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* The Insider: Wildlife Worldwide

Alison Bembridge, Wildlife Worldwide
Wildlifeworldwide.com

Hampshire-based Wildlife Worlwide is an independently-owned tour operator specialised in wildlife-themed trips to far-flung destinations such as Borneo, Malawi and the Arctic. Next year travellers will be taken to a one-off special tour to the Pantanal guided by a group of celebrity wildlife experts for their Festival of Wildlife. We spoke to Alison Bembridge, fresh from her experience in the lush wetlands to tell us more about the abundant fauna and flora.

First-time visitors often describe the Pantanal as a ‘lost world’ destination. Why is that?

As you drive along the red dusty Transpantaneira, over one of the hundred rickety wooden bridges with the wetland heaving with caiman less than one metre under your vehicle, you start to appreciate that this is not a regular tourist destination. This is also the land of endless horizon’s and spectacular sunsets, and you know that you are a tiny spec surrounded by thousands of kilometres of pure wilderness. It’s a humbling thought. The wildlife here is free to roam where it pleases, so during an evening amble you may come across a lonely jaguar as it pads gracefully in search of its prey. Dawn break brings the colourful flutter of wings and sharp squawks of the hyacinth macaw to accompany the cacophony of noise that belongs to some of the planets most diverse avian communities. Added to this you have the bizarre call of the howler monkey, the odd shaped capybara, the large nosed, skittish giant anteaters and the small coatimundi bouncing around. For a European traveller this certainly is an enchanting and exotic world of sights, sounds and wildlife.

Why is the area, despite these impressive credentials, still relatively unknown?

As the Pantanal is so vast (at some 180,000 square kilometres) and the roads so limited, well there is only the one road – the Transpantaneira – and the main mode of transport is by small boat along the complex network of rivers and streams. It also requires two internal flights and a drive of a few hours to just reach the start of the Transpantaneira…for an independent traveller it’s not simple to get to, leaving it relatively untouched by mass tourism. Until recently many cattle farmers scraped an existence from the flooding flat lands, battling against dangerous jaguar, anaconda and crocodilians. It was not until recently that the value of such wildlife was acknowledged. There are also enormous areas in the Pantanal which due to inaccessibly lie untouched by humans’ influences.