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17/05/09 - 23/05/09
After the week and a half of classes I felt ready to have a break and found a great 5 day biking and boating trip
Bike&Boat - from Sorata (about 3 hours north of La Paz) to Rurrenabaque in the Amazon Basin.
I travelled to Sorata by minibus, about 4 hours north of La Paz on Sunday, 17th of May and stayed there overnight and met the rest of the group at 7am the next morning. We travelled uphill in the two jeeps for about 3 hours, up to an altitude of 4,800m (from 2,700m) where we kitted ourselves out with helmets and protective knee/shin pads and rode our bikes a little to get used to them, before commencing the 4,000m decent which would take 2 days and cover about 110 kilometres on the bike. Here the landscape was barren but beautiful with a snow capped peak in one direction and in the other (the way we were heading) were clouds sitting just below the mountain range.
Immediately the going was difficult, riding a very rough 4WD track with large stones and constantly using the brakes to try to slow the bike down and keep
it under control. Over the two days the "road" improved in places but was always rough and by the second day I either had the pleasure of a sore bum when riding on the flat stretches, or sore hands when going down hill where I could lift my bum off the saddle to get into a better riding position but having to continually apply to brakes to keep the bike under control and hence the sore hands.
As we decended on the first day we dropped to the level of the cloud, rode through it and eventually dropped under it. Slowly the landscape began to change from the barren desert-like mountain wilderness into a green, lush valley. We had ridden about 60 kilometres but thereafter the last 15 kilometres of the ride would have been a tough up hill section and it was getting late so the majority of us decided to put our bikes on the jeep and get a lift (both 4WDs followed just behind us the whole way for the two days). That first night we stayed in a simple hotel in small village in the middle of no where and a hot shower was a
welcome relief (the two girls who had a shower before me hadn't seen the switch to turn on the electric shower head which heated the water and had to make do with cold showers!).
The next day we left at the leisurely time of 9am to commence the 40km or so of riding with the same rocky terrain in places but also uneven, churned up mud in places where the road was being "repaired". At one point there was no road at all where local gold miners regularly damm up a stream and once in a while release the water to strip away the earth in their search for gold. The result was to have to carry our bikes over the 10 foot deep crater in the ground and the Jeep drivers having to use spades and pick-axes to try to level out the road enough to pass. At lunchtime we stopped a river and I took the opportunity to have a dip in the refreshingly cold water and rinse some of my clothes too. We arrived at the hotel at about 4pm.
The next day commenced the boat part of the trip - 3 days to Rurrenabaque
in the Amazon basin. The boat was a lancha, a long narrow boat with an outboard engine and accompanying us was the boat driver, the boat captain, a cook and the guide. The 3 days was pretty tranquil passing many gold miners along the river bank, who were either using diesel powered engines to suck up sediment from the river bed or to pump water through gravel they were digging up from the river bank. Unfortunately we didn't see much wildlife on the river, except for some turtles basking in the sun, but that's always the risk when in the jungle or rain forest, you need to be lucky to see anything interesting and in any case night time is the best time to try to spot wildlife. We camped both nights, the first night in a clearing just above the river and in the morning we walked to a water fall where we swam (and got bitten lots by the blood thirsty mosquitoes). The second night we camped on a beach by the river.
We reached Rurrenabaque at about 4.30pm on Friday, 22nd of May and the next day I flew back to La Paz on a tiny
little plane (having opted to fly for 45 minutes, rather than sit on a bus on bad roads for 20 hours!). It was the smallest commercial plane I have been on, with around 20 seats only and we must have ascended to only something like 5,000 metres and after about half an hour we passed in between two mountains (with the summit to the right towering above us), and without changing our altitude were immediately only about 1,000m over the Altiplano (the large plain which surrounds La Paz on its west side), which meant a quick decent to the airport. Not many international airlines use the airport because apparently even mid-sized planes need 3 miles of runway and use up a lot of fuel in the thin air.
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