Welcome to The Jungle
Trip Start
Apr 14, 2010
1
20
41
Trip End
Feb 21, 2011
Rurrenbaque, Bolivia
Friday, July 23, 2010
The journey started well with a bit of leg room and views that blew us away. The bus left from La Paz at 11am and climbed slowly into the Andes. We drove past eerie Lord of the Rings esque gravel covered mountains and as we climbed the snow caps began to surround us. The climb was slow but beautiful and we were unaware of the time passing as we couldn’t remove our eyes from the view. When we reached the top of the Andes we had to descend the other side which became even more stunning. Soon after the decent began we could see a tapestry of trees making up the cloud forest which clings to the side of the steep mountains. The dense forests were sporadically interrupted by a patchwork of rectangular, near vertical farmlands for those communities living in the mountains (GPS alert, but it is Joe writing). As we wound down the mountain road, which had been very good by Bolivian standards, it turned into a narrow, single dirt track with only occasional passing points. To add to the excitement of the journey we had seen signs telling drivers to keep to the left (the wrong side of the road). This meant that we were next to the almost shear drop as we trundled along the dusty track. Although the view was still amazing and it was actually quite exciting being that close to drop off the edge, this was where the pain began.
Every 2-3 minutes we would meet a truck coming the opposite way and for some unknown reason to us, it was always our turn to back-up to the lay-by on the edge of the cliff and wait for them to pass. This two steps forward and one step back continued for hours, at which point we both said, "this can’t last forever, the track must turn back into a road again soon". How wrong we were. We stopped for a toilet/snack break around 5pm and we took the opportunity to eat dinner not knowing that in a few hours later we would stop again for another hour on this already long journey. Night was now upon us and even Anna was struggling to sleep. The seats were angled down and slippery which just added to the pain of the bumpy road and slow progress. We had presumed that we would be off of the dirt track by nightfall as surely it is too dangerous to be passing trucks on a single tracks in the dark. No no, the track continued on late into the night. Joe finds it difficult to sleep on buses at the best of times but this journey was becoming unbearable and there was a five year old child asleep in the aisle next to Joe who decided that he would kick Joe’s legs and steel his leg room. Joe was not happy. In the end we were on the god for sacken road for 20 hours. 300 miles in 20 hours means the bus was travelling at an average speed of just 15 miles an hour! We could have cycled quicker!
We arrived at 7am, a mere 20 hours from when we departed. Luckily it was not the wet season, when this journey can take days and days. In the welcome morning warmth of Rurre we walked to a Hostal we had booked the day before. We arrived to hammocks and only a short wait until our room was ready. Joe proceeded to have a short nap of about 7 hours while Anna went off and found her bearings in this small riverfront town. Rurre is, by Bolivian standards, a pretty little town with beautiful mountain cloud forest surroundings. We took it easy for the rest of the day and double checked the tour we had booked at the office.
The next day we had a little lie-in and the manager of our hostal (El Curichal) asked us if we could move to a private room, for the same price, so we obviously obliged. As we were moving Joe found that the beds we had slept in were not the cleanest. His had a bit of dried blood on the sheets and Anna’s had a foot print in the middle of the bed. Joe thought it is best not to tell Anna, as she would have freaked out. After we moved rooms we went to read our books in the hammocks and Joe watched the guy “clean” our old room: all he did was remake the beds but not change the sheets. Anna asked the manager if our new beds were clean as we didn’t think the maid was changing the sheets. The manager insisted the bed was clean, so we took his word for it (mainly because our Spanish vocabulary does not cover complaining too well) and carried on relaxing with our books in the hammocks.
When we went to our new room Anna checked the sheets to find that they were obviously not clean by any stretch of the imagination. When she told the manager, he said we could have a more expensive room, which she declined and asked for the sheets to be changed. His response to this was to ask us to change hostal. Anna returned and told Joe the story and he was not happy to say the least. As we were packing to leave the manager asked Joe to look at some sheets in another room, which did look clean but Joe asked the manager to look at the sheets in their old room (the new people had moved in already so they were not pleased with dirty sheets). After this the manager was very apologetic but we just said it was his loss and left. Although we did get a pound off for the night we had already stayed, result!
We left for our 3 day jungle tour on a small boat up the Beni river. This was our first glimpse of the jungle and everyone on the trip was amazed at the views from the river. The boat trip was a 2.5 hour trip (which flew by) to the reserve we would be staying in. We walked up from the boat and shown to our accommodation which was a private hut in the middle of the jungle. The hut was just a frame with fly net wire covering it so we could see the trees that surrounded us. There was no electricity, just candlelight, which just added to the beauty of the whole place. The room was stunning, actually amazing, romantic and simply wonderful with king king sized bed, a room definitely beyond our travelling wildest dreams.
We were paired up with another English couple called Paul and Lizzie to share our English speaking guide. Our first walk into the jungle involved a short canoe ride across Lake Francisco nearest the Casa Grande (main house) of the reserve and a walk through some amazing jungle and banana plantations. This was our first encounter with the wildlife out in the jungle as we came across numerous armies of worker ants carrying leaves to make nests, termites which we had a taste of (kind of minty and surprisingly tasty) and monkeys. We saw a Howler monkey in the top canopy of one tree but he did not want to come and play. On our way back to camp, we stumbled across a group of Chinchilla and Cappuccino monkeys who were happily jumping and swinging around the foliage above our heads while we tried to snap a photo or two. Our walk took us on a loop, back the lake where we jumped back in the canoe to row across the lake and admire the most amazing sunset over the jungle as bats flew round us and eating insects off the lake. A truly memorable scene.
We awoke the next morning to a strange scraping sound coming from outside which we presumed was coming from the next hut, a few hundred metres away. Whilst we were cleaning our teeth we looked though the wall of our hut to see that the sound was being made by a red squirrel, eating a nut, just outside our bathroom. What an way to start the day. After a tasty, healthy breakfast we set off for day two, and a difficult row across the length of the large, windy Lake Francisco followed by a walk through the jungle to Lake Pinky. Through the jungle section we saw a lot more ants and termites working away and then we stumbled across a tarantula house were our guide tempted it out of its hole so we could see it up close. When we arrived at Pinky it was lunch time and our guide started up a fire so we could cook up kebabs of meat and vegetables he had brought with him. Very tasty. After lunch we packed up and headed to Pinky to jump in a another canoe so we could try fishing for Piranas. As we came across the boat, from underneath swam a 3 or 4 metre long anaconda, which had been chilling out in the sunshine and the warmth of the shallow water. Just a few seconds and he was gone, just enough time for us all the whip out our cameras but only Joe to get a shadowy shot of him swimming away. A great moment, but not what we needed just before getting into our leaky canoe for a trip into the middle of the lake. No piranas and only a catfish caught between the four of us, we lost interest pretty quickly and rowed back to shore for the journey back to camp for dinner.
That night we headed out after dinner for a spot of alegator eye watching. We rowed to the other end of the Lake Francisco to a spot where there were at least twenty sets of alligator/caiman eyes staring back at us from the reed beds. You can only see the eyes if you shine a torch straight at them, tricky with a wind up torch.
Evenings at camp were lovely and quiet, candlelit with only a 2006 copy of the Guardian Weekend Magazine to read, after dinner we were all in bed pretty early to enjoy two beautiful nights under the capony of the forest.
We saw lots of weird and wondeful creatures in the jungle including, caimans, alligators, monkeys, squirrels, badgers, turantulas, ants, termites, an anaconda, capybara (large dog-sized rodent), herons and lots of other birds, macaws, catfish, piranas and most interesting of all, jaguar poo!
The rest of our Rurre trip was quite uneventful, apart from we decided to save ourselves the horrendously painful bus trip back to La Paz and treated ourselves instead to a comfy (ish) 45 minute flight. The flight however, was interesting in its own right. We turned up to the "airport", or shack to be more accurate, to a welcome of two seperate 70p taxes to be paid to two old guys sitting next to each other and a family of piglets running across the runway. When it was our turn to departe a bus pulled up to take us to the plane but there was not enough room for us so we both had to walk the 500 metres up one of the runways to meet our plane. The plane we boarded was an ex military, dual propeller plane which held 36 passengers. It was the noisest plane we had ever been near and it rattled all the way over the beautiful Andes to La Paz. Anna, of course slept the whole way and awoke, to what she thought was a crash as we touched down.
In La Paz we both stocked up on winter clothes for the cold weather ahead in Chile, matching light grey Adidas tracksuit for Joe, he looks AMAZING, and maroon and blue West Ham esque delight for Anna!
Food: Dinners in the Jungle were good but tiny for hoover pigs such as ourselves. Great kebabs cooked on an open fire in the jungle. Nice savory banana chips too. Crème Brulee in Juliano’s French Italian Cusine, Rurre was good and a welcome treat after some average food (top could have been crispier but we’ll forgive them this).
We're really sorry for the babbling noisense and thanks for getting this far folks!
Hours on a bus: 126 hrs (5 days, 6 hrs)
