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Published: July 30th 2009
Lucky Bartoni 😊
After the coldness of the salt desert tour and the high altitude we had been in, including La Paz, we decided we needed to get back down to sea level and also to do the infamous Pampas tour that had been recommended by Ken (thank you) and Heidi and Tom (from Salta) who raved over it compared to the desert. I am so glad we took their advice.
The Pampas is made of a network of riverways and swamp like wetlands. The area is full of wildlife including various birds, alligators, caiman, capibarah, turtles, snakes, monkeys. Basically we got to see it all and the amount of wildlife was better than any of us could have hoped for. To get to the Pampas however we needed to leave La Paz and take an internal flight of about 50 minutes to a place called Rurrenbaque an early start was required to get us to the military airport for our plane to Rurrenbaque.
Leaving the cold and altitude of La Paz was no problem though as we landed on a grass (no joke) runway and stepped out to warm sunshine, tropical vegetation and jungle backdrop. Despite the early
start the warmth of the sunshine and the almost Caribbean feel of Rurrenbaque had us all smiling. A local tour operator offered to give us a lift into the town for a few coins and bags hoisted on the roof we arrived outside our first hostel, Hotel Oriental. A lovely hostel with hammocks and hot water and a chance to chill out before exploring the town. Rurrenbaque is not a very big place but it has a wonderful laid back atmosphere, a brilliant banana cake and chocolate brownie stall and warm weather both day and night allowing for lazy days in hammocks reading or sleeping or watching the world go by 😊 in fact i even started to replace my English rose complexion (aka pale skin) with a tan!!!
Anyhow, having caught the same flight as Scott and Kate from the Adventure Brew hostel in La Paz we all stayed in the same hostel and then met Dave (another reprobate we met in La Paz) who was staying in a cheaper location, nearby. That evening we met at the Mosquito bar (our “local” as it turned out to be over the coming days) and toasted ourselves before agreeing to
The Pampas tour group
Kate, Aaron, me, Scott, Dave, Brimspend the next day doing nothing, and then booking a Pampas tour. We had decided that the 5 of us (Dave, Scott, Kate, Brim and me) could cope with spending the next 3 days on a tour involving a lot of river travel and wildlife!
So on day one, the crew (as I shall call them) packed our bags and trundled to the tour office for an early start. We were met by Aaron and Cynthia who would be joining us for the tour and we settled into our jeep for a long and very bumpy ride to the start of the river journey (made shorter by our decision to play the country game - someone says a country and the next person has to name a country beginning with the last letter of the previous country). This was the preferred option after Dave wanted to try and make us all change seats whilst the jeep was moving! Typing this up now makes it sound ludricrous but at the time it was quite funny and you should have heard 7 adults discussing the logistics of moving seats in a squashed jeep along a bumpy road! Arriving at a place
called Santa Maria (I think) we stopped for some lunch. During this short respite Dave managed to meet a new friend who he wanted to join the tour group. A black monkey who literally took it upin himself to jump on Dave´s shoulder...Dave had been trying to get a picture of the animal but it was slightly more than he had bargained for.
Lunch over, we located our canoe....with one of those motor´s attached to the back and waited for our guide, Bismark to take us up river for about 3 hours to our lodges where we would be staying for next 3 days.
As with most of my thoughts as I try and write up what I have seen and done the Pampas is one of those places that is hard to summarise in words for me. It simply needs to be seen and enjoyed. As we started down the river, I am not kidding if I say we must have seen at least 20 aligators-caiman before we had even gone 30 minutes. The aligators were either at the bankside or laying up on the banks enjoying the sunshine. There were turtles on logs, paradise birds, wood
Me driving another boat!
Please call me Captain Barton from now on ;) storks, cranes, parrots, large juba (don´t know spelling) either swooping over the water or sitting in low branches along the waterway. It really was wonderful and the thing is the next 3 days were exactly the same. Bismark would at times stop the engine so we could listen to the wildlife sounds and even spot some squirrel and howler monkeys up in the trees. He pointed out the difference with the aligator and caiman (Caiman has a dark head and light body whereas the aligators had lighter heads with generally no difference between the shading on their heads and bodies). There were so many paradise birds over the next 3 days that Dave took it upon himself to call them Jungle Turkey´s because there were so many and the noise they made was not too dissimilar to the turkeys from home!
Enough of my rambling, we arrived at our base for the next days. Brim and I shared a hut like room and everyone else paired off. There were a maximum of 3 tour groups where we stayed but we noticed that along the river there were a number of other lodges and camping grounds. Despite this however, the
river was not full of boats and tourists and the wildlife did not seem too alarmed at us gwaping at them for hours on end! That evening, we took the boat up river to the sunset bar, where literally we could drink beer and watch the sunset over the pampas. Thinking of it now brings a smile to my face. It was beautiful. On the boat ride back, in pitch dark, Bismark switched off the engine and we floated down stream using our torches to pick out the caiman´s red eyes!! The stars were out in abundance and the pampas was filled with the sounds of animals swooshing in the water or fidgeting in the trees.
Next day we were on a snake hunt! With wellies provided by the tour we took our boat along a different part of the waterways. Bismark (who seemed to have quite a soft spot for all the ladies on the tour) even let me take the helm! Despite a few concerened looks from the other passengers I was in charge and navigated us quite calmly along the water and even through some of the bends in the riverway, as we neared our destination
The Pampas mud on my cheek
was to bring luck in seeing an Anaconda! however the river became quite narrow and shallow so Bismark took over where we disembarked directly onto the wetlands. Somehow we landed at a place with no alligators, phew! We were told to fan out and look groundwards for brown-grey like movement....it could be a snake. If we spotted one we were told to raise our hands and shout snake!! I think the snakes probably felt us tramping towards them and moved before we could spot them but after about 30 minutes (Pampas mud on my face thanks to Bismark´s theory it was lucky) SNAKE was shouted...we moved over there and to my disappointment established it was a dead cobra 😞 excitement over we wandered around some more and then a guide from a second group had found one. An anaconda. Not massive by anaconda standards but still a good 3 meters long the guide held up the snake for all to see. We didn´t spend too long torturing the reptile before it was placed carefully back on the ground where it could move away! My first anaconda in the wild...what a morning!
After lunch (back at camp) we were back in the boat and piranha fishing! I say
we, but as i do not like fish or the idea of taking them from the waterways I simply observed as the crew hooked their lines with some bait and threw their lines into the river. A few fish just literally jumped into the boat whilst the others managed to catch small sardine type fish. No pirahana caught before Bismark threw a wobbly that people were throwing their fish back into the river rather than keeping them to be eaten! He had previously cat fish that no one seemed too excited to keep and BBQ that evening! So, fishing over that evening we watched another sunset (after a dubious game of volleyball) and then it was torches out again as we drifted down the river at night with the moon and stars blazing and the sounds of the water and wildlife for company. Perfect 😊
Next morning, our last in the pampas we were up early to catch the sunrise but the clouds and rain had set in so no sunshine could be seen. Instead we spent some time feeding the squirrel monkey´s and then drifting in the boat where Brim cleverly spotted a host of baby aligators on the
bankside being protected by their mum from a large hawk that was up in a nearby tree! It was like something from David Attenborough program! 😊
The morning over, we had the boat ride back to Santa and then a long bumpy jeep ride back to Rurrenbaque. However, as I sat at the front of the boat watching the world go by, enjoying the wildlife, the sunshine (now in a blue sky) creating a dazzling light effect on the water, I really wish I could have stayed there forever.
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Jeff Slaughter
non-member comment
Am I cute or what?
This all sounds truley amazing but where oh where was the King of the Pampas Trees??? Who's your little mate in the squirrel monkey shot..looks suprisingly like Barton Jnr xxx