DAY 154
Our guide was right about the weather. In La Paz, one can have 4 seasons in one day. Deluge, sunny, drizzle,... Surely they'll have snow later in the day. We don't want to know and have a flight to catch to Rurrenabaque anyway ;) We meet Marie at the airport, her flight is late. We met her at our hotel and did some of the activities in La Paz together. The boarding time comes and go, the departure time comes and go and all of that without any news from the airline. In the meantime Marie had left but she's back in the airport. Her flight turned back after 10 minutes, pressure indicator problem. Awesome first contact with flying in Bolivia! Finally someone from the airline shows up but we have to go ask to know what's going on. Still no announcement... Marie leaves again... For good we hope for her. We eventually leave too with only a 35 min delay. The plane is indeed small, it's a 19 seater! The cabin is 1,5m high, you almost have to crawl to get to your seat. To stay consistent with the absence of communication, the pilot does not say a word before we take off. They don't even mention that we're not actually going to Rurrenabaque because the airport is closed. We had to extract that information from the ground crew...We're in really thick clouds during ascent, not fun. It was so bad I had the puke bag ready during the whole flight. 45 min wondering if it's going to be the one too many bump is quite a long time. It clears up over the forest and the view is quite a change from what we had for the last month. Green everywhere! Even the runway is grass :D Icing on the cake, our altitude is now down to 175m... Youhouuuu! It's hot and humid as expected. To keep working on their already bad reputation, they make us pay the transfer between Reyes (where we landed) and Rurrenabaque. They land us in the wrong place and makes us pay to get us to where we were supposed to land. And we're talking about 15 Bolivianos for the each of the 19 passengers; that's a crazy total of $40... The airline can't afford that? We leave them with two official customers complain. If anything else it's a good exercise for them and liberating for us.
We check in at our hotel (that has a pool!) then go meet our guide for tomorrow. We're leaving for a 3 day expedition to the pampa. Back at the hotel we enjoy a good swim at dusk, divine!
DAY 155
A bad bed makes for a bad night and life start at 5:30am here it seems :( At least it gives up plenty of time to get ready for the adventure. It's just the two of us on top of that so we'll feel like royalty in the boat! The show starts right away, on the road to the river. Countless birds are hanging out on the fences, electric lines or in the ponds. Falcons, Kingfishers, herons, even a pack of black vulture fighting over a dead capybara. In the fields we see water buffaloes with strange horns. They came from Brazil and suffered genetic mutations. Now their horns are kind of flat and hang like long ears on a cocker...weird.
On the river it's more of the same with as a bonus a boatload of alligators, capybaras and turtles. One of the resident of the area is a strange bird, different from all the other birds. It's the last survivor of a bird line that branched off in its own direction shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct. It evolved from a omnivorous diet to a strictly vegan one. It has multiple stomach's (a flying caw that stinks!) and can only fly for 30 seconds. It flies badly and land badly too. Nature was still experimenting clearly. The young ones have an interesting strategy to escape danger. They throw themselves in the river because they can't fly yet! To climb back up they use the claws they have on their wings. As they become adult they loose these claws...
The ride is pleasant, our guide stops often to let us observe the many animals living along the river. We spot a group of 10 capybaras and stop in front of them. They don't seem to mind and let us observe them. The adults are peacefully lying down on the group while the little ones are eating and playing. Cute animal and also the biggest rodent in the world.
We pass by a few island of vegetation floating downriver and end up stuck into one for almost 30min. We're almost trough when another ones comes toward us but instead of trapping us even deeper, it causes a portion of the island to float away, freeing us... lucky us! I though we're good for another half-hour (or more!) of digging our way out.
After a much needed shower we watch the sunset from hammocks in our camp waiting to go out again and explore the river a night. It's a different world with the eyes of the alligators, spiders and birds reflecting the light of our flashlight. The alligators especially look like daemons. The noises in the forest at night are unsettling; The owls, the monkeys, the branches cracking, birds,... very different world indeed.
DAY 156
As expected the howler monkeys wake us up at 5am. Life in the jungle starts even earlier than in the city :/ It's more of the same today with two additions. We're looking for sloths and pink dolphins. The former are easy to find, they actually are all over the place are always curious. Geology trapped them in the region a very long time ago and they adapted to their new environment. The water is murky so they got rid of their skin color and eyesight. They're more albinos than pink even though they still have patches of grey skin. Our guide finds a spot where we can go in the water with them. When they are around the alligators stay away but it's still a weird feeling to get in that brown water.
Back in the boat we keep going downriver looking for the sloths. These guys are hard to find, they hardly move and look like branches. We're about to turn around when we finally spot one. It's looking at us, cozily installed in its tree. Time to go back to camp and take yet another shower. I need a shower to cool down every hour or so... my body is not fit to live in the jungle clearly ;) After lunch and a small nap it's time to go fishing. For a long time, we only feed the fish. These little bastards just eat the bait and take off but they eventually run out of luck. We catch 2 piranhas and a bunch of catfish. Our cook will prepare them for us for dinner of course!
DAY 157
Early birds again but I don't think anything else is possible in the jungle anyway. The goal today is to catch the animals in their morning chore. We stay as quiet as possible and are rewarded with a lot of singing by the howler monkeys and birds; special price for the ibis song.
It would be perfect without the throngs of mosquitoes. Every time we stop the boat, we only have a few minutes of tranquility and then they attack from all everywhere at once... clearly, I'm not fit for living in the jungle :D Last thing we do before going back to Rurrenabaque is a short walk to look for anacondas. It's meh and weirdly the guide don't seem very engaged anymore. We see a cobra (scary!) but no anaconda in sight. The ride back home is nice and only troubled by a fish who jumps in the boat unceremoniously. Needless to say we were as scared as the poor fish by the accident :D
DAY 158
Last day in the amazon! Some zip lining in the canopy is on the menu. We booked it for the morning to avoid being eaten alive while zip lining. It's a short boat ride upstream on the main river. The current is super strong and we have to stay on the side. The river is riddled with plastic bottles, a sad sight. It also have trees and branches floating around. Overall it looks dangerous and it's the end of the dry season. It must be really scary at its peak. We walk for a good hour in the jungle to reach the starting point. On the way, we see countless butterflies, leaf-cutter ants and Tamarin monkeys. Once again it's just the two of us with our friendly guides.
It's the first time we zip line in the canopy. The lines are not very long but the views from up there are amazing. Mosquitoes are nowhere to be found to our delight, The only visitors are butterflies. To break at the end of each line, they make us use a different technique that the one we used in Hawai. We have one heavy duty glove with a piece of leather and it's up to us to pull ourselves up with it on the line itself to slow down. Of course they tell us when and how much we have to break but it's nicer than being stopped by someone else. It's over too soon though and we kind of wish we could do a 2nd run :D
DAY 159
The day starts with a bad news. Our flight is delayed because of a presidential visit. They claim they learned about it this morning and don't know when the flights will resume. It's supposed to be a short visit so we should be leaving this afternoon. We're told to come back in an hour... An hour later, the Amazonas office is now looking like a refugee camps. Even though the plane is small, they have several flights a day so people keep piling up in the office. They clearly are overwhelmed which is not surprising. We got to experience their customer service not so long ago and it was really really bad. Nothing new once again and we're told again to come back in an hour... This dance will last all day. Eventually they tell us there won't be any flight today. So begins the fight for compensation and they shine once again for their absolutely horrific customer service. They are trying not to pay the compensation even though it's written in their rule book. On top of that when they give in, they try to make it discreet so people who don't speak Spanish fail to understand what they should receive... We're too happy to translate so everyone can get its due. After hours of fighting (we had nothing else to do that day anyway), we eventually get 50bs (lunch money) then 130bs (cancelled flight) then 100bs (daily allowance) then 150bs (hotel night) yeah! (total $61).
During that long day, we meet two American tourists in a dire situation. They have their flight back home the next morning so we give them our 7am spot, hoping they'll be able to catch their flight. The other option they had was an illegal night ride back to La Paz... A few days later, we'll learn they actually made it even though the 7am flight was late!