Hola!
So, I’ve been REAAAALLY bad at keeping up to date with this and I apologise. So I am promise I am going to keep this brief but still tell you about all the awesome stuff I’ve been up to since I arrived in Bolivia.
My first stop was Copacabana, a sleepy town the other side of Lake Titicaca from Peru. I spent a few days here relaxing at an awesome hostel called Joshua Eco hostel whose mission was to be completely self-sustainable and had incredible vegetarian food, very comfy hammocks and free yoga classes!
One day I took the boat over to Isla Del Sol, an island the Incas believed was the birthplace of the sun! On the boat I met two Dutch girls (yes more Dutch people!) Marjolein and Sara. We spent the night on the island and had a brilliant dinner at a restaurant called Las Velas which was in the middle of a forest and had no electricity, so everything was by candlelight.
I returned to copacabana the next day and travelled to La Paz that evening where I met up with Sara and Marjolien again in the Wild Rover hostel. We had a few drinks at the bar that night and ended up in one of La Paz’s infamous clubs. The next day I had a much needed lie-in and we explored a little of the local area however the following day I got to see much more during a walking tour, which took us to the witches market, a couple of churches, plazas and taught us a lot about the culture of the city.
The next day was full of food and finished off with a trip on the Telefonica, a huge network of ski-lifts that the president has built to connect the sprawling districts of the city. It was beautiful seeing the city from above and being able to see the sunset and the millions of twinkling lights as far as the eyes could see.
In the morning we caught a flight into the Amazon rainforest for the exciting activity I booked a while ago, a three day wildlife tour on the Amazon river! The flight there was beautiful, over the Andes and the incredible jungle. Getting off the plane was a bit of a shock, as we had come from the colder weather in La Paz to the hot and crazily humid climate of Rurrenabaque. We relaxed by the pool at the hostel trying to escape the heat and prepared for our excursion the next day with Fluvial Travel. We left the hostel at 9:30 the following morning and zoomed into the jungle on a very dusty and bumpy road in a rickety Toyota. After three hours of driving and the occasional stop to view some road-side wildlife, we reached the river where our little boats were waiting for us.
We travelled along the river for 2 hours in our boats. The first alligator and capybara we saw we took tons of photos and stopped to watch for a while, however by the end of the 2 hours we had seen countless numbers of both and it had almost become normal.
Our camp was basic but charming and the food was delicious! We woke up with the sounds of talapoin monkeys scuttling over our heads and sometimes even poking their heads into our room to see if there was some stray food they could cheekily grab lying around.
That morning we got suited and booted for our first activity, anaconda hunting. Yep, really. Our guide wasn’t the most talkative guy so we followed him through snake infested fields with not much of an idea of what we were about to do. Soon the fields turned to a marsh which got deeper and deeper until we all had swamp water in our boots.
Trudging through a swamp where you know anacondas, rattlesnakes, and alligators are living is a strange experience, but to be honest my biggest concern was trying not to get my wellies stuck in the thick mud. We were all getting tired and a bit frustrated with the lack of information when we heard that another group had found a snake. I was desperate for all my effort not to be in vain and so marched straight through a VERY deep part to get to where the snake had been spotted. Luckily we all got there in one piece and got the chance to see this beautiful animal up close.
That afternoon we all had lunch and a siesta before jumping back in our trusty boat for a spot of fishing, piranha fishing. We tried a few spots with little luck but at our third area we managed to catch 11 of the fish using fresh meat as our bait. When I say ‘we’ managed to catch I really mean that our guide managed to catch, the rest of the group were all pretty awful at it. We are the piranhas for dinner that night and they were actually delicious, an Amazonian version of fish&chips!
I woke up the next day to a very strange sound and it took me a while to realise that it was a howler monkey. The noise was unbelievably loud and like nothing I have ever heard before, almost alien! The howling went on for about 40 mins and after snoozing for a while afterwards in relative silence we started the day. And what an amazing day it was! We took the boat for about 20 mins past the alligators we had become accustomed to and got to a wider and deeper area of the river. Here the guide stopped the boat and told us to jump in. Yep, jump into the water that we were all too aware was teeming with alligators and piranhas (and who knows what else)! Nevertheless, I did it. It may seem crazy, and looking back it probably was, but the reasoning behind it was that in that part of the river lived the beautiful and elusive pink Amazonian dolphins!
We swam close to a pod of them for a while, which was absolutely magical! We then got back in the boat and went slightly downstream and just watched them making bubbles and giving us a glimpse of their fins and noses every so often. We returned pretty chuffed, showered, had our final delicious meal and rode the boat back to where our cars were waiting to pick us up to take us back to Rurrenabaque. During the car journey we got one final wildlife wonder, when the driver stopped the car and guided us to see a sloth and her baby chilling out in a tree, which was just the cherry on top for me!
Those three days were seriously some of the most surreal, exciting and adventurous days I’ve experienced and I highly recommend to anyone who is thinking of visiting Bolivia (just remember your suncream and insect repellant!)
The next day in Rurrenabaque Marjolein, Sara and I went on a hike next to the river in the morning and in the afternoon took a quick boat ride to the other side of the river, where you can find an abandoned 5-star hotel, which it’s rumoured that Brad Pitt once stayed in. I don’t know the full history (you’ve got google for that) but the reason it was abandoned has something to do with one of the preset dents of the country being killed, apparently. It’s been unused since 2010 and the buildings are really starting to crumble, we walked through old hotel suites, still with beds and working taps, under roofs now habituated by bats, past a kitchen with cutlery and pans still on the drying rack, and to the natural waterfall pool which must have been the centre point of the once lavish hotel.
We left Rurrenabaque with a head full of new memories and returned to the now stormy La Paz, where we got ripped off by the taxi driver straight away (classic) and spent the rest of the day relaxing and eating. I’m now on a bus in the main terminal at La Paz, having said a fond goodbye to Sara, waiting to leave with Marjolein for our next stop Sucre.
Wow, I’m quite proud of how relatively concise that post was, I hope you enjoyed!
Emma x
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