Rurrenabque pampas
After we had such a good time on the jungle tour, the evening we arrived back in Rurrenabaque we booked a 3 day tour of the pampas starting the next day.
After an uncomfortable 3 hour jeep ride it was another 3 hour boat ride to the Indigina lodge where we going to be staying. For me this was one of the highlights of the trip, we saw so much wildlife, it just didn`t seem real, more like a disney ride. Everywhere you looked there were animals and birds, including alligators, cayman, capybara,, pink river dolphins, turtles and monkeys.
After settling in to the lodge, a game of volleyball and dinner we went for a night time trip down the river to see the wildlife at night, when the alligators and cayman go hunting. This was also really good, apart from fireflys you could just see the eyes of things in the river and on the bank and hear all the sounds of the animals and birds.
The next day it was overcast and raining a bit, unfortunately the wrong conditions for our morning activity of a walk across the pampas to find anacondas, which are apparently easy to find when its sunny because they like to lie out in the sun. The walk for us basically involved wading through really smelly, swampy water for 3 hours, although we did see a lot of birds we didn´t find any anacondas.
In the afternoon we went a bit further up river to an area where a lot of dolphins are commonly found. We did have the chance to swim with the dolphins, but only Peter was brave enough to get in the water. As our boat stopped in the dolphin area, we could see that there wasn´t just dolphins in the water, but also alligators and cayman and we knew there were also piranhas. It was still good just watching the dolphins swimming round the boat though. By the evening the weather had improved so we went down river to a mirador to watch the sunset over the river and pampas.
The next morning we went piranha fishing again. this time we were a lot more successful and I lost count of how many I caught, although they were all quite small. But we kept a few to feed to a ´pet´ alligator that lived at the lodge called Casi Miro, because it only had one eye.
After lunch it was time to travel backto Rurrenabaque. Unlike the first day we arrived, it was really sunny and this made a big difference to the wildlife we saw. A lot morealligatorsand cayman lieing out in the sun. Some of themwere huge,at least 5m long. Alsosaw a green mamba snake in the river,which made up for not seeing any anacondas and was another good reason not to go swimming.
We had another night in Rurrenabaque before getting the bus to La Paz next day, a 17 hour trip known to be the most uncomfortable journey in Bolivia. But it wasn’t actually too bad. The first few hours were very bumpy on dirt tracks but then it did improve as we went up into the mountains, where we had spectacular views but you had to ignore how close the bus got to the edge of the cliffs. The last part of the journey was along the road of death, just since I have been in Bolivia at least 10 people have died on this road. But I managed to sleep through most of it,which was probably for the best.
Tags: 1, Tag Index
kt_m_white