Jannis & Martine

We have just come back from a very ECO-friendly tour to´the jungle´, booked at an agency (Maldidi Travels) run by a very inpiring woman. Let me explain:

A few days ago we flew into the Bolivian Amazonas, into Rurrenabaque with the idea to go on a pampas tour. This is a tour into the wetlands around here, were you can spot loads of wildlife.
But we heard some very animal-unfriendly stories: drugging a tarantula spider with cigarette smoke, so you can put it on your face for a picture, grabbing baby kayman´s & anaconda´s to show them to you (which apparently caused that there are 50% less around these days) and feeding wild animals. So we weren´t that keen on going to the pampas anymore.

But then we ran into Rosa Marie, a very interesting Bolivian woman who managed to achieve that a part of the rainforest here is now a national park (which means now it is all protected area) in a time when Bolivia was still a dictatorship. Something that required a lot of persistance and guts, because she had (and still has) a lot of enemies. Such as local politicians who want to built a huge dam in the area or to cut down big pieces of forest to make a lot of money, but of course would destroy the nature there.
Despite this (often criminal and violent) resistance she still succeeded in making part of the rainforest here, a national park. This is why, a couple of years ago, she has been decorated as the worlds most effective nature conservator. 
Now she has bought a big piece of another part of the rainforest herself to also turn it into a protected area; the Serena reserve. To attract tourists to this reserve she has built some nice lodges over there, reached by a 3-hour boattrip from here. The profit that is made from the tourist visits, is invested back into the reserve, for further protection against illegal hunting etc.

So this is how we ended up going on this more expensive, but definitely more ECO-friendly ´jungle-tour´. It was certainly worth the extra money!
The lodge was very romantic. It had no walls, it´s only surrounded by mosquito nets. Not even the bathroom, but because you´re only surrounded by rainforest nobody can see you anyway. And because there is no electricity, at night everything is lit by candles.
After blowing out the last candle it is pitch-dark, which makes you experience the noices and smells of the rainforest even more.
But we were also a bit worried after our neighbours found a scorpion in their lodge. The guide told us not to worry though, because he had a cure for scorpion poison. He came up with an old fishook, we never realised before that fishooks should be part of the first aid kit…… 

We woke up the next morning by the sound of rain. Very cosy. Even though it´s dry season here and we arrived in a humid and very hot environment, the weather has changed very quickly during our stay. So it has mainly been raining here for the past few days.
During our stay in the Serena reserve we still got to see a lot of animals. In between the rains, we still walked a lot, spotting heaps of monkeys, and have canoed along a couple of lakes, spotting heaps of birds and a some kaymans.
We also enjoyed the food in the lodge very much, because even though they don´t have electricity here, the cook still prepares amazing meals. He was for instance able to prepare a very creative but very tasty ´cholcolate-pancake´ cake for Jannis´ birthday.

Even since we have arrived back in Rurrenabaque the rain has not stopped yet. So we can´t fly out of here, as there is only a grassy airstrip here (we heard that the mayor here doesn´t allow the building of a concrete airstrip here since he still is trying to build the dam, and too many tourists going to the Madidi park would prevent this forever). So instead of an easy 1-hour flight we are going a 20-hour bus-ride back to La Paz tomorrow….

Love, Martine.

P.S.

We have published loads of pictures on our Flickr-webpage again.

We just ended staying in La Paz for a couple of days.

Except for the fact that this 2-million people city is strangly built on the slopes of the mountains (it is very tiring to walk in the streets here) and that there are very nice museums and traditional markets here, not much positive can be said about it. It is basically a city unlike any other Bolivian city we have been: it is very dirty and chaotic here, there are no trees and flowers here and the old colonial buildings all seem to be sort of collapsing….

But yesterday evertything was different. We went on a day excursion 65 km from here, to the ruïns of the Tiwanaku city. It used to be the capital of a very important ancient culture. 

The ruïns of Tiwanaku are located near the famous lake Titicaca which is the highest lake in the world. Tiwanaku is near lake Titicaca because the lake once functioned as the river Nile of this continent, regulating the climate of the nearby ´altiplato´ flat lands located high in between the Andes mountains. As the Tiwanaku people were also very inventive in the way how they farmed those lands (using ricefield-like configurations) it was possible to produce lots of the food, so much that Tiwanaku could become a very big city. 

In the end this resulted in Tiwanaku becoming one of the most important South-American empires, compairable to the more famous Inka´s. Tiwanaku built big cities like the Inca´s: using unknwown ways to move, cut and combine large stones into big buildings and they also knew as much about astronomy as the later Inka´s did. In contrast with the Inka´s however (who lasted less than 300 years), the Tiwanaku empire existed for more than 3000 years. But around 144o it suddenly dissapeared (they don´t know why), more than 500 years before the Inca-empire appeared.

At the site of the Tiwanaku capital only 40 % of the stones are left, since a lot of them were stolen by the Spanish to build churches. But what remains of this ancient city is still fascinating: some very large and impressive Inca-like statues, a very large piramide (they are now reconstructing it), a big religious temple and an underground cellar in which they have put more than 200 stone faces in its walls. There also is a big harbour, built when lake Titica used to be a much bigger lake. This harbour is constructed by strangely shaped massive 150.000 kg stones, nobody knows how these stones have been moved to that place.

What interested us the most was a very large stone gate in which the Tiwanaku´s had inscripted a very accurate calendar. The calender has 12 months, with each month having 30 days, so they really understood the monthly & yearly cycles of the earth. But they were 5 days short, so they gave the month September 35 days, because it was the most important month of the year (spring starts in September over here).

Tiwanaku is probably not so well-known in Europe as the Tiwanaku culture has no written history, and it was already gone before the Spanish arrived here. But these ruïns are not to be missed when you are around here.  

This morning we took a 50-minutes flight, landing on a little grass airfield in the jungle in Rurrenabaque, in the Bolivian amazone. So we are now out of La Paz and in a very different setting. It´s very warm, there are lots of trees, plants and animals, and it´s very humid.

A very nice change of environment…

Jannis.

In a couple of hours we are going to leave Sucre to La Paz, with the nightbus.

So we say goodbye to ´the white city’ – all the buildings in the city centre here are painted in colonial c.q. Spanish white. Because of the white city centre, Sucre is now UNESCO-protected.
When we arrived here we thought that Bolivia just had received a huge amount of money, because they are renovating and painting a lot of the buildings here. Later we found out that UNESCO will visit the city centre during the main independence day on May 25th, so that´s why the city council mandates that everything has to be perfect for that day. It doen´t matter if you have or don´t have money, every owner of a building in the city centre has to assure that his building is in perfect shape. Otherwise you will get a fine.

It´s a shame that Sucre is not as rich as we had thought before.

Jannis and Martine.

P.S.
We still are reguraly publishing new pictures on our Flickr-webpage), so keep checking it out. 

A couple of days ago we still were in Potosi where we were introduced to a bit of the history of this area.

The little streets of Potosi are full with lovely Spanish balcony covered & brightly coloured buildings, so you can still see that back in the 17th century Potisi was a very wealthy city. In fact, back then it was the largest city in the world.

Potosi became so wealthy because back then there was a huge amount of silver in the mountains around the city. The nasty thing was that the Spanish got this silver out of the mountains by forcing the native people and African slaves to work in the very unhealthy mines, killing a couple of MILLION of them in the process. It seems like the Spanish didn’t mind to much, because they used the African slaves and natives for about 250 years, until there was no more silver left.  The church didn’t seem to mind to much too, because a big amount of this silver was used to ‘decorate’ the local churches…

The silver was also used to make the money for the Spanish kingdom, so a big mint was operating in Potosi. This mint is still around, it has now been restured and is very impressive. It is a very big, but also a very beautifully designed, building with about hundred rooms inside. Each room is now a small museum, and the old Austrian horse driven minting machines (to make coins from the crude silver) are still around.

Potosi is one of the nicest cities we have ever seen, but its main disadvantage is that it is the highest city in the world. Its main plaza is situated at about 4000 meters high. So, walking around, uphill, in the winding streets is a bit of a struggle as constantly it feels like you’ve just run a maraton. At night it also gets very cold, and they don{t put the heating in the hotels, because they think it’s still pretty warm now. As the Salar the Uyuni had also been very cold, we needed a change of climate. 

So, after having stayed a couple of days in Potosi we moved to Sucre which, for Bolivian standards, is ‘pretty’  low (about 3000 meters) in the mountains. We arrived in Sucre by a short but very beautiful ride through the mountains, in sort of a taxi which we shared with 2 other people. When we got out of this taxi it was already feeling a lot warmer, and we could breath normal again. 

Apart from this Sucre is also a very nice city. Not so sweet and cosy as Potosi is, but a bit more elegant (all the buildings in the centre are white here) and with a much better nightlife (we even have found three Dutch bars here, so we ate ‘bitterballen’ yesterday).  Sucre also used to be Bolivia’s only capital, but now it has to share this status with La Paz as the government moved to that city a while ago. But, as the supreme court still resides in Sucre and as the independence from Spain was declared here, Sucre remains one of Bolivia’s TWO capitals.

When we arrived here last Thursday we heard that this weekend Bolivia was going to celebrate its 200 years of indepence. So, by incidence, we were staying in exactly the right city this weekend.

They have made lots of work of the indepence celebratings, so we got see some nice things of a very varied program. From groups of all over South-America dressed in traditional dresses, local rock and folk bands, a very good Jazz-band which brilliantly mixed standard Jazz instruments with local ones, such as wooden fluits, to some fireworks (the organisation has hired some guys who fire ‘mortars’ and other big stuff from behind each band and from the the middle of the busy plaza, with people curiously watching from very close-by if everything is going all right).

We will see if they have organised something for tonight too…

Jannis.  

We arrived in Potosi yesterday evening, after having visited Tupiza´s beautiful eroded rock formations, very pretty lagunes and the famous Uyuni salt lakes.

This we did with a 4-day tour, sleeping in very cold places and driving through deserted landscapes, so we are a little behind with our internet stuff. So in some days there we will update our blogsite properly, but for now I want to say this:

This tour was one of the most impressive things we have done untill now. It was at least as impressive as our visit to the eroded rock formations of Valle de Luna & Talampaya parks (we just have published the pictures of these on our Flickr-webpage).

Jannis.

Even though I wasn´t to sure if I would do it again, yesterday we went horseriding, here in Tupiza.

After our experience in Bariloche, where we had a real ´drill-intructor-guide´, I wasn´t too sure if I was going to like it.  The more in the past our horseride-experience in Bariloche became, the more I forgot about the nice bits and just remembered the scary part.

Jannis convinced me that if I wouldn´t go horseriding again soon, I would probably never go horseriding anymore in the future. As this spot seemed to be a good place for it, as the surroundings here are very beautiful and it gives you a real ´wild west cowboy feeling´, we booked for a short 3-hours horseride. But only after a lot of talking to the tour operator…

And it turned out to be really lovely!!  The guide was nice and relaxed, the horse was very kind, a dog came along for support, the weather was beautiful and the homemade local cornballs we got for lunch were very nice. And most important, it wasn´t scary!! But I must admit the whole trip we only went on a really slow ride.

We even extended the 3 hours into 5 hours and I enjoyed the whole trip. Today I don´t even have pains, as this time I didn´t cramp.

Next time I go for the multiple day horseride option  😉

Love Martine.

A couple of days ago we arrived in Bolivia from Paraguay in a little city called Villamonte, near the border in the southeast of the country.

As said before, few people travel through Paraguay and as everybody in Villamonte was staring at us with our large backpacks, it was pretty clear that even fewer people travel to the dry eastern part of Paraguay to cross the Bolivian border there. So we were the only tourists in town.
A new experience for us as even in dry east of Paraguay there were a couple of tourists around (three Australians and one Italian to be exact).

Together with this ´new´ experience we were very suprised by the fact that Villamonte looks like a pretty rich city, with beautiful buildings, green looking plaza´s and very well maintained roads.
The next day we moved on to the much bigger city Tarija (because there were no cash machines in Villamonte and the next bus would go three days later) and here we again saw a very well maintained and very nice looking city, dotted with trendy restaurants and nice plaza´s. Yesterday we moved on again, to Tupiza, a little town 3000 meters high in the mountains, and again the plaza looks marvellous.
All very different from Paraguay where you find every once nice plaza to be occupied by drunks, homeless and turned into a slump…

At first we didn´t get why these Bolivian cities were looking so good, as Bolivia is the poorest country of the continent, but then it became clear.
When we had a good look around Tarija we began to see grafitti everywhere proclaming independence for the eastern part of the country. So it is probably not only the northeastern part of Bolivia that is the rich part of the country and where they want to become an independent republic. The same seems to be true for the southeast.
I just have read that they have huge amounts of gas here and a couple of years ago president Morales (the first indigenous Bolivian president, from the poor west part of the country) nationalised the gas industry, and he now has plans to invest a big part of the gas earnings to the poor parts of the country.
Not a terrible bad idea it seems, it looks much like the way the Dutch government is spending the earnings of the Dutch gas reserves. But the rich in the east don´t want to give up their luxery lifes it seems…

Happily enough the most of the demonstrating (and sometimes even the fighting) to become an independent republic is only taking place in the northeast. That is why we won´t go there. But we still see a lot of soldiers here too, to prevent further problems with the independence movement…

Jannis.

Right now we are in Tarija, a fairly big city in the south of Bolivia just across the Paraguayan border.

We arrived from Paraguay a few days ago. It took me these few days to overthink and realise how I really feel about Paraguay. Jannis already told about the struggle to get through this country, so I´ll write a bit about some of the other impressions I have of Paraguay.

Besides that it´s soccer team is the Number 1 in the South America poule for the worldcup 2010 at the moment, we didn´t knew anything about Paraguay before going on this trip. We hadn´t met any other travellers or knew anybody who had been there before. I can say that Paraguay is really off the beaten track. So before we arrived we did some reading about this country.

The main thing which becomes very clear when you read about Paraguay, is that it is a very corrupt country. Luckily we mainly had good expeciences and thought the people (and even the very corrupt police) were very friendly indeed. We didn´t experience the corruption too much ourselves, but you can tell if you know. We even came across the building of the minister for anticorruption.
There is a joke here about the fact that Paraguay has been Number 1 on the list of the world´s most corrupt countries year by year. There was an exception a couple of years ago, when Paraguay was suddenly Number 2 on the list. The saying is that this is because they had sold their Number 1 position….

One of the impressions I have of Paraguay is that of a country with huge contrasts.
Here in Paraguay is the first time we saw slums (sloppenwijken). In other parts of South-America we know there must be some as well, but it was not something we ever actually have noticed anywhere. But in Paraguay it is something you can not mis. In the backyard of the very expensive, very new and well mantained congress-building is a slum. It is not something they try to hide…….
In the capital, Asuncion, we also passed Hollywood-like neighbourhoods. You can´t imagine a bigger contrast.
Even in the isolated orthodix christan mennonite villages in the far east, you could still see a big gap between the rich mennonites and the poor indigenous indians. I assume they were poor, because many of them were hanging around drunk, looking for work.

Another impression I have is that Paraguay is tropical. Luckily we were here in fall, but in the far east it was still unpleasantly hot, besides very dry and dusty.

One thing I am very possitive about is the Paraguayan food. After having travelled through a mainly meat-eating country, it was a relief to get loads of vegetables. Also rice, sweet patatoes, cassaves, beans, corn and lots of fruits is part of each meal.

What I liked too is that they are really soccer-mad here. When we say that we are from Holland, people often say they know Holland because it is the land of the famous ´Naranja Mecanica´, the Orange machine.

But the thing that striked me the most was the fact that we had breakfast with a German who was carrying a gun around. He put the gun on the table and acted like it was very normal. He is the director of a farming-thing (if I understood correct, because I was stunned for a while) that bought a piece of land somewhere. And this piece, is the land that a big and rich landowner wants to buy, so for this landowner it would be very convient when the German would die. So from now on this German is watching out, especially every time he gets out of his car…

As you can see it was again a very different country to all the other countries we´ve been before, with lots of new experiences. Only the flag is like the Dutch flag, so that made us feel a bit at home. But now we are very happy to be in the (so far) very cheerful Bolivia!!

Love, Martine.