On a trip the Brazilian Pantanal one of the tour group, was a US Marine

 You could tell just by him looking at you, he could break every bone in your body

He was with his Brazilian girlfriend, they met in the States

They were on a tour to meet his girlfriends parents and she wanted him to see some of the real, Brazil

As the parents would never be able to pronounce his English name

She nicknamed him “Cinco”, five in Portuguese 

One evening after I’d asked Cinco which guns, he could break down and clean in the dark

I asked, “so what do you want to get out of this visit to the Pantanal?”

Cinco thought for a few seconds and then answered, “I want to wrestle an alligator”

Health and safety people look away that this point

The tour thought it would be good fun to enable him to fulfil his ambition

Afterall, he could clearly look after himself

We didn’t distract us from the main activities, but at the end of each day

We paddled the canoes to see if there was a lone (small) alligator

As you can imagine, when any smallish alligators spotted 4 canoes

With 8 humans, they soon scarpered 

The other problem for Cinco was that the Pantanal is a marshland

So as soon as he jumped out of the canoe, he was waist deep in mud and roots

It was also Piranha infested (see my story from last week)

He didn’t want any nasty nips around his waistline

To cut a long story short 

He never did get to wrestle an alligator and the guides knew this all along

But he would have gone back to Marine base with a story to tell I’m sure

And you will be pleased to hear that no alligators were hurt in writing this blog