Advertisement
Published: September 22nd 2007
Edit Blog Post
Capybaras
The world´s largest rodents A lovely girl we met on the second night in Lima told us that if we went through La Paz we should definitely take a trip to a place called Rurrenabaque and from there do either a jungle or pampas tour. Thanks German-Italian girl! This was amazing.
Rurrenabaque is a small town in the Bolivian chunk of the Amazon Basin. We bought a flight from La Paz to Rurrenabaque because someone told us that the bus journey can be anything between 18 and 30 hours and is never fun. This was wimping out to an extent but a 45 minute flight in a 12 seater propeller plane sounded pretty random.
We left La Paz at 7am, it was cold, foggy and grey and we were rapped up pretty warm. Within and hour we were stepping off the plain into the most intense kind of heat I´ve ever experienced. The little plane had bumped down on a gravel airstrip in the middle of the jungle and out we jumped to be greeted by an unforgettable scene of green and blue, the Andes behind us, the Amazon stretching on all the way to the Atlantic.
The Amazon Basin is completely
cut off from the rest if Bolivia by the awesome eastern range of the Andes. Stepping off the plane we could have been in a completely different country in a completely different part of the world. It didn´t feel like the Bolivia or the South America that we´d known so far.
The Rurrenabaque region is real back-country with the kind of out-of-the-way feel to it that I had always wanted to experience. Indeed it´s such an out of the way place that the entire staff of the airstrip were on the bus with us back into town. They only have a handful of flights a day at the busiest of times.
The bus ride into town took us down some bumpy unpaved sandy roads with think tropical vegetation on either side broken by the occasional dusty homestead. Rurrenabaque town itself consists of about 1.5 square kilometers of perfectly square blocks lying on the eastern banks of the wide Rio Beni (which flows far north-east into Brazil where it joins the Amazon proper near Manaus). It´s fair to say that over the last few years Rurrenabaque has experienced something of a tourism boom and has become the center for
A Real Life Wild Monkey
Not a Weatherspoons Shift Manager the growing eco-tours industry. Having said this there are no ATMs in town, no paved roads for 100s of miles, very little in the way of officialdom and the only visible sign that the Bolivian state has a presence is a rather ramshackle military barracks on the edge of town.
The bus dropped us off outside the office of our tour agency. There is still some confusion as to the company is called Donanto or Indians but both names seem to be used equally. It was here that we met our companions for the next three days. There was a young Swedish couple on honeymoon, an Austrian student we´d already met in La Paz airport, a well traveled French woman with brilliant stories to tell and a retired Danish couple who were spending their later years traveling the world.
Next came a fairly uncomfortable 3 hour 4x4 ride along even more questionable roads further into the outback. The journey was cramped and hot. To make things worse the infrequent trucks and other 4x4 s we passed threw up huge dense clouds of dust with the resulting choice of expiring from the heat with the windows closed or suffucating with them open. I passed the time by listening to the French woman´s story of how she cheated death in Siberia.
Eventually we rolled into a tiny collection of buildings (that I thnk actually had a name) on the banks of the Rio Yacuma. Waiting for us on this tributary of the Rio Beni was our boat. Also waiting for us were the two people who would be looking after us for the next three days, our guide (and captain of our motorised canoe) and our cook. We all pitched in to unload supplie from the 4x4 and load up the boat. After allowing enough time to buy melted chocolate we were off again.
We followed the winding course of this muddy Amazonian river as it passed through a wild landscape of thick jungle and tropical savannah. Eddie and I agreed that this was somthing trully special. Within the first hour we´d encountered alligators, turtles, cabybaras (the world´s largets and cutest rodent), caymans (like crocodiles), toucans and best of all monkeys. Our senses were filled with trully alien sights, smells and above all sounds. All abot us we heard the splashing of alligators, the call of strange birds and the shreeks of monkeys. It trully was like the soundtrack of some jungle adventure film. This was the South America everyone knows about. I´d never felt so far from home.
By 5pm we reached our camp, high up the muddy river bank and in a clearing surrounded by dense tropical vegitation. The camp was essentially a series of wooden rooms interconnected by raised walkways. A particually long walkway led to a makeshift bar overlooking the open pampas. Here, with a cool beer we watched the sunset to the sounds of howler monkeys and all manner of hungry-for-human insects.
The next day was a mixture of excellent meals, hot walks through swampy pampas in search of elusive anacondas and awsomely refreshing swims in the river with pink river dolphins. The dolphins inhabit particually pleasant corners of the river and (comfortingly) seem to keep away alligators, caymans and paranas. Although mildly amused if you throw a plastic bottle for them to play with the dolphins are pretty much aloof and disinterested in stupid gringos. The day was capped off with an international football match between English, Argentinian, Bolivian, Canadian and Australian tourists. Eddie poached a crucial goal that might just have been ruled out for offside in lesser heat.
On the final day we fished for paranas. We caught none but annoyingly the Frecnh girl who was least interested caught a few. Meeting our Argentinian goalkeeper-striker in the bar in Rurrenabaque the next evening we saw that catching a parana might be more trouble than its worth. The tricky part is unhooking them to throw them back without them hooking onto you, as his bandaged finger proves.
Back in Rurrenabaque we met up with the Argentines who turned out to be doctors on a weeks booze and sun holiday and we had a few drinks. Our plane was delayed until the afternoon so we spent the morning kicking our heels before finally getting back to La Paz, never more grateful for the convenient existance of ATMs.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.086s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 6; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0554s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb