Sao Paolo

 Our flight to Sao Paolo was uneventful and the various immigration / health rules went surprisingly smoothly on the Brazilian end.  We learned a lot about the history of Sao Paolo and Brazil in general during our drive through morning rush hour traffic to the hotel. Did you know that Brazil had 10x as many African slaves as the US did (because of the sugar cane plantations in the early 19th century)?  Or that Brazil has the same land area as the continental US? Or that the largest Japanese community outside Japan is in Brazil?

After a late second breakfast-cum-lunch, we walked for several hours in a nearby park with a local birding expert.  We saw 35 different species (not bad for a drizzly afternoon), including 4 types of parrot (or parakeet or macaw), 3 kinds of woodpeckers, and a lot of waterfowl, some native and some introduced.

We had our welcome dinner with the rest of our group this evening.  There are only 5 tourists in the group including us, and this will be the first trip for our leader, Zapa, since March 2020.  The menu for dinner reflected the diverse nature of Sao Paolo -- sushi, middle eastern, south american, italian, with lots of seafood.  Tomorrow morning we head out before dawn to fly to the northern Pantanal and the real start of the trip.

Pictured: Narrow-billed Woodcreeper, White-faced Whistling-duck, and a Toco Toucan (which is common where we are headed but rare in the center of Sao Paolo; our local guide Marcos was very excited to see it).