Bastante Bichos!

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Wow what an adventure I’ve been having. At this moment I am in a sleepy little town called San Jose de Chiquitos, on the Jesuit missions circuit in the lowlands of Bolivia. I arrived last night from San Ignacio and have spent hours today just sitting in the plaza waiting for the internet café to open. There really isn’t much to do here and I have another 8hrs until my train leaves from Santa Cruz. I already checked out the church, bought my train ticket and walked round most of the village which took me all of half an hour.
Bolivia really is a country of two completely different halves. The people and landscapes in the altiplano are nothing like down here. They are shy and reserved up there, I guess it’s a hard life, while down here is more like Brazil or the Carribean. The traditional dress is a kind of African off the shoulder ruffled dress for the girls and I hear "Ay Caramba" nearly every day. People are so friendly and laid back, everyone stops to chat and invites me to stay with them or have dinner. I have made loads of friends in every place I’ve been in the last few weeks.
When I left Santa Cruz I was apprehensive about what I would find but of course there was nothing to worry about. First off I got chatted up by the cute guy working for the bus company and I almost persuaded him to join me on my trip to the little village of Piso Firme where the fiesta was, through him I also found out that there was another fiesta a few days after in another village called Remanso which was nearby.
The bus ride was fairly uneventful really. I turned a nice orange colour from the bumpy, dusty, unsurfaced road and because I got the last seat available right at the back it was even more bumpy than normal, the guy next to me got bumped right off his seat at one point when he was asleep. I got bitten by lots of mozzies too but apart from that there was only one breakdown and a fallen tree to contend with where everyone hopped out and started hacking at it with machetes and an axe which appeared from somewhere.
I arrived at midnight in Piso and there was a Señor from a hotel there waiting for us (I had had visions of putting up my hammock on the green for the night). My hotel was basic but clean and tidy with a long drop toilet (a hole cut in the top of a box for a seat, very comfy) and a proper shower in a hut out the back although the fly screen only slightly above the level of my chest (I hope) didn’t give much privacy.
There was a little restaurant with only one menu choice per day, mainly fried piranha, yam, rice and beetroot salad, and that was for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My main concern was the water though. It turned out there was no bottled water in town, only horribly sweet soda which left a film on my teeth which I could never seem to brush off, and I didn’t have enough purifying tablets for the weeks I planned to be there so I ended up drinking the well water like everyone else and expecting to drop dead at any minute.
Clearly I am still here though, I’m not sure if the Doxycicline tablets I’m taking against malaria are protecting me (they are antibiotics) but I haven’t been ill here at all (apart from when Pedros Mum cooked me dinner in Potosi!).
The fiesta in Piso Firme didn’t start for another few days so I just hung around a bit soaking up the atmosphere, listening to the insects in the evenings which sounded like microphone feedback and went to see the Park Guards about getting into the park. The head ranger organized a guide and boat transport from Remanso (where the next fiesta was) to a small community called Bella Vista where I could walk to a laguna and camp for a few days, while the other ranger invited me to stay at the rangers office with them but the room he showed me was his own I think.
There were also a group of students there from Santa Cruz studying the freshwater dolphins and giant otters in the river who I got chatting to. They told me there were piranhas in the river but I was assured that it was OK to swim as they were not around the village where the villagers were washing their clothes on wooden tables standing in the shallows at the edge of the river.
I got dragged along to the local bingo night by a guy called Emilio who had appointed himself my guide but I was too slow at recognizing the numbers in Spanish and marking them off with pieces of dried sweetcorn to win anything. The prizes turned out to be bags of cooked duck and bread rolls though so I wasn’t too fussed, although it would have made a change from fish.
The next night there was a ‘misa’ which was the religious ceremony where they paraded a wooden saint through the village, followed by the velhoria which was supposed to be a few hours of contemplation before the fiesta started at midnight. They all got bored of waiting by about 10:30 though and I was soon initiated into the Brazilian style dancing. As the only Gringa in town I was pretty popular and didn’t get to sit down much at the discos over the next week! I stayed up drinking whiskey and dancing with the students till sunrise when I had to perform drunken first aid on a girl who went swimming and got a big chunk of her little toe bitten by a piranha. Needless to say I didn’t go swimming in the river again after that.
I spent most of the next day sleeping and woke up to find that half the village was worried about me because I hadn’t appeared. Its very weird being the centre of so much attention all the time and a bit tiring in fact, sometimes I just want to go and sit quietly somewhere and be ignored.
I got chatting to a couple of Peruvians in my hotel and found that they were also going to Remanso and had found a truck which was going to take them so I decided to join them. I was pretty excited to be traveling by camionetta at last and with friends too instead of having to stand and hitch at the side of the road.
The two Peruvian guys Fran and Javier were traveling around selling stuff at all the fiestas in the area with another couple of Bolivians and Javiers wife and 3 yr old daughter, Marisol. I had a great, atmospheric truck ride with them in the dark through the smoky forest fires that were all around creating a smoggy humo in the village, chatting with Fran who I got on with really well, jammed in with all our luggage and a load of bananas and papaya. I spent the next week with them in Remanso and Javiers wife, Riberaldina, cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for all of us each day while the guys were out selling or fishing for piranhas. Other than that we eat loads of the lovely cheese empanadas washed down with cold sweet chicha freshly made by the Doña of our hotel.
Our hotel in Remanso was pretty basic, my room was basically a barn with dirt floors, hard straw filled mattresses and no electricity and there was no shower, so we washed with buckets of water from the well. It sure makes you good at conserving water when you have to pull it up yourself. I developed a great one bucket strategy that meant I could wash my hair, myself and my clothes all in one go! The trick is to put a little bit of water in another bucket for the final rinse and not to rinse yourself until you have soaped your hair then do the whole lot in one go.
I went for a bit of a walk one day and managed to get stung by a bee, they are after salt in your sweat and its pretty impossible not to get hot and sweaty walking around here, they are OK if you keep moving but I had stopped to watch a family of spider monkeys in the trees at the side of the road and was trying to get a photo when the bee got me! I had a few worried minutes as I was alone in the middle of nowhere and I've only been stung once before at the age of about 10. If I had been allergic there wasn’t much I could have done about it. In the end it just swelled up a bit so I had an attractive elephant ankle for a few days.
Remanso was also on the river which served as the border with Brazil and so boatloads of Brasileros turned up for the fiesta and pitched their tents all over the place and commenced to drink and dance for the next 3 days solid with a bit of a break for a few intervillage football matches. I soon made a load more friends despite not understanding each other much and had a great time, although unfortunately Fran (who didn’t dance) was slightly ‘enamorado’ with me and became my constant shadow at the edge of the dance floor. Still he was great company the rest of the time and remained a gentleman without trying it on, which is a first for the men I’ve met here.
I was very sad to say goodbye to my new family when they left on the bus to Santa Cruz after the festival was over, but I was waiting for my guide from Bella Vista to arrive and take me up river…and waiting…and waiting.
He never showed up and I couldn’t get any response from his village by radio so there I was stuck in Remanso with the only bus for another 4 days having just left with all my friends on it. I couldn’t hack another 4 days on my own in the now deadly quiet Remanso so I managed to find a truck leaving the next day on a circuitous route, through another small village to sell their goods, to La Mechita from where there was a chance I might get a lift to the Southern part of the national park. La Mechita turned out to be just a building at the side of the road near the turn off to the park and I got dropped off there in the morning after sleeping on a tarp in the back of the truck.
I was welcomed by a couple of over excitable dogs but the owner of the house didn’t seem too keen, I spoke to a very good looking guy round the back who told me which way the potential trucks might come from but didn’t seem to fancy my chances of a lift and didn’t invite me in.
After feeling a bit of an idiot sitting outside and getting slobbered on by the dogs I went and asked if I could sit inside where they eventually told me that infact they were going to the village I wanted to get to that same day in their car. Talk about lucky.
They were off somewhere else first so they told me to relax, hang out in the hammock and they would pick me up later. I was offered a badly needed wash but the bathroom turned out to be a murky pool of water outside from which a guy kindly fetched a few buckets of water but then proceded to chop wood right next to me so I had a slightly awkward wash in my undies and then fell asleep in the hammock with a small menagerie of ducks, ducklings and chickens milling around the dinning room with me. I woke up to find I had been bitten to death by something all over my arms.
Hay arto bichos aqui (or un monton if you are Argentinian)!
‘Arto’ is the Bolivians favorite word here and generally means 'loads' and ‘bichos’ are any annoying little insects. Another lovely saying is ahoringa - a little minute or right now. They put -inga on the end of anything to make it diminutive or -anga to make it bigger. I’ve heard some lovely words that have been inga-ed.
So I finally made it to the entrance to the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park - named after a scientist who got killed there when he accidentally landed at an airstrip belonging to some drug runners. Now I just had to get myself a guide and some form of transport and I was set.
My first night there I had dinner in the dimly lit restaurant while being stared at by lots of people who seemed to be there to watch the new tv with DVD player. It was so dimly lit that when I asked for dinner and Doña Flora asked if I ate meat, I wasn’t entirely sure if the thing she dished up was actually turtle or not, but when I got my torch out I could see that I had some sort of scaly foot with toenails on my plate so I surreptitiously managed to put it to one side and just ate the rice!
I also had a bit of an unnerving bucket shower when I had to chase the toads out of the hut first and the crowd of ducks hanging around me while I was getting the water from the well made me a bit nervous, I wasn’t exactly sure what they were after.
The next day I found myself a guide and arranged to spend 2 days in a canoe on the river and then 5 days in the park by bike. I had spoken to two Germans who had just done it that way and although they were not very enthusiastic about it as a means of transport I didn’t really have much choice as I didn’t have the cash to hire a 4x4 and no one was offering me a ride in theirs.
The couple of days on the river were great and I got to try out my new hammock finally. We didn't see much apart from a couple of monkeys and the Londras - giant river otters, also we couldn’t get very far up river because it is the dry season and the water is very low. We spent the evening silently paddling up and down looking for Cayman with torches and anything else which might be down at the waters edge for a drink, bats are amazingly loud when they are whizzing past your head feasting themselves on the cloud of insects which my torch light was attracting. The rest of the time we spent fishing for piranhas to eat for dinner, at which I was particularly useless. Luckily my guide Juan had more success and we cooked them up on the campfire later. I did eventually catch one but it was a tiddler, of course all the bigger ones got away.
So then we headed into the park on our bikes, our first obstacle was a river crossing just out of the village where there was a barge on a rope system but it was stuck so we had to steal a canoe and put the bikes in it to get across, Juan was saved from having to return the canoe and swim the last bit by the appearance of a bloke who kept telling me I was very pretty and he was divorced, didn’t I know. Really, thanks! He was old enough to be my dad.
The actual ride itself wasn’t too bad as it was all level 4x4 track, although there were a few thorny branches and some deep ruts waiting to try and throw you off your bike. It was only the heat and the odd puma which set it apart from a nice ride through a really beautiful forest. We were incredibly lucky and actually saw a rarely sighted puma within the first hour, while we were busy chatting away and not paying attention. Of course that was the end of our luck and we didn’t see much else, although we also got off quite lightly with the weather as it was a bit overcast most days. We got into a routine of getting up at 5am so we could get to our next camp by midday to avoid the heat. I would cook up the porridge then we’d load the bikes and set off. When we arrived at the camp we’d have lunch, go for a bit of a walk and then be forced to hide from the insects and bees until dusk when they all miraculously disappeared and I could cook dinner. My guide invariably fell asleep at about 5pm and didn’t wake up again though, so I’d be sitting in the dark with my little stove worrying about the noises and forest fires, then we’d eat his portion of dinner for lunch the next day. There had been lots of forest fires in the previous weeks and we weren’t sure if we could get to one part called La Meseta because a previous group had had to leave in a hurry as the fire descended towards their camp in the night. However the previous days rain had dampened things down and cleared some of the smoke so we headed up there on the second day. It was all pretty burned out though and we were plagued by little flies which get into your eyes, nose, hair and, most irritatingly, ears. So I spent a hot sticky climb to the top of the table-like hill picking them out, I cant say it was really worth the effort. When we got back down to the camp all our things were covered in swarms of bees and so we retreated to our beds, although I was unfortunate enough to discover that if you try to get into the swanky integrated hammock/mozzie net/rain cover contraption I was calling home, too fast, to avoid the bees, and fall out the other side, its impossible to escape and very embarrassing and you have to get your guide to pull you out!
Our next camp was a short walk from an amazing 80m waterfall with a huge pool beneath it where we stripped off and swam around enjoying our first wash and the lovely cool water. I had one of those great moments in life just floating on my back staring up at the waterfall above me. Unfortunately on the way there we spotted a fire which looked like it was going to cut us off from the track back to the camp so we literally had to hotfoot it out of there after only a quick dip and a check over the body for tics! Such a shame as I could have floated there all afternoon. Maybe one day I’ll come back in the rainy season, it must be quite a sight.
So we returned safe and sound, slightly saddle sore and scratched, to the village of La Florida where again I had the amazing luck to bump into the same guys from La Mechita who just happened to be in town again and were about to return to La Mechita and then on to San Ignacio de Velasco, exactly the place I thought I was going to have to wait a few days for a lift to. I couldn’t believe it. As we were on our way to San Ignacio I also couldnt believe it when a wild turkey crossed our path and a pistol was hurriedly produced from the guys bumbag, we screeched to a halt and he tried to shoot it down. He missed luckily but it was hillarious.
I was on a mission to find me a nice cold caipiriña in the lovely town of San Ignacio (who also happened to be having a fiesta that weekend, I don't know how I do it!) and dance with the cute brother of the owner of La Mechita, called Moses. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out like that but I spent a pleasant few days in San Ignacio which is one of the Jesuit mission towns and is like a tropical wild west with a beautiful square, an intricately carved and painted church and some terrible karaoke bars. From San Ignacio I also visited San Miguel and when I found the church there was closed took up an invitation from a lovely girl in the tourist office to join her and her friends on a trip out to a local community. It turned out there was some sort of meeting about how to bring Ecotourism to the community so we whizzed off in the back of a pick up and when we arrived the whole village was waiting in the community building to greet us, we had to go round and individually shake hands with each and everyone of them. I was the gringo on show again, it was all very odd but extremely interesting. There was lots of talk about the tourism bit and not much about the Eco bit so at the end I went and put my oar in, I just couldn’t resist, so we ended up talking waste management and fishing limitations.
And from there, here I am in little San Jose... only another 4 hours till the train leaves….

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