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Another awesome wake up call from our friendly neighbourhood howler monkeys making excruciating burping noises at 5:30am. Combined with the macaws screeching away, there was no way we'd get a sleep in! Dawn and I got up and went for a walk on the boardwalk around the hostel looking for the elusive anaconda but all we saw was a cheeky coati (like a long tailed possum) that wandered in front of us, completely comfortable with our presence.
We then had a nice buffet breakfast and then headed to the riverside wharf for a lazy spot of piranha fishing! After an hour, I'd only had a few big bites but no piranha, despite all the locals catching tonnes of them. I blamed the crappy rod and bait and then gave up. These piranhas weren't man eaters anyway, they had very sharp teeth but they weren't the fangs you imagine on these little fish. We then said our good byes to Jackie Chan our hilarious guide and were on our way to Bonito.
On the way we stopped at a road house for lunch. As we got back onto the main road, something amazing happened.....
A jaguar ran our in front of the car!!!!!! This is SUCH a big deal here to see a jaguar, because they're not only incredibly endangered, they're also very shy and a extremely rare to see in the day time. It was so awesome. That's something I won't forget for a while!!
Arriving in Bonito it was really hot - about 39 degrees, so we all went straight to our rooms to try and cool off. The hostel owner Pam, a morbidly obese Brazilian woman waddled around organising our trips for tomorrow. I had planned a wicked day of going to the abismo anhumas, and went later that night to get training for it - as I have absolutely no rappelling experience whatsoever. My tour guide also decided to come tomorrow, so at around 6pm, we headed to the abismo headquarters to get trained. We were assigned a trainer to take us through everything we needed to know, and of course, I got the most beautiful man on the planet - completely off putting when he's trying to teach you how not to fall 72 metres into a cave full of stalagmites to impale yourself on. So Brazilian Clarke Kent shows me how to climb up the 8m rope and then rappel back down, easy enough, once I got my left and right hands sorted. After spilling water all over myself at the water cooler while Clarke Kent was watching me, I signed my life away and collected the rest of my gear for tomorrow. An early night in prep for quite possibly the best day of my entire trip tomorrow!
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Daddyo You mean the second most beautiful man on the planet, surely...