Jungle boat to La Paz

"Mosquitoes remind us that we are not as high up on the food chain as we think."
~Tom Wilson

Thursday, November 13th to Monday, November 17th 2008

As you might remember I didn't want to get to Rurre by boat so I booked a round trip flight. Well, in Bolivia not everything goes according to plans... I returned from the Pampas on Monday, spent Tuesday in the pool and got myself a seat on the flight that leaves on Wednesday noon. However, Wednesday started with a tropical storm that flooded the local airfield canceling all flights for at least 2 days or more if it keeps raining. Not wanting to take a chance with the weather or the local buses, I went for the third option: a 4 days boat trip that includes jungle treks and than a 6-7 hours jeep ride to La Paz on the fifth day. My partners for this journey where Oded, Dennis and Kathy who were with me in the Pampas and two Swiss girls named Corin and Marilla who we met at Rurre. Early Thursday morning we went to the Flecha Tours office to meet our guide and help carry our equipment to the local port where we loaded it on a canoe with rather comfortable seats and a roof which was a nice addition in face of the dark grey sky. We spent 3 hours on the boat which were a little cold, but luckily not wet after which we unloaded the equipment at our first camp site. The first task we were charged with was building our camp. Unlike the previous jungle expeditions in which we slept in lodges - this time we'll sleep in the jungle proper. We started by taking bamboo sticks and striping the top layer of loose sand and dried leaves from a flat area about 5X5 meters in size. During this activity we found a nest of huge poisonous ants at the bottom of one of the trees adjacent to our planned campsite. Our guide didn't think to relocate and instead went to the boat and returned with gasoline which he used to start a small fire around to tree that hosted the hostile insects. While the ants burned, we finished clearing the camp ground and moved to phase II. In the second phase we built a frame using a machete, bamboo sticks and vines as ropes on which we stretched the blue plastic sheet so we will have a roof over our head. A black nylon for a floor and another construction to hold our mosquito nets finished our makeshift home. When the camp was ready we sat down to eat lunch that was cooked while we worked and than took our water bottles and went into the forest. Our guide, a native Indian from the Amazonian basin near the Brazilian border, explained about the different medicinal plants as well as about the different edible plants and how we can use that information to find different animals. As always, we were lucky enough to see some monkeys again. After 3 hours we returned to the camp to eat and set out again for a 3 and a half hours night walk with our flashlights in which we caught a glimpse of the night monkey - the only type of monkey that lives in this part of the world that we didn't see so far.

The second day started with breakfast and a long walk to a panoramic view point from which we scanned the surrounding jungle and than returned to camp. During our walk our boat driver was replaced with a new driver that had the necessary experience to navigate the treacherous river up ahead. The boat took us to our next camp, a little plateau near the river that was the home of a local Indian family. We said hello to the family and build our camp next to their home. We than returned to the boat and went fishing or more correctly our guide with the help of Oded, who volunteered to help, went fishing using a big net they borrowed from the Indians, while we watched them from the boat. After 20 minutes Oded returned proudly holding 3 fish but as it turned out somebody had a bigger fish to fry: the sand flies that had been bothering us all day caught Oded in his shorts wading through the shallow water and made a meal out of him. The nasty insects whose bite is bigger and much more scratchy than mosquito, covered his legs with more than 50 bites. I had few bites already on my lower legs and hands and felt sorry for each one - getting so many didn't looked like fun... We gave one fish to the locals and our cook prepared one of the other fish for us, but we also had spaghetti bolognese and the fish had a lot of bones - so nobody really ate them. Our boat driver suggested that we'll leave our bags in the boat for the night instead of carrying them up to the camp but since I left my big bag in La Paz and I needed most of the things in my small one for the night I decided to take it with me.

We were waken up a little early than we planned by Kathy who got up to brush her teeth and found that during the night water got into the boat and that all the bags that were left in it were soaked in water. Since Oded and myself had only a small bag and it was with us, and Marilla carried her bag up, it meant that only Dennis, Kathy and Corin bags suffered from this unfortunate accident. When we took the boat to nearby beach to dry everything, we found how bad things were,especially for Dennis and Kathy who lost an Ipod, many documents and their expensive crystal down were irrecoverably damaged. Dennis, who worked in a camping store before the trip, had a lot of good expensive gear and now all of it was scattered across the beach wet and damaged. This incident ruined our morning and Dennis and Kathy preferred to stay on the beach despite the heat and sand flies and watch over their equipment while we crossed the river and entered a virgin plot of jungle. We hacked our trail using a machete and search for wild pigs that we heard in the distance but failed to find them. As a consolation prize we got a rare view of a couple of majestic macaws from few meters away. Our guide showed us how we can drink purified water directly from a special kind of vine and we returned to our boat. We picked up Dennis and Kathy and continued to make our camp near a small gold finders settlement stopping on the way in a beautiful natural pool for a well needed shower. We spent the entire 4th day on the boat sailing against hard current and hard to navigate river in strong rain stopping in a small village for lunch (and witnessing a drunk fight while waiting for it) our next stop was to see how gold in found. Since it was a Sunday the main sites have been deserted, but our guide stopped near an old gold digger and his wife who were kind enough to show us how it's done. Basically you fill a little wooden bowl with dirt and than you take it to the river and wash it slowly until all that is left is one or two gold specks barely visible to the human eye - not exactly a "get rich quick" scheme. We finally reached our destination, a sandy beach near a small village accessible by road where we build our last camp and warmed ourselves next to a big bonfire. In the morning we said goodbye to our guide and cook and traded our boat for a rather new Toyota station wagon with four wheel drive. Our driver drove like crazy on the narrow beautiful dirt road and after long hard 7 hours ride during which we asked him more than once to lower his speed, dropped us off back at our hostel in La Paz.