Pantanal on own boat (1 Viewer)

[temmie]

What is impractical about logistics regarding Porto Jofre?
From what you wrote, it seems like the main river is a much better bet in getting further into the Pantanal (as the smaller rivers are shallow / dry / overgrown...), or did I miss something?

 

[opisska]

Well we could use our boat to cross the river that the failed bridge was supposed to cross, but that's still 20 kms from Porto Jofre on land.

The big river is problematic mainly because it's a one way street - from what I have heard the current is strong enough to prevent return. We haven't seen it yet, we plan to come back when the bridge is fixed.

 

[temmie]

Well we could use our boat to cross the river that the failed bridge was supposed to cross, but that's still 20 kms from Porto Jofre on land.

The big river is problematic mainly because it's a one way street - from what I have heard the current is strong enough to prevent return. We haven't seen it yet, we plan to come back when the bridge is fixed.

Would it be an option to go down the Cuiaba river to Porto Jofre?

 

[opisska]

Oh, gotcha. This has been tried by some people and it was a bit problematic - first it's quite far, second when they tried to camp last night before Porto Jofre they were picked up by some rangers and removed. From what I generally heard the Porto Jofre area is the hotspot of jaguar danger because they are being purposely fed to show better to tourists there. I just don't feel that area to be honest. But I wanted to see it, from the ground and check it out.

For more boating, we are planning to try around Rio Piquiri upstream. There seems to be some hope for reasonable access. As one has to make a huge detour to get there, we made a dry stop in the Emas park for now and will get back to boating later. (As for the Emas stop, I will vent my frustrations later, but really, the next person to tell me "only with a guide" gets hit between the eyes.)

 

[opisska]

Rio Piquiri did not work out. The river is easily accessible just when it descends to the plains, but there the current is strong and it would be a strictly one way trip, with very little hope to ever get out of it. Lower parts look really good on the map and there is a publicly accessible road, but it's simply too sandy for out SUV - we reversed out from a sandy hole and would certainly get stuck if we went any further. This is quite clearly a key problem here - we are not even trying to solicit any permissions from landowners to explore into ranches because most side tracks are clearly not passable for us.

 

[opisska]

We eventually settled for Rio Mutum. On the map it looks close to Cuiaba and we were afraid there would be many people, but the area is quite empty. We camped on someone's garden - google maps show a campsite there, which seems to be a mistake upon which the family capitalized and started offering the camping ... But it's a nice place on the river and we had it to ourselves. We paddled only up and down the river - going up, open water ends after 3 kms, going down it goes forever but the current is not negligible and coming back was demanding. Also interesting is that overnight the water level dropped a bit, but the current increased. This area doesn't seem to have jaguars (as people camp here freely), but the river has Giant Otters, which we saw several times. Pretty good.

Honestly, this is probably it. There is far less open water in Pantanal than we thought, so it's only rivers - and even rivers are often overgrown and impassable. We enjoyed the two occasions where we could boat - Rio Claro and Mutum - but overall this idea is less feasible than we thought, between the lack of open water, difficulty of access, difficulty of getting safer campsites, heat (35 deg usually) and currents.