Things to do
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Araras Eco Lodge
A small lodge thirty kilometres down the Transpantaneira with its own boardwalk across a marsh and a tower over it, run on solar power and long standing conservation work. Guides are resident rather than brought in, and rooms are limited by design.
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Parque Estadual Encontro das Águas
A state park of about a hundred and nine thousand hectares where the Cuiabá, Piquiri and Três Irmãos rivers meet, reached only by boat from Porto Jofre. Jaguars hunt caiman along its banks through the dry months and are watched from the water, never from land.
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Porto Jofre
The end of the Transpantaneira, a landing on the Rio Cuiabá with a handful of lodges, a fuel pump and a boat ramp. It is the base for the jaguar boats, and in the dry season the density of jaguars along these banks is the highest recorded anywhere.
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Pousada Piuval
The first lodge on the Transpantaneira, a working cattle ranch of seven thousand hectares that took guests before the Pantanal had a tourist trade. Game drives, horses and night safaris run from the door, and hyacinth macaws nest in the manduvi trees.
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Rio Pixaim
The river the Transpantaneira crosses about halfway down, and the usual place to swap the truck for a boat. Runs upstream at first and last light put giant otters, black skimmers and five kinds of kingfisher within a few metres of the hull.
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RPPN SESC Pantanal
The largest private nature reserve in Brazil, over a hundred thousand hectares of seasonally flooded grassland and gallery forest on the Cuiabá. It runs its own research station, boardwalks and observation towers, and access is through the reserve's own programme.
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Transpantaneira
An unpaved causeway running a hundred and forty seven kilometres south from Poconé on more than a hundred wooden bridges, raised above a floodplain it was never finished across. The bridges are where the wildlife gathers: caiman, capybara, jabiru, hyacinth macaw.
