Brazil
Pictures
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Brazil, South America's largest country, offers the curious tourist kaleidoscopic carnivals, some spectacular cities and towns - Rio de janeiro, Salvador and Curitiba for starters, lively friendly people, superb beaches and the massive Iguacu Falls in the south, but naturally many visitors come to Brazil looking for wildlife.
Beware, the Amazon can raise false expectations, especially if a traveller has been to Africa previously and has hundreds of pictures of thousands of wild animals in their albums at home.
The Amazon Basin vegetation is so dense that you'd be lucky to see an
anteater at ten paces, even if it ventured out in the daytime.
But most
Amazon creatures hunt at night, and that's not an especially good time
for nervous tourists to be thrusting their way through dark, dense undergrowth,
accompanied by squadrons of thirsty mosquitoes, spooky noises and slithering
things that are probably hypertense black mambas.
Not forgetting the
tarantulas that like to drop onto the insects that will be hovering
over your torch beam, of course - and they're sometimes not very accurate,
which makes them irritable as hell.
So why go to Brazil's Amazon?
For the ambience, the name, the river/forest views, the chugging life
and the epitome of the jungle experiences, that's why. Forget animal
head counts, go to feel, hear and see the world's greatest rainforest
in all its monstrous, sweaty, buzzing, uncomfortable glory. While it
lasts...
If you really want to see clearcut wildlife consider heading for The Pantanal further south instead. We have no experience of this massive swampland but some visitors say it's the bees knees.
Brasil weather:
Best
time to go: April-September; for the Amazon
or Pantanal specifically July-October [the dry
season].
Worst: December - February [hot, humid and local holidays]
