After a week in La Paz we decided to head up to the Amazon jungle. This is one of the main things I was looking forward to in the trip so we wanted to pick a good tour. There are basically two different types of tours you can do for the Amazon - a pampas tour or a jungle tour. With a pampas tour you see a lot more animals, and with a jungle tour the focus is more on the environment. There are a few unethical tour operators here and it's important to choose wisely. We ended up paying quite a lot for an ethical, environmentally-friendly jungle tour based in Serere Park in the Madidi National Reserve. The park was founded by Rosa Maria Ruiz, a Bolivian environmentalist and acitvist. It's highly recommended and has been featured in the National Geographic, and it was worth paying extra to do.
To get to the jungle you first have to get to Rurrenabaque. The best and most expensive option is by boat; the worst and cheapest option is by bus. Since we'd splashed out on the tour, we unfortunately had to take the bus - a horrendous 20-hour journey around winding cliffside roads (again) on a cramped double-decker with about 80 other people. There was no air conditioning and no toilet. The road was unsealed for the first half of the journey, and we inhaled about a kilo of dust from the road through the open window. The wheels were so close to ther edge of the cliff that people sitting on the other side of the bus told us that when they looked out of the window, all they could see was the drop.
Rurrenabaque is suffocatingly hot. We had two nights there before and after the tour, and that was enough. We sweated constantly. I had a small block of chocolate in my bag and it quickly became a a small brown puddle (but don't worry - I just drank it). The moon in Rurrenabaque was red when we arrived, because they had been burning off a whole lot of rainforest for crop land. On our three hour boat ride down the jungle river to the lodge, Rosa Maria told us all about the problems they were having with illegal deforestation, hunting, and goldmining. The authorities deny that it's happening because they accept bribes to let it go through. Rosa Maria had a little baby spider monkey on the boat with her that she had rescued from the black market. It's mother had been killed when it was only a few days old.
Once we got off the boat it was a half hour walk to our cabin. The cabin was a big, single room on wooden stilts with a bathroom, big beds, wooden floors, a straw roof and mosquito nets for walls. When you lay in bed you could hear everything moving and shrieking in the jungle around you. It was a rather terrifying walk back to the cabin from the main lodge on the first night, especially after seeing a tarantula the size of a saucer on the wall.
Over the three days our guide took us walking through the jungle, pointing out monkeys and spiders and plants on the way, and on several boat rides through the river and the lakes. The boats are like wooden, dug-out canoes. All of them had holes in them so the person in the middle always had to be on bailing duty, scooping the water out with the bottom of a coke bottle. While on the river we saw countless birds, monkeys and crocodiles. Our guide got really excited every time we saw a crocodile. "Hola croc!" he yelled. "Wow, it's a big daddy one, four metre!". At night in the canoe we slapped off swarms of mosquitos and flying beetles, while shining the torch around to see all the crocodile eyes glowing in the torchlight.
During one walk through the jungle our guide pointed out some wild pig tracks. This didn't really bother me, until I found out how dangerous the wild pigs are. Back when the lodge was first set up a group of men had gone into the jungle and come across a group of about fifty wild pigs. They killed ten of them, but this just made them angry and they charged the men. Most of them escaped by climbing up tree but one didn't get high enough and the pigs pulled him down. They heard screams for a while. When the screaming stopped, they climbed down. They only found pieces of him. Another time when one man was running away from pigs, he climbed a tree but his bum was hanging down. The pigs ate his bum off, and now he has no bum. I was thinking about these stories as we were walking along and started scoping out the trees. I wondered how quickly I would be able to climb a tree if I had to. It didn't help that our guide kept sniffing the air and saying "Smell that? Pigs". I became suspicious that he was leading us on a wild pig hunt. I told him firmly that I was not interested in seeing wild pigs. "Don't worry", he said. "The pigs are smart. Usually tourists aren't lucky enought to see them".
When we returned to Rurrenabaque one of the first things we did was book a flight back to La Paz. There was no way I was getting back on that bus. It was a small 20-seater plane, not high enough to stand up in, but I felt safe for the entire forty minutes.
Nicola
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