Welcome To The Jungle, We Have Fun And Games

Many people like to wax romantic about the jungle, an amazing place with vast amounts of different and unique animals and plants, a place that seems to be mystical in appearance and feel. A place where one can feel connected to the earth as they breath in the oxygen abundant air. I like to call it "The Most Itchy Place On Earth."
We based ourselves out of a town deep in the jungle called Rurrenbeque. Deep in the jungle but not so deep that we could not get a slice of pizza or shots of booze with 'funny' names like 'Dengue Fever'. Our first trip into the wilderness was actually into the Pampas, a water logged area where a person can walk around in the 'dry' season. To get there we first had to take a four hour jeep ride. This is the 'dry' season road.

During our ride the jeep broke down, but in a move that would make McGuiver proud, our driver fixed it, and I am not kidding, with a flip flop and a hammer which are now a permanent part of the jeep.

While we were waiting, we all got a chance to take in the local farm house we were stuck at and observed the "baby pig feeding hour", that put everyone who witnessed it off bacon.

Back into the jeep and a slightly bumpy ride to the river where we transferred all of our gear and waited a bit for our guide to be ready, this was to be our last pit stop for a few days. As we stood around waiting looking at the river wonder what animal we might see I noticed that there was an alligator on the river bank. I backed away from the water and wondered how long it would take for the alligator to eat me.

What I did not know yet was he was only one of the hundreds of alligators and camin we would see in the next few days. They lined the river banks on both sides, sometimes floating in the water, usually just board with us as we passed by.
Here we are in the boat

The amazing thing about Bolivia is the amount of diversity there. In all of the U.S. AND Canada there are 700 bird species, in the Maddied park in Bolivia, with one tenth of one percent of the land of the u.S. and Canada there are 1000 different bird species.

With that fact in hand I thought our trip would be a lot like an old Hitchcock movie with birds flying at us from all directions. This was not the case, we saw plenty of birds but the camin and alligators had to outnumber them 20 to 1.

We hung around the Pampus and it rained hard and heavy for a day, then we went swimming with dolphins. Yes, there are dolphins in the river, that crazy pampus. Pink river dolphins, apparently they keep the alligators away so it is O.K. to swim.
Here is a photo of the largest rodent in the world, they would hang out sometimes on the river banks also, but not in the numbers of the alligators.

I can not even start to think of how big the mouse trap would have to be in your kitchen if you found out your house was infested with these things. We thought they were wombats, but I am not sure if anyone knows, please let us know.
Here is a photo of the Alligator that came into our camp. He just wondered up from the river and hung out in front of the kitchen area and waited to be fed scraps from lunch.

He was pretty old and did not have a lot of teeth left but still, it was a little disheartening to look out side from lunch and see this.

On the last day we went for a walk into the Pampus, we were issued rubber boots that cam up to our knees, which was great until we walked through water that came up to our butts.

The water looked like the water from the first Star Wars film, you know the part where Luke, and Han and everyone are trapped in the Death Stars trash compacter, remember what that water looked like, well that was exactly the kind of water that was filling our boots, I just waited for someone to get dragged under by some outer space one-eyed monster. Not that the real life bugs and snakes were not creepy enough.

Here is a photo of Lotta, while we were Piranha fishing.

O.K. so out of the Pampus and back to town, then right into the jungle. The jungle really lived up to the hype, in that it was very much like a jungle. There were not nearly the number of bugs that I thought would be out there but the ones that WERE there could bite though a bullet poof vest. We took a boat out again, and here is a photo of our great captain, a wonderful man who jumped out and PULLED the boat forward a few times.

This is a photo of the caterpillar of whom our guide told us "Do not touch, if you touch you WILL go to the hospital."

The same could be said of the fire ants, the fire ants only stay on a specific tree. They live on that tree and the tree gives the ants some sort of sap that they live on, in return the fire ants attack anything that touches the tree for more than a half a second. Our guide told us that a long time ago, i.e. last week, jungle villages would tie men who stole or women who cheated on their husbands to the tree for fives minutes as punishment. I asked if men who cheated were also tied to the tree? "ha ha you are so funny gringo" he said. well he did not actually say that, but he did chuckle when he said "no".
A good rule to follow in the jungle, as well as an expensive pottery store or leper colony is: DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING.
A nice photo of the river and jungle.

The girls showing off their jewelry they made out of jungle seeds and the such.

I think the women would have been happy to just to make stuff for the whole trip. A good word for any man out there looking for love, show a woman how to make jewelry out of jungle seeds and you will own her heart.
Another cool thing in the jungle are leaf-cutter ants. They cut off part of a leaf and then take it back to home base on their backs. They form amazingly long lines from their tree to the ant hill. It looks a lot like leafs moving through the jungle, but after four days we had to go back into town. The town we would be stuck in for a bit. While the 17 hour bus ride was a lot of fun we decided to take a plane back to LaPaz, the plane ride is only one hour. Unless of course it rains because no planes can take off in the rain or even shortly after the rain because they have to wait for the runway to dry because the runway is grass. I am not a big fan of flying anyway so the 18 seat, grass runway thing made me a little nuts.
But we did not have to take off for some time because of the rain, we were lucky in that we were stuck with some good friends we made on our trip

and another dog wearing a sweater

After a day or two of Bolivian paperwork and weather we were off and it was a wonderful view that made it worth while.
Well, it is coming down to the wire, only a week of travel time left and it is feeling very short indeed. Next we head back to Peru, up the coast, to Lima and back home. I think we may be in for a case of reverse culture shock, as in cars will stop for red lights and stuff.

Road of intense super death and rock n roll

Back in La Paz. After a bunch of running around we found ourselves in La Paz with a week before our friend Jason came to town. Just to update, me and Lotta met for the first time in our lives in Cambodia in 2003, when we were both traveling. This momentous meeting was created by our mutual friend, Jason, who we had both met at different times but on the same trip through south-east Asia. Flash forward to today. We had been e-mailing Jason, who is a native of and still lives in L.A., about our trip. It turned out he had about a month in which he could do some traveling and we thought it would be cool if he came on down to Bolivia, we said as much and he said "what the heck, I´ll be there." So, he was coming to La Paz on the 11th and we had a week to kill.
Lucky for us that La Paz is a great city. We decided to go to some ruins that were just outside of the city, only a day trip really. The ruins of Tiahuanaco, a pre-Inca civilization, were uhmm sort of boring. Apparently, this was a pretty great society and they did a bunch of stuff, and invented some farming and building methods and did some other stuff, but they should have put some more time into making things that were not so dull. The least they could have done was make their civilization "mysterious" or make some big, strange structures that no one understands. Maybe a 40 ton rat/lizard statue made out of rock, that could have been put here by U.F.O.´s hey, I don´t know, but something. O.K. I am not really being fair, the Tiahuanaco´s did have everything I am complaining they did not have but every society after them destroyed what they made so all that is left are some rocks and monoliths. The Monoliths are cool, I will have to admit. I suppose some of it is ruins burn out. After a while a person gets a bit burned out on the ruins. There really were some cool things there, for one thing they worshiped the Puma and had a bunch of statues of Patcha Puma, which is sort of like "mother Puma" but really it is just fun to say¨"Patcha Puma" a lot. I bout a small Patcha Puma statue for good luck. The natives think it will bring luck, but I am not so sure how much luck a non-practiced, completely destroyed religion will bring me. None-the-less I think a cartoon based on the life and times of "Patcha Puma" would be a big hit in the states. Sorry got a little side tracked there.
The Tiahuanaco people made a big pyramid, what no one told them is that in order to be remembered they have to make pyramids much higher. This "Pyramid was only about 16 meters tall, but very wide, about 200 sq meters. A good PR agency would have told the Tiahuanacoians that wide pyramids are soooo like 234 B.C.
One of the cool things they had was a basement, very modern at the time, decorated with faces, the first face is the most modern.

They also had a monolith that went on a rampage and started beating up monoliths from other excavation sites. Apparently, he was carved out of some poor quality rock, left out in the elements and was just never really cared for or given the support that other, much more responsible monoliths were given. Anyway, one night he had too much Chicha (a local corn beer) and he just went nuts and cut an Inca condor spirit statue, with a broken bottle. They caught him and threw him in this barbed wire cage, they also had some guards with jackhammers just in case.

O.K. although I never get tired of it, I suppose I should stop bagging on the Tiahuanaco civilization, I mean it is not like they do not have enough problems, I mean not existing anymore and all.
Just some random things about La Paz. McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy´s Watch out . Bolivia has it´s own fast food chain and it is coming for you. Soon my friends, on every coroner there will be bright, new Mega Burger. Right now this young up and comer busting out of it´s seams with over three locations, but I think it is only a matter of time before happy meals are a thing of the past and all kids are whining to their mothers to get a "Mega PicPoc" What is this? welllll a mega picpoc is a very large plastic cup with a cardboard divider on the top and a straw sticking out of it. On top your fries and chicken bits are divided and you suck on the straw to get your (divided from the food) drink on the bottom. It is really an amazing invention and easy to walk around with, hmmmm if you see a "Craig Burger" pop up just forget you saw this.

Banks in U.S. are backed up to 100,000.00 dollars so you have some security when you use the bank. Banks in Bolivia are back up by however many shots the guard with the machine gun or shotgun can get off on anyone stupid enough to try and rob the bank. Every bank we saw there were VERY armed guards outside.

I had sort of mixed feeling on this. On one hand I felt very secure, it is nice to have a lot of security around. On the other hand, WHY DO YOU NEED SO MANY GUARDS!.
We also ended up seeing the new Fantastic Four movie for like three dollars which was fun and the movie was made much better simply by seeing it in Bolivia, I recommend that if you have to see a bad movie you first go to a developing nation to watch it.
On a movie note we found a place that sold movies and we bought one, The Transformers. I think the movie had come out in the theaters about three hours earlier and now I hold the DVD in my hand for two dollars, God bless Bolivia.
So, we walked around, ate some stuff, and poked some things with a stick, but then Jason came in to town. He showed up in the middle of the night at our hostel in tip top shape after a very long trip from L.A. to Lima, to La Paz.

The next day checked out the city and ran into a guy who asked us if we wanted to check out the prison. This might seem like a bad idea but we read about it in the guide book. You can have a guide take you into a Bolivian prison and talk with some of the less dangerous inmates about their experiences. In a Bolivian prison you can live as well or poorly as you can afford. If you have 20 grand you can have your own apartment with catered food, a sauna if you want. Many inmates bring their family into the prison to live with them. If you have no money you have to do odd jobs to earn money to pay for your food or shower. Anyway, we thought it would be interesting. They guy we were talking to already had to English girls interested, so in our group of five we said yes. He lead us to the prison said it was five dollars each. We gave him the money and he went to the prison and came back and said we had to wait for two hours. He would meet us back here in two hours. Yes, it sounded like a scam and in fact it was a scam and we never saw that guy again. But, what would a trip to a different country be without having someone rip you off for five bucks. In all fairness I can not even blame the different country, the guy who ripped up off was obviously from the the U.S. Oh well.
That day we also booked a bike ride. The ride would be about 36 miles and would take at the end of it we would take a bus the rest of the way into the jungle. We wanted to take the bike ride because it is "THE MOST DANGEROUS ROAD IN THE WORLD". In those 36 miles you go from 12,000 feet to 6,000 feet.
We saw the tour company, mountain madness, that offer a mountain bike ride down "the most dangerous road in the world" but I took it with a grain of salt, I come from the U.S. the home of the over hyped non-event. In the U.S. a thing may be advertised as "most deadly", or "super-intense" but in the land of the sue-happy we all know that no matter how dangerous a thing may look it is perfectly safe because no one wants to get sued. What I learned quickly is that Bolivia is not really hip to advertising yet. The tourist industry is just starting to take off so when they call something "The most dangerous road in the world" it is no joke.

Also, keep in mind that by Bolivian standards a "safe" road is a one lane slightly washed out dirt mountain pass with rock slides and bandits.
How does a road get the moniker of "most dangerous"? It was given by an Inter-American Development Bank report. An average of 26 vehicles per year disappeared over the edge. The road is just 10 feet (3.2 meters) wide, most of it with 1800 foot (600 meter) drops, with waterfalls spilling over the dirt to make slippery mud in certain spots. Most of it is gravel with mid-sized rocks that sit around waiting to kill. The road use to be MUCH more dangerous about 8 months ago. A new paved road has been made and almost all vehicle traffic uses THAT road now. Before then, bike riders would have to hang out on the edge while trucks and buses drove by,because upcoming traffic gets to stay by the mountain.

We broke into two groups of four each and one guide. One group, the fast group and one slow. I was in the fast group but I was by far the slowest in the fast group. After going down the road I can say the only way it is NOT the most dangerous road is if there is another road made of LAVE, where tigers try to devour you and men sit in caves trying to sell you AMWAY. Only that road would be more dangerous

Ever since the new road was built, "DEATH" on the road has declined but don´t worry bikers still zip out over the edge just in time to think "ummmmmh oop´s" Our guide would stop us at certain spots to point out where "just last week two Germans were racing their bikes and ran into each other and both went over the edge" Some of the guys in our group complained that they wanted to go faster, where as I thought that walking might be too fast of a clip for me. Anyway we lived and it was very pretty.
Once down from the mountain we stayed in the town at the bottom, then we booked out tickets on the bus into the jungle.

We got to our "bus station" in the middle of no where at two in the afternoon. We waited for our bus until seven. The upshot was meeting two very nice sisters from Canada. At seven our bus got there and we started our 16 hour night bus, on what can only be considered the second most dangerous road in the world. With Bolivians sleeping literally underfoot, and on top of us the bus ride was.....an experience.
Happy to be in the jungle we showered and drank. Next stop.....Jungle
Drinking some beer in the jungle.

Can I Have Some Salt With That Flat?

This week found us at Salar De Uyuni, or the great big salt flats. I must say that before coming to Bolivia that I did not really know much about it other than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid got killed there. What I have found out so far is that Bolivia is one of the most amazing places on Earth. Highest, Largest, Most Bio diverse, these are all descriptions of landscapes that get tossed around all of the time here. It was Lotta who came up with the idea to go the salt flats. I was very enthusiastic about the idea "uhhh it´s a lot of salt, right" was my first jump up and down statement. After dragging my feet about going "ohhh can we go see the hot sauce lake, and the nacho valley next" we committed. Turns out this was good because there is nothing like this place on earth and to top it off the salt flat was really only the first day. We booked our tour with four other people: Michell from Colorado, Lucas from Australia, and Amanda and David from the U.K. Turned out that everyone was cool, good thing too because we spent every hour together for the next few days. The tour consisted of our driver/guide driving over the salt flats and pointing things out to us in Spanish.

Our first stop was a train graveyard-0000hhhhhhhh very scary, it is a place where all of the trains come to die.

O.K. I am not sure why they did the train thing but we snapped some picks anyway. By now we had all hear about the amazing Salt Flats. 3653 meters high, 12,106 Kilometers wide, a massive amount of nothing. A huge lake evaporated some 14,000 years ago leaving...well.. salt and some mini lakes. So, after the train thing we zipped right back into town to hang out in the jeep outside of the driver/guides house for.... well who knows what... while we passed the time hanging out in the jeep we got to see some lady butcher a sheep? cow? something in the back of her car.

Now it was time to hit the salt flats. They lived up to the hype, and there really was nothing there but salt (well duh) none the less I found myself just sort of looking around going "Wow". Here is most of our Salt flat crew.

Here is also Jeep we drove around in which Lucas aptly christened "The Bullet".

It was a great jeep that Alfredo, our Driver/guide would pop the hood up on every other time we stopped to gently massage the hamsters that kept the jeep running.
Here is Lotta on top of the world.

A photo of the two of us because nothing is more sexy than salt and lots of it.

I had to lick the salt too because I had to make sure as a matter of fact I had to lick a rock later and even a llama but it would not stand still.



But, salt was just a part of it, later that day we came to an island in the middle of the salt flat, an island full of cactus, somehow some water got out there.

Next we all sat down for some lunch, our guide made everything and it was good, he made some pasta, fried style, and it was fine after we used Lotta's secret: drown it in ketsup.

Then everyone got really creative and we took some goofy photos.

Back into the jeep and out of the salt flats. Into some amazing landscapes. It was like the MTV of landscapes, every hour an completely different one appeared, you would just space out for a little while, then look around and think "Am I on THIS planet?" Fist there was the nothing landscape.

Then we hit mountain, and strange rock formations.


Then a lake that looked red because of algae, plankton, and deposits of sodium, magnesium, and gypsum.

For all you people who love birds, we saw some flamingos. O.K. so that might not be so cool BUT, these flamingos live in icy lagoons at 5000 meters high, and they have developed a way to filter out the alkaline water of the lake from their food. So, these flamingos ROCK, alas I did not get a very good photo of them but you can see yet another funky colored lake.

Here is another great mountain and lake and the water is probably thick with Borax or micro fossils, or mayo or something.

The nights did get cold and once we reached the hotel, and I am being soooooo generous calling it a hotel. Really, more of an old army barracks, speaking of which while we were driving we got to see a bunch of military guys drilling for something, but I hope NOTHING because to be realistic Bolivia's military conquest record has been nothing short of CRAP. Sorry Bolivia but it is so true, it seems every time they get aggressive they actually end up loosing their own land. But we did see a lot of very tough looking Chuck Norris shoulder rolls going on.
So, two chilly nights later we were off on the bone shaking ride again. We found some snow and some of the strangest wind swept rocks I have seen.

Lucas made a snow Llama that was so cool I had to get some shots of it.

More rock filled roads and then another cold night where a rabbit hopped into where we were eating and chewed on a chicken bone, the creepy rabbit invaded our dreams, "bad bad scary rabbit."

We woke up very early to see the geyser basin. Bubbling mud pots, and bellowing sulfur, then after days of not showering we all endded up at a hot springs that was heated from the core of the earth. Never have I liked the core of the earth more.

Oh and with all of the amazing landscapes we also had come cookies with happy faces on them.

Overall we had a great time on that tour, our tour buddies made it just that much more fun. Once we got back into town we waited for our train that was leaving at midnight, we backtracked to Oruro and then worked our way back to La Paz, where we will be meeting up with a friend of ours from L.A. who is flying down

This has been a pretty photo intense blog because I have been able to find an Internet place that has a really good connection, if you have any comments or questions about anything in the blog feel free to ask. If you would like further information about the countries and have some complex political or historical questions I will be sure to make up something that sort of sounds right.