Forrest and Meryl do Southie: La Paz... and Rurrenabaque. Montanas y selva!

LA PAZ
I spent about 5 days in La Paz, before heading to Rurrenabaque to visit a part of the Bolivian Amazon. I loved La Paz, it´s really beautiful, located in a valley with huge peaks surrounding it. The city is built up the sidewalls of the canyon and onto the pampa (flat land) above. I visited several museams including a museam about the history of the Coca leaf, which was really fascinating. My other favoite was a museam of instruments (Forrest would have loved it), they have really nice examples of instrument from Bolivia and all arround the world (behind glass cases), but then they have replicas of them everwhere so that you can play them, it was really fun. I visited the Vally de la Luna outside of La Paz, which is a series of badlands. What was more interesting than the badlands however, was the journey to get there. I went with a gal I met from South Africa. We took public transportation (aka a mini-bus, designed for small people like Bolivians, crammed FULL of people) on the way to get there we drove through the Zona Sur, which is the most affluent part of La Paz, and boy was it fancy! Huge mansions, and lots of hummers... on of the school kids on the mini bus asked me if we have big box cars in the US! ha! I also venture up onto the rim of La Paz to view the famous ¨Colitas Wrestling¨ which was one of the more rediculous things that I have seen. It is Bolivia´s version of WWF, complete with a midget wrestler (not very PC). The crowd which was mostly Bolivians all had signs for their favorite wrestlers. It was an experience.

LA SELVA (the jungle)
I booked a 5 day tour to go to the jougle when I was in La Paz, to go the the Sere reserve which is run by the same woman who sarted the Madidi national park. I flew in the morning to Rurrenabaque (Rurre), after an interesting takeoff in a very small plane (16 pasengers, one seat on each side and an open cockpit) we abruptly landed back in La Paz because the instruments on our plane werent functioning! After about 45 min, we tried again and this time we made it all the way to the tiny dirt runway of Rurre. It was a bit of a shock, getting of the plane into really hot humid air ( i had been in high altitude desert for the past month!). We arrived late so I assumed that I had missed my boat(litteraly)... The tour was supposed to leave by boat at 1030, and my plane got in at 11. I huslted to the tour office, convincing the bus driver to drop me off there first. They waited for me! Our group was 2 other couples, one german/french, one couple from Australia, me and our guide Nilo. We all piled into a large dougout canoe with a motor on the back, and motored down the Rio Beni (a tributary to the Amazon) for about 3 hours, with a floating break to have lunch. It was so beautiful, the land behind Rurre was large moutainous jungle and cloud forest and the area downstream was thick flat jungle. We got out of the boat and began our walk, which was about an hour through the jungle before we reached the cabanas that we would be staying in! They were beautiful, netted cabanas with thatched roofs, and we each had our own. The cabanas were about a 15 min walk (which seems really far when you are walking in the dark in the joungle by yourself) from the main lodge which was about 3 floors and overlooked Lago San Fransisco. The first floor was the kitchen and dining area and the other floors were devoted to lounging... old wooden canoes full of pillows and hammocks galore. I spent my 5 days exploring the joungle both on and off trails, as well as paddling arround the lakes in a wodden canoe. The joungle is really amazing, the noise is incredible, it always loud and always changing. I woke up everymorning to the masive sound of male Howler monkeys climing there teritory, the sound litteraly gives you the shivers, its incredible (youtube it). The seccond thing that really supprised me was how thick it was, vegitation growing everywhere, the Amazon also has a way of super-sizing everything... the ants were the size of my thumb! We saw tons and tons of insects (i have my fair share of mosquito bites depite my 98% deet, i also had an incident with ant crwling up my pants-and biting me) most of them are huge. The spiders were the most noticeably large insect because they are everywhere, we saw 2 types of terantula, the bigger one was about the size of a small plate, and about 2 dozen other types. The mariposas (butterflys) are beautiful, my favorite was the transparent butterfly, the really huge metalic blue ones were nice too. At night the mosquitos came out with a vengance... but they were acompanied by huge luciernagas (fire flys) which would light up the trees. My first night we went out after dinner for a late night canoe camin spotting mission. They were everwhere! All of the camin in the lake were small, less than a meter, but we saw one on the Rio Benni that was 3m long! During my visit I was also lucky enough to spot 4 different types of monkeys, a deer, pecarys, an anaconda, 2 other types of big snakes, tons and tons of different types of birs including a tiger heron )my fav), Serere, pigmy kingfisher, hummingbirds, cormorants, Macaw (all 3 types that they have there), 2 othe types of heron and lots more! The Serere reserve is truely an incredible place, it is one of the last places in the area where you can still find old growth trees that havnt been cut down, they are really big! We saw a ficus tree and the base was about the size of my living room! I was sad to leave the selva but I was happy to be out of the buggs...

So, apparently all of the photos loaded to the side instead of to the center so the captions are a bit funny... sorry.

The Rurre airport... the landing stip was dirt and it dead ended into a rock wall.

Rurrenabaque

Boating up the Rio Beni. It was a three hour motored boat trip and then a one hour walk to get to the ecolodge. It really was the middle of the Jungle.