Dream come true

This photo was shot out of a five seater plane on the last leg of my dream trip. Okay, the trip itself was more of a nightmare, 36 hours spent on planes and airports but I was finally on my way to Fazenda Rio Negro in the middle of Brazil's (and the world's) biggest wetlands - the Pantanal. Back then, the bank I was working for had a tie up with Conservation International and Earthwatch. For a sizeable donation these two institutions would fly some of the bank staff to different conservation projects around the world to volunteer time and help out the real conservationists in their projects. Not only was I picked, I was picked to go to one of the more exciting projects in the Pantanal. While my other colleagues would be digging in the middle of the desert or watching flamingos in a lake, I was actually off to a research center that was used as a base for several projects from studies of cattle ranching on local water sources, to monitoring the local peccary population to catching small mammals and taking fruit and bird census in one of the greatest places around.

Even before you land you know you're the minority. Dozens of caimen line up the shore of the estuaries of the Rio Negro and even walking over to the main building you see giant flightless Reah standing around the grounds, tucans resting on the trees of the fazenda. The briefing notes told us to bring cameras with zoom lenses but I couldn't afford one and went with a standard lens. This ended up both a curse and a blessing, if I wanted to get any real good shots I'd need to get up close and personal. Hard to do with skittish rodents and mammals but not so hard to do with the more aggressive animals like the caimen which you didn't want to be too close to to begin with. Nonetheless I wanted nature and now I got buckets of it. The week I was going to spend here was going to be one of the best in my life.