+ After the cold days in La Paz and Lake Titikaka we needed a break. We were missing too much those days on flip flops and shorts and some real air to breath :) so we dediced to go the Amazons. Yes, for those who didn´t know (like Dani), 2/3 of Bolivia is actually the Amazons! So no mountains and plenty of jungle. The point is that this part of the country is underdeveloped, mostly uncommunicated and therefore not very commonly visited or simply inaccessible.
+ To reach the most touristic town Rurrenabaque, from where you can make trips into the jungle, there is a bus which only takes 20 hours... ehem, yes, 20 hours. In the rainy season it can take up to 3 days. Since we were not yet psycologically prepared for a 20h-bumpy-ride on a dirty road, we opted for a very cheap flight:
+ Well, now you also understand why it was that cheap... the plane was like a shoe-box with two engines. But the best was the airport's landing piste: a piece of grass and a rusty building. There was not even a metal scaner, nor any kind of security check and so far, no terrorist attack. USA and EU should follow these practices.
+ Rurrenabaque is a town made for tourists and there is a countless number of agencies offering the same excursions, with the same rates. So, which one to choose? Ha! Nodoby knows. After two hours of torture listening the same stories, watching the same pictures in different brochures and observing very different marketing techniques, we chose one: perhaps not the right one because we were the only ones choosing it... and they didn't have the photovoltaic penals they told us in the agency they had at the campsite..., but well, it turned out not really as a bad choice: we loved our camp, our guide, the tours we did with him, our cook & her cute little son and had great time!!!
+ We did a 3 days trip into Las Pampas (flat wetlands with several rivers). We drove for 3 hours into the jungle before taking a boat upstream for another 2 hours to our camp. The way: unforgetable!!! No need to describe it.
+ As the pictures show, full of caimans, capybaras (the largest rodent), monkeys, garzas, vultures, turtles and many more bird species that can not be translated into English.
+ The second day, we did a hike with our guide "Nilo" into the jungle. Normally, they don´t do this way because they go with the tourists to "hunt" anacondas. Since we were the only tourists in this camp, and we had heard that the looking for the poor snake was terribly dissapointing, we agreed with him to explore a bit the jungle around. There weren´t any tracks to follow so we made them with the machete. Very unique experience. We had to walk (literally) over trees to be able to advance, we were stabbed by some little bees, saw many fire ants and had other spooky insect encounters.... But Nilo, who grew up inside the jungle, always knew how to react and what to do in which situation.
+ At a certain point, we got somehow lost, so Nilo wanted to walk back by the river shore to take a shortcut. The only inconvenience was that the shore was infested with caimans!!!! Crazy! The only proposal that Kinga vetoed was to return at the river side even if Nilo was convinced that the caimans would not be interested in us. Maybe he was right; we didn't got to know...
+ In the following photo, Nilo shows the level the water reaches in the rainy season. It means that everything is completely flooded.
+ We learnt about the use of different plants as medicine and others that are poisonous, for example the tree of the fire ants, you use for... we forgot already. :(
+ In the afternoon we went fishing piranhas. Nilo wouldn't give us any break from the activities. God, the river was full of them. The best fisherman was Kinga. She got the largest fishes. Dani wasn´t so skilled fishing them but he was the one who ate more for dinner!!
+ During the nights, on the boat, we could observe the crocodriles' eyes watching us. Very spooky!
+ The cook's son, Raphael, who lived with us at the campsite and who loved to play with Dani.
No comments:
Post a Comment