Day 5 - Sunday

Set off stupidly early (515am) to get inside the hides and ready for dawn - unfortunately though, the storm had collapsed two and destroyed the third. So we went back to the field of termite mounds to look for Anteater again... this time it was David who spotted her - and lord only knows how - 800m out, underneath a tree on the horizon - the chase began again - the grass plain had fewer tussocks than the previous stalk and made for much nicer shots too - and this time of course, my focussing was a little more accurate after fine adjustments made in camera. Still not perfect, but as David says, I will need to "tweak" somehow. She also didn't move quite so fast or so often so we got to observe a bit more behaviour, although she was much more skittish than the last one. I now need to work on my positioning and speed when we stop walking and get down ready to shoot, because on a number of occasions I found my view blocked by the others and as a result I have a number of images of the backs of their heads! - quite frustrating. Still... third time lucky and all that.
After breakfast we packed up our rooms and set off for our transfer to Paso da Ema - the remotest stop on our tour.  Not a long transfer, 20kms or so, (depending on what you see on the way), I guess it took us about an hour or more, so lunch was pretty much waiting when we got there. It's exactly how I remember it, with the jetty into the water, the basic rooms (no air con!!!!) and a lot of fairly habituated birds flitting about. 230pm set off for the parent lodge, Araras, 6kms back to the Transpantaneira where tea and cake was waiting for us under a mango tree which happened to have a Great Horned Owl in it that half the guests didn't know was there until David and Ricardo pointed it out to them! Then we walked the boardwalk up to the monkey tower - which unfortunately had no monkey's on it (or even close to it), just a shed load of mosquitoes - Kim suffers worse than me if that's possible and was done up like an arctic climber on the way back with hood up and gloves on etc. poor thing, but I do know how she feels.
Back to shower and change... back to Araras for dinner....back to Paso Da Ema for beers on the jetty.... non-stop, no time to blog, no time to review images and no time for siesta, so with a planned 430am start tomorrow (to get in the hides again) staying on the jetty til almost 1am was a really bright idea Joanne... well done - right good giggle though - nice to have a group that know how to have a laugh :-)