We drove from Piuval Lodge to the very end of the Transpantaneira to reach our next destination, Santa Rosa Pantanal Hotel in Porto Jofre. We stopped for a few sights along the way, including jaguar tracks on the edge of the road.

We spent the next three days on a small speedboat that held the six of us, Nathalie, and a boat captain. We would get up for breakfast at 5:30am, get onto the boat by 6:30am, and stay on the boat until about 6:00pm.

Most of our time was in the Meeting of the Waters State Park, half an hour or so by speedboat from Porto Jofre. This area is home to a large concentration of jaguars that hunt the edges of multiple twisty waterways. Some areas are lined with vine-smothered trees that form Rorschachian shapes.

We were told that the various boat captains in the area would contact each other if they saw a jaguar. Plenty of other wildlife charmed and impressed us while everyone kept their eyes peeled for jaguars.

This capuchin monkey was chowing down on delicious larvae from a big hunk of wasp honeycomb. It was not in fact conducting a tiny symphony orchestra.

Especially in the early morning, much of our boat time was spent peacefully drifting down a beautiful river, using binoculars and long camera lenses to scan the vegetation.

But when our boat captain got a call, our mellow experience was replaced by action. We called this "Jaguar Speed".

Seeing our first jaguar was an utter thrill. We were pretty sure we would see a jaguar on this trip, but we weren't completely sure until it actually happened. What a majestic animal!

Many of the jaguars in this area can be identified by their spot patterns; this first one we saw was an adult female named Ti. We pulled our boat up near her just as she was waking up for the day, getting her bearings, stretching, and yawning.

That video (and all the others in this travelog) was filmed by Monica on her iPhone, which gives you a sense of how close we were to these animals.

Ti wasn't the only jaguar in town. This beauty is one of Ti's adult daughters.

Jaguars were the most exciting mammals in the area, but they were not the only exciting mammals in the area. We saw quite a few of one of Nathalie's previous oversized study animals: Giant Otters! So large! So cute!

Meanwhile, back in Jaguar Land, we got to watch Ti for over an hour as she hunted along the river.

For the rest of the three days we spent on a boat in Jaguar Land, we watched jaguars whenever there was a jaguar to be watched, and watched other animals the rest of the time.

So far we had seen only a handful of my favorite animals, reptiles and amphibians. In fact we had seen no amphibians at all. The only reptiles I had photographed were one huge tegu lizard, several iguanas, and one medium-sized ameiva lizard I had spotted on the shore from our boat in Jaguar Land. The most exciting reptile in the area is the Yellow Anaconda, which I had never seen before, unlike all of those other ones I just mentioned. Nathalie had asked the boat captain to try to find an anaconda for me, and on the first boat day we stopped and looked around at a couple of locations where anacondas had recently been seen, to no avail.

In the late afternoon on our second boat day, we started heading towards a spot on the river's edge that I recognized as one of the recent-anaconda-sighting locations we had checked out earlier. And also, there was a boat just pulling away from that same spot after apparently observing something. Could it be the much-anticipated (by me, anyway) Yellow Anaconda? Why yes, it could be!

We pulled up so close to the resting anaconda that I could only take iPhone photos because my telephoto zoom lens wouldn't focus closely enough. Now I admit that this was not the very best anaconda in Brazil. It was about 7 feet long, rather dull-colored, and coiled up in a way such that its head was buried in the vegetation. But still, it was a friggin' Yellow Anaconda! I was very happy. Supriya and Monica, however, were underwhelmed by this marvelous snake. It wasn't nearly as colorful or large as the one that ate Jon Voigt in the movie, which is basically what they had expected to see.

Anyway, back to the jaguars. In our three days in Jaguar Land, we saw eight different jaguars, some of them multiple times. We were given the latest edition of the Jaguar ID book, which has photos of the faces of all the known jaguars seen in Jaguar Land in recent years. We could try to identify each jaguar by taking a photo and then comparing the photo to the ones in the book. Nathalie was excellent at this game and didn't even need a photo or the book to recognize some of them. But after the first few, she made us try to ID them while providing only minimal clues. Here are a couple that we were able to name correctly (as confirmed by Nathalie).

Just so you know, one of the jaguars in the book was named Mick Jaguar. Unfortunately he hadn't been seen by anyone in a few years and we did not see him either.

While we were watching Donal, we noticed that the family on the boat next to us included a large and rather concerned-looking dog. We were surprised and confused about why anyone would bring a large dog on a small boat while looking for jaguars. All we found out was that the dog was named Mamacita and was from Mexico, while the people on the boat were from Sweden. This knowledge did little to assuage our surprise and confusion.

As dusk approached, our jaguar friend Ti finally stopped hunting and settled down for a peaceful sleep.

At the end of our third and final boat day, Nathalie surprised us by pulling out a bottle of champagne so we could celebrate our wonderful trip to Jaguar Land.

We were now done with the jaguar-intensive part of our trip to the Pantanal, but we were not yet done with the Pantanal. Would we really end up seeing a wild ocelot? Read on and find out!

Next: Santa Tereza Lodge