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Published: January 8th 2006
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small town
on the way up north Can´t afford to fly, so I took a bus for 17 hours up to Rurrenabaue.
I bused up with Flota Vaca Diez. The seat I booked, no 28, window, was broken.
It would not lock into place in any posistion, and would recline at every bump. Normally a broken seat is a bad thing, except on this trip it acted like a secondary shock absorber, and was just the ticket when bussing the worlds most dangerous road, which leads through to the world´s most bumpy road.
As a note, the worlds most dangerous road isn´t all that dangerous really. Sure, it´s mostly single lane, cut into a cliff, dirt road, but any drunck wouldn´t make it up the first K before driving off the side, so you can be sure most drivers are sober (if not hyped up on Colca leaf, after being 14 hours behind the wheel). Actually, I would ride down on my ten speed- hogwash to the travel guides who say you need the latest U.S made mountain bike.
We where stoped by military police on four ocasions, who where looking for drugs. It is illegal to transport anything that could be used
It´s a slow
journy down as we had to stop on neally every corner to let whatever was coming the other way pass. to manufacture drugs - plastic buckets; any type of petrol derivative; toliet paper, ect.
Except the roof of our bus was over loaded with Coca leaf, and they didn´t care one bit. Didn´t quite add up to me; I can transport a tonne of coca leaf into the drug manufacturing captial of the world but cant´take in a plastic bucket....
Rurrenabaque is tourist central for those wishing to explore the jungle in Madidi national park. Rurrenabaque is stinking hot and humid and looks like what I expect Vietnam to look like. I half expected a river boat to come motoring up with a young Martin Sheen looking thoughtful hanging off the front...
I didn´t have the time to so the jungle trip I wanted too (I have a wedding to go to) so I opted to trake a trip down river to see alligators, fish for piranhas, and hopefully swim with pink dolphins.
So we drove for 6 hours to Santa Rosa (normally it´s a 3 hour drive, but with the rain, it was 4x4 driving most of the way). We were a little delayed when our driver drove us off the road
I wouldn´t
fancy driving a bus on this road. We caused a traffic jam, with a truck comming the other way, which lasted about an hour. into a flooded field. We had to wait for an other jeep to come along with a tow rope to pull us out.
Following this, a 3 hour cannoe ride up the Yanue river got us to camp just before nightfall. The first hour up the river was like, "look alligator, look turtles, look monkeys, look birds" looking everywhere as there is so much wildlife, that by the secong hour it was "oh, just another stupid alligator".
The second day saw us walking in the pampas though unbearalbe heat, in even more unbearable humidity looking for Anacondas. We couldn´t find one easly, so a few braver soles went walking in the swamp for a hour.
It looks like grass but is actually knee deep stinking muddy water with a skin of grass. It´s the hardest stuff to walk in. Well, not as hard as the mud at Raglan, but then mud at Rags doesn´t smell like a sewer. After a hour of torture we gave up looking for anacondas and went fishing for Phiranas instead.
Contrary to what I had been tought in Primary school, piranhas aren´t the efficient eaters I´d been lead to
believe. They hit the bait and only take little bites. So to catch them you have to yank the line when you feel them strike the bait. A number of times I yanked a little hard on the line and sent a little piranha hurtling out of the water, clean over our canoe, and into the water on the other side.
And they are a lot smaller than I had thought. The first one I caught was bearly a finger long and would take a year to eat me if I had fallen in the river. But after a hour I had enough decent sized piranhas for a feed.
Well, I thought I had enough. These little crittles lack meat. They are like water bourne Guniea pigs. You need a crate of them to get full. But what meat they have sure is tastely. I would eat them all the time if I could get my hands on them.
The 3rd day we jetted up stream to find the pink dolphins. There are a lot of dolphins in the river (we had a small pod resident at out camp) but most of them are
El hospital
Wouldn´t like to get sick here grey. So up stream we went and after half a hour we spotted a pod of three pink dolphins.
They are ugly looking things, like kori carp with skin cancer, but they are dolphins none-the-less, and swimming with them I went. Apparnetly the Alligators tend to stay away when the dolphins are around, and the piranhas only attack if they smell blood- so unbleeding and unconcerned I dove into the chocolate water.
You can´t see the dolphins when you´re in the water, it´s just to muddy, but they surface just a few meters away every now and then. It was an interesting experience, and am pleased to have done it (also I can say I swum in piranha infested water... bonus).
I would recommend this little trip. It is cheap as chips, and the is more wild life than you can shake a stick at. The mosquitos are unreal though- take an extra stick of Dimp.
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