Getting out of Bogota international airport is a nightmare. You go to the usual line up to check in to your flight, but if you’ve been in Colombia for less than 30 days, you are told you can leave your suitcases with them but you have to go clear across the airport to get your passport stamped so that you can be exempt from paying part (half?) of the airport tax, which you can pay in USD or local currency (which comes to thousands of pesos). So you get that done and you extract the exact money from your money belt and line up at your airline desk again. You are then told that, in addition to the airport tax they mentioned before, you also have to pay a second tax. So you pull more money out of your money belt rather grudgingly. You will get two receipts, one for the first tax, and one for the second. Why can’t they just tell you the full amount you will have to pay when you reach the desk in the first place? I was in a foul mood by then so by the time I got to the desk where I got my ticket and handed over my bags, I think I put fear in the airline staff and was not in fact asked to pay the luggage overweight penalty. In the coffee shop, as I was having a cappuccino after customs and security and before walking to my gate, I overheard an American comment on all this constant harassment for money and checking of bags to his Colombian girlfriend and she told him, yes this is the land of “Qué más?”, literally “What more?” or “What next?” implying that the corruption of this country is even worse than the others I had been through – perhaps you’ve already read about my experiences in Mexico City.
In any case, my next flight was to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and this being about my fourth visit there, I was well familiar with less expensive transportation options to my hotel. For a great deal of the flight, we were flying over the Amazon River with its wide, chocolate brown meanderings, surrounded by dense, dark green forests. I could not understand the concerns for disappearing trees in this region, they all looked present and correct to me and working in the wood business this is a question I am often asked (about the growing scarcity of Brazilian species). Unfortunately, as there was a slight haze (or perhaps the airline window was too dirty) none of the photos I took, look the same way as I saw it.
I had six business contacts to visit within two full days in Buenos Aires, but as I have photographed here plenty before and have several web pages dedicated to this area of the world already, there was no need for me to plan another tour. As it was, I did not even have to chance for a walk round the streets of my hotel. My flight the next day was at 5:45a.m. so that meant I had to get up at 2:00a.m. to take a taxi to the airport as the airport bus does not travel there at that hour.
Tired and bleary eyed, I flew to São Paulo and waited for my connecting flight to Cuiabá in Mato Grosso, one of the main timber areas of Brazil. There is no properly protected area in this airport, in the most populated city in South America, to take a safe rest (I had been hit on for money in this airport during a previous visit), so I ended up walking around to keep awake and moving, trying to find a money changer at a decent rate (impossible – money changers, yes, but decent rates, no) and putting up with the inevitable pungent odour of pão de queijo. This curiously enough reminded me of the, contrarily, deliciously sweet pan de queso (cheese buns) that I’d had in Merida and loved – the ones in Brazil are savoury and the sweat-like smell permeates the entire airport!
Having finally left São Paulo, although I was dozing in and out of consciousness on the plane, I woke up sufficiently to witness our landing in Campo Grande among lush green fields full of crops and livestock, and then took off again to land finally in Cuiabá, gateway to The Pantanal, around 5:00p.m. However, there was a time change somewhere between São Paulo and Cuiabá, which meant that we were now in the same time zone as Santiago de Chile though we were still in Brazil.
My business contact came to my hotel in the evening for a meeting and kept me up until midnight (after I had been up since 2:00a.m. that day!) Incidentally, it was Hallowe’en night and as Brazil is famous for its flamboyant Carnaval, I was expecting to see elaborate costumes, dancing, and hear a cacophony of noise, but there was nothing. A young Australian tourist I compared notes with a couple of days later as I was leaving Chile for Dallas and he was leaving Chile for Sydney, told me that he had been in Quito, Ecuador on 31 October, and the entire city had put on a splendid party. Absolutely all ages were in costume and dancing and drinking went on into the wee hours. He also told me that their Presidente was visiting Russia at the time and had banned such celebrations in previous years so I guess it was a question of “While the cat’s away…”
The next two days (Sunday and Monday) were family holidays in Brazil to celebrate All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day and as it was my first time in The Pantanal, I again asked at the reception desk after breakfast what tours they could organise for me. Once again I was told it was the off season and it was better to be more than one person, but there was nothing I could do about that, so I had two different receptionists working on the case for me. Once again I lucked out, for instead of getting the recommended tour agency linked to the hotel I was found a perfectly respectable and educated tour guide who actually spoke English! I was sufficiently impressed as I listened to the various phone calls that were made by the receptionist on Sunday morning as one person referred another and that one another until they found someone who was free and willing to take me on a tour around his city (mirroring my experience in Guayaquil). My Portuguese is not my strongest language, but I can get by (I had gotten by talking a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese with my business contact for several hours the evening before) and I had offered the information to the receptionists that I also spoke French and Spanish fluently if they couldn’t find an English speaker – they seemed to think finding a tour guide with English was necessary, though I never requested it specifically.
I then spoke to Elionil, the guide whom they had found to take me on a tour of the city, on the phone myself to see how his English was, to negotiate a price and to arrange a time to meet. When we finally met around 1:00p.m., I was delighted by his smiling face and friendly personality and (almost immediately) booked him to guide me into The Pantanal the next day. The receptionist had actually put me in contact with another guide, so that I could save a little money and travel with two other people, but that guide spoke only Portuguese, and, as it happened, he had to cancel the tour, because the other two people never showed up! Could the gods be smiling on me again?
For the continuation of my adventures in The Pantanal, go to http://www.acfairbankconsulting.ca/cuiabapantanal.htm.
