Bolivia

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After walking the Inca Trail to Machu Piccu in Peru we flew from Cusco south to La Paz in Bolivia - almost the highest capital city in the world..almost in as much as it isn´t a capital city, but hey it is pretty high at 4200m! Sucre is capital of Bolivia for those of you who are interested...what nobody?

La Paz is a pretty bazarre place spilling up out of a canyon and onto the altiplano (high altitude plateau). Its very cheap. In the markets you can get some real bargains..cheap guitars and pan pipes, cheap silver things (so I am now adorned in the finest Bolvian jewelry looking rather like a cheap South American Jimmy Saville!) and also llama foetuses. I am not sure how I have got by until now without a well stocked cupboard of llama foetuses, I´m sure your all asking yourselves the same thing!... OK thats La Paz just pretty much covered.

From La Paz we flew north east into the outer fringes of the Amazon Jungle. We spent 3 days on the Pampas (kind of grass lands criss-crossed by rivers and really busy with wildlife) and 2 days in the jungle proper.

We saw more wildlife in the Pampas than the jungle due to the density of vegetation that there is in the rain forest, but also because we we joined in the jungle by loudest and campest Swiss guy that Switzerland has ever had the pleasure of waving goodbye to at Zurich airport. We did see a Puma though which was exciting, and a tortoise which was perhaps less exciting (there was less of a lengthy stalk required with that one!), but still pretty cool.

In the Pampas we saw some kind of crocodile. Loads of them. We also swam in the river at one point - I am still trying to work out what we were thinking with that one. There were also Piranha in there....it must have been the heat affecting our brains. We saw fresh water dolphins, tutles, Capybarra (big guinea pig type rodents), loads of birdlife and an anaconda! - I had to wrestle with the little blighter for hours to get it out of the water...it had me in a death roll at one point but I poked it in the eye and it released its grip, so I managed to grab hold of a crocodile and beat the snake into submission with the semi-dazed lizard while playing a piranha like a pair of castinettes!....Something like that anyway.

By far the most common creature we encountered in the Pampas was the mosquito. I looked like I had chicken pocks (they bite through clothes the little ba....!) and Tom was bitten on her bum every time she went to the loo. On how I laug...uh hmm, felt much sympathy for her.

It was a really good experience and vastly diferent from anything that we had seen up to that point. Hot too which was a nice change from temperatures up at 4000/5000m.

After the jungle we spent a couple more days in La Paz and then headed south to a city called Potosi, in the south west of Bolivia. Potosi has grown up around El Cerro Rico (the rich mountain) which is honey combed with silver mines. It is where all the Spanish coins used to be produced back in the days of pirates. I was obviousy paying no attention at all to the guide during that bit. I found out why Spanish parrots can only say ´pieces of eight´in English, which is something that has been puzzling me for some years. Everything else is in Spanish and noone bothers to translate it into english because on the whole its just half-witted babbling..but anyway ´pieces of eight´ are Spanish ´8 Real coins´. So there you are.

Potosi is a bizarre place (the highest city in the world) and the only place I´m sure, where anybody can buy 1 litre of 96% sugar cane alcohol in the same shop as a stick of dynamite, a bag of fertiliser (to increase the boom), fuse and detonator all for 1.50 pounds. Who says England is a free country. I want the right to buy all these things in a shop in Tadcaster. Why, Why, Why is it not so!

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Comments

[nichola]

Tom- good to see you are putting your pole dancing skills to good use. Don't see much of a crowd though!