So after leaving the island, we caught a bus to Curitiba and stayed the night in a cheap bus-station hotel. Then we caught a bus to Sao Paulo the next morning. We decided to stay around the airport somewhere as we had arrived at 5pm and flew at 6am the next morning. It was a bit of an expensive disaster. Lets not talk about it.

We went to a hostel that has good reviews and tried to organise a tour of the Pantanal - the world's biggest wetland! It's dry season, so not that wet at the moment, but still, while we're in Brazil we thought we'd go and see it.

We had checked a few tour websites and only found super super expensive tours, so this hostel was reccommended by lonely planet and some people online so we thought they might be reasonable. We were wrong. Aparently EcoVerde Hostel/Tours in Cuiaba have decided that since they've been recommended they can just be absolutely rude to anyone and expect things to keep rolling in (and sadly, they probably do). Sad to see how much the word of a company like Lonely Planet can make people try and rip you off. They are listed in the LP 2010 as running a three day tour for 800 reis (the brazillian currency, roughly 2 to a US Dollar). Now, two years later, they charge 1500 reis for the same tour!!!! So when we said that we couldn't afford it they basically stopped being polite or helpful in any way...

So we hunted down the municiple tourist office and found someone there who speaks Spanish. She was amazing, gave us heaps of good information. We ended up getting up early the next morning and taking a bus to Chapada - which is a plateau about 60kms north of Cuiaba.

We got to our Pousada - and tried to organise transport to the local sights, but things were too expensive... (Brazil is not a good end of trip option!!). So on eof the workers from the hostel offered to take us on his motor bike... we agreed and he called another 'guide' and Karl and I (with helmets!) jumped on the back of their bikes and we were off!

The first stop was the lover's waterfall - very cool. A pretty waterfall over the mouth of a wide but very shallow cave and a shallow pool in the front of it. We quickly got into our togs and jumped in the water! It was cold!!! So nice after the temperature here - our first day was 42degrees in Cuiaba and up on the plateau it's not much cooler.

The vegetation around here was pretty lush, lots of scrubby greenness and a few palms and lots of trees. Also quite a few birds we didn't recognise. From there we walked a few hundred meters to another waterfall - this was pretty amazing - about 20m tall and the pool underneath was a big deeper. Better for swimming :) we played around in the water for a while and Paulo, our guide, took some photos for us.

After a quick drinks break we headed over to the other side of Chapada to the lookout (el Mirante) which is the geographical central point of south america. Equidistant to the various coastlines. Now that's just a positive side note - it's actually beautiful and well worth visiting regardless of that! It's the edge of the plateau and so there's spectacular views of the surrounding countryside. The cliffs of the plateau are also beautiful - stunningly sharp cliffs make the vista really impressive.

We climbed down to a rocky outcrop about 200ms down from the lookout and took a bunch of photos. It was so pretty and very relaxing to have the view - and a nice breeze at the same time. Aparently the view can be better, as it was so dry and hot, there was a haze on the day we were there... oh well, still pretty special for us!

We made our way back to the bikes and all the other people staying at our pousada ended up converging at the one point - late afternoon is the time to be there. Our second biker apologised and said that he was running late for his other job and we had to call it a day - that was okay for us, the heat was still strong and it had been a long day.

We made it back to the pousada to relax on the verandah and met a new guest, Vera, from Sao Paulo, who was up for a week. Quickly we made friends and ended going out with her and her local friend for dinner in town - a yummy meat kebab - they routinely put bacon on the outside of chicken and beef on their kebabs... and who are we to complain! ;-)

The next morning we were meant to go and do the rest of the sites we had missed the afternoon before, but Paulo's bike wasn't working and the owner of the Pousada didn't want the other biker back - there had been some intregue the afternoon before - three backpacks had been stolen from a car belonging to one of the other people from the Pousada while he was at the lookout. Who's to know what really happened, we will never know.

So we jumped on an earlier bus than we had anticipated and headed back to Cuiaba to get a rental car and get ourselves to the wetlands!!