La Paz La Paz and Rurrenebaque Pampas Tour

Day 1 We arrived in La Paz Bus terminal reasonably early with chris and set out looking for a hostel to dump our bags (we were meant to be flying straight to Rurrenebaque to go to the jungle but the flight was delayed 2 days because of rain), i had been recommended a good one by a girl called heather "who may or may not appear in a later entry" called the wild rover. Turns out the wild rover was an irish themed bar complete with irish owners, bar, tv room, computers, the most comfortable beds i have ever slept in and good british grub (including HP sauce and PG tips). It was bizarre, we basically lived out 2 days in this tiny little bubble of the UK in the middle of the Capital of Bolivia, stepping in and out was a culture shock in its own right. As would be expected there was a great party atmosphere and we spent the first night partying it up, that night was an orange theme so holden and Chris blagged a few bits of orange from some girls and dressed appropriately, i managed to get a hat but someone stole it. Unfortunately the Hostel worked on a tab system so we had nooo idea how much we were spending until it was too late.

Day 2 Woke up today with great plans in mind but turned out it was a national holiday being may the 1st (seriously, any excuse for a holiday or a strike and these people will take it!) so we pretty much lounged around the whole day being bored. Later on we met a canadian girl called Shire who had just graduated from university with a degree on the trombone and had been travelling around with her band for a while doing gigs and this and that, we were a bit confused as to why she was playing the Ukulele but she had a lovely voice and played it well so we let it pass. (its worth noting at this point that a couple of weeks previously i had been challenged on a bus by a Dutch man called Jarun to write a song about being a gringo that lasted at least 2 minutes and i did) Anyways eventually Shire coaxed us to sing her the Gringo song and played backing music for it on her Ukulele. The end result is linked at the bottom of the page under "videos from La Paz La Paz and Rurrenebaque Pampas Tour" (a little video icon called the gringo song) and the lyrics are as follows:


Pale and White, I don't look right
I don't know the lingo
hopped on a bus to i don't know where
I must be a gringo

You can smell my hair from anywhere
and you can hear my bracelets jingle
Ill eat anything if its local grub
I even ate flamingo

(Chorus)
So gringo away we go
I've a map and a compass but just for show
its the very first time ive been away from home
I'm another foreign bugger called gringo

Yes gringo away we go
Up in the desert or down in the snow
a brick of a book tells me where to go
I'm a stupid smelly gringo
(end chorus)

I got in a fight, the other night
with an old man selling pisco
he said "five pesos" i said "no way"
so he hit me with his fisto

If you see Imodium, your in for fun
cus it means I'm feeling malo
And ill leave no doubt when you hear me shout
"donde es el bano!?"

(chorus)

You wont make a fuss, when there's lots of us
you'll even let us take your photo
cus you know one thing, that gringos bring
is mucho mas dinero

your jungle tours will make us sore
and we´ll struggle on the altiplano
but don't feel like, you have to treat us nice
cus you'll still get bolivianos

(chorus)

I look a prat in my Llama skin hat
and my mouth stuffed full of coca
but when i think, I'm really fitting in
i just look bloody loco

Please feel a need to take good heed
of this cautionary jingle
cus no matter how good you thing you are
your just another fucking gringo

(chorus)

Anyways that kept us entertained for most of the night until

Day 3 Got up early this morning to catch our flight and to everybody's surprise everything went as planned, we caught the plane, flew to rurrenebaque and got off, no delays, no screaming death, no nothing. The only slight hitch was that because wed booked in late our bags had been loaded onto the next flight which arrived 4 hours later but that didn't matter at all. We booked our hostel which was a great place with hammocks, beautiful frescos painted all over the dorms and a friendly owner who i assume was called pedro. We spent most of the rest of the day trying to book our Pampas tour and trying to get money out of the bank (which was no easy task, maddening!).

Day 4 Woke up early this morning to catch the Jeep to the river where we would then catch a river boat to the hostel, it turned out that 4 girls from our hostel were also going on our exact trip so we teamed up with them and made our way down. On our 3 and a half hour jeep trip we found out that the girls were called Halina, Joni, Laura and Rachael and they were on a year study abroad program studying spanish (they were supposed to be in Buenos Aires for the whole year but had decided to ditch Uni for a bit and go travelling) anyways turned out that they were all mad, extremely energetic and extremely dappy which i have to say made the whole trip far more enjoyable. After the Jeep tour we hopped onto some river boats and began our 3 hour treck up the river, the sheer variety and abundance of wildlife was amazing and in the space of the 3 hours we saw more birds than i could count, alligators, crocodiles, monkeys, dolphins, "big big hamsters" and so much more (most of the animal pics haven't been uploaded because they come across a bit boring in photo form so we didn't bother) the monkeys were by far the best though, they squeaked and screeched at us a lot as we got close so we decided to give them some bananas which only aggravated them further, they ended up fighting each other and clambering all over our boats to get to our precious yellow cargo, we considered sailing off with a little monkey captive in exchange for the bananas but the monkeys were too clever and escaped as soon as the bananas ran out. A little disappointed we carried on to our hostel. The hostel itself was brilliant, it was exactly as you would expect a jungle hangout to be with wooden planks joining all the sections together , mosquito nets everywhere, a series of hammocks set up around a central beam and a river running right past it where we moored the boats. We hung around the hostel for a couple of hours getting used to the surroundings and eating then we were ushered into the boats again to go see the sunset. The field we ended up in was part of another hostel and had volleyball courts and a football pitch, it was swarming with mozzies but they didn't bother us that much and the sunset was fantastic as promised. We went back for a bite to eat then set out once again to go night time crock hunting with our torches. The only way you could identify the crocs was by shining your torch in their eyes which would show up as little specks of orange, probably didn't please the crocs too much but they didn't make any formal complaints. It was eerie sailing down the river in complete blackened, most places I've ever been have had at least the slightest hints of light pollution seeping over the edges of the horizon but this place was pitch black and as a result the night sky was amazing, you cant appreciate quite how small you are until you see a perfectly black nights sky punctuated by millions of tiny specks of light, it was the best sky i have ever seen period. Also occasionally you would hear a splash or see a little fleck of silver leap out of the water which apparently was fish eating the mozzies (serves them right).

Day 5 we were woken up at 8ish this morning to go anaconda hunting and although we were warned it wasn't 100% certain apparently it was a good time of year for them. It certainly was, after only 10 minutes serching around in swampy bits of mud the first one was found, everyone rushed to see it and we all got a hold, it was a strange thing to hold a wild snake, you could feel every muscle in its body and it was quite slimy, it also stank because apparently they keep all their food in their stomachs for weeks and it begins to rot, after letting our smelly slimy friend go we went on searching in smaller groups. Eventually a scotsman called Alan found another one which he went to pick up but the guide ran at him shouting "Cobra! cobra!" Apparently it clearly wasn't a cobra so he thought the guide was taking the piss but the guide lunged past him and picked up another long snakey animal right by the first. This actually was a cobra and the guide legged it away with its tail in his hand swinging it around a bit to disorientate it, the snake then began striking at him and in true steve irwin fashon he jumped out the way each time until he could get a hold of its head and make it relatively safe. Unexpectedly the guide actually let us hold the snake and we had a bit of fun with it, afterwards we were told that a cobra bite can kill in 30 minutes, good thign they told us afterwards. If you were wondering what happened to the scotsman and his anaconda he flung it around for a bit until it bit him then let it go.
After our fun with snakes we went back to the hostel for a bit of a refresh then went straight out to go swim with some pink dolphins, in case your wondering pink dolphins arent like the flipper were all used to, think more...flipper in a burns ward, theyre uuuugly and they dont play as much but we still had a good swim with them and they played with a ball for a bit and kept the crocs away so they were ok and i suppose it was quite special to see them so i gues ill give them a 7/10 on the dolphin scale. Went out again that night for a sunset viewing and a bit of volleyball but had to turn in early because...

Day 6 got up at 5am to go see a sun rise, to be honest it wasn't that spectacular, dont get me wrong, it was pretty...but not 5.30 in the morning pretty more 8-9ish pretty took a few snaps fo that then went back to the hostel for a quick breakfast before going pirannah fishing! we floated upto a nice leafy hollow which is apparently where pirannahas like to hang out, set our hooks with fresh meat and stuck in the water, i was expecting at least a 10 minute wait but the effect was allmost instant, they began biting immediatley which made me a bit worried about all those times id dipped my feet in the water, it was like little fishy bullets ricocheting off the meat and it wasn't long before i caught my first fish, unfortunatley it wasn't a pirannah so i bashed it on the head, cut it up and used it as bait for the real deal, eventually after a few near misses (the bloody fish kept stealing the meat without offering themselves as a replacement) i caught a real live piranah, a smaller yellow one but a pirannah nontheless, quick bash on the head, into the bucket, job done. During our time fishing we were witness to an allmost horriffic boat crash, apparently one of the drivers of the boats was moving into a little shady spot on the wrong side of the river and another one was zooming back really quickly to get his passangers back for a flight, the 2 just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the boats collided, one of the boats actually mounted the other side on snapping the back off a chair (which 2 seconds earlier had an english girl sat in it who luckily got out the way just in time) and cutting a gash in the side of another guys leg, luckily nobody fell in as wed managed to draw quite a number of pirannahas to the area and fresh blood might have started somthing nasty, after a bried struggle the boats seperated, the one heading to the airport went on its way and the other one had to return to the hostel because of great big crack in the side, luckily though nobody was hurt badly. After a while when everyone (excpet for holden who we think might have had a dodgy line and through an amazing feat of bad luck and incompetence actully managed to get his line firmly wrapped around a tree) had caught a fair few fish we took them all back to the hostel to be cooked up for our meal, while we were waiting i decided to give fishing outside the hostel a little try and used a chunk of fish id saved and a bit of line. I climbed down to the river on a log and dipped the hook in, instantly and even more ferociously than before the pirannahas attacked and within 2 minutes i had a bite, it was a bloody big, really angry red pirannah with a big ugly face like a bulldog and a nasty "im going to eat you slowly" look about it, apparently theyre the most vicous kind of pirannah around so i gave it to the guide who took the angry little sod off to be cooked. we finished our lunch and then hopped back onto the boats for the return journey home, it was a long hot treck back and we were all glad to finally be out fo the jeep by the end of it. As a celebration of our little jungle excursion we all decided to go out for cocktails and carryokee, everybody got very drunk but since we couldnt find a caryokee bar we just settled for pub games instead. Twas a rather good night.

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Videos from "La Paz La Paz and Rurrenebaque Pampas Tour":

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