Welcome to the jungle.

                                                     Welcome to the jungle. Literally.

After a couple of days in La Paz we decided to have a break from the high altitude/cold weather and head to Rurrenabaque, AKA, the jungle (just a short 20 hour bus journey away through the bumpy mountains). The bus from Salta was first class in comparison so I'm sure you can imagine how fun this was. Did I mention it takes 20 hours? And part of the route is death road? Imagine the M8, in the fog/clouds, on a crowded bus and the road being only 3 meters wide; On one side there's an eroding mountain and on the other a cliff that goes so far down you can't even see the bottom. I can now see why the locals pray before taking this trip!

10 hours in to the journey, we stopped in a small town in the middle of nowhere with very little in the way of electricity - on the way up to it, it kind of reminded me of night time at T in the park as if I was standing at the entrance looking up towards the campsite. After some brief summer nostalgia I got bumped straight back into reality when we were made to get off the bus while the driver had a break. There were no toilets on the bus so it was a good chance to do a quick pee before the last half of the trip. Since we'd been in Bolivia for a while by this point, I was pretty much used to bad toilets, so without hesitation I paid my 1 boliviano (about 10p) and went in... But OH. MY. GOD. This was the worst toilet I'd ever seen and I couldn't even bring myself to squat over the bowl; This town was NOTHING like T in the park and I was glad to get back on to the bus - even if it did mean holding in a pee for another 10 hours!

The journey seemed to get worse and worse, it was too bumpy to sleep and every so often we had to reverse in order to get to a part of the road wide enough to let oncoming traffic squeeze by. I was pretty sure we were going to die. But luckily, after what felt like forever, we arrived in Rurrenabaque.

We decided to go for a Pampas tour which is basically sailing through the jungle rivers on a motorised canoe. So the next day we headed to the treks tour office to meet the others in our group and get a 4X4 to the boat. It wasn't that much of a shock that it was missing a window and the seats were covered in dust, and after 3 hours of bumpy roads we arrived at the boat and sailed to our lodge. The lodge reminded me a lot of summer camp, only surrounded by swamps populated by snakes and the odd caiman.

On the first night we sailed to a communal area for all of the tours/lodges throughout the jungle and watched the sun set with a beer (I've resorted to beer due to the lack of rose wine in South America) which was great, well at least until the sun went down and swarms of Miskitos came from all directions. So. Many. Bites.

The second day got off to a shaky start when I woke up with a frog beside my head (how did it even
get through the Miskito net!??) and decided I hated the jungle and wanted to go back to La Paz. But after a breakfast of pancakes and all the fruit my heart desired, I was ready for day 2 in the jungle. We
went anaconda hunting in the swamps, but as the guide had pre warned us about the rattle snakes around us and to be careful because he had no ant-venom, as soon as I heard a rattle (ok, it was probably a cricket) I ran straight out of there. Luckily, our group didn't find any anacondas so I didn't feel too bad that Chris had felt obliged to follow me out. Our guide was really good though, and went back in to find one and brought it out for us to see. I even managed to pluck up enough courage to hold it!

In the afternoon we went piraña fishing, which was scary because every time anyone moved the boat would tip and falling into a river full of piranhas was hardly my ideal afternoon. Luckily, we didn't capsize (despite the boys in groups best efforts) and Chris even managed to catch some! We had them for dinner, and they were surprisingly really nice.

By the third day we were used to life in the jungle, and spent the morning swimming with pink river dolphins, which was a really surreal experience. Although, we did feel slightly uneasy as we were swimming in the same spot that we had went caiman hunting the night before!  After swimming, we chilled out in the hammock area of the lodge for a few hours before the 3 hour boat ride back through the Pampas to reality/another brush with death on the return bus to La Paz...