|
|
Title:
|
|
|
Region:
|
|
|
Countries:
|
|
|
Date:
|
|
|
My Rating (out of 100):
|
|
|
|
(written by Rick Geisenger)
There are 4 choices of airlines to take you into the Amazon Basin. One is Aero Boliviano, which only has a handful of flights per week, and most of them depart up to 24 hours late (but they don’t tell you, you just sit in the airport until they feel like flying). Another is the military airline, with the same sort of record but with the added inconvenience of having no seats. The next is the "Meat Plane," which transports various agricultural carcasses, charges your fare by the kilo (like the meat), makes you sit in a pool of blood, and has the worst crash record in commercial aviation. The last is Amazonas Air, which has daily flights between La Paz and a little jungle frontier town called Rurrenabaque for $57. We chose the latter.
Amazonas´ plane is a little 16-seat single engine job. Our pilots were wearing leather bomber jackets and aviation sunglasses, of course (I was sitting right behind them). You really feel insignificant waiting on the runway in this little Tylenol-with-wings as huge commercial jets come screeching down in front of you. Planes have to land at twice their usual speed up there, because the air is so thin at 14,000 feet, which makes them all the more imposing. Eventually our turn for the runway came along, and along we went with a thumbs-up from the ground crew.
Sometimes you sit in a 747 and wonder how that thing stays in the air. That feeling is magnified a hundredfold in a flying coffin with a lawnmower engine, which is thrown side to side and up and down by every breeze. We were all strapped snugly to the seats to prevent unnecessary travel.
We quickly reached the edge of the high plains and the Andes reared up directly below us. It was the most amazing scenery I’ve ever seen on a flight. We were so close to the peaks that you could see the tracks left by various mountaineering groups. I’m sure that everyone on the plane (maybe including the pilots) was thinking over and over again of the crash scene in 'Alive' where a strong downdraft threw their plane into a rocky summit. We were certainly close enough for that to happen, and at over 20,000 feet I’m sure that the plane couldn’t have taken us any higher to allow more buffer.
The mountains ended as quickly as they had begun, and dropped many thousands of feet directly into the Jungle. We now had plenty of air below us. The pilot followed a river (possibly the Rio Beni) for about an hour until we reached a little rectangular field cut out of the trees. Oh crap, that's the landing strip! Some of the landing strips around here are former cocaine refinery camps, but I don't think this was one, much though it looked the part. We executed a tight 90-degree turn and began a kamikaze dive bomb maneuver, which leveled out just in time to plop us into the grass. We came to a stop, somehow, with plenty of room before the strip ended abruptly at the jungle wall.
Rurrenabaque is a little town aside the Rio Beni with dirt roads, surrounded by little grass huts. It's been described as the Katmandu of the Amazon, for it's remoteness and position as the jumping off point for excursions into the jungle and the 'pampas'.
Now, after the 1.5-hour flight into the jungle (and a night of beer at the mosquito pub), we jumped into a 4wd for a 4-hour trip down the road to Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa is on the edge of the pampas, our destination. I'm not sure of the literal translation of 'pampas,' but I think it means something to the effect of "smelly swampland full of big snakes and alligators." Or, "place to dump tourist bodies after you rob them".
It was a long, bumpy, dusty, hot, slow drive down a road dotted with police check stops, which is totally impassible in the wet season (and in a broken down Toyota, as we found out later on the way back). The driver slowed down as we passed a marsh along the road, and the guide pointed out the alligators. One was floating belly-up, and the guide pointed out, ´Finito´. Ahh good, a new word for the Spanish vocabulary.
At Santa Rosa we were fed a quick lunch of some kind of luke warm, tough, bitter tasting meat with cold rice. Apparently, a taste of Bolivian prison food was part & parcel of the tour.
Finally the fun began, with a 3 hour motorized canoe trip up a tributary to the Beni, which itself runs into the Amazon hundreds of miles away. Our destination was a small camp in the Pampas, but this last part of the journey buried the destination in irrelevance. Here was a small, slow moving river lined with alligators and caimans. Every ten feet or so another huge lizard would dash from the banks and watch us pass from the safety of the murky water. And to top that, the river also happens to be infested with playful pink dolphins. Go figure.
During the boat trip we also spotted howler monkeys high in the treetops, spider monkeys which appeared from the lower bushes as our guide called them with a clicky-squeaky sound, strange and huge birds, and gigantic rodents the size of small bears. I can't think of the name of this species offhand, but they've been described as big retarded guinea pigs.
The camp was nothing to write home about, a small hut of wood and mosquito netting with mattresses and individual mosquito nets inside. We set up housekeeping in our respective beds/mosquito sanctuaries and were fed something marginally better than the prison lunch, and awaited the morning's anaconda hunt!
In the morning we boated a short distance to a huge swamp, and plunged right in. We were knee to hip deep in smelly, sulphery, water and mud full of centuries of decaying matter. I had a bit of a problem with my sandals in the mud, and as I caught up to the group, the guide pointed at my feet and laughed, "los sandalos es finito!" There's that word again. Sure enough, the only evidence that I was ever shod was a single Velcro strap around one ankle.
Then we saw the two who were up ahead chasing something. Anaconda! Sure enough, they had caught a small (well, three meter!) anaconda. We took some pictures of it and let it go among it's merry way to eat frogs and grow huge. Seconds later, the same two were pointing at another movement in the muck, and the guide ran to catch it. The two suddenly backed off, calling "leave it! leave it! Es el Cobra!"
Uh, Cobra??
Seems this swamp is also crawling with cobras. The guide caught it by the tail and swung it round and round. While this was going on, somebody asked the other guide if the bite was poisonous. The answer was "Si, Finito."
There’s that word again.
The centrifugal force of swinging the snake kept it from turning and biting the guide, and eventually it was too tired (dizzy?) to react and they caught its head and brought it over. "Want to hold her?"
Uh, no.
They let it go. Unfortunately, they had been gripping it too tightly (go figure) and it wasn’t very energetic when they put it down. After some prodding it moved into the grass, but I’m not wholly convinced that it survived the ordeal. It made Jon and I remark how good it is that we have a "look but don't touch" orientation to tourism back home. The rest of the group seemed quite excited that they’d nearly squeezed the life out of a snake.
We slogged around the swamp for the rest of the morning, catching another couple of anacondas and steering clear of another five or six cobras. The guide nonchalantly pointed out the occasional cobra as he walked right by it! These things were everywhere under the sludge, and there I was tromping around in bare feet. Not that they couldn't have bitten through anybody's pant leg anyways, but it was still unnerving.
After finding our way out of the swamp, attempting to wash off the stench in the river (something nibbled on my toe -- uh, piranha?) and having some more prison food, we reentered the canoe for more "fun". Jon and I didn't realize that we were off to inhumanely catch another creature.
After about an hour of serene cruising through the monkeys and pink flamingos, the one guide grabbed something that he had in the boat and motioned to the other guide who was driving. We slowed down and veered towards the shore, where the first guide extended a crude noose with a tree branch.
He was able to slip the noose over a young alligator's head and cinch it tight around it's throat. It flailed and squirmed and gagged as the boat dragged it to a muddy shore where we could land, it's head slamming against the boat several times. Once we landed, the guide dragged the exhausted lizard ashore and hogtied it, as it gagged and squeaked and struggled for breath. For the next half hour, the other part of our group took photos of each other holding the helpless creature, in a "see what the great hunter catch" sort of pose. It reminded me of the old movies you see where the English genteel would go on African safaris with their hundreds of enslaved shirpas, shooting wildlife from the safety of their elephants and bringing home the teeth to prove their masculinity. I saw even more why our "look but don't touch" rules are so important.
The last day was more catching of wildlife, but it didn't occur to me to be at all offensive, maybe just from social conditioning. This day was piranha fishing!
The minute you put your baited hook into the water, the line was abuzz with the little wallet-sized fish. The tough part was to hook them, they have small mouths and the hooks were pretty big and dull. They mostly just ripped the meat to shreds on the hook (hey, we'd been swimming in this water, supposedly with the dolphins!) The usual method of pulling them in was to wait for one to have a good grip on a chunk of meat and just yank it in, and the fish's greed would pull it along with.
We went back to camp with our catch and the cook fried them up for us. They're tasty but bony. After lunch we started the long journey back to Rurre, made especially long by a faulty something-or-other in the Land Cruiser which allowed us to drive about a quarter mile at a time without stopping and savoring the heat. We got back to town at around ten PM, and are now stuck here until the next available flight to La Paz (better to wait for a plane than to take the 18-hour-not-including-breakdowns jeep trip).
At least it's not cold, the mosquito pub has plenty of cheap beer, and I have a big supply of malaria tablets.
This story is Finito.
Rick
|
|