I'm not exactly high maintenance but I didn't expect that I would feel so at home in the jungle. I guess it's just the monkey in me.
We went into the jungle twice - firstly to the pampas which involves spending more or less 3 days in a boat and then to a jungle camp for some general wandering about and regressing.

The Pampas
We left Rurrenabeque in a jeep with 5 other people including giles (our friend from home) 3 boys from Coventry and a Californian self-made sailor. After a spot of lunch on land we piled our luggage and sweaty corpses into our small wooden boat that was to be our mode of transport for the next few days. There was a slight leak in the side but it was okay once you bailed it out...

We were already being inundated by swarms mosquitos and although we covered every inch of our bodies they still managed to get at us through our trousers and shirts.

The river was beautiful with excessive greenery containing interesting animals on either side. Every now and then our driver would stop and we'd all peer into the bushes to see what he was showing us. Often it would be a bird, an immensly large stork, a bird of paradise or sometimes it would be a monkey -once it was a porcupine in a tree (I think it was having a siesta) - a crocodile, terrapins, a snake, and more. Sitting around in the boat while we cruised through the calm waters was very relaxing and it also cut down on the amount of mosquitos because they couldn't keep up with the speed of the boat.


6 men in a boat

We camped in a suprisingly accommodating place with boardwalks between the rooms, a bar and a resident crocodile which they fed pasta every morning.


The 'pet' crocodile under the boardwalk

My biggest fear in the jungle was the prospect of seeing a tarantula but I had convinced myself that the chances of seeing one were probably pretty slim in such a large jungle. The first night however, as I walked with my torch across the boardwalk towards my bedroom I was stopped in my tracks by a very large tarantula sitting directly in my path. I calmly turned around, went back into the bar/lounge and announced to the rest of the crew that there was a tarantula on the path. Their reaction was slightly different to mine as they all piled out to stare at it and dare each other to touch it while I stood back and took deep breaths. After they had scared it away I was able to go to bed, but I did have to get Jon to come to the toilet with me and check my bed before I got in it.


aaAAARRRGGGHHHH

We stayed in the pampas for 3 days going out onto the river every day to look for different animals. We went out at night to find crocodiles at the bank by torchlight and while we were spotting the glowing eyes, one of our group announced that there was a crocodile in a tree, which obviously seemed a little hard to believe. On closer inspection it turned out to be a small puma or ocelot and the guide was fairly excited since it was an unusual sight in the pampas. He guided the boat into the bank and leaped off into the thick bushes urging us to follow. Funnily enough, the puma (or ocelot) was not too happy about our presence and ran off hissing. It's only luck that it didn't run AT us hissing because i'm sure it had some very sharp teeth!

The second day we went to the long grasslands to look for anaconda who live in the area. The grasses are mostly taller than headheight and the water is almost thigh high in places. So there we were wading through the water, straining our eyes to see the colourful snake before it saw us. To be honest I was quite glad that I had already been told that the chances of finding an anaconda in the wet season was pretty slim because I didn't fancy having a snake curling around my legs in the murky depths. It was cool sneaking around like guerillas though and we did manage to find a tree with very large angry wasps in it and a dead fish with a spider in it's mouth.


Guerillas

On the third day we set out to go and swim with the pink dolphins. The fact that the river smelt of sulphur and was a dark black colour hadn't actually escaped our notice, but we knew people had done it before and thought that maybe there was a place that the guides knew with nicer waters. Not so - the water where we moored was black and smelly, but a few people started jumping in and soon we all joined them. It wasn't so much that the water was inviting as the fact that we were going to have to wait in the boat with hoards of mosquitos until the others came back aboard and the black smelly water seemed more inviting than being eaten alive. The dolphins did actually come and swim near us and after we had got back into the boat they put on a little excited display of jumping and splashing about. It was all rather cute but the queue for the shower afterwards was very long...

By the time we were leaving we were all pretty glad to be getting away from the mosquitos. On the way back in the jeep we stopped at a lake to go fishing for pirhana at which most of us had some trouble, but Jon managed to bag himself one;


Jon catches a piranha