It's a Jungle Out There

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We enjoyed some chill out time in Sucre, Bolivia's judicial capital. Bolivia is an incredibly cheap place to travel in - comparable to India and Vietnam - so we treated ourselves to a posh hotel for a few days. Sucre felt like a small town really, not too busy at all with lots of pleasant buildings - a good place to chill.

On one day we went to have a look at some dinosaur footprints they have close by that have been jolly well preserved. They have a few different types of footprint but the biggest are 80cm across and belong to the Titanosaurous which is the biggest ever living ´thing´ to have walked the earth! Them greedy Titanosaurous´s used to eat whole forests for themselves! As well as the footprints they have lots of lifesize dinasaur replicas and we had fun looking at them too. On another day we went for a walk on a local Inca trail on a sunny day which was grand and had fab views across the Andes.

We ended up staying one more night than intended in Sucre because our flight to La Paz was cancelled due to low cloud. The runway in Sucre is pretty much in the town and there's a possibility that the pilot could land on the high street or something like when there's low cloud! No worries - another day of cable TV and then we caught the flight the next day. International airport security standards haven't quite caught on in Bolivia yet - no one checked our carry on baggage (no x-ray machine's, no spot check - nowt) or checked us or anything like that! Silly us worrying about taking our swiss army knife in our hand baggage when we could easily have had a bazooka each!

A lot of cities around the world are a variation along the same theme - not La Paz - this place is a little bit different. It's the highest capital city in the world at 3640m and it's built into a great big canyon with buildings clinging to the canyon walls right the way up to the top - it's as if they´ve plonked the city into a great big bowl. You don't see many recognisable brand name shops here either - it's pretty much street stalls and independant shops here. On the streets here are people sat at tables with typewriters (remember them!) - people pay them to type letters and application forms - we've never seen that before! Despite not being on the beaten path, we still quickly found some home comforts in La Paz. We found an English bar and had fish, chips and mushy peas for dinner (the fish from Lake Titicaca) and then found ourselves a great chicken tikka masala for tea in a trendy bar - they even have oxygen masks that can be used if you're struggling with the thin air - strawberry or apple air sir?! We were effectively in the bottom of the canyon for our curry and the city looked fantastic at night - it was like being stood at the bottom of a great big bowl of twinkles.

We left La Paz on a very small twin prop plane (we had to pretty much crawl into it) and flew north headed for the town of Rurrenabaque in the Amazon basin. Bouncing around the sky we left the snow capped Andean mountains that surround La Paz and headed down down through the clouds. When we popped out of the cloud base we were greeted by a lush green landscape - trees as far as the eyes could see with brown rivers winding their way through on their way to join up with the mother of all rivers, the Amazon. The pilot swung the plane around and down and all of a sudden the very nice trees seemed to be getting rather close to our little wings - no panic though because we could see that the pilot was aiming for a mud landing strip just ahead - we were pretty much sat with the pilots really - all nice and cosy. We hit the mud with a bump and a skid and then parked outside a shed (terminal 1) - as we climbed out the plane everyone thanked the pilots for keeping us all alive. Bizarely, just after we'd come to a halt, three seemingly wild horses came out of the surrounding trees and ran across the runway! Thank goodness they didn't decide to do that a minute earlier.

Rurrenabaque is a good place to visit both the pampas and the jungle. The pampas consists of a low lying watery world - mainly tall grass standing in the water - there's also the odd forest and trees line the main rivers. The jungle is the jungle of course - loads of different types of vegetation and trees all packed in tightly - with lots of creepy crawlies and what not. We decided to visit both. The pampas is actually the best place for viewing wildlife just because the terrain's not so good for the animals to hide in! To get to the pampas we travelled down a bumpy and sometimes rocky path in a jeep for 3 hrs - we stopped to give a women with a sick baby a lift along the way for about an hour. She had to travel that distance to go see a doctor and then she would have to catch a lift back afterwards! In the pampas we stayed in a wooden hut along the side of the river and we mostly cruised around in a thin wooden boat although we did go for a few hours stroll along a track on our last day. We saw loads of cool stuff, loads and loads of all different types of birds - some big, some small, including Toucans, Kingfishers, Vultures, Cormorants, Herons and loads we've forgotten. A real treat was the pink river dolphins - they look a lot like the regular sea fairing varieties but without the fin sticking out of the water - they ranged from 1.2 - 2m in length and they seemed to be in abundance. We saw a few doing some good jumping. :-) We also saw quite a few Cappybarra - these chaps are just ace - the biggest rodents in the world - great big guinea pig looking things that are as happy on the land as they are in the water (we saw them in both locations, super wildlife spotters that we are). They generally wander around looking a bit gloomy (but cute at the same time) eating grass but if they need to get away from preditors then they can't half swim fast with their webbed feet - they can even stay under water for 5 mins and they can walk along the bottom of the river too - ace! Caimans (think alligator), we saw a lot of them too - sneaky looking characters indeed. Crickey, mustent forget the monkeys - saw 3 different types of monkeys.

After returning back to Rurrenabaque for the night we then headed up river for 5hrs headed for the Chalalan ecolodge. It was a tough job for the chaps to navigate along the river as it had deep channels interspersed with very shallow sections all along the way. We had a chap with a dipstick at the front constantly checking the depth and they did a very good job because we only ran aground the once and only very briefly. We had a pleasant 20 min walk from the riverbank up through the jungle to our ecolodge. We managed to get ourselves into a very nice private jungle bungalow with attached bathroom that the Prince of Denmark once did stay in apparently! We did lots of walks around the jungle with our guide and learnt a lot about the plants (this plant is good for this type of snake bite etc) and animals - we didn't get to see a Jaguar but we did see a few snakes (on our nightime walk), a few spiders, tarantulas(!), monkeys, birds and lots of ants. On our nightime walk we found (with our torches) a big colony of army ants which was very nice - Steve followed the line of ants with his torch..........all the way back to his shoe - he was stood right in amongst em and had a fair few making their way over his shoe and onto his leg - arrggghhh! Thankfully our brave guide sorted it out for Steve and got rid of the pesky critters. Janine also had a moment of panic with the ants when she discovered a few making their way down into one of her shoes - thankfully our super guide saved the day again just before Janine was about to take said shoe off and lob it into the dark jungle! On another occasion Janine started to run off in a panic through the jungle - away from a clever twig posing as a snake... We got bitten a lot too - we were very definitely on the menu for lots of different critters and they seemed to have a right old feast of it.

On one night there seemed to be as much wildlife in our cabin as outside it - big cockcroaches and a very very large spider combined forces to attack us whilst we were preparing for bed. For some strange reason Steve decided he'd rather place a cockroach outside than kill it so he moved in with a glass to capture the blighter. Unfortunately the pressure was too much for Steve, he got his aim wrong and he ended up separating the head of the roach from it's body with the edge of the glass. We then briefly took our attention away from that blighter whilst Steve pulled another critter out from behind his ear. On getting back to the cockroach we discovered that the head and body of these ugly critters can carry on living (and moving) quite independantly of each other!! After all that excitement we didn't have any more energy to deal with the spider so we instead dived into bed under the mozzie net and kept our eyes closed until the sun came up.

We really enjoyed our time in the pampas and the jungle - saw lots of super cool stuff and enjoyed the very hot and humid weather. It was also more relaxing than we thought it would be as we spent quite a bit of time in hammocks (in between excursions) reading books and listening to the sounds of the jungle. The jungle (actually our guide kept telling us that it was rainforest not jungle but we just weren't having it) was especially noisy at night - seemingly every little and big creature trying to make themsleves heard above the all others - spooky. On one night we had a mega rainstorm too - it was like being under an immence power shower - incredible noise accompanied by thunder and lightening. The leaves that made up our roof pretty much kept the cabin dry though.

After all that fun we headed back to the urban jungle (La Paz) yesterday - back on the little plane flying up amongst the snowy peaks back to the city. We struggled big time with the altitude last night though - we felt very weak and didn't hardly get a wink of sleep as we were both gasping for air most of the time as our bodies struggled with the lack of oxygen! Eight days spent down at 200m has seemingly rid us of our altitude acclimatisation - wierd man. We'll take today to acclimatise again (hopefully) and then we're gonna get booted up and go on a treking and camping trip tomorrow. :-)

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Photos

Cappybarra
Biggest rodent in the world -can walk on land and swim under water for 5 mins - he's a super rodent

Funny looking bird!
Can't remember what they're called but they squarked a lot, were very comical and could only fly for 20 seconds at a time

Big bird
Heron we think!

Pink river dolphin.....
...chasing our boat

Stop. Hammock time again....
....on the patio of our jungle cabin at Chalalan ecolodge

La Paz street scene
Hugemungous mountain in the background!