South America Explorations: Week 6 - La Paz & the Bolivian Amazon

Saturday, November 16^th, 2013

 

So the German guy and I booked a bus to La Paz – apparently we picked the backpacker bus because there were no locals on this bus at all… and surprisingly enough, there were also a lot more Americans than I expected – up until this point, it had almost felt as though I were the only one in the region. There were a couple of Asian girls across the aisle from me from the DC area. One was doing an extended trip and the other took vacation to join her for a few weeks.

The bus had to cross over a small body of water, but apparently they hadn’t bothered to build a bridge. So all of the passengers had to get off the bus and watch the bus driver drive onto a flat piece of floating wood barely bigger than the bus. Then we had to buy a cheap ticket (2 Bs ~ $0.40) to get onto a ferry to shuttle us across the river, where we waited next to some food stalls until our bus showed up. Come to think of it, I’m guessing that if the government built a bridge to span this relatively measly small strait of water, the entire community would probably suffer since there’s this whole sub-industry of people whose employment depends on ferrying people or vehicles across the water.

On the way into the city, it looked as though everything was under construction for a solid 20-30 kilometers. Finally, we started descending into the city and we started passing by the different shopping districts: from painting supplies to leather goods to liquor to the oil change district. I found this last one fascinating because the district was on a pretty steep incline; all of the work is done on the street and the cars would drive up on two inclined blocks to raise up off the ground. I still can’t decide if being on an inclined street is a disaster waiting to happen or pure genius.

The hotel I wanted to stay at turned out to be 2x the expected cost, so I walked around a little bit and found something for 65 Bs. After doing the math, that’s only about $10/night so the original place was completely doable. After being in Peru for 6 weeks, I need to reset my currency math and get a better feel for what’s cheap and what’s expensive in Bolivia.

It started to rain, so I had to scratch my initial plan of walking around the city a bit, so I tried to find something close by to eat other than pizza. I saw a sign for Thai food and hopped in on a whim – the dining room was really bare, but a young lady invited me to sit down and eat with her. She had been wandering around the city all day and was looking for someone to talk to. She was very pretty too.

So, Reka is Hungarian but lives in the UK and works for Worldvision, an international non-profit organization that largely focuses on helping children in impoverished areas. As some of you might know, I’ve entertained thoughts of a career move in the past to the non-profit sector as well, so this was quickly a conversation I was looking forward to. She’s been here in Bolivia for work for about 4 weeks, but leaves tomorrow to go to Cusco for 2 weeks of vacation with her boyfriend in that area. I admire her balls to invite a total stranger to join her for dinner, and I was very glad she did. We had a really great conversation too and surprisingly a lot in common, but it’s too bad she’s not single and that she’s going to Cusco in the morning with her boyfriend. And since she lives in London, it would be a bit more difficult to stalk her… J

Sunday, November 17^th, 2013

I didn’t have anything planned in La Paz today, so I wandered around the city and tried to set up some trips for the coming days. One of the things I wanted to do was book a bike ride on “the most dangerous road in the world” or the “death road”. Unfortunately, that road was under repairs for the next 3-4 days, and I definitely didn’t want to wait around that long. It's not that deadly anymore anyway - the only people who die on it are the idiots who are trying to take pictures while they bike, and in those instances, perhaps there's an element of Darwinism at play anyway.

I spent about 5 hours just walking around town – since it’s a Sunday, a lot of things were closed, but I did stumble across a massive central park-like area and there were lots of young families out and about. Because the city is built on a pretty steep valley and the streets are really busy, there was an elevated walkway for pedestrians to get from one section of the park to another. The park was a welcoming sight actually since I hadn’t seen South American families in this type of context yet. It was a quick reminder that no matter where you go, people are essentially the same. It’s the organizational structures (religion, government, etc.) that tend to create the differences/conflicts that separate us.

Despite this park, I left feeling that the city pretty much sucks. There are three distinct areas to the city – El Alto in the highlands where the poor people live, the centre/downtown area where I was, and El Sur in the low lands where the rich people live. It struck me that this layout is the polar opposite of many other cities – often the rich people live up in the hills for views and cooler temperatures from a steamy city in a valley. But since this city is already at 4000m, the lowlands are more desirable because they are warmer and more comfortable; and the last thing we’d want is for poor people to be comfortable of course.

I also had a bad food day. It wasn’t bad from a taste standpoint, just from a health standpoint. I figured I was due – I ate something resembling a large nachos supreme platter for lunch and a 5-topping pizza for dinner. Yum. Sometimes I’m glad the belt I have with me is highly adjustable.

Monday, November 18^th, 2013

A tour bus picked me up this morning at 8am along with 10 other passengers for a day trip I had booked to Chacaltaya, a local mountain range that is a ski resort during the winter months. Along the way, we passed by Huayna Potosi, which is the tallest mountain in the area. It is also supposedly the mountain used in the logo for Paramount Pictures.

Chacaltaya itself was a 3-peak mountain – the van took us pretty far up the mountain to about 5200m and we only needed to climb the final 200m to the top. Normally, this elevation is pretty dang high for normal people, but I guess since I had spent the past 5 weeks in high altitudes, it really didn’t feel any different for me. I just took small steps and kept moving and I was at the peak in no time… so then I continued on to the next peak for the heck of it, along with the other handful of people from my bus and others who were similarly acclimatized. The views were really quite nice because of the height, but also because the area is full of minerals which add some dramatic colors to the landscape: it was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and… no, wait – that’s the chorus to that song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. You get the idea though. We did this play my senior year in high school and now that song is stuck in my head. Damn you, blog!

There was a bike tour that was on the mountain as well – I had initially thought about doing this since the Death Road bike tour was not available. In retrospect, I’m very glad that I didn’t book it. When we arrived, there was a tourist who was getting strapped to a board and rushed to the hospital after taking a nasty fall. There was no quick and smoothly paved way to the hospital, so I can imagine that his bumpy ride to the hospital was less than pleasant in addition to the pain he was undoubtedly in. I know that I sometimes have a tendency to go beyond my athletic means, so I could imagine me being in that guy’s place. So far, I haven’t participated or done anything stupid, so you all don’t need to worry too much. Unless, of course, you secretly hate me and are only reading these blogs in your attempt to learn more about me to be able to better plan out my demise. Bring it.

Second billing on this trip was a quick jaunt to Valle de la Luna, which is a small park of very curious wind-eroded rock/sand formations in the middle of the rich neighborhood, El Sur. I was a bit less enthused about this part of the trip – partly because I felt like I had entered an amusement park because it was right in the middle of where people lived, and partly because it started to rain and like the wicked witch, water has a tendency to melt me into a lifeless pool of muck. Interestingly enough, I did bump into the DC Asian group in the park again; their numbers had increased since a few more friends had flown in to La Paz the day before.

Similar to my experiences on other day trips, I didn’t really have anyone to talk with much on this trip either, though there was a French guy who was teaching the basic concepts of photography (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) to another couple to help them stop shooting in automatic mode all the time. He did a really good job explaining it, and I was happy to know that my understanding of basic photography matched what he was teaching almost word-for-word. I’m glad I’m not shooting in automatic – I highly encourage you to do the same. Your pictures will definitely come out better.

Tuesday, November 19^th, 2013

This morning I left for the airport for a flight to Rurrenabaque, a town in the Bolivian Amazon. The taxi fare itself to the airport was almost as much as a bus ticket to Rurre (I exaggerate), but the bus takes an entire day and is very unpredictable and not so comfortable. The price of the flight was less than $100 anyway, so that was worth it.

What I didn’t know is that the flight would be as exciting as it was. My fellow passengers and I hopped onto a tiny 19 seat plane with no overhead space or underseat space for bags – your carry-on bags went in your lap or on your feet. The window or aisle designation for seat location was irrelevant since there was only one seat on either side of the aisle. There was no flight attendant to tell us how to buckle our seat belts, but fortunately for me, I still remembered the entertaining Delta pre-flight video from my plane to Lima from Atlanta a month or so prior and was able to figure out the complexities. There was no door separating us from the cockpit, so any idiot could have bum-rushed the pilots with little difficulty. There were no exit doors, only exit windows. There was no announcement to remind us to turn off our deadly navigation-system-interfering cell phones. I think a US flight attendant would probably die of head explosion if one of them boarded this plane. Maybe Al Qaeda’s new plan is to spur the growth of these small flights worldwide and watch the airline industry implode from the inside out – that’ll show us capitalist infidel pigs!

More interestingly, the pilots fired up the engines and after a few minutes turned them back off. Suddenly, the door opened and a mechanic or other airline employee popped his head in, exchanged some quick words with the pilots, and then left and shut the door behind him. The engines fired back up and random lights started blinking, including more red ones than any of us would prefer, but the pilots took off anyway. I’m sure they know what they’re doing.

The 40-minute flight was spectacular when I could see more than just clouds outside my window. There were lots and lots of clouds and so the little plane bounced around quite a lot, unfortunately. But every once in a while, I could see the mountain ranges and the jungles within and it was glorious. At the very end, after we had flown over a particularly steep set of mountains, the plane seemingly went into a dive to reduce altitude enough to land in the little itty bitty town of Rurrenabaque.

The airport was interesting too – only the runway was paved. So to get to the terminal, if you could call it that, the plane essentially went off-roading along a dirt path. I wonder what happens when it rains? How does the plane not get stuck in mud in this scenario? Will we even find out? Only time (i.e. a future blog post) will tell.

I had no existing plans on where to stay, but there was a tout at the airport offering a free ride into the town (10 Bs) if we stayed at the hostel he worked at, Hostal Lobo. It had a pool and dorms were 50 Bs per night. That worked for me… and it apparently worked for two others on the plane as well: KarIn from Holland who is travelling for 5 months but going the opposite direction from me, and an Indian guy Abhimanyu (Manyu) from Singapore travelling for 3 months and going south like me.

The dorm was beautiful and we had a stunning view from the room, but the pool was the first order of business when we unloaded our bags – and it was also glorious. Well, gloriously refreshing at least. It was hot and a tad sticky here in Rurre, especially when compared to La Paz where we had come from. Manyu already had a trip planned out here in Rurre, but I found that Karin had not an we had similar plans on what we were looking for in a trip. So off we went to grab lunch in the central market and then shop the tour agencies to find the best options for us. And since we were two people, agencies were now willing to create a trip just for us – it seems that most places I’ve been here have a minimum of two tourists to run a tour.

After spending a few hours wandering from agency to agency and getting confused as the tour explanations for each company started to sound the exact same, we settled on doing a 6D/5N with Max Adventures that was extremely appealing to us – it was a combo tour of both the jungle and the pampas; these are the two types of tours available in this region. Often, people will choose one or the other, but neither Karin nor I could decide on only and we wanted to do both. There was a couple from Ireland who was at the Max office just before us and they were more or less doing the exact same trip, so there would be four of us together.

Rurre itself has an extremely large Israeli tourism population. Apparently, an Israeli hiker got lost in the jungle for 27 days almost a decade ago before a local man (one of the founders of the Max Adventures we booked with) found him. The Israeli guy’s story was huge back home and he wrote a best seller on it. As a result, apparently scores of Israeli fans make the trip here. I suppose it’s not much unlike the massive tourism boom in New Zealand focused on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, except that it’s one small town in Bolivia and one small nation instead.

Since we would be eating jungle food for the next week, I wanted to get some solid edible food tonight. So we went to El Nomadico, run by an Australian expat. The ribs here are supposed to be excellent, and so that’s what I ordered. Unfortunately, they were just ok… a bit short on edible meat. As we finished eating, it started to pour down rain and we had to just wait it out for the next 30-45 minutes since none of us had brought rainwear.

Finally it stopped, and we headed over to a bar called Moskitto’s, where we each had two free drink coupons. The free drink was a really good caipirinha, and then they allowed us to buy more drinks as part of an apparently flexible happy hour policy (1/2 off, supposed to end an hour ago). Unfortunately the happy hour drink list did not include the aforementioned caipirinhas so we had pisco sours instead. And then we started playing some very comical rounds of pool – the table was not very good, but we three were about the least skilled players the bar had probably seen. We matched each other in how much we sucked. I think one of our games lasted 45 minutes because we couldn’t knock in a ball if our lives depended on it. It was a good night.

Wednesday, November 20^th, 2013

Karin and I had an early rise this morning to get packed up and walk over to Max to start our tour. The breakfast at the hostel was taking an inordinately long time, so on the way to Max we stopped by this little French bakery that I had read about. The pastries were amazing, well – amazing for the Bolivian Amazon at least. Regardless, a semi-authentic French bakery is generally one of the last type of eateries I would have expected to see here.

Our task this morning was to stuff everything we didn’t need into a locker in the Max facility and then add a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, mosquito net, 3 large 2L water bottles, and a sack of food to our large backpacks. Of course, we didn’t really know what we did and didn’t need for the jungle trip, but Tereza’s cute assistant Regi was there on hand to help us with that.

Our tripmates for the rest of the week were John and Linda, a couple who lived in Ireland. Both are in the consulting business, though for different companies. Linda grew up in France, but is originally from Algeria, while John was born and raised in Ireland.

Once we were done, we walked down to the port with our packs and hopped on a boat. The boat takes us to the park ranger office where we fill out a pretty comprehensive park entry form with a packing list only to find out that it is not collected by anyone. I guess it was supposed to be for our benefit or something or just in case we were pulled over in the jungle by the Royal Bolivian Mounted Jungle Police. Who knows.

We had a three hour boat ride upstream to get to Max’s base camp. Despite the light cloud cover, we had some spectacular views of the mountains and the river. The hum of the outboard motor must have been particular soothing because before I knew it, my travel companions had passed out cold.

About 30 minutes before we arrived to the base camp, it started raining pretty heavily. As we pulled into the base camp, we saw a previous tour group diving into the river and tackling one another. As I’d find out later, each of us had the same thought running through our heads – exactly what did I get myself into?

The camp itself was pretty basic, and we had expected as much. Tereza in the office told us up front that the jungle trip was a more authentic experience led by locals who were born and raised in the jungle. There is no electricity, no running water, no flushing toilets, and most frighteningly, no wifi. The group playing in the river camp back in to the camp and it appeared as though none had any dry clothes or dry shoes. Again, I think we all wondered what we got ourselves into.

Before too much longer, a few other groups arrive into camp from the jungle and are covered in mosquito bites. One Korean tourist hands me his rain boots and tells me that I’ll need them – apparently, most of these folks got rain boot back at the office but none of us were given any. On top of all of this, every one of the guides seem to be hooting & hollering like delirious maniacs. I guess they’re just on a natural high all the time, and perhaps after the experience we’ll have over the next few days, we’ll be in the same spot as them.

Our guide is Pedro, who had just finished up with a group this morning. After sitting around for a few hours (and getting some lunch), Pedro is finally ready and so we start to head off. I ask about the boots and Pedro says we don’t need them, so I leave them behind since my pack was heavy enough as it was. Our plan is to hike out a few hours into the jungle and set up camp for two nights and return on the third day to spend the last night here in the base camp. Sounds like a foolproof plan.

As soon as we leave, we are covered with mosquitoes – but they largely seem content to just follow us around. John & Linda go through about half their bugspray on this walk alone. I hang back to avoid the clouds of bugs following the others. There might be a cloud of bugs following me too – I don’t know since unlike Matthew Perry’s character in a movie of the uncommon genre of white-teacher-uplifts-poor-urban/black-classroom-despite-initial-setbacks-that-make-him-wonder-if-he-can-hack-it, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.

The hike was mostly flat, which is good since this is basically the first time I’ve hiked with a full backpack. There are a few streams that we cross balanced atop a log – I end up being the only one of the tourists who didn’t lose my balance and end up with wet shoes. Perhaps the rain boots would have been a good idea after all.

We get to camp and start setting up, but the tarps they have to create the roofs have a ton of rips in them. Karin fortunately has some duct tape so we use it to patch a lot of the holes, which we knew would be critical because it was apparent to all of us that we were in for a wet few days. We also set up a kitchen area and a large mosquito net for a bug-free living room of sorts.

Our cook Jeremiah starts making dinner and we eat around the cooking fire – the smoke largely deters the mosquitoes, though not entirely. I end up pacing between the cooking tent which has fewer bugs but with heavy smoke that burns my eyes, and outside the tent where I’m bitten regularly by bugs. Dinner was remarkably solid given the lack of a proper kitchen. Jeremiah fried pieces of chicken and cooked rice over an open fire and it was really quite good.

After dinner, we gather to have a Pachamama ceremony in the mosquito net lounge. Pachamama is Mother Earth and the locals have a ceremony to her to pray for good weather and good luck and so forth. Apparently, we were supposed to bring something to give to Pachamama, but none of us had anything. The ceremony itself seems to largely consist of the vices of the jungle people: coca, cigarettes, and alcohol. About halfway through, it starts raining and water is coming through the net, so we move to the sleeping area to finish the ceremony. Normally, I thought in the rain the mosquitoes go out and hide. Apparently in the jungle, they all come to your dry tent area and huddle together, and when there’s a large group of mosquitoes, they get emboldened and start biting you through your clothes. In the five minutes we finished up the ceremony under the sleeping tent, all of us managed to get more bug bites than during the entire day.

After the ceremony, John & Linda found that one of the duct tape fixes didn’t quite work well enough and one side of their sleeping bag was soaked – so Pedro helped them undo their tent completely. I think his plan was to wait until the rain stopped before helping them set up again but he didn’t tell any of us one way or another. So we all sat there waiting out the rain, unsuccessfully trying to keep free of bugs by staying in the smoke of the fire. I actually found that the best success was to smoke a cigarette (which the bugs don’t like) and stand outside in the rain (which the bugs also don’t like). Eventually, it dawns on us that Pedro has no plan, so Karin and I shuffle our sleeping nets a bit to create more of a dry area for John & Linda to re-set theirs. I carefully get into my mosquito net as well – since mine was on the end, there were rows and rows of mosquitoes camped out on my net either sleeping peacefully or awaiting their orders to swarm en masse. Going to sleep was a delicate operation since I didn’t want to find out which.

At some point in the evening, Pedro and Jeremiah stop drinking and smoking and set up their nets & bags as well. I just have no idea when this was. Any noise they were making was very easily masked by the heavy rain all night. And I mean ALL night.

Thursday, November 21^st, 2013

I got up early because I had to pee, but I spent the next two hours trying to find an alternative solution to getting out of the tent. Because it had rained all night, the mosquitoes remained on the outside of my mosquito net, which I suppose is a good side for them to be on. Lying there watching them reminded me of those old Windows screensavers of bugs, where you could watch the little critters crawl across your screen – similarly, the mosquitoes were crawling across the mosquito net a few feet from my face. I lost count at about 50 or 60.

So my early morning mental efforts first focused on a different way of peeing that would not require me to get out of the net – the best option I came up with was to grab an empty plastic water bottle and unload into it instead. Then I thought that perhaps I could lure the mosquitoes away from my bed instead by creating a diversion or an alternate source of flesh – my strongest option here was to fashion a syringe from a large thorn and empty a ½ cup of blood into a wide dish. The negatives of this particular idea was that it might also attract a large carnivorous mammal (like a jaguar) while we were asleep.

After an unnecessarily long period of contemplation, I got up and peeed. While I was walking around, I noticed that the water level in the river next to our campsite was easily 3-4 feet higher than last night. This made me realize what type of hiking would be in store for us today.

By this point, Jeremiah had woken up and gotten started on cooking breakfast. He was frying up some dough balls and I stole a few while waiting for the others to get up. Jeremiah really is an excellent cook. My only problem with his cooking method (which is not unique to him with this company) is that his water source is the murky river – and it was really murky. I guess boiled murky water is still healthy water or something. I’d like to see Nestle or Coke try to sell that in a bottle.

 

Others finally got out of bed, and awoke to the realities that I had been processing for the past hour. We quickly concluded that we needed to go back to the base camp this morning because all signs were that the rain would not stop today. We also came to the realization that we would be hiking through knee deep water, which really pissed me off. I don’t mind being wet and I don’t mind being in the middle of nowhere, and I don’t mind roughing it, but I absolutely HATE not having dry shoes. Wet socks & shoes lead to unhappy feet, and unhappy feet have a way of exacting painful revenge. If the question I had asked yesterday about boots was answered in any reasonable fashion, I would have left my hiking boots back at the base camp and made my way here in the rain boots. Pedro clearly could care less and was more interested in hooting & hollering & smoking cigarettes & drinking his hooch, and for that, I basically had a very strong inclination to kick him in the balls.

After a breakfast of lots of fried food, leftover rice from the night before, and hot river water cocoa, we re-packed our bags and got moving. Indeed, we ended up walking through about 8-9 knee-deep streams. Jeremiah noticed I was peeved and tried to tell me that he was in the same boat by showing me that he had water in his rain boots. Not the same, dear sweet Jeremiah, not the same.

We did have a nice piece of excitement along the way though – we saw a horde of wild pigs. We could hear them in the distance so we ran towards them a bit. Pedro started making noises similar to a jaguar – he later told us that this was important to keep the pigs on the defense, otherwise they could be quite dangerous for us. Initially, we only saw a few pigs – I think these were the sentries or something, but then all of a sudden there was a massive rumble as they crossed our path a few hundred feet ahead. Their horrid stench followed – even the pigs back on the farm have the good sense to bath in mud, but I guess you can’t count on wild pigs to have any basic human decency.

By the time we got back to the base camp, we were completely soaked as expected. I found the rain boots bequeathed unto me by the kindly Korean tourist where I had stashed them and immediately got out of my wet socks & shoes and into something dry. I would have brought sandals, but Regi in the office told me they weren’t needed. I found out later that that was her first day on the job, but it was extremely hard to be disappointed with the very sweet, well-intentioned and terribly cute Regi. Ahhhh, Regi…

We weren’t much in the mood to go out hiking again in the rain, so we made jewelry. Yes, you read that right – we made jewelry. This wasn’t unexpected since Tereza had shared up front that this was part of the itinerary. First up was a ring made from a hard hollow brown seed. On the hike back, Pedro stopped to gather some of the rounder seeds he could find and now the reason was clear. After selecting a seed that fit the approximate size, he used a hacksaw to cut out a center band. Then we used sand paper for an inordinately long time to polish the rings, though at that point we weren’t quite sure what we were trying to do in all honesty. Pedro was very short on instruction. The final buff was done with cigarette ashes, which was surprisingly effective.

Next up was a necklace, for which each of us had to select a tooth or claw as a main pendant and then decide how many beads we wanted. For the beads, we took smaller seeds and poked a hole through them with a middle-finger-shaped fork – this was actually very time intensive, so I decided to only get four beads. My stomach was also giving me some problems too and I was a little freaked out by the teeth/claws splayed out in front of me, so I was happy for this part of the day to be over. After polishing the sloth claw and poking holes in the beads, Pedro did the rest for me because I was feeling quite weak by the time he got around to helping me out.

I forgot to mention – by this point in the trip, Pedro was full-force in “Operation: Get in Karin’s Pants” mode. He had decided the night before in the jungle that Karin was perfect for him and started dedicating about 90% of his attention to her. For her part, Karin was a willing accomplice to play along. Pedro had also decided that he could care less about me – I don’t know if this was related to my being a single male as potential “competition” or what. Regardless, this only made the attraction between my foot and Pedro’s balls even stronger.

After a dinner of more fried foods (which I tried to steer away from), Jeremiah made an anti-diarrheal tea for me from medicinal jungle plants. There was also a ton of coca leaves in the concoction as well. It was a very bitter and sour mug of tea but Jeremiah made sure that I drank every last drop. He told me if I didn’t feel better in the morning to let him know and he’d make a stronger batch for me. What a sweet boy. Well, he’s not really a boy since he’s 24 years old, but his salad bowl haircut reminds me of my nephew Neil.

We were slated to go out on a night hike this evening after dinner. Even here, Pedro was trying to get alone time with Karin. When John & Linda ask about water level, he won’t commit to not getting their feet wet, which leads them to think they will stay behind. When Karin asks the very same question, Pedro reassures her that they won’t cross any deep streams. He’s a jackass. I was planning to stay behind anyway because of my stomach, so I just headed off to an early sleep.

Friday, November 22^nd, 2013

Our group joined with another group of 4 people and their guide, Nino, for much of the day. This group was a young couple from Australia and a man & his young son from Korea. I don’t think these Korean tourists were quite prepared for the trip since the older fellow was wearing a business casual clothing the whole time. Their English was spotty and Spanish was nonexistent, so I’m sure that didn’t help either. The son generally looked like he was having a crappy time too. I felt a bit bad for them.

The first item on the agenda was tubing down the river. So we all got in our bathing suits and loaded on to the boat. After about an hour of riding the boat upstream, Pedro ties the boat up to a tree and tells us that we’re going to take a quick walk to see some macaws. That’s awesome, but no one brought their cameras, mostly because we were specifically told to leave them behind since we were only tubing.

We take a quick walk to a viewing spot at the bottom of a clay cliff wall and there are no macaws to be found. We’re told that many macaws live in small openings in the wall and so we might see them at any time. Then Pedro asks us if we want to take a quick hike to the top of the cliff where there’s a beautiful viewpoint. Of course we want to do that, but none of us are prepared for the onslaught of bugs since we didn’t bring bugspray. And I didn’t bring socks, so I quickly developed a blister on my ankle from the rain boots. Karin mentioned to Pedro that I didn’t bring any socks and that I was getting a blister and he laughed and said that he’s barefoot so I can’t complain. He’s an asshat, plain and simple.

When we finally got to the viewpoint, we saw 6-8 macaws often flying in pairs. This was definitely closer than when I saw a few in Manu (Peru), but it was especially wonderful to see them from above because you can see the full extent of their colors across their wings. Good thing we all got a lot of photos. Oh wait… that’s right, we didn’t have our cameras. I wonder why?

After hiking back to the boat, we cross to the other side where there’s a better spot to get in our tubes. Pedro and Nino give us extremely little instruction other than saying to stay in the middle before they take off. Several of the others were having difficulty figuring out how to steer, but after a while they realize that backwards is easiest. Within minutes, my inner child appears and I start spinning in doughnuts as quickly as possible. And then I try unsuccessfully to stand atop the tube. Before long, the group gets split up quite a bit as some people are content to just relax and float while others stay in the fastest moving water in the middle. Along the way, we hit some awesome rapids and I see the Korean father hanging on to a branch along the bank – apparently, he tipped over on the high rapids and lost his tube. Meanwhile, the Aussies are far behind and just floating where the river takes them.

Pedro tells everyone at last minute to paddle to the beach from the middle because he wanted us to get back into the boat. A lot more notice would have been helpful since not everyone was a strong paddler – in fact, Karin wasn’t able to get to the beach fast enough, and had to grab a tree branch to stop from going further. And then she struggled to stay upright because the fast water was pulling her down with her tube. The Aussies meanwhile are nowhere to be found, and then Nino realizes they must have got caught in a split a few hundred meters upstream so they rush us in the boat to go find them. After a few minutes of searching, they drop us on a random beach because we are weighing the boat down too much. Fifteen minutes later, they show back up with the Aussies in the boat. I’m glad they had everything under control.

When we get back to the camp, we see the DC Asians again – the same ones I had bumped into a few times in La Paz. They had also booked with Max Adventures and we were overlapping by a day.

After lunch, our group went fishing. I’m not a huge fan of fishing – this should not be a surprise if you’ve been reading this blog at all given previous comments about seeing animals killed for food. But I figure I’ll try my hand at it since at least the fish caught will be eaten and not thrown back in. First we need to find some worms though, so we stand around while Pedro digs in the soil for 20 or 30 minutes with his machete to find some worms. We wanted to help, but there wasn’t really anything else we could do except stand around. Finally, we tell him that we’ll make do with what we have and convince him to stop.

We walked another 15 minutes to a stream and Pedro attaches a worm or worm section to our fish hooks and tells us to get the hook in the middle of the stream where it’s deepest. Our fishing gear is quite basic – a hook, a weight, a line… and that’s basically it. John tried to fashion a rod from a piece of bamboo later on but it didn’t do much.

Within a few minutes of casting my line into the stream, I end up getting a bite and I “reel” in a fish, and as expected, it’s flapping around like crazy. I ask Pedro what to do and he tries to ignore us before finally telling John to whack it with the flat side of the machete to knock the poor bugger out. Neither John nor I are experienced in this sort of thing, so unfortunately for the fish, it takes a few whacks. A few minutes later Karin catches a fish. Pedro sprints over to help her and skillfully puts her fish out of its misery with a quick whack. You already know what I think of him, so I’ll stop there.

Karin took the fish in to Jeremiah who confirmed that he would cook them up for dinner in another hour. When we sat down for dinner, our originally intended food came out first and Jeremiah told us the fish was coming. It came out… but it was basically the fish de-scaled, sliced into sections and pan-fried. All of the bones were still in the fish, so it was difficult to get to the meat. I had a few bites and gave up. Oh well.

There is no evening activity planned since we need to wake up early in the morning. Unfortunately, after the DC Asian group gets back from their Pachamama ceremony, the boys are hanging out with their guide & cook right outside the sleeping bungalow. After an hour of being awake from the noise, I get up to join them at around midnight – they are nice guys and I didn’t want to complain. They take the hint when someone else gets up too, so they move down a few hundred feet and quiet down, and I just go back to bed.

Three hours (and lots of cigarettes and hooch) later, the four are playing music and laughing quite loudly. I waited as long as I could before venturing back out to ask them to move to the dining tent which is very far from the sleeping bungalow. Instead, they move another few hundred feet down and somehow manage to play the music louder and sing along louder. I wanted to punch someone.

Saturday, November 23^rd, 2013

After maybe two hours of sleep in total, Pedro woke us up at 5:30am to let us know that the boat was here to take us back to Rurrenabaque. This was a good 45 minutes earlier than what he had told us, but at this point in the trip, we would have been more surprised if he had told us correctly. One of the DC Asian girls was in a half-sleep stupor started to get up and pack up to join us as well, but fortunately John noticed and told her she could go back to sleep.

Last night, I kept jokingly pestering Jeremiah for dessert after dinner. He promised us that he would have something for us for breakfast – true to his word, after we got on the boat, he handed us a sweet cake bread he had gotten up this morning to make for us. Love that kid.

Tidbits:

1.       In Bolivia, apparently it’s exceedingly demeaning to be a shoe-shiner. About 90% of the shoe-shiners wear ski masks everywhere so that they are not recognizable.

2.       The currency in Bolivia is a Bolivian, abbreviated “Bs”… not as in “BS” but as in plural for Bolivians. The exchange rate is about 6.85 Bs = 1 USD and I’d say the purchasing power is anywhere from 3-6x (labor is very cheap), making it quite inexpensive to travel in Bolivia.

3.       PDA (public displays of affection) norms are definitely different in South America. I continually see locals everywhere holding each other close and kissing and snuggling much more than back home. It takes a lot of composure to not yell out “Get a room!” in Spanish.

4.       I’m seriously suffering from peanut withdrawal. At home, I go through a jar of natural peanut butter every few weeks because I love the stuff so much. And here, I’ve been devoid of peanuts for the entire trip. On the way to Chacaltaya, we had stopped by a small shack of a bodega to pick up snacks/food and they had some home-wrapped plastic sleeves of roasted peanuts. It was divine. I briefly contemplated hopping out of the van to run back and clean the bodega out of their peanut supply.

5.       Many people of indigenous descent here in South America have distinct “East Asian” facial characteristics. I noticed this more in Peru than here in Bolivia, especially with the boat driver who could have been a hunkier doppleganger of one of my Chemical Engineering classmates at Columbia (I’m talking about you, J Lieu). But I suppose this isn’t so surprising considering many Inuits and Eskimos also have physical characteristics generally associated with East Asians as well.