The Natural Zoo

Continuing my journey north from Potosi, I decided to take one of the nicer bus option since it was quite cheap and an overnight bus arriving at about 5am, exactly my least favourite type of bus. The bus journey however was completed with little in the way of problems as well as little in the way of sleep. My attempts to check into a couple of hostels in La Paz ended in failure so I decided to join some folk and head straight to the airport, saving myself a day and hopefully getting on the early flight. This didn’t quite go to plan and we arrived at the airport to find the next plane we could buy a ticket on was at 5pm leaving us with a lovely 10 hour wait at the airport. This airport wait was pretty painful however we didn’t have the energy to leave the airport so without Wifi we merely occupied a table at the restaurant for the day, one guy however did manage to ring up a bill of 6 hours at the extortionate internet café.

Lately with my desire to get to Cusco quickly it feels like my days have been filled with either bus rides or waiting for bus rides. A nice four day trip out to the pampas area will be a nice change and should offer the opportunity to share the jungle with the many animals in the open marsh like areas as well as the population of mosquitoes that will be ever present.

My second attempt to get to Rurrenbaque couldn’t have started better , arriving in near perfect weather with the plane easily able to negotiate the grass field unlike the last time, when three straight days of rain prevented me from arriving. The next morning we set off on an incredible boat ride down the Beni river with wildlife spotting the order of the day and boy were we successful! Along the way we managed to see several different types of birds as well as hundreds of turtles and even some caiman eyes. The highlight however was the two different types of monkey that we saw, including the cappuccino monkeys that provided the highlight of the day when they joined us on the boat for a bit of fun and plenty of photos, After the boat ride we arrived at our camp for the next three days a simple but nice place that even had its own rope swing and resident crocodile. Its fair to say that the rope swing didn’t get a tremendous amount of use where he was around.

Later that night after a good feed and a short siesta (playing hide and seek with animals is tiring work let me tell you) we got back onto the boat after dark to go caiman seeking. Sadly they were being shy and we saw but only a few sets of eyes that produce a magnificent yellow glint with torch light.
Next day was probably the most painful day we could have with little going right but as they say it was experiencing the Amazon wetlands in its rawest form. We set off in the morning searching for anacondas in the scorching heat, a foot of water and metre high grass…..finding a needle in a haystack would have been easier. After three hours of trekking our guide finally divulged the fact that he hadn’t seen one in the last two months! To add injury to insult almost all of our group managed to walk past and disturb a beehive, with the counter attack by the bees producing some comedic running as they tried to get away. Unluckily for me my boots had a hole in them that meant I was walking in water most of the time, luckily for me this meant I was far enough back to change my path and not get stung – always a silver lining.

After our unsuccessful anaconda search we returned to our camp for some lunch and to do some washing such was the encouraging sunshine. About an hour after cats and dogs fell from the sky as the rainforest lived up to its name with 4 straight hours of rain leaving us with little to do but hope our roof held up (thankfully it did) and have a long siesta. As quickly as it had begun it stopped with blue skies greeting us for our late afternoon pink dolphin search. Rather embarrassing we didn’t learn from our mistakes and half an hour later we were soaked in another thunderstorm. With a bit of ingenuity we managed to fashion some dry spots for our cameras and we spent the remainder of the storm swimming with the dolphins that we found. The dolphins themselves looked quite grey however later on we found they have a definite pink tinge under the suns reflection. The river dolphins are supposedly the kings of the river and when they are around the alligators and caimans stay away. Not sure about this as we saw the two pretty close together at times but it still made for a good swim and everything left us alone. The dolphins in sight however are a bit of a tease compared to their salt water cousins and don’t come out of the water for very long at all and they don’t surface anywhere near as much still impressive to see none the less. After this we had a about half an hour to get to know the resident alligator that was out of his hiding spot and residing on the bank.

The next morning we out fishing for piranhas which are quite difficult to catch, made even more difficult by the fact that the hooks they use are way too big. Despite this we did manage to catch a few on our boat and they contributed some food to the resident alligator. The fishing boat trip also provided us with some of the best views of the pink dolphins in the sun and the opportunity to try and get some photos of them although this was quite difficult. After this it was time to take the boat back to the city and say goodbye to the Amazon wetlands. It was quite weird on the way back as we had seen so much that it became a case of “theres another dolphin” or “theres another gator” which says something about the sheer amount of wildlife that you see – certainly more prevalent that in my jungle trip in Peru. As a final parting gift on the drive back we managed to see a sloth and a cabybara the largest rodent in the world – this place is amazing!