Welcome to the Jungle!

After our trek, we had one day of relaxation before we were supposed to fly out for a pampas tour, and then a jungle tour. Well, in typical Bolivia fashion, they call us 8 hours before our flight and say it is cancelled, until the next day. This causes us to cancel our pampas tour. Oh well, the next day we flew out on a very sketchy twin prop plane to the town of Rurrenbaque. When we get to Rurrenbaque, the company tells us we won´t be leaving the next day as planned but the day after....we are used to this by now. We were OK with that, b-c the town looked pretty relaxed and fun. We go to check into our hostal, and ask for an AC room since it is about 99 degrees in the middle of the jungle. We were quickly laughed at and told, that we could have an AC room, but it wouldn´t do much good because the miner´s strike the we told you about in the earlier blog, has caused a gas shortage, and there is no electricity. We had a good time anyway, and paid a couple of bucks to have access to this pool on the top of a mountain overlooking the city, and hung out in the shade the next day!

After all this, the next day we took a 4 hour boat ride(twice as long as normal due to gas shortage) to the jungle camp. It was absolutely amazing. We have been to jungles in India, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos...but nothing like this. This was thick and lush jungle. About 30 meters after getting off the boat, on the walk to the campsite, Ben spotted a 6 ft. yellow snake right by the path. The next 2 days were spent on hikes through the jungle, seeing some amazing plant and wildlife. We both fell in love with this jungle. There were tons of monkeys, insects, spiders, snakes, caiman and we even found a fresh 9 ft. Anaconda skin. The guide said the skin could only have been hours old, because the ants would have eaten it if it was any older. The next day we went pirahna fishing, and spotted caimans at night. We had a good group and a great time!