Boliva - jungles, lakes and witches markets

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On to Boliva for crazy La Paz and some Amazon Jungle action.

La Paz is the only airport I have ever seen with an oxygen assistance room next to the luggage belt (which appears to never be in use, they just kinda chuck your bags in through the door and then leave 100 crazed Bolivians to fight over the pile). Anyway, after exploring the city on foot my initial dislike turned to curiosity - got to love a city where you can walk out of your hotel door and be confronted by pickled eyeballs, dried llama babies (kids, lambs, I have no idea what they are called), more soccer shirts then your could where in a year and the kind of wonky, hilly roadwork that would be an engineers nightmare.

From there we took a little 16 seater flight (yes Lisa, still bigger then the last plane we took to site!) to Rurre in the Amazon basin. Awesome flight over mountains, glaciers, Beni river and more. I don´t think our bodies will forgive us for the torture of flipping from hot to freezing and back agin so many times on this trip! Anyway, our plane somehow safely landed on the little grass runway and we were whisked off to Rurre for some hammock time before heading up the Beni to Chalaln Ecolodge. If any of you think you may come this way one day, Chalalan is the place to be. Our guide, Rigoberto, like all the guides there, grew up in the jungle a good 8 hours by baot from the nearest town. His community decided the get the lodge going as a way to show tourist the real life in the jungle, whist keeing control of the environmental and cultural impacts that come with increased visitors. The staff are awesome - they have taught themselves spanish and english in order to get the place going (having grown up only speaking quechua). I have never seen so many animals in sucha short space of time - heaps of different monkeys, caiman (like a croc - glad we swam in the lake before we saw a few of these guys), macaws, woodpeckers, toucans, spiders the size of my hand etc etc etc. They threw a party the last night. It was pretty clear that i had no idea how to kepp up with their unique dancing style and I am yet to be persuaded that the baby puma milk cocktails are any good. After hiking the jungle for a few days we headed to Lake Titicaca - the hippie culture of Copa, combined with the intermitant electricity and cold showers provided too many funny tales to go into now. But the lake is stunning - so much bigger then I had realised, which made the hiking just that bit tougher.

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