We set of at speed and once we were going fairly fast, our guide Tony cut the engine and we used momentum to drift along the river to catch the wildlife, only using the engine occasionally to maintain direction.

At one sandy spot we saw jaguar tracks. They were eat most smaller animals including fish if they can get them. And they are particularly  partial to caiman.

There was plenty of wildlife along the river, using it to fish or just to get about the jungle.

We came across another party of fishermen trying to catch piranhas although they had been less successful than us.

Then we saw several families of capybaras, a giant rodent the size of a large dog unique to this area.

And everywhere there were birds.

And more caiman n every stretch of the river bank.

Weaver bird nests hanging from branches above the river.

One of several herons that we saw fishing.

A beautiful sunset and time for a dusk safari. The previous nights groups had got lucky and had seen jaguars so we were going to the same area in a truck plus a spot light to peer into the dark jungle to see whether we could also see a jaguar. However were unlucky and although we saw lots of wildlife including wild pigs, we saw no jaguar.