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"Watch where you step," Leandro told me. "Stay away from the caiman."

That was the sort of warning I took seriously, even when spoken so casually. We were in water up to our thighs, deep in Brazil's Pantanal wetlands, and it was pitch black outside, save the stars and the headlights from the jeep.

"What do you mean, the caiman?" I asked, trying to sound unconcerned about crocodile-like reptiles looming near my unprotected legs.

"Over there," he said, pointing to a spot a few feet away. "That's where the caiman is that we were stuck on." I moved quickly.

Now it all made sense. We had just pushed our jeep off a dead caiman. At least I hoped it was dead.

Maybe I should have been less surprised by this development. The Pantanal, in southwestern Brazil, is the world's largest freshwater wetland — where caiman far outnumber humans. I'd come here, along with 13 others, as an Earthwatch Institute volunteer. The coolheaded Leandro Silveira led the jaguar research project that Earthwatch co-sponsored with Conservation International.

We'd been waylaid by the reptilian roadblock going to a party at another fazenda, or farm, some miles off. In Pantanal terms, it was a 16-gate trip — meaning someone had to get off the truck to open a gate across the road 16 times.

About 13 gates into the drive, the sandy road became submerged below 3 feet of water for nearly half a mile. It wasn't our first water crossing, but this time we got hopelessly stuck. A fellow volunteer and I hopped out to push, foolishly disregarding the likelihood of water creatures — caimans, anacondas, piranhas. Now that I knew the cause of our breakdown, the walk back to dry land seemed significantly longer.

This is no Pantanal safari

Travelers who require certain amenities — say, room service or private baths — are unlikely to find their way to the Pantanal. Although there are tours of this remote region, which borders Paraguay and Bolivia, most are safari-style outings of a few days. Earthwatch volunteers, on the other hand, spend seven or 12 days working on research or conservation projects related to jaguars, otters and other wildlife.

My group arrived by a five-seat prop plane, a one-hour flight from Campo Grande, Brazil. From the air, we watched the hills fall off into an enormous flat basin punctuated by clumps of forest and lakes or dry, circular lakebeds that would fill in the rainy season.

Waiting for the others, we walked around the 19,000-acre fazenda , out to a tributary of the Rio Negro. The river was unlike anything I'd ever seen. Scores of caimans basked on its banks. Across the river sat a family of capybara — the largest rodents in the world. Hyacinth macaws flew overhead, and kingfishers noisily dived into the water.

Reminders of the rainy season — clumps of seaweed and grasses — hung on tree branches 10 feet above the current water level. In a few months, most of Fazenda Rio Negro, including the landing strip, would be under water.

At one time, this ranch was 500,000 acres and, like most, had been used for grazing cattle. But with ranching becoming less profitable, some Pantaneiros think that ecotourism may be their future. Conservation International purchased this self-sustaining farm in 1999 and teamed up with Earthwatch to conduct wildlife research here.

There are more than 30 million caimans in the Pantanal, an area about 24 times the size of the Florida Everglades. The region is also home to jaguars, pumas, maned wolves, giant otters, peccaries, anteaters and rheas.

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