Friday, September 23, 2005
...Capybara´s, Caiman´s, and Monkey´s...Oh My!
...We took a break from the brassic conditions in 4000m La Paz to enjoy the balmy tropical climate in Rurrenabaque (part of the Amazon basin). The flight was an adventure - a 15 seater plane and the airport at Rurre is a grass strip, very exciting. It was 30 degrees+...lovely! We joined a tour to the Pampas (swampy grasslands) starting with a canoe trip up river. Unfortunately everyone else on our tour was Japanese and members of the Japanese National Eating & Sleeping team, seriously these guys could put it away - you should have seen them gorging on pirahna´s (and then sleep it off). Anyway, enough blathering...here are the photo´s of lots of cool animals...
...in a nutshell, we saw alligator´s, caiman´s (lots sunning themselves on the banks and some around 4m!), capybara´s (so cute), a sloth, an anaconda (2m this one), chichalla monkeys (Pete´s favourite), piranha´s, turtles, howler monkeys, and so many mozzies!
It was Pete´s big 33 whilst on the trip...to be exact we spent most the day in knee deep swamp searching for anaconda...though we did get to celebrate with a nice cold cerveza and sunset...but really not much fun...so it has been officially postponed until New York. By the way, looking for snakes when you´re knee deep in water is a weird activity. On the one hand you really want to find one (exciting), but then your rational brain says whooaaa, I don´t wanna see no snake...
The tour was great, except there were some dodgy moments which we didn´t feel fitted in with the ideal of ´sustainable tourism´. These included photo opportunity with the anaconda round your neck, feeding the monkeys, piranha fishing etc. We did take part in some of these (feeding a banana to the monkeys was one of the funniest things i´ve ever done....pete had them all over his head and giggled about it for days), but i´m not sure whether all of this can keep happening in this place without impact on the environment. Hey ho...
...coming back turned out to be a bigger advenure than getting there. The land ministry were buring some pampas for agricultural land and as a result the visibility was too poor for planes to take off from the grass strip. After a day of waiting, and getting fobbed off by the unhelpful Amazonas staff we decided to get a jeep ride 12hrs back to La Paz as we could see our holiday disappearing day by day. It was pretty uncomortable (9 people jammed in)and we took the ´most dangerous road in the world´, clinging to the side of a canyon for much of the way with only room for one car and some crazy drivers.
Back now in frio La Paz...farewell balmy nights
# posted by Pete @ 1:16 PM 
