The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  “The bus should be here in an hour.” After the weariness of 16 hours of continuous travel, to arrive with a hunger unsatisfied by that curse of long distance westerly travel – unceasing breakfasts – one of Brazil’s national characteristics had already appeared. The country’s motto, Order and Progress, sits unhappily beside its habitual lack of punctuality. You can try and excuse it – the climate is hot and what else is there to do anyway; psychologically examine it; rage over it; threaten all manner of menacing consequences if it continues; but you never get resigned to it. A party of Brazilians delayed us further, apparently unable to climb aboard until they had finished their conversation – another national affliction.

  And then we were off on the road to Corumba – yes, Corumba, by golly! A single track narrow gauge railway snaked alongside the cracked tarmac. Electricity poles, each a slender twisted tree, gave a vanishing perspective to the road. For three hours, we swooped up and down the gradients, the surface sometimes scarred and holed and great trucks full of cattle packed sideways head to tail thundered past. Sometimes we swept down an avenue, at other times the scrub stretched to each hazy horizon. Many small wild animals lay in the roadside dirt, victims of the scurry across the man-made divisions of their territory. Later, rocky outcrops with flat tops like the tepuis of Venezuela appeared, circled by turkey vultures languidly riding abundant thermals. The road was edged with charred strips of land burnt by the Indians to encourage new grass growth, much as keepers in Scotland burn the heather but here it seemed that part of Brazil was perpetually in flames.

  This was cattle country, sparsely dotted with grey zebu that moved slowly over the yellow grass making for the little shade that existed. Grand gateways on the road announced Estançia Jesu Maria, Fazenda Cordoba, and Poussada Paradiso. At some, well fed horses mingled with the bony cattle. Having passed through the roadside entrance of Estançia Caiman, my destination, it took an hour to reach the ranch house (there are another three hours to drive out the other side). The estate of 150,000 acres (60,000 hectares) looked like Hampshire with palm trees.

  “Oi!” said our guide on arrival. I looked around. “Who, me?” but in Portuguese it is not, “Oi! – You there,” but, “Oi! – Hello.” Our small party of eight included two chain-smoking Koreans whose only language seemed to resemble that of the family of peccaries that rootled around under the stilted lodge, two Germans and six Brazilians. One Brazilian was a singer (in high heels and a pint of Chanel), and another the president of Avon Brazil. “Ding Dong Avon!” he proudly and cheerily admitted. In the case of the Koreans, there was some initial difficulty in establishing their nationality. Carlos, a dentist from Sao Paulo, said they were Mongolian, apparently deduced from their easy horsemanship and preference for lamb at every meal. The German couple (who, after they left, turned out to be the German Ambassador and his wife) insisted they were from northern China – he had once had a spell in Urumqui. As it turned out, I took the prize by drawing from a random selection of eastern countries and suggesting, “Korea?” Great smiles of recognition split their faces accompanied by much nodding and bowing. The tricky thing was then to discover the relevant half of the peninsula. While thumbs up indicated the top half, it simultaneously implied friendliness to dictatorial communist regimes. Conversely, thumbs down tended to show a disapproval of cheap televisions and computer assembly lines. I followed up with, “Daewoo?” whereupon they each shot out a hand to shake and with more beaming nods I found I had made two friends where the only word between us was a car whose name I could only ever call to mind by humming the Jamaican farewell, ‘Day-o, Dayay-o’. Korea, England and the Caribbean were thus surreally united on the Brazilian pampas. To myself, I named the German ambassador King Kong (he was broad and hairy), the Koreans Ping and Pong, the entertainer Sing-Song and the Avon chief was, of course, Ding-Dong.

  The tropical wake-up call is one of life’s most exciting and satisfying pleasures. To lie in bed as an interloper on nature watching the sky brighten and the mist lift while howler monkeys whoop, macaws cackle, hornbills honk, chacochocalades have their first squabble, emerald ibis screech and mocking birds mock, is as wonderful a half hour as any I know but the rising sun soon exhausted the ritual and wonderment was rudely reduced as we went out to meet our horses.

  “These are cowboy horses,” said Adriana, broad of beam and smile and long in leg and patience. She added, “They are well trained, tough, nimble and like exercise. Don’t pull on their bit as they get angry.” I trembled a little at the thought of an involuntary exploration of the Pantanal on a beast that yearned to stretch its legs, simmering with an anger that might turn to violence as I pulled harder on the bit. “Keep a good distance since some of these horses like to bite. They enjoy riding through thorns, it scratches off dust and ticks. And one more thing, if you let your horse go into water, it may lie down.” Added to this alarming advice was the juggle with a large camera, the binoculars around my neck, a note pad at the ready and a whip – for goodness’ sake, what did I want with a whip! The boyhood envy of the Lone Ranger’s carefree life vanished with the reality of the rigours of the saddle.

  In the event Tonto, as I charitably christened my bay gelding, was a friend from the start. I daresay my weight gave him second thoughts about exercise but he patiently braced himself as I heaved myself aboard and he responded instantly to the slightest touch of the plaited leather rein on his neck. A little practice showed that there was only a gram of pressure between pull for stop and pull more for reverse. We ambled through the prairie grass, avoided thorns, gave a wide berth to water and three hours later with a patronising pat to his rump, I slid off and with a John Wayne gait returned to base for embrocation and to offer a prayer for deliverance.

  The Pantanal oozes life from every pore and I had favourite animals; the ringed coati was one of these. It is a large racoon that saunters in a dégagé manner with its long banded tail held vertically and several together look like a furry hula-hoop stall. They are gregarious creatures and small groups shuffle along in single file with the dominant male leading. When ousted from his kingpin position, this male remains alone and relieved of the responsibility of care and protection, becomes a slouch – fat and lazy and spending most of the day snoozing. Armadillos, on the other hand, incessantly scuffle around searching for bugs and worms. Poor sight but keen smell mean that they can be approached up-wind but within a few yards they sense something is amiss and trundle off, blundering through the grass like a miniature tank. The native cowboys catch them with a long pole and roast them, the unfortunate animal making its own self-immolating oven.

  At this start of the dry season the dwindling pools known as baias and the connecting corixo channels force caimans to come together. Normally solitary individuals, a fish diet attracts hundreds to the same baia. “Never lost a guest yet,” Adriana jokes for the fortieth time. I wish that the two Brazilians, who had spent the last two days laughing at each other’s jokes with much back slapping and complete indifference to nature, might be the first exception to this unblemished record. In the hope of not only removing an irritation but also providing a sensational photographic scoop, I offer to take their picture and urge them closer to jaws that had opened an inch in anticipation. The fun is spoilt when the alert Adriana, no doubt equally irritated but anxious to return to base with the same tally of limbs as she started with, shouts a warning. Roseate spoonbills gather by the last waterholes glowing like candyfloss against the sun. Jabiru storks – white, with a fleshy band of scarlet around their neck – pace slowly and gravely along the sand on slim black legs, their heads bowed and shoulders hunched like trainee philosophers in thoughtful meditation. Hyacinth macaws, the largest of all the parrot family and as deep a blue as a tropical midnight sky, fly past in pairs cackling like old fashioned football rattles. Ornithologically they are araca azura which perfectly describes their call and their colour.

  In the evening, the trees on the margin of the rivers and baias provide refuge for countless egr
ets, herons, cormorants and spoonbills. In the twilight they squabble for the best bed in the dormitory but at lights out, when every branch seems double booked, the chatter stops. Capybara and giant anteaters with large bodies to support continue to munch away through the darkness.

  The Aquidauana River translates in the local dialect as ‘Water of Yellow Fever’. I double checked my vaccination certificate and persuaded Ding Dong, Mrs Ding Dong and the two Koreans to take the trip. The former packed a small suitcase of lotions and anti-bug preparations and the latter an extra carton of Marlboroughs. Expecting something akin to the Limpopo but with extra fever trees, I took a flask of whisky. The trip did not start well. First, Ding Dong had to wait for a fax (although I had come 7,000 miles (11,200kms), to those who live out their steamy life in a Sao Paulo suburb, four days in the Matto Grosso is akin to leaving Fulham for a long weekend in the Lake District); the Koreans got into trouble by throwing stones at the cattle to make them stampede and then the truck had a flat tyre. On the way, several miles from the lodge, we stopped to look at turkey vultures feasting on the carcass of a dead cow and the truck would not restart; pushing was the only option. Whatever preconceptions one might have of the Brazilian economy and the resultant frequency of truck breakdowns, Mrs Ding Dong made it clear that in her back yard pushing five ton trucks was uncommon and undignified but Ping and Pong from the land of Daewoo took to it like professionals. Miraculously, although we only heaved it along a few feet, the engine fired. Mrs D.D. sat in the shade a while to recover and the Koreans each opened up a new pack of cigarettes. Thirty miles from base and beside a rotting carcass almost invisible with greedy vultures, I measured how many tots remained in my bottle of whisky.

  The river turned out to be benign, beautiful and bordered by flowering trees of yellow Putrea and purple Ité. Nothing bit nor buzzed and not a fever tree in sight. We pottered gently along in an aluminium dingy slowing for caiman, capybara, herons, macaws, curassows and howler monkeys and then the Great Event occurred. In an uninteresting stretch where each bank was thick with tall grass and taller reed and several of us had taken the opportunity to nod off, the small boy sitting beside me in the stern suddenly bellowed, “JAGUAR!” If he had yelled, “INDIANS!” the effect could not have been greater. The boatman went instantly into reverse, heads swivelled like spinning tops and the Koreans shouted, “WOW, WOW, WOW,” and kept shouting until sat upon.

  There on the bank, lying relaxed and somnolent with one front paw over another, indulgent of noisy Koreans, disdainful of a boatful of breakfast and indifferent to any activity that might spoil a snooze, was a large male jaguar. Beautifully spotted, whiskers catching the sun, head up, ears pointed and with a coat that seemed woven in velvet, he exuded an air of arrogant supremacy. Fourteen rolls of film later and videos exhausted from hyper drive, he was still posing and then, stretching a limb or two, he turned his head to the boat, indicated the audience was over (I swear I saw him nod), scratched his nose and casually wandered off. The boatload broke into spontaneous applause.

  The jaguar is secretive, rare and habitually nocturnal; to have seen it at all was exceptional, to gaze at it for 15 minutes extraordinary. We had urged the boatman to get nearer to the bank (the Koreans would probably have jumped off and hugged it) but he would not move from mid-stream and it was only later that he sobered the excited chatter by explaining that a jaguar can clear 20 ft (16m) in a single bound and we had floated to within 15 ft (4.5m). The encounter was the talk of the guides and the guests and a note to me from the Director asked if the Refugio Ecologico could have my photographs.

  After three days, my new friends departed and I moved to another lodge and another guide. My room rested on stilts on the edge of a lake whose surface was carpeted with water lilies and in whose crystal water swam small pink fish and large, black, whiskered catfish. My new guide Mauricio was dark, handsome, seldom out of a T-shirt and shorts whatever time of day and, like Adriana, could identify most things that grew and everything that moved. Against the sun this was by gait or wing beat, in the forest by sound and when these were absent, he knew the tracks left in the sandy soil and dug around in dung and droppings to explain diet and seed dispersal. His enthusiasm went straight into top gear at breakfast and his accelerator was then set for maximum revs all day. In three languages he identified, explained, joked and encouraged. But he never patronised and was eager to learn from others with specialist knowledge. If he had been able to find an alternative for ‘beautiful’ that described every bird and ‘wonderful’ for every mammal, I could have tagged along in his tracks for weeks.

  Manuelo, a local campeiro born and bred in the Pantanal, came with us one day. He wore a battered hat and had a facoes – a great knife that could slice hardwood like salami, stuck in a decorated leather sheaf in his trouser waistband at his back; his eyes could pick out a pigmy owl in a cup sized hollow or snails’ eggs in a lake of hyacinths. He was only happy in a saddle and as with all campeiros, he liked a spirited horse to show off on. After riding at barely more than a trot for the day, he suddenly spurred his horse as we approached a village so that he could arrive at full gallop, the horse’s mouth lathered with foam, its hocks sweating and create a small dust storm as he pulled up his steed and dismounted. With dark skin tanned to a walnut brown and cracked by the rigours of a life lived under the sun and stars and with a smile that split open his leather face like a pod about to shed its seeds, he was a character straight out of the pages of those books which librarians once classified under ‘Travel and Adventure’ and which I used to read with a torch under the bedclothes long after lights out. On the fifth day I said goodbye with warm handshakes and they waved until the dust blurred their farewells.

  Back in the urbanity of Rio de Janeiro, there are few birds but many dogs, and early on Sunday mornings these are taken on slow preambulations by women with thin legs and flabby waists who then retire to flats with balconies from which they watch the later surfers, rollerbladers, bicyclists and joggers before they in turn give way to the hedonists of the beach. I looked on for a while too and then went to Petropolis with William. This was not the centre of Brazilian oil refining and William had no catapult or short trousers. The town was the early 19th century centre of the imperial court of Don Pedro de Orleans Bragança and William, bearded and bald and speaking not a word of English, gesticulated enthusiastically as he drove round the hairpin bends of the busy road which wound up the hills to the north of Rio.

  Petropolis had once snuggled duvet-deep amongst forested hills but now a blanket of urban sprawl reached up the sides, sometimes to the top, spreading modern clamour over previous tranquillity. On this particular Sunday, the cathedral was shut as was the Palacio Cristal (a poor and small replica of the Palm House at Kew) and the Palacio del Isobella was under repair but Don Pedro’s palace introduced an insight into the stiff formality of the Portuguese ruling power. They had a useful wheeze there; on entering, each visitor steps into huge padded slippers with which you slide over the marble, terrazzo or wooden floors – a trick that English country houses might usefully adopt. In the stables, an English Merry-weather fire engine, badly needing a polish to its brass equipment, incongruously sat beside an exquisite and dusty 19th century nobleman’s landau.

  Contemporary horse-drawn carriages clattered along the town’s cobbled streets and the older houses had steep pitched roofs, painted stucco façades with timber decoration, and sat behind high walls and solid metal gates. Substitute the tropical vegetation for pine and remove the smell of sewage from the river and it might have been an alpine canton. William seemed unconcerned that the doors to history and prayer had been locked, possibly because his long frame needed one of its daily top-ups of meat. Food in this country comes in huge portions and apart from every meal’s staple accompaniment of feifao – rice and beans – it consists of meat, meat and quite a lot more meat; well done or overdone. The prince of all eateries is the churrascharia and William hurried to what his excited gestures indicated was th
e best, the largest and the meatiest churrascharia he knew.

  In these carnivorous establishments there is no menu in the conventional sense but a list of veggie side orders; deep fried potatoes, battered onion rings, sautéed cassava, fried beans, bread soaked in garlic butter and cauliflower with dripping. William ticked them all. Waiters continuously wove in and out of the tables, each with a sword of skewered meat. Grilled on an open fire, they drip juice and smell divine. Baby beef, rib of beef, neck of beef, haunch of beef – a small break for a skewer of chicken hearts, chicken feet and crispy pork fat and then beef steak, breast of beef, shin of beef, tail of beef. As an example of carnage and gluttony it has no equal but half a cow and several poultry dented my pocket only a tenner.

  The downhill journey to Rio was slower and weightier. At every other bend or so it seemed, William exulted me to take a picture with accompanying oba! chocante! or tudo bom! In the heat haze, the smog and the failing light I might as well have photographed the interior of a Loch Fyne smokery; in any case I was too busy picking from my teeth rib of beef, tail of beef, neck of beef, shin of beef…