Off the beaten track: the East of Bolivia !

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After the touristy parts of Bolivia, I visited some of the more remote parts in the east of the country. Not so easy, considering that transportation facilities are often very limited.

My first stop Samaipata, a nice little town with the main attraction being the gateway to the national park Amboró. The night bus from Sucre to Samaipata was terrible. After a long ride on a very bad road, the bus dropped us off at 5AM next to the road in no man's land. Fortunately I had already gotten used to taking night buses and sleeping in those terrible conditions was not a problem anymore. In Samaipata I took the opportunity to take the San Pedro powder that I had bought earlier in La Paz, i.e. a cactus that produces hallucinations. Together with a friend, we enjoyed the great views from the archaeological site El Fuerte "on San Pedro". Perhaps that is why it looked so incredibly beautiful ;-) Not less interesting was the evening when we got invited by a fellow traveller to have some birthday cake while we were still feeling "a little bit strange". From Samaipata we also went for a 3-day trekking to the rain forest of the national park Amboró. We visited parts of the park were only very few tourists per year go. For me, this was the first multi-day hike after my accident in Colombia. I survived without too many difficulties.

An Australian travel companion and I had big plans to go to the national park Noel Kempff Mercado, one of the most untouched parts of the Amazon jungle. We wanted to go ourselves without an organized tour from Santa Cruz, because this costs easily 1.500USD per person. Luckily enough, we found 4 other very nice travel companions to join us ! We went for a few days to Santa Cruz to prepare our 1-week jungle trek. Those few days ended up being more useful than expected. It was very hard to find the correct info. Even in the park information center, they did not know how we could get to the park with public transportation. Instead, they could only give me the telephone number of the park director, who explained me in very general terms how we could get there. We needed to go to San Ignacio and from there a weekly bus would bring us to La Florida, the gateway to the park. Spending some extra time in Santa Cruz was not too bad at the end. A big city, but much more developed than other parts of the country and people much more friendly and eager to speak to tourists. From there we left for our big adventure as we were explained. In San Ignacio, it seemed almost impossible to find bus ticket to go to La Florida due to incorrect info received from locals. This "if I do not know it I lie"-culture is fun at the beginning, but starts being a little bit annoying after that many months of travelling. After 2 hours of wandering though the streets, we eventually found the correct place because one of my companions had by coincidence asked the question to a bus driver who used to drive this bus. In San Ignacio, we did all the shopping. We bought all the food for 6 people for 7 days, since this was the time we intended to spend in the jungle. A whole organization ! I was crazy enough to leave with 18 eggs in my backpack. During the 1-week trekking, I managed to break only 1 of the eggs ! In the beginning my friends thought I was crazy, but I think that some of them understood my point after one week with almost no proteins.

The jungle trekking in the national park Noel Kempff Mercado was extraordinary. Even after the dry season, it is definitely worth the hassle to visit the park. The park is still really wild. Only very few tourists come here and you feel that in every step you take. Most of the time you cannot see the animals, but you can feel them. This is very different from the local jungle "zoo" at Rurrenbaque where you can touch some of the caymans because they are so used to the contact with the locals. At night we were not allowed to go outside of the sight of the camp site because there are tigers hunting. There were plenty of monkeys hanging and jumping in between the trees and many smaller animals. A fellow traveller unexpectedly saw a black Cayman of 3 meters when he went fishing with the guides at night. One of the guides was standing in the water until his waist when he noticed something unusual only few meters away from him. When I asked the next morning to go back and find the cayman, he did not want to go. He said he did not know there were black cayman in the park and that the big ones would not mind having him for dinner, or for breakfast in this case. I could convince the other guide to join me, but we could not find the cayman anymore. The conditions in the park were very basic. In the jungle we were never alone during the day. The mosquitoes and the bees were very everywhere. I got stung 3 times by bees, had probably around 100 ticks and as many mosquito bites. Esp. the ticks were very annoying because they itch for weeks or even months. We could not stay at the same camp site for more than 2 nights, because the insects just became insupportable. Fortunately they always went to sleep together with us.

Our short stay in La Florida also was a very beautiful and authentic experience. People were extremely friendly. Children inviting us to go and play football with them, our guides invited us to go fishing and to have lunch at his house, to go swimming in the river... I left with mixed feelings. On one side this was one of the most friendly and welcoming towns I had seen so far, on the other side I could do it without all the insects and basic conditions...

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