● For full details on our route, transport info, hotel details, etc, look at our Google Maps page

Wednesday 18 June 2008

Jungle Trip

10th – 12th June

We chose Fluvial Tours for our Jungle trip, and at 8am on Monday morning, we met the other people in our group at the office, and headed to the river to jump on our boat. The trip upstream took 3 hours, on the Rio Beni then the faster flowing Rio Tuichi. On several occasions we had to get out of the boat and push as the water was too shallow to use the motor.

The camp is deep(ish) in the Madidi national park, and is a 10 minute walk from the river. Laden with supplies for the next three days, we hiked to the camp, getting our first taste of our new surroundings.

Our group consisted of 6 people – Adriano and Begonia from Spain, and Axel and Pia from Argentina. Our guide was Eliberto. The trip would be a test of our Spanish skills as Eliberto spoke very little English, although the other group members, all native Spanish speakers, spoke very good English.

Over the course of the 3 days, we took several different walks into the Jungle, to view different plants and animals. The photos don’t really do justice to the kinds of things that we saw, it was difficult to capture the scale of the place with the camera. We both agreed that the part of the jungle we were in wasn’t as thick as we expected and the canopy was not as high as we had read about. Nevertheless it was a strange feeling to be immersed in a thick green world where everywhere you turned looked the same and without the guide we would have been lost within minutes. Although there are some unmarked trails, it is very easy to stray off these and the guide was using tracking techniques to record the path we were taking. This was especially important on the walks that we took after dark, the other group who was staying in the camp at the same time as us did manage to get lost on one of their walks, and it was only by luck that they managed to get back onto one of the trails!

We spotted a variety of animals, including monkeys (see photos), wild pigs, a variety of birds and many different insects. We were shown lots of different plants with toxic properties such as venomous sap from one of the largest trees in the Jungle. As it was raining on the morning of our second day, we used the time to make rings and necklaces from some of the things that we had found on the forest floor. There’s a business in making and selling these things and we realised why so many people are selling this type of thing on the street – it’s so cheap to make!

The return journey, downstream, was a little quicker than the last time we had been on the river, as there had been a lot of rain through the night. The river had turned a very muddy brown, and it promised to be another bumpy ride (now the norm for any type of transport in Bolivia!) We were back in Rurre in half the time it had taken us to get upstream 2 days earlier!

No comments:

Visitors Since 19th May 2009...