Free at a price

The kilometres deplete quickly and we manage to sleep for a lot of the overnight journey. A bus ride like this also serves the purpose of being your accommodation for the night, (Get that down you, money saving Martin) albeit it is accommodation that seemed to stop a little too frequently, even at one point for a guy to come on and clean the toilet. Lucy seemed to sleep most of the way looking extremely comfortable in a Virgin airline eyemask and a thick hoodie for ultimate warmth.

We arrive at Campo Grande bus station and there is a marked temperature difference between itself and that of the slightly chilly São Paulo. The air conditioning of the executivo coach already a distant memory, we leave the platform to wait for our transfer. We wait a sweltering forty minutes and nobody comes.

We get a taxi to the Hotel Nacional, looking forward to checking out the facilities but there are none. No really, there is nothing. We were offered one night there free because we stopped in Campo Grande, (apparently nobody ever stops at Campo Grande on the way to the Pantanal) so I have to be mindful and kind to the Hotel Nacional. So here goes…

Upon arriving at our luxury prison we notice the exterior painted a fetching shade of grey. Perhaps a nod towards European Art Deco design or inspired by chez Colditz, made famous by a very famous German dictator in the first half of the 20th century.

We get a grand tour of the lower dungeon by a grumpy receptionist and are plonked at the very end of a very scary looking cell block, opposite the toilets. As we pass other rooms which have been left open for cleaning it feels like a trip back to the Favellas of Rocinha. A family of damp checks in and gets the room next to us. Mummy damp gets to sleep on the walls. Daddy damp gets the ceiling, whilst the kids run riot in the bathroom. How any damp manages to survive in this climate vexes me. The bars on the windows give the Hotel Nacional a real “Je ne sais quois”. Our room has a strange nutty smell and we get a little bit scared of catching something nasty from the bathroom. Lucy has a dream about being trapped in the Hotel Nacional whilst a fire rages down the corridor (there are no fire escapes) and I also dream of somebody kicking doors in one by one, firing shotguns into bedrooms, starting at the opposite end of the corridor until finally reaching ours… Thankfully, none of these dreams transpire into reality.
Campo Grande is too hot a location not to have air conditioning. Lava would get a sweat on and take multiple showers if it stayed at the Hotel Nacional.

So all things considered, a perfect place to holiday if you are thinking of becoming a prisoner of war in the Second World War or for a lively typhoid couple, keen to network in the Brazillian infectious hotel scene.

We trek into town (and it is a trek in the midday sunshine) along the Rua Dom Aquino to get fed. We actually really struggle to find somewhere to eat because the majority of shops sell shoes. We find a slightly odd, all you can eat restaurant that weighs your food. You get charged by how heavy it is, but disappointingly they don’t weigh ours, I don’t think we took enough.

We wake up in the morning thankful we made it through the night. We pack our gear and get on the small silver minibus on the way to the pantanal. We sweat through the journey (no a/c although we suspect the driver is just not using it to save fuel and money) and feel the temperature rising en route. The landscape ranges from sparse scrubland (similar to the Australian outback) to dense marshes along the way. We meet two other English travellers, Kate (who came on the Jeep safari in the Paraty) and Sarah. Word has it that the hostel in the pantanal we will be staying at is measuring a temperature of forty one degrees.

I am Ryan’s overworked sweat glands.