Travel Blog 2010

La Paz. What a weird and amazing place it is. It seems to be the words biggest market, and also to be set in a valley too small to hold it all in so it just climbs higher and higher up the sides.

We have been staying in a great hotel that has BBC news (perfect for watching the shambles of an election) so it feels a bit like home. The view form the top floor breakfast room is just amazing.

We were getting aware that our time in South America is running out, but we couldn’t leave without seeing part of the Amazon basin, so we took a flight to Rurrenabaque on a massive plane:

Its alright, at least it had a proper runway and airport when we arrived:

We had been told in La Paz that rather than book a jungle river tour there it was cheaper to come and book it here. It is not. Not only were there no tours available for that day, the prices were exactly the same if not slightly more than those in La Paz. We had only 1 hour to try and find a tour and after visiting all the agencies almost gave up. Nikki, however tried one last time to beg our way onto a tour with a company called Sunset. They said that they could take us but would have to charge us £20 more each than all the others. Reluctantly, so as not to miss our return flight to La Paz, I accepted and we were bundled into a shabby 4×4 with a nice Bolivian family for the 3 hour bumpy road-less journey to the tributary of the amazon that we were be heading down. It was only when we arrived there that we realised why we had paid extra for our tour, rather than being on a boat with 8 other people we had boat to ourselves. Cashback.

The tour was amazing. We set out to hunt for the Mighty Alligator

The elusive Caiman

And the agoraphobic Pink River Dolphin

  

  

(I know, they are more grey than pink…)

I have never had to photograph anything as frustrating as these dolphins. Although there are loads of them they break the surface only for a fraction of a second to breathe and then disappear under water again. Their lack of an extended dorsal fin like their sea faring cousins also adds to their inconspicuousness. Nikki did manage to get a shot of one behind me whilst swimming though:

What isn’t clear from this shot, and was unbeknown to me at the time was that on the far bank of the river was a huge Caiman (they can grow up to 5 meters!) apparently only not coming in the water because the dolphins were there to scare him off.

The volume of wildlife here is incredible. There are loads of birds

Turtles

Capybaras (worlds largest living rodents)

Loads of different monkey species

And we just couldn’t believe how many Alligators were there.

Including the very friendly Pedro

On the first night we went out on the boat without the motor and with torches to see the reflections in their eyes. That and the bats swooping to get the mosquitoes, the fireflies in the trees and the amazing stars made it an awesome experience.

After watching sunset in the local pub:

We were walking back to our huts in pitch black when in front of us we saw a massive alligator. Although we were getting used to being surrounded by crocs, I never thought I would have to use the phrase “don’t worry Nikki, just don’t walk too close to its mouth”

Our accommodation was fairly basic, but nice enough, and the food wasn’t too bad either.

It was seriously hot, and on the second day we went out into the Pampas, the damp Savana, in search of an Anaconda. We failed. Most other groups did too. Oh Well.

I did however get a chance to go piranha fishing, which was great, though again was in the water we had just been swiming in.

We had this guy, and a few others, for dinner.

Ive been avoiding putting this next bit into words. Willie, our guide, casually said to me “see these holes, they are tarantula nests.” My response “Are you F***ING CRAZY! THERE SHOULD BE CLEARLY MARKED WARNINGS”.

Turns out there are loads of them. This guy was only about 2 meters from our hut. But the good thing about a tarantula is that they are so territorial you generally know where they are going to be. Except for when I walked past a massive pink toed tarantula on a tree. I could have beaten Usain Bolt that day. In fact the number of bugs here of every shape and size is a little bit much really, from flying beetles to dragon flies, moths to mosquitoes it is pretty intense.

Anyway, we spent a second night there, and after that made the journey back up the river, where everything was going fine until we were boarded by some ruffians:

These guys are incredibly cool, very human like in their gestures, and not at all scared of us.

We arrived back at the port to find that Nikki and I didn’t have a 4×4 waiting for us, and we only had 5 hours to get back for our flight. We managed to squeeze into 2 other tour groups jeeps and got dropped of at the airport, only to be told our flight had been cancelled. So had all the flights. For the next 2 days. When your runway is made of grass and there is a lot of rain you can’t take off. So we have been stuck here in Rurrenabaque for an extra 2 nights waiting for the runway to dry out. We only bought enough clothes for 2 nights, and everything was filthy from the jungle but we found a second hand shop, spent about £3 and ended up looking like Vincent and Jules after being lent clothes by Jimmy in Pulp Fiction.

We are hopefully getting out of here tomorrow morning, but I wont be able to upload this until La Paz, which means if you are reading this we did.

Our next stop is Cuzco in Peru, where we shall hopefuly be tomorrow night, and we shall update you again from there.

Untill then, never smile at a crocodile.

OK. We have a lot to get through. Its been about 3 weeks since our last update due to the unreliable Internet and electricity in Bolivia and due to my lack of faith in public computers. Since the last update we have acquired a netbook due to the number of viruses I have been getting on my SD card. Anyway, due to this lack of updating you are getting not one but 2 blogs over the next couple of days. I am writing this offline so things may jump from future, past and present tense depending on whats happened. These have both been written for some time.  Here’s the first:

As you know the last entry was called “Living the High Life”. We should have saved that one. Since then we have been to the highest city on Earth, Potosi (4090m):

The highest Capital city, La Paz:

Drank beer from the highest Brewery:

And Wine from the highest vinyard:

But I’m getting ahead of myself. More of all that later.

From San Pedro De Atacama we travelled with another two couples Noel and Kate, and Mark and Karen, by 4×4 to Uyuni in Southern Bolivia. Here we are at about 4500 meters

The imigration building at the Bolivian boarder is impressive:

As are their toilet facilities:

Seriously.

The tour was a convenient way for us to carry on moving north, but what we were not told when booking it in Chile was that the salt miners who work the worlds largest salt flat, Salar de Uyuni, basically the whole point of the trip, were on strike. This meant that rather than having hours to gawp at the hallucinogenic perspective mangling vast white salty emptiness we spend hours and hours in a jeep at well over 4000 meters, so still unable to breath/think properly, driving on a huge a detour to avoid being blockaded by the protesters. It meant the trip was cut short by a day, but we still saw some amazing stuff, on the odd occasion we could stop.

The main problem with the tour was that we were meant to have a whole day on the salt flats themselves, but we arrived there at about 6pm on the second day and only got out of the jeep for 10 minutes. It is an incredible place though:

In the end I suppose we were lucky as the second day of our tour 17 jeeps full of tourists were stopped and held for 10 hours by the disgruntled miners, which doesn’t sound fun. It was made tolerable by the excellent company we had, had we been with randoms it would have been a total nightmare.

After this relative ordeal we decided to stay for 2 nights in Uyuni itself, partly so that we could see the “Train Graveyard” I initially thought this was some PR persons excuse for dumping a load of rusting metal in the middle of the desert, but it did prove have a certain beauty

Uyuni itself is nothing special so we moved onto Potosi, as previously mentioned the highest city in the world at 4090m. It is a chaotically beautiful, with some fantastic colonial architecture. Due to the silver mines Potosi became the most important city for the Spaniards in their American territories, and a lot of money stayed here, but today it has a neglected feel to it.

One funny thing we noticed is that all the buses here are old Japanese imports. This lot passed in the couple of minutes we stood waiting for the ATM:

  

  

Although we love camping it is nice to be in a country where we can afford to eat out all the time and stay in hotels. We found an amazing restaurant here where a couple of bottles of wine, a fondue (in Bolivia you say?) and a desert comes in at about a tenner.

Our next stop was Sucre, again a nice colonial town with a rich cultural heritage.

By this point we had firmly decided to get this netbook, so spent a lot of time looking around the worlds most useless electronics stores to try and find one. We couldn’t. This led to a strange set of events. Through some online research we discovered that the only place in Bolivia to buy any kind of PC is Santa Cruz, a 20 hour bus or only 40 minute flight away. The flight was only about £30 so it seemed a no brainer. We booked this and an onward flight to La Paz through a travel agent. Everything seemed fine and the prices were cheaper than buses were in Argentina so it seemed a bargain to boot. It was only when I was trying to find out our baggage allowance online and found that the airline didn’t have a website that we started to panic. Turns out that we had been booked on with the Bolivian Military. What concerned us more was that the only web reference we could find only had a list of all that airlines accidents with details of the numbers of fatalities. Needless to say there were enough of them for us to cancel this flight and fly with AeroSur on a 727.

We didn’t have long in Santa Cruz, less than 24hrs so the race was on to find the market where all computing stuff is sold. We did and I found almost the model I was looking for so that was that. The only other thing to report in Santa Cruz is that we woke to find a toucan in our hostel’s kitchen, which was a first.

It turns out his name is Simone and he is the Hostels pet, and very tame indeed

After all this we caught our flight to La Paz where I shall pick up from again in the next Blog.