Down in the jungle where nobody goes...

After a few days discovering the witches and prisoners of La Paz, we flew into Rurrenabaque (still Bolivia) in a glorified tin can of a plane owned by TAM, which is the Bolivian Military's commercial airline.

Please don't touch

Rurrenbaque took us back to the jungle towns of Asia: hair-curling humidity, mal-nourished dogs and stalls selling deet, ponchos and dubious bottles of suncream.

When people think Amazon, they think Brazil. I know we did. Yet the Amazon basin covers nine South American countries meaning you don’t have to take an expensive tour in Brazil to see it. Our backpacking budget breathed a sigh of relief.

Our luxury cabin

With the Aussies, Tess and Adrian, and the Kiwis, Simonne and Mike, we had booked a 3 day jungle/2 day pampas tour with Mashaquipe tours. The pampas are the low, flat wetlands, teeming with caymans, dolphins, birds, monkeys and more.

It was jungle first, and so we took a well-worn wooden boat to a cooperative jungle camp organised by indigenous people of the Tuichi River area.

Following in the footsteps of pumas

It was jungle heaven: spacious, scented wooden huts, lazy hammocks and butterflies providing decoration across the camp floor.

Our guide, Billy, was a walking encyclopaedia of the jungle. We followed tracks and looked and listened for animals, stifling giggles when Billy did the most loud and amazing imitations of their calls. Sometimes, we actually heard the animals replying to him. Billy, the original Tarzan.

Hundreds of beautiful butterflies

We chased through the trees to find brown capuchin monkeys, listened to the raucous calls of the howler monkeys, saw poisonous frogs and beastly spiders on night walks, touched the mangled and spiked branches of ancient, gnarly trees, tracked a puma just ten minutes from camp and followed the footsteps of anteaters.

The jungle is so thick and lush that it's hard to spot animals without spending weeks in it's heart.

Then came survival fishing. After finding maggots inside sugar cane plants to catch small fish...and using the small fish to find the big fish...we waited for a bite. But none came.

Med gets peckish

Vultures and condors swooped and glided overhead, stretching out to their full 3 metre wingspan and wiggling their long fingers in the breeze. Yet still none came. Eventually Billy, our guide, caught three huge salmon in his net. We would not go hungry tonight.


We then spent a night on the jungle floor (quite literally - with just a roll mat and net), watching electric blue and red macaws at sunset from a lookout, eating an amazing feast by candle light with our ears swarmed by the sounds of the jungle - more alive than ever at night. Mosquitoes - 34, Sally - 0.

Double, jungle rainbow

After a testing night's sleep on the hard floor, we arose for a delicious breakfast of pancakes, dulce de leche, fried cheese, fruit salad and empañadas. The food was sensational at every meal time, even in the middle of the jungle on a single-ringed stove.

Before our raft started to sink

After more macaw spotting, we built a raft to take us back to the main camp. The building itself went quite swimmingly and we set off down the river. Then disaster struck: Mike and Billy stood on the same log at exactly the same time and it snapped, cleanly, in two.

Turtle tanning

At that same moment, Med dropped the paddle. We were, quite literally, up the creek without a paddle. Somehow we made it across rapids back to camp, and then jumped in the water for a swim as all our clothes were wet already from the half-sunken raft.

The next morning, we went by boat and car to Santa Rosa: the gateway to the Pampas. It was an eventful journey (I know no other kind in South America) involving us trying to tow trucks out of the thick mud, and failing, trying to fix someone's car, and failing, and watching a sloth move in a tree, and failing (because sloths don't move, I've seen it with my very own eyes).

Capybara and bird - best of friends

As we arrived to our river-side hostel, even before we got onto the boat we spotted some fresh water pink dolphins swimming around just ten feet or so away from us.

A red-bellied piranha (supper)

A long, thin boat with rickety seats and water pooling in the bottom was to be our transport for two days and soon enough we are floating along the muddy brown river, the sun beating down relentlessly on our shoulders, the river occasionally splashing us with a welcome spray of water.

On various river trips during the day, we got up close to an amazing amount of wildlife: tortoises sunning themselves on logs, birds of all shapes colours and sizes (egrets, herons, blue kingfishers, eagles and birds of paradise) skimming along the water or atop the trees, capybaras (giant, semi-aquatic guinea pigs - I joke not) and trees full of tiny yellow squirrel monkeys, black howler monkeys and brown capuchin monkeys.

Yellow squirrel monkey catching mosquitoes with his hands

Before sunset, we balanced in our boat on a laguna and held our fishing lines with lumps of meat on the end, shrieking at every tug and rejoicing when we caught something. We were piranha fishing - I had a unique technique that involved getting Tess and Simonne soaked and I nearly fell in when I pulled a big one into the boat where I sat.

Cayman lurking

At night we went cayman spotting, their beady eyes burning red by torch light near the riverbank. We came across a few babies in a nest too and our guide insisted it was perfectly fine to get out the boat and wade towards a group of three big caymans. When one disappeared, the girls made a quick dash back to the safety of the boat. We then turned off our torches and watched the fireflies sparkling in the trees.

Swimming with pink dolphins

The final day was my favourite of the five day trip: we went swimming with pink dolphins in the river. Perfectly safe, we were told, as the dolphins push away the sharp-toothed, blood thirsty caymans.

Once I had convinced myself I wasn't going to get eaten, it was a really special experience: dolphins big and small swimming close by, quite happy with human company. And noone lost any limbs.