Anaconda hunting!

After four days in Lipez we took the nightbus from Uyuni to La Paz. The ride was very unpleasant, the bus was freezing cold and the roads so bumpy that we couldn't even hear our own thoughts anymore. Also a kid who peed in his pants and old ladies were sleeping on the floor of the bus. We came to La Paz feeling tired after a horrible sleepless night. From La Paz we organized a tour to Amazonas. The next day we flew to Rurrenabaque with a tiny airplane that could fit only 19 passengers. It was so small that we couldn't even stand straight up there :) We could also see the cockpit from our seats and all the cool thingies the pilots used. :) The flight was very turbulent and you could really feel it in your stomach when the plane flew into turbulens. We also heard really strange peeping sounds that scared some of the passengers. (Sara du sku int ha kommit med på det här flyget! :) )



Our cute plane on the runway (which was grass!)

We spent one night in the tropical climate in Rurre (it was over 37 degrees all the time) and took a three day tour to the Amazonas the next morning. Our tour guide Victor (aka Pollo) was the cutest Bolivian guy we met. His english was really adorable and he told us great funny stories about monkies and other animals. Our group was great except for Dimitrios, a Greek guy (he had only lived in Greece for six months but he still considered himself as Greek even though he spent his childhood in Germany and now lives in London) who annoyed the shit out of the whole group including our guide Victor. :) The rest of the group was great, we had two Canadian and two Californian girls in our group.


Our group (minus Dimitrios) in the motor canoe

 We had to take a three hour jeep ride (a really bumpy one again) to get to the river. From there we took a motor canoe to our accommodation which was in the middle of nowhere. The boat ride was about three to four hours long and it included us jumping into the river ,which was full with caimans, to push the boat when it got stuck in the bottom. The girls were the first ones to jump into the water while the only guy in the group was only complaining (he was stupid enough not to have brought flip flops to the amazonas) and being the biggest girl of us all.. We also saw a lot of Caypibaras (Vesipossu in finnish). Caypibaras are the biggest rodents in the world and Bolivians don't eat them because they are said to bring bad luck. We also saw many different kinds of monkeys including squirrel monkeys and cappuccino monkeys. We even got to feed the yellow squirrel monkeys with bananas. Our tour guide made us promise not to tell this to anyone though :) On the way to our accommodation we also got to swim with pink dolphins. Again we had to jump into the murky water which was full with Caimans and Piranhas. All the girls were brave enough to do this but our Greek friend Dimitrios sat in the boat being afraid of getting parasites. :) After arriving at our accommodation we went to the sunset bar (which also served cold beer) to enjoy the lovely sunset.



Caypibaras



Squirrel monkey



Cappuccino monkey



Cayman (they don't eat humans, even though Victor has been bitten by caymans many times :) )



Sunset bar

The next day we woke up at 5 am to see the sunrise. After having too much deepfried dough (!) for breakfast we left for Anaconda hunting. We were wearing rubber boots and had sticks in our hands to poke the anacondas with. After walking in a swamp we realised that our rubber boots had holes in them and our feet were completely wet :) Victor had a really interesting technique for finding anacondas. He was smelling the mud to locate them because apparently anacondas have a very distinct stink. We managed to find two anacondas, unfortunately they weren't as big as Lili hoped they would be (they can be up to 9 meters long). In the afternoon we went fishing for Piranhas. We had to use cow meat as the bait. Lili was the only one who catched a piranha and got to eat it ( a red one, there were five different colours of Piranhas in that part of Amazonas where we were). The californian girl Jamie catched four catfish (we think they were all the same fish though :)) and named all of them Dimitrios and fed one to an eagle! :)



Our spandex group going anaconda hunting



Lili holding snake skin



Anaconda inside a tree

 

Lili and the red piranha



It had really sharp teeth

The next day's program was to go swimming with the dolphins again. This time we were the only ones who were brave enough to get into the water. While waiting for the dolphins to come and play with us, Lili got bitten by a little piranha and she started bleeding! When we got back to Rurre, we had dinner with the girls and later met up with Victor for drinks in Moskkito bar (this was the first alcoholic beverage we had on our trip and we got really tipsy just after one drink). We met this american guy Jamie had been talking about before. He was according to Jamie the most annoying guy ever, even worse than Dimitrios:) He was really full of himself and pretended to be a yoga master with his own yoga program (but when Katja asked him what kind of yoga it was, he couldn't even give a straight answer). He aso claimed to have been travelling for two years now even though he counted his time working on a cruise ship as travelling. :) He had his own travel webpage which he was really proud of and his life plan was to sell his travel videos to some tv channel. We later googled his webpage and were laughing our asses off when watching his travel videos :)



Having drinks in Moskkito bar with the girls and Victor

 The next posting will be from Lake Titicaca which was our next destination after Amazonas.