Parque Ambue Ari

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Inti Wara Yassi

Leaving Santa Cruz on a 7AM bus, we saw the first car smash of our trip on the outskirts of town. A truck had smashed head first in to a bus and the wreckage implied that neither driver had escaped with their life. Otherwise, the trip to Guarayos was a hot, sweaty affair and we arrived around 12:30ish. We went for a feed at a restaurant directly opposite the bus station where the middle-aged waitress took our expectations for Bolivian service to new lows. We ordered food, a bottle of coke, used the toilet (it didn´t flush and so had a couple of “presents” sitting in it), ate, paid and left. She treated us as though we had come in, spat in her face and called her a whore.

We returned to the bus station and paid B$10 each for a cab to Parque Ambue Ari. We were told that the minivan we put our bags in would depart as soon as they had enough customers to fill it. With seven seats in the car, we figured it would be ten minutes tops. About an hour later we departed with thirteen people in the car! The back two seats had two women with two children each on their laps, the Boss, myself and a random Bolivian sat in the middle seats, two Bolivians squeezed in to the passenger's seat and it must have been “bring your kid to work” day, because the driver's toddler son sat in the gap between the driver's and passenger's seats.

The driver was about 45 minutes and we arrived at Inti Warra Yassi's Parque Ambue Ari at around 3PM. We were greeted by Zac, an Aussie with a full Ned Kelly beard, given a brief tour and showed to Coco, the 8 bed dorm we would be calling home for the next month. Later we were given a more complete tour by Jeff and Chris, two brothers from Canada who had been at the parque for a couple of months. There were dorms with enough beds to sleep around 50 people, showers with cold water from a bore, a dining room (the comedor), kitchens for people and animal food, an office and a couple of holes in the ground with toilet seats for, well, y'know.

We also met the house animals. The chanchos are bush pigs that are kept to eat, not be eaten. The Pios are emu-like birds in that they are big and flightless but they are smaller than emus and not as badly tempered. There are two of them named Matt and Damon. There used to be four but one of the Pumas (Warra, she´ll get more of a menbtion later) escaped a few weeks before we arrived and ate the two females. It hasn´t stopped Matt and Damon's sex drives however, as we caught the two of them going at it on our third day at the park. For the record, a pio's pee-o is the length and colour of a strand of cooked spaghetti and corkscrew shaped. Lucas is a squirrel monkey about a foot tall. He's got yellow fur and, though we haven´t seen it yet, he spends his days eating the chanchos'and pios' food and riding them! He also likes to hump... Anything. Finally there is an aviary with a variety of exotic and colourful birds and two that live outside the aviary – a macaw named Lorenzo who is inclined to biting fingers and paraba named Gordo who can´t fly but can talk and mimic a human laughing.

There is a small section of the park on the other side of the road to Guarayos with a few more dorms, a few of the cats and two more house animals. Herby is a tapir weighing in at around 200kgs! He has a beautiful temperament, loves to be petted and eating coco leaves. He used to have two deer in his cage, Bambi and Rudolpho but Rudolpho grew antlers and started putting them to use on Herby and Bambi. After puncturing one of the volunteers' skin with his antlers, they were cut off but Rudolpho continued butting away with the stubs left on his head. Eventually he killed Bambi and, out of concern for Herby, their cage was split in two. So Herby now has an evil murdering deer for a neighbour but no room mates.
After our orientation we met the rest of our dorm mates. Sarah, from Ireland, Anameijn from The Netherlands, Johnny from Scotland, Gado from Israel and Orr who was also from Israel but left the following day and was replaced by Arjan from India. We spent the evening in the nearby town of Santa Maria. Not much more than a few shops and houses, a bus (the “floater”) stops at the park every night at 7PM on the way to Guarayos and for B$2 each takes most of the park's residents to Santa Maria. The nightly ritual is to go to a small store there, owned by the park's cook, which has a TV and DVD player. They sell cold drinks and food and we spend the evening watching a movie and enjoying a beer, since alcohol is banned at the park.

That night, after a sweltering day with humidity surely in the high 90's, it poured rain. The following day was comparatively cool and windy and, as a result, the breakfast announcement included a warning that the cats were all likely to be far friskier than usual. The volunteers looking after one cat, named Ru, were warned not to take him out of his cage at all. It turned out that they were talking to me because, after being registered by Gill, the park's volunteer coordinator, I was told that I would be working with Ru.

At over 800 square kms, the park is fairly stretched out and Ru is the furthest cat from the camp. The twenty minute walk to and from his cage each day would be frustrating but, being in the jungle, it's a great opportunity to see animals. So far I´ve seen a few squirrels, small pig-like animals, squirrel, capuchin and howler monkeys and even a yellow-furred ant eater that climbed a huge tree and then jumped in to the branches of the tree next to it!

Yaguaru, or Ru as he's known, is 100 kgs of pure jaguar muscle! Though I don´t know his full story, he arrived at the park as a cub (or is it kitten) and so does not have the hatred of humans that many of the other cats have from a life of mistreatment. He does, however, still have his instincts, so interacting with him is done through his cage. Mostly he just likes to lick your arms, which is a surprisingly painful experience due to his tongue being rough as sand paper.

Most of the other cats are simply put on leads and walked through jungle paths for exercise. Ru used to have this system but apparently he was becoming too playful with his volunteers and after some injuries it was decided that he shouldn´t be walked that way anymore. So to exercise him, runners have been built. These are metal ropes tied to trees which he is carabeen to.. One runner extends to the nearby river so that he can go swimming, the other two are out the back of his cage. He eats 2.3 kgs of meat every day, either beef or chicken, and feeding him involves putting him in to his management cage, then putting wrapping the meat up in large leaves and putting them in various positions around his cage, like up in trees. Watching him bound three or more metres up a tree for his dinner is a pretty entertaining show.

I´ve been working with Gado and a German guy named Sebastian who both love Ru and really enjoy their time with him. But to be honest, and this is going to sound selfish and insane, I'm kind of bored. I'm constantly told by other volunteers how lucky I am to be working with such a beautiful cat but the lack of interaction with him means that most of the day is spent looking at a jaguar in a cage, which I can get at a zoo. I'm going to ride it out for a couple more days and, unless I develop some kind of amazing bond with him or somehow I start finding my time more interesting, I'm likely to ask to switch to a cat I can pet and walk around with.

The Boss is working with three Puma sisters (Inti, Warra and Yassi) and her days are spent being nudged and nuzzled for pats and affection. She also gets the occassional playful bite but if that´s the price you pay for physical interaction, I'm willing to cough up!

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