Where's Catherine?

Hey Y'all,
      Some people have commented that I haven't updated recently and the reason for that is *drum roll please*.... I've been in Pantanal and Bonito! I went on a ten day trip to these beautiful locations with the travel company Belo Brasil. These trips were specifically designed for exchange students and I can honestly say these have been the best weeks of my life. Belo Brasil is an amazing company that really caters to their clientele and our guides were two young girls in their twenties who were a blast to hang out with. So before I get into the nitty gritty details, I'm going to give y'all a little bit of background information. Pantanal and Bonito are in the south of Brasil in the middle of no where. In Pantanal the closest living things were jaguars and cows. Bonito was a little bit better. It's a tourist town that is thrives on eco tourism. I highly recommend taking an eco tour as it's the best way to truly see the untouched land and animals and it helps protect the environment. As I said earlier, our tour was for exchange students from all around the world that our studying here in Brasil with different high school programs. There were about 90 of us total and we were put into two different luxury buses and we rarely saw the other bus. I'm going to try and tell you all about this trip but it'll take several blog posts so please be patient. Okay, now that we have some background lets get started.
                                                                                                                                                                  

My trip started at 4 am with a bang. I scrambled out of bed, downloaded the new Taylor Swift album (it's amazing!), and jumped into the waiting cab and,just because I'm me, I hit my head getting into the cab. Way to go, Catherine. I had a nice relaxing cab drive into Sao Paulo and to the hotel where all of the exchange students were gathering. When I got to the hotel I was greeted by nervous exchange students all milling around the lobby. To give me something to do and to keep people from talking to me (it was 5am!), I started looking for my phone to text my host mother to tell her I'd arrived. I panicked when I realized I left it in the cab! I was forced to have the guide call my mom and have her call the cab to come back and deliver my phone. I also had to double the cab fare. Not a great start. Thankfully, I was distracted by all the other exchange students from all over the world. Bus 1 boarded their bus and left the rest of us to wait on our bus 2. I met a girl from Canada and we chatted for awhile before she declared, "You're going to be my best friend for this trip." She was right. After we decided that,  we made it a point to always sit together, save each other seats at meals, and just generally have each others back when things went wrong. It was great having someone to look for in that giant crowd of people.

Canada and me at the beginning.

One thing I noticed is our buses lack of boys. We had a total of about 40 exchange students on our bus but only 9 of them were boys. Yes, I even counted. Disappointing but since the rules of this trip were no drinking, drugs, or dating, it might have ended up being a good thing. On the first day, we drove for 16 hours before checking in at a hotel for the night. This is the hotel where I left my phone charger. Oops. So for the trip I had no way to get in contact with anyone. This was both good and bad. Bad because people were expecting to hear from me and good cause it allowed to focus on what was going on around me. The next day we drove 8 hours. We were in the middle of nowhere. This was like the Siberia of Brazil. All we saw for miles was chickens and cows. Not normal cute cows but God forsaken evil cows that looked like they wanted to murder you.

You can just tell by it's eyes that it's plotting your death.

Our guides tell us that our luxury bus won't make it through the off roading that's required to get to Pantanal so we'll be trading buses. No problem, right? Wrong. Instead of getting on the new bus, I and eight other exchange students are shuffled off to the side to get into the back of a truck. At this point I just started saying good-bye in my head as I was sure the nine of us were about to be sold into slavery.

Our death mobile.

We're in this truck, bumping along through the mud and demonic cows when suddenly it starts pouring rain. Just absolutely pouring! We're all soaked and cracking up, sure that we're about to die at any moment. We finally arrive at our destination and race into the dining area where all the lucky exchange students on the bus have gathered. After filling out your typical boring paperwork we were whisked off to our first activity. That'll be part of my next post. Tchau!