The Amazon

Before you read this, I will let you know that I just added a previous post describing our time in La Paz. Read that first to follow our travels in order.

Not all travel is fun and games, full of laughter and joy. This leg of our trip proved to be the most difficult for me. The Amazon rainforest and the pampas were incredible places to see, but they all come at a cost. Let me explain.

Our destination was the town of Rurrenabaque, in the Amazonia region of Bolivia. To get to this town, we had to take a bus from Coroico (the town our mountain bike adventure ended in). This bus ride can take anywhere from 16 hours to 3 days. Rurrenabaque is in the middle of the jungle, so the road to get there is pretty bad. The bus has to drive right through a few rivers, so if it rains a lot (remember, this is in a rainforest), the bus has to wait for the river level to subside. The bus we were on was a old, run down, and uncomfortable. And it arrived to pick us up 4 hours late. Luckily, our bus ride went smoothly and we arrived in Rurrenabaque in 16 hours.

On Sunday, we went on a one day hike with a guide through rainforest. From Rurrenabaque we rode in a small boat up the Beni River to the edge of Madini National Park. This is a famous rainforest because it hosts numerous indigenous tribes and all of the forest is untouched. Our guide taught us a lot of medicinal uses of various trees and plants throughout the forest. One trees sap contains medicine for kidneys, one trees sap has a good cure for insect bites (a topic I will cover soon), and another tree contained the antidote for one of the poisonous snakes in the forest. There is a certain species of termites which contains menthol in body. Our guide opened up a termites nest and we each ate a live termite…..and sure enough, they taste like menthol. Mmmmm, delicious. We didn’t see any interesting animals, but we did see a few large spiders, and come really interesting birds.

On Monday we embarked on a three day tour of the surrounding pampas, which is similar to an enormous swamp filled with animals, birds, reptiles, etc. We went with a group of 9 people. We drove for three hours outside of town where we waited for two small boats to come pick us up and drive us up river. While we were waiting, a family of freshwater pink dolphins began playing in the pool in the river in front of us.. Our guides told us the dolphins are curious and friendly so we quickly threw on our bathing suits and jumped in with the dolphins. We swam with the dolphins for about 15 minutes or so. The dolphins would swim around us and underneath us, but would never touch us. They would come within 15 feet or so or where we were swimming. After the dolphin swim, we jumped in the boats and rode a few hours upstream to our base camp for the next three days. On the boat ride, we passed by three types of monkeys, and numerous types of very large birds. The sunset that night was pretty nice.

We had a cook with us as well, and she made some incredible meals, considering we were five hours deep into a Amazonian swamp. That night after eating dinner, we hopped back into the boats and went searching for alligators by flashlight. The alligator’s eyes glow in the light, so it is fairly easy to spot them. We spotted a few alligators within about 30 minutes and decided it was time to head back to base camp because the mosquitoes were pretty bad.

The next morning we had breakfast, and then embarked on what has been the most difficult part of this trip for me. This morning is an example of what I describe at the beginning of this post as, not everyday of traveling is fun. Our objective this morning was to walk across a huge field and search for giant anaconda snakes. The problem was that the entire field is about shoulder height in weeds, and about shin deep in water. And the biggest problem of all was that about 100 billion mosquitoes lives in this wretched field. The hunters became the hunted. Off we went into this field and within minutes we are covered head to toe in mosquitoes. No kidding. At any given moment there were probably 50 to 100 mosquitoes biting us. Our destination was about 1 half mile across this field, so we continued on, hoping it would get better, but it only got worse. Every one of us was hopelessly swatting mosquitoes off of every inch of our bodies. After a while, I tried running, but the water was too deep and the weeds were too high, so I had to continue on at the slow pace. Needless to say, in this frantic state, we saw no anacondas. We arrived at our destination almost delirious from the amount of mosquitoes that just fed on us.  After resting for a few minutes, we had to walk back the same way, back to our boat. This was possibly my least favorite hike in my life.

Afterwards though, we did something very fun. We drove around the river in the boat attracting the dolphins from each of the big pools. The guides would knock on the side of the boat, and this noise attracted the dolphins to the boat. We had a trail of freshwater pink dolphins behind us. We stopped at a large pool in the river and jumped in with the dolphins. There were probably around 8 of them. They at time would get pretty close to us. One of the dolphins jumped within a foot or two of one of the guys in our group. Here is a picture of a dolphin blowing through its blow hole.

After swimming with the dolphins, we drove in the boat for a while longer and then went fishing for piranhas. Pretty fun day. And yes, we were swimming in a river that is infested with alligators, piranhas, anacondas, but at least there were dolphins!

Now we are back in La Paz. Instead of taking that long bus ride back to La Paz, we opted to jump in a 12 seat propeller plane this morning, which was much more comfortable and entertaining. Tomorrow we head to Lake Titicaca and will start to explore the Inca ruins.