To go from La Paz to Rurrenabaque, the jumping point for all tours into the Bolivian Amazon, the options are either: 1) take a short 30 minute flight or 2) take a long bumpy bus. Because we decided last minute to head there and figured we could save some money and do more tours in the Amazon, we decided to take option #2, the bus, to get there. It is an overnight bus and we had been thoroughly warned by the internet and some friends we met along the way, that it was long, bumpy and memorable (not in the good way). It needs to be said, the distance between La Paz and Rurre (as locals call it) is only ~440km (275 miles). That's only slightly further than NYC to DC or NYC to Boston both of which are ~4 hour drives. This one was advertised as an 11 hour ride, however it took us 15 hours.
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| Our valiant steed to Rurre |
In addition to transporting passengers buses in South America often shuttle all sorts of things, acting as a form of mail delivery/shipment method (a bootleg FedEx or UPS). Our bus was loaded up with a slew of items that ranged from furniture to small care package boxes to freshly caught fish on ice.
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| From Ecuador, not Rurre, but just to illustrate that if someone sleeps under a bus then you can really send anything |
We survived the bus, didn't sleep too much (all bumpiness described online and by others was accurate), and decided the morning we arrived to book return flights to La Paz and not go through this again. And if we may rant a little here about buses...while night buses are the norm in South America, so much so that many times no day option exists, almost all the night buses schedule their arrival to the final destination for between 3-5am and with a +/- 2 hr it seems absurd to us. Why not leave 2 hours later and arrive at a normal hour of the morning, say 7am? Nope.
Anyways, we arrived at our hostel at 5 am to a dark and locked building. We banged on the door and called the number we had to get in, but no luck. We waited what felt like a very long 30 minutes and finally someone opened up. Lucky for us they let us into our room to get a few hours of sleep! Note: the hostel we stayed in (Santa Ana) was a lovely, clean, and bug free place (not easy to do in the jungle). The owner provided us with larger breakfasts before our tours because she knew we had long car rides and let us store our bags for free while on our tours.
Once in Rurre we booked two different tours: the Pampas and the Jungle. Each was 3 days, 2 nights and they were very different. The Pampas was river based and chock full of animals while the jungle was much more thick jungle bush. Though we saw almost no animals in the jungle the experience of wandering through wilderness where you can't tell where one plant ends and the other begins, where everything is alive and decaying all at once, and where you lose all sense of direction was equally enjoyable to monkeys literally jumping on our heads.
While we can't compare the Amazon experience in Bolivia to Peru or Ecuador or Brazil, we definitely felt the expression 'you get what you pay for' (specifically speaking about lodging here) and it explained maybe why it was so much cheaper in Bolivia. Words do not describe either well enough so we will let our pictures take over.
Pampas:
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| Our chariot for 3 days on the river |
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| Heading up the Yacuma River |
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| They came for bananas... |
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| ...And how could we say no to that punum (not captured A freaking out) |
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| With no more bananas they went back into the trees |
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| The largest Black Caiman we saw all trip, easily 12' long |
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| Morning hike to search for anacondas (not shown that we are wading through 2' of water and A has a hole in her boots) |
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| Piranhas + lone Catfish |
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| Dusk on the water |
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| When the sun goes down the creepy crawly things come out...Tarantula in the bathroom |
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| Sunrise over the lowlands |
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| More monkeys |
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| You can tell from the facial expression that we didn't have any bananas |
Jungle:
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| Heading up the Beni River |
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| It is dry season and sometimes we got stuck and had to get out and push |
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| We got stuck a lot |
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| The Cuati, also known as the hog-nosed coon in english |
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| A beautiful vine growing in the jungle |
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| Russian doll like mushrooms |
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| More mushrooms |
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| Our guide inside a massive tree |
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| Shoreline of the Tuichi River |
Also, we skimmed the book
Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival by Yossi Ghinsberg which has been turned into the movie
Jungle (starring Daniel Radcliffe). It is a true story about how Yossi survived in the jungle on his own (with almost nothing) for 3 weeks. It takes place in and around Rurre and the jungle park (Madidi National Park) we went on in the jungle tour. As we walked through the jungle, we found ourselves constantly at awe in how he survived.
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