Jungle medicine: Madidi National Park (Via Rurrenabaque)

Red howler monkey

On Sunday we met up with Mas and Suzanne and flew to Rurrenabaque. The airport is not really an airport. There is a landing strip and mini buses wait beside it to take you to the airport building (pretty much just a shed) and on to town for 10BOB unless a tour operator is collecting you from the airport. We decided to stay at a hostel reccommended to us by the Qiwis from the bike tour because it had a pool and a pet tucan and macaw (Ambibo or something like that). The Macaw turned out to be a little sadistic, not surprising when I saw how the tourists (mainly the male tourists) tormented the poor thing.
The others wanted to compare prices at other tour operators but we ended up going with Mashaquipe, the company we were wanting to go with anyway, and then we went and booked out flight back to La Paz for the night our tour finished.

Our friend, the macaw

Going up river

After a night of blaring TV and a couple episodes of very loud vomiting from the middle-aged, over-weight man next door, we had a terrible included breakfast. We decided we had enough time to go to a bakery people had reccommended and were glad we did, best quiche and chocolate croissant ever.
After getting on the boat to go up the Beni river we had to stop to get our tickets for the national park and fill out our details a million times. You then stop further up to hand a park ranger (I assume) part of your ticket and he explains the park, in Spanish. It´s about a 3hr boat ride to most of the tour operators (there are two that are a wopping 6 hours up river).

After lunch we went up river a little bit to a bamboo forest, not that I saw much bamboo while we were there. We walked around for about three hours and saw and heard red howler monkeys, heard a white turkey run away from us, heard an iguana run away and saw some tortoises. The accommodation was quite nice, the beds were a little saggy and the oiled wood had a bit of a smell to it. There was a nice area under a shelter with a number of hammocks and we sat there until dark and watched a lot of fire flies.

More howler monkeys

Jungle tucan

The next day we went across the river to visit a community. It wasn´t really a community, it was just one family and their banana and sugar cane plantation. We juiced some sugar can with a wooden cog thing and got to drink some. It was no where near as sweet as we were expecting but we didn´t finish our cups. Unlike the other group´s guide who filled his two litre bottle with it for later. We then walked through the plantation and our guide cracked some palm seeds and I ate a larvae out of one of them, it tasted like eating a bit of coconut cream to be honest. We saw a couple squirrels and a little troupe of squirrel monkeys. After lunch I had a shower and we packed our stuff up to go camp out by a river that night. I also discovered that sugar cane leaves will give you prickles if you touch them.

Getting Guardia from sugar cane juice?

The activity options are very flexible and we planned to camp by a river (not in their designated camp sites) the first night and then in one of the campsites the next. It was about a three hour walk to where we would sleep and it was quite a tough walk. There was only a path for the first little bit and there were 2 gullies to cross a long with a very steep climb down a land slide. When we reached the river we walked up stream a bit and came across tracks of jaguar, puma (which is just the same as the north american cougar) and tapir. Our sleeping arrangements consisted of wooden poles stuck in the ground with others running horizontal, for a tarp to hang over, all tied together with a part of the inside of the bark of balsa. We then had two to a mosquito net with a sleeping bag and foam sleeping mat each. Dinner was really good, and afterwards we went for a walk in the dark up the river. Because it is the dry season, we crossed the river a number of times, walking on sand-dirt most of the time. We saw a lot of footprints, got really close to a small owl-type bird and very close to a cayman. Sleeping was not good that night. It is unpleasant to sleep after a sweaty walk without a shower, on the hard ground. Brandon got sick in the middle of the night and woke up feeling like death. Yay...

Our camp

Because Brandon was feeling so horrible, I carried most of our stuff out, and it was heavy... Since we were walking down the river before we started our actual hike we had to put our shoes and socks on wet, sandy feet. Recipe for blisters. Halfway up the landslide I couldn´t keep carrying our bag so I swapped with Mas and took our bag back at the top. It was so hot and humid by this stage, I know I have never sweated that much in my life! Brandon threw up at the top and unfortunately (despite looking away and sticking my fingers in my ears), I sympathy spewed too. Embarassing... The rest of the walk back was pretty hard. Our guide, Avar had woven us fans from palm leaves and I was alternating between fanning myself and fanning Brandon, while trying not to fall down a ditch. As soon as I saw the camp, my shoes were off. We were meant to stay another day and two more nights in the jungle, but I knew Brandon wouldn´t want to walk the next day, so I asked if we could go to La Pampas a day early. A cold shower has never felt so good than that day and I decided to try to wash a pair of our pants, badly. Another guide found some bark and made Brandon a tea for Diarrohea, which I made him drink. We mostly just sat around for the afternoon and Brandon did start to get better. Just before dusk Avar took us for a walk near the lodge and we tried some cacao straight from the tree. There is a white flesh around the seed that is slightly tangy and the seed itself tastes similar to "raw" cacao you buy here but nowhere near as bitter. We got confimation that it was fine for us to go to La Pampas the next day, phew.

Our jungle trip with Mashaquipe was very good, I would definitely reccommend them. They have set itinaries listed on their website, but it´s actually really flexible. Another group did 3 days also and they walked to one campsite on their first morning, had lunch there, then walked on to the second campsite to stay they night. They then built a raft and rafted back to the lodge. This took in pretty much all the company had to offer in the way of walks and I think it´s probably the best option. The walk we did was much harder than the walks to their main camps, those are basically flat. It was nice because it really felt like you were walking through proper jungle because there was no path for most of the walk, and not many groups go that way.