Bolivia: Free of Bolivians at Last!

For those of you who are regular readers, you realize by now that Bolivia was tough for us at times. It was a confounding mix of beautiful and difficult. However, as with most places, life became much easier when you took people out of the equation. So, we set out to Rurrenabaque, right on the edge of the rainforest, where wildlife is plentiful and people are few.

It is worth noting that it was this same bus for which we were waiting when our bag was stolen. I left Tara at the station holding on to our bags with another American couple while I went to see if I could buyback any of my stuff in the local market (didn't find any), and three older men tried to steal their bags. Fortunately, Tara was quick to grab them before they could get them. Unfortunately, she wasn't quick enough to kick any of them in the head before they ran away...

Okay, now to the pictures. The bus ride to Rurrenabaque is 18 hours despite only being about 180 miles away. It doesn't take much math to figure out that it should be about the same speed to take a donkey. However, we don't know much about caring for donkeys, so we took the bus. It travels down the "world's most dangerous road", which may or may not actually be the most dangerous. (This motto is mostly used by mountain bike companies taking trips there, but the road seems to be much less dangerous on a bike than in a vehicle.) The road is mostly along cliffs with almost no shoulder and no guard rails. Additionally, some brilliant lawmaker in Bolivia decided that the vehicle going down the cliff should always be on the edge. Here's the view:
The mountains were lovely, and as we got to lower altitudes, they started to be very green as well with waterfalls and all the stuff that you would expect when driving to a rainforest.
Once we got to Rurrenabaque, we managed to book a last minute tour with a decent seeming company for a really good price. Additionally, they read us really well and offered up free use of showers for the two hours until the tour left. We had been on back to back overnight buses, so we were sold. Two hours later, we set out for the Bolivian Pampas, which is the grasslands bordering the rainforest. It is easier to see animals here than in the forest because they have no trees in which to hide. On the way, we saw dinner.
We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that seemed to have some quasi-pet animals from the area. This guy is a peccary, which is very much like a pig in looks and actions, but isn't actually related to one. Hard to tell his size, but he is the size of a pig and he walked right under our table and laid down until someone shooed him off.
Tara loves peccaries. Had there been baby peccaries, we would no doubt have one in our backpack. This one was too big to keep, though.
This jabiru also stopped by for a visit. These birds are about five feet tall and don't take kindly to strangers getting very close. One had a huge nest right above our camp site, but none of our pictures of that one were nearly as good.
This spider monkey took a liking to one of the other guys in our group and then to me. They have a prehensile tail that they use like a fifth arm and they are very strong. This monkey seemed really friendly, but then started chewing on one of the girls. It decided it didn't like me anymore after I pulled him off the girl (she was fine--the monkey was just biting her lightly).
After it bored of playing with the tourist, it was ready for a ride.
To get to camp, we took a three hour boat ride down the river. Because it is the very end of dry season, the river is at nearly its lowest point of the year. This means all the animals come to the river for water because the local watering holes are dry.
We saw a troop of squirrel monkeys (they live in groups of about 30-50) and one brave one even came to board the boat. He left in anger when no one would feed him.
All the caimans and crocodiles (they apparently have black caimans and then some species of croc here) come to the river at this time of year. They are everywhere. They eat anything, including other crocs. We saw them from about a foot long to about 15 feet long. It was great when they stopped the boat and told us it was time to take a swim.
The real reason that we went to this area is to see capybaras, the biggest of the rodents. These rats can grow to 180 pounds and are huge. We were worried we might not see any, which turned out to be silly. We saw hundreds. Everytime we saw one with babies, Tara took a picture. They bathe in the mud at the edge of the river to stay cool and insect free (and to sometimes feed the crocs).
This one seems to be waiting for us to come get in the boat. I let Tara get in first.
One morning we spent four hours hiking around looking for anacondas. The downside of dry season is that many of the marshy areas where anacondas live dry up, so they run away. The guides tried hard to walk through the mud poking around for a giant snake, but no luck. The best I could do was some colorful fungus. We ran into another group that had seen one, so our group tied them up in jealousy and left them there to see some more anacondas.
A blurry sunset over the pampas. These are grasslands, but the grasses grow to about four feet high. We walked through a lot of it looking for snakes, and it isn't what you think of when you think grass. It's like Little Shop of Horrors grass.
We also went pirana fishing. Again. For those who don't remember, we tried this in the Amazon and caught nothing. This time, at least there were piranas, but they were tiny. I couldn't even get this one to bite off my nose.
The only bird that seemed fearless was this tiger heron. A really nice looking bird. He is suppose to eat fish, but given how unafraid this one was, I suspect he eats a lot of leftovers as well.
Here is a whole herd of capybaras rushing out of the water as we passed by. Okay, herd probably isn't the right word for a group of capybaras. I actually did some reseach just now, and no one seems to know. A BBC article also calls them herds, so I'm going to say what I usually say--I was right.
That brings our exciting time in Rurrenabaque to an end. I should say that we also finally saw pink river dolphins, which were really cool. They went back under too fast to ever get pictures of them, but it is the areas patrolled by these dolphins where it is safe to swim. They will not let crocs swim in the same water as them and they can be ferocious in their defense of territory.

After several nice days in the wilderness, we got back on the very slow overnight bus and went back to La Paz. We left La Paz as soon as we could and decided that we would deal with not having Bolivian visas because of stolen passports when we got to the border. So, we exited at the same Bolivian crossing where we entered.

The guy was nice enough and found our entry visa information in about 30 seconds. Then he looked at us and said, "You need to get a new visa stamp in La Paz. I'm not able to do it here." We told him all we needed was an exit stamp and he clearly had proof of our legal entry. And that we weren't going back to La Paz (4 hours away). He finally agreed to let us just leave with no stamp. So, we practically ran the 500 feet to Peru before he changed his mind.

The woman at the Peru border looked at our fresh passports and said that she could not let us in without an exit stamp from Bolivia. We told her the whole story and she reiterated that we absolutely must have an exit stamp from Bolivia. We said that we could not go back and asked if there was any way to get into Peru. After a moment, she decided that we could pay a $20 "fee" and the problem would go away. So, it surprised us, but we did not have to bribe our way out of Bolivia and instead bribed our way into Peru.

That wraps up our Bolivian adventures. It was a decent country, and is really cheap, but the culture is really difficult to adjust to. We have met many travelers who say that Bolivia is their favorite country. That definitely isn't true for us, but we certainly will keep some nice memories from parts of it.

Of parrots and peanut butter, hiking and hitching: Guyana!

Today is our last day in Guyana, the Westernmost of those three small countries in the northwest of the contenent that no one really seems to know about. Guyana is English-speaking and feels decidedly more Caribbean than South American, with a lot of goods available that we haven't seen since Trinidad. Culturally, it is a mix of people African and Indian (East Indian, as in from the country of India) descent with some Amerindian (what we would call Native American in the US) villages in the interior.

Though I am blogging from the capital city of Georgetown, on the Atlantic coast in the north, we started our adventure here far south, in the small town of Lethem, on the border with Brazil. It was a dusty town with no paved roads (here is our guesthouse)...



But, peanut butter!!!


Locally made by a women's collective, to boot.

The next day we took a bumpy bus ride north a couple of hours to the Oasis, a "rest area" along the side of the main road where we got a cabin and were able to hike to see a panorama of the surrounding rainforest and savannah.


(Interestingly, when our book said that the "newly completed" road connecting Lethem and Georgetown was "now all-weather," I took that to mean it was paved. Wrong-o!)

The next day, the real adventure began. We really wanted to go to Surama, an Amerindian village 25KM north that was known for its affordable eco-lodge and beautiful rainforest and savannah surroundings. But when the Oasis told us it would cost us $80 US to hire a car to drive this short distance, we balked...and (moms, don't read this!) hitched a ride with a guy we met at the rest area who was heading that way anyway.

OK, that sounds a lot worse than it was--he was a tour operator with a company jeep and also had two other passengers with him, so it really wasn't that sketchy. But, it gave us a taste for how easy hitchhiking was in this country, which was to come in handy a few days later...

But first, we needed to walk to Surama, which was actually 5.8KM (almost 4 miles) from the junction with the main road where we were dropped off. We knew this in advance and had accepted that it would be a long slog into town carrying our 30-lb bags, but we geared up and did it. We even spotted this pair of scarlet macaws en route, which seemed like a good sign for wildlife to come.



The thing is, no one had told us that once we reached Surama proper, it was ANOTHER 3miles walk to the Eco Lodge, which was well on the outskirts of the small cluster of buildings on the savannah known as "town." So we walked and walked and walked in the direction the woman in town had pointed, and finally we got there.

(When we told the people at the lodge that we had walked in from Surama junction, they looked at us like we were completely insane. They were probably right, but we also thought that paying $80 for a taxi was insane!)

Anyway, we stayed two nights in Surama, and it was one of the highlights of our trip so far for me. We saw lots of birds and a few monkeys in the beautiful, untouched rainforest and out on the savannah that surrounded the eco-lodge.

On our boat trip up the Burro Burro river, we saw loads kingfishers, herons, swallows, macaws, and some capuchin monkeys. Here is a great shot Andy got of a kingfisher.



Turkey vulture:


And here are the bees that decided to attack my bag on the boat. Notice how well they match my bag!


The rainforest was also chock-full of these millipedes, and on our hike up Mount Surama, Andy and the guide convinced me to let one crawl on my arm. Yes, I've officially lost my mind.


Aaand, remember how I said I'd come back to hitchiking? Well, when it was time to leave Surama, we were told it would be $25 US to be driven the 6 miles to the junction, where we could wait for a minibus running the 12-hour route to Georgetown. Now that we knew how long the shlep was and could mentally prepare, we turned down the taxi offer and, once again, strapped on our packs for a long, long slog by foot to the main road.

Two hours and over 500 choruses of "999 bottles of beer/guava-pineapple juice/milkshake etc." later (we switched beverages every 10 choruses and got pretty creative), we arrived at the shop at the junction. It was 12 noon. And we were told that there would not be a minibus arriving until 10PM, and that it wouldn't actually leave the junction until 4AM. Crap.

But then, literally 30 seconds later, this truck pulls up...


I mean, it's like the gods of hitchhiking had sent us this ride. It was clearly meant to be!

So we road 12 hours in the back of an open supply truck over an unpaved road to Georgetown. This was my position for approximately the first 5 hours of it.


My view wasn't bad at all. Note the rainbow!


Of course, when we picked up three more people in Mabura, and it started to get dark, and then it started to rain and we all had to get under this dirty tarp, well, it was a bit less pleasant then. And three days later, Andy's and my butts and lower backs are still a little sore from our adventure.

But, hey, we made it, and saved somewhere between $50 and $100 on bus fare. Solid.

We'll have to do another post recapping all of the fantastic and cheap street food we have enjoyed in Georgetown--we took a lot of pictures. Tomorrow we are off to another country, Suriname and will try to check in from there if we can figure out how to surf the Web in Dutch.