Birds, birds, birds. From the burrowing owl above, to the Jabiru Stork you’ll see as the featured image (if viewing on anything except a hand held device), our species list is exploding. Our i-phones were not up to bird photography, so we give buckets of photo credit to Karen Share, with gratitude for her telephoto lens and generous nature. Our guides had great scopes but pictures through them were less successful.

Pronounced, “sair-HA-doe”, this savanna covers between 20-25 % of Brazil; half of it has already been converted to agricultural use.  It is an area responsible for more than half of Brazil’s soybeans, 40% of its beef and 84% percent of its cotton; adding lime and phosphorus can make poor soil arable with sufficient water. So successful is production here, the Capital of Brazil was moved to Brazilia to accommodate agricultural needs. We flew about an hour from Sao Paulo to Cuiaba, and then drove two hours up into the highlands about 3,000 ft above to the Cerrado. At the horizon below, you can also see the Pantanal, the largest tropical wetlands in the world.

The Cerrado has an enormous diversity of plant life that offers pharmaceutical solutions we know of already (the Barbato plant here allegedly cures HPV), and endless untested possibilities. As a comparison, California has 6,000 species of flora and fauna, whereas this area of Brazil, including the Pantanal, boasts over 10,000 species!  We were fascinated by this plant that can self-imolate to start wildfires when the area needs to be refreshed…

…or this one where the fractured line at the bottom of the seed pod, drops away to dump a huge load of seeds, only in perfect conditions.

When the fires abate, this Pepalanto plant below is the first to come back. What a beauty!

There are also great escarpments of exposed granite, making sculpture gardens…

…and sheer cliffs for safe nesting for red and green macaw pairs. The waters that originate here flow either north into the Pantanal wetlands or south to the Atlantic. That means you can pee into the Amazon River here! Yippee!

What we noticed is that Brazilians will find and enjoy even the smallest tributaries…they love water!

We enjoyed the visual map of the early life of the Leaf Miner, who is laid as an egg on a leaf, embeds itself inside the leaf and eats its way around the leaf until it finally gets fat enough to pupate, and flies away.

So many beautiful floral displays that I fell for the biologist’s silly spiel on this delicate tropical flower…until I looked closely and realized he was teasing us, because it is a bundle of plastic fencing material! Ha! Got us!

“I am not lead, I lead”. A pretty apt motto for the 11th most populous city on Earth. Sao Paulo is the financial center of Brazil, with the biggest GNP and population in the Southern Hemisphere, making us think of Tokyo, Mexico City and Delhi. It should. It is huge. A massive display of skyscrapers and urban sprawl as you fly over it, a sea of commuters as you traverse the city on the subways, a seedy, unappealing downtown, and frightening crime against the person statistics, one could easily forget that quirky neighborhoods hide out in every direction.  The abundance of pocket parks and trees make it more serene than other cities of this size.

We had only two days to explore the city before we joined our adventure travel group in  Cuiaba, so we stayed in Vila Madralena, a hip and arty neighborhood with a high degree of safety… at least in the daytime. Also it is a very walkable neighborhood. We learned the importance of this on our first Uber ride that took way longer than using the subway and walking the same distance. 183 miles of backed up traffic is the historic worst in Sao Paulo history.

Every blank wall, offered a mural. Every business with a blank wall had a mural themed to the business. A favorite was at the local veterinarian’s office featuring dogs enjoying a standing pee together.

Trees, power poles, traffic signs sprouted painted plastic bottles recycled as plant containers, and often were wrapped with fabric sheaths, ribbons, and friendly messages.

We had extended conversations with warm and chatty Paulistas, all of whom spoke several languages besides Portugese. The Portugese spoken here sounds just like Italian by cadence and inflection because the earliest immigrants were primarily Italian. 60% of the city residents claim some Italian heritage! Founded by Jesuit priests in 1554, there is little feel of the sacred now, as big business, (including the systematic destruction of the Brazilian rain forests to support cattle grazing), is the driving force here. The city’s GNP is 24th in the world compared with all countries. Due to a later influx of immigrants after the Italians, Sao Paulo has the largest Arab and Jewish population in the Americas, and the largest Japanese population anywhere in the world outside of Japan! Such a melting pot makes for a foodie paradise including excellent sushi (only 43 miles from the Atlantic Ocean), Brazilian meats cooked on skewers for slicing at the table, “Churrasco”, and over a million pizzas a day, produced by six thousand pizzerias. Ciao, bem-vindo!