Trippinvignettes - Number 3

In which ‘Shazza’ reveals the complex dichotomy of her feelings towards coati, the cute and cuddly ground-koalas of South America. Upon meeting us, she told us how she hadn’t had a drink for well over a week. Later that evening at dinner, in a blizzard of strine-flavoured profanity, she drunkenly displayed the reason for her period of self-denial. Hair styling by Miss Breoni Taylor.

'...a***holes... except this one... Smell ya fingas: BURNT TOAST!! Not just 'like'- EXACTLY!! Burnt f***** toast!!!'

Arabian Restaurant, La Paz, Bolivia.

Leaving La Paz

La Paz Outskirts

What a trip this was. One day, three busses, minimal enjoyment. On our final Bolivian bus, we were treated to one last piece of the mischief so often wrought by the Bolivian Transport Gods. Our ride out of the city had been overbooked by one seat, and the last one on the bus was an English backpacker. He had his ticket in hand, and was most upset when told that there wasn’t a corresponding seat anymore. He asked if he could sit up front in the stairwell, but we had the only bus driver in Bolivia worried about the police, and apparently sitting there is illegal. Having pre-paid for his seat, the guy was awfully put out about having to stand on this four or five hour trip, but, there was a Plan B. Much to the bemusement of the upstanding, the driver magically produced a camping stool from behind his chair and presented it as the solution to everyone’s problems. ‘What the f*** is that?’ was the ungracious, bewildered response. What it was was the kind of folding stool made from two staple shaped pieces of steel with a piece of canvas between the horizontals- something designed and marketed for ease of portage, not for it’s ergonomic qualities.
Reluctantly, our plus one took the stool and sat in the aisle next to his friend. Frustrated, he lamented his situation to a giggling crowd of seated passengers. Finding little sympathy, he put on his iPod and took out a copy of Wuthering Heights. For a while he seemed somewhat contented, but this fragile state was shattered soon after when the attendant redrew attention to his plight by handing him a dirty, smelly, stained pillow. Just exactly what he was to do with it nobody was completely sure, and he ended up gingerly resting his head on it as he lay down, defeated in the aisle.

The Disposable

La Paz is fairly tame as far as South American cities go. Crime only seems to happen to those who are very careless, very unlucky or very drunk. Still, pulling out a couple of grand’s worth of camera to take a shot isn’t a great idea (it’s very careless), so I bought a disposable to get some of the shots I was too afraid to take the big camera out for. The lens isn’t quite as sharp, but it’s nice to be able to take photos without worrying about losing a backpack full of electronics around the next corner.

These are road safety zebras. They tell people when it's safe to cross the road. The police try to do the same thing, but nobody takes notice of them.

A La Paz bus stop.

Bolivia is the abused runt of the litter that is South America’s countries; at some point in history, Bolivia has tried to assert itself in a warlike fashion against most of it’s neighbours, each time copping a whipping and leaving the arena with a nasty new grudge.
The unfunny repercussion is that many Bolivians have died in these wars, which have been fought over things such as the (ex-Bolivian) Chilean coast and non-existent oil in the Chaco region of eastern Bolivia. In the centre of the city is a memorial commemorating the dead. It’s a rare example of this very specific kind of sculpture, because it in no way, not even in an stealthy way, does it glorify what goes on in war. Instead, it mourns the dead people (as opposed to dead soldiers). The figure is face-down in the mud, shirtless and ingloriously anonymous while his rifle is flaccidly aimed at the ground. There’s nothing whatsoever heroic about the sculpture, it’s all about the tragedy of people dying at war, and not concerned with whatever political cause they died for.

Twin Lanes Bowling

Most people spend their time in La Paz coked to the eyeballs and getting up to all kinds of ‘tolerated’ illegalities. Not us, you’ll be pleased to know. Aside from shopping and pancake breakfast competitions, we spent a good deal of time with Sam and E-J at ‘Twin Lanes’- the premier (only) location for ten-pin bowling in La Paz. Apart from the intense competition on offer, the main reason for spending so much time there was the $1.80 games and the quaint, old-timey atmosphere.





We scored on a piece of paper mounted on an angled wooden bench, while the ovular balls shook and rattled down the lanes, which were smoothed to the steady level of spent minefields. And waiting at the end of each lane- real life pin monkeys! Not actually animals (though in La Paz I’m sure they’d employ uniformed primates if it was viable), they were humans who risked untold levels of lower leg destruction each time they moved in to restack the pins by hand. I’d never seen these guys in the flesh before, and I’m sure they must be an endangered species.

San Pedro Prison

For everyone who’s read Marching Powder, we did go and see the San Pedro prison, but tours around the joint have been stopped since the release of the book. We sat across the road from the entrance, watching the parade of visitors and residents passing, but the concentrated stares of the guards outside were enough to stop me taking photos. Bit of an anticlimax, really.
(For everyone unfamiliar with the book, it’s about a naughty man who got in trouble for smuggling cocaine out of Bolivia and started giving tours around the prison as a way of earning money so he could buy food and pay for his cell).

Pampas Tour Day 3- The Final Harrasment

The shrill of a digital watch alarm urged us out of bed and into the pre-dawn darkness to go and hunt down some howler monkeys. As we stumbled into the canoe we could hear their hoarse bellows barreling down the river like warcries from some psychotic troop of warriors suffering from laryngitis. If you were trapped in the jungle and had never heard of howler monkeys and their calls, it really would be a worrying sound. Freddo motored toward them, and we soon arrived at the colony, where a group of the burnt orange monkeys were cavorting through the greenery of the treetops. Daz, an Englishman on the tour, made the nearly disastrous mistake of watching the animals from directly below their designated toilet spot (the monkeys don’t go to the toilet just anywhere), narrowly avoiding the need for an early morning wash in the river.

The orange thing is a monkey

After breakfast back at mosquito central, Freddo decided that the sun was shining strongly enough to dry the pampas out sufficiently enough for us to go and pester an anaconda. Ill-fitting gumboots squeezed onto our feet, we trudged off through some shoulder high grasses and then into the pampas proper, which was basically an enormous expanse of spindly grasses and water plants existing in about a foot of dark, smelly, watery mud. After about an hour of marching uncomfortably through this muck, Freddo called a halt and then pounced on a surprised juvenile anaconda that had been napping quietly in the sun. The two-metre five-year-old was subjected to being passed around the group, looking mighty annoyed to be put in this position. Mission accomplished!

Not quite the anaconda Ice-T had to deal with, but an anaconda nonetheless

Double Strangle

Apparently we were very lucky to be able to badger an anaconda like this, most groups that go through the frankly unpleasant trudge, never to find an animal as cooperative (consenting or otherwise) as the one we encountered. We walked around for another couple of hours, which was more than enough in the children’s boots we’d been supplied. Angie suffered a nasty bug attack, when two ants crawled into her gumboot, inflicting pain far beyond what we thought possible for such tiny little creatures. Or at least Angie acted like they did.


By the time we got back to camp, my feet had permanently altered their shape and the resulting pain had pretty much crippled me. Personally, getting those boots off was the highlight of the entire trip. After lunch, we climbed aboard the canoe for the last time and set off downriver towards our jeep pickup point. As is typical in Bolivia, the day’s bus to Rurrenabaque was delayed, which meant our jeep was delayed, which meant we were treated to another hour or so of battling mosquitoes to finish off the trip.

Angie and Freddo

The next morning we got a flight out of Rurre, this time on a 35 seat plane- a hulking mammoth compared to our ride into the jungle. We were flying with TAM- which stands for Transporte Aereo Militar- the commercial wing of the Bolivian Airforce. It was a bit if a novelty to be flying on a Military plane, but it was decked out like any other commercial aircraft, except for the numerous utilitarian hooks and loops attached to every surface inside the cabin- painted white to blend in but obvious signs that this bird had seen other kinds of service before hauling gringos to the jungle and back. It felt marginally more airworthy than our Amazonas flight, and we landed safely in La Paz an hour later, gasping at the cold and thin air, and quite glad to not have any miniature plane rides planned in the near future.

Cheers to TAM for not crashing

Pampas Tour- Day Two. The Annoying Continues.

Bats sleeping on the ceiling

This is our camp. In the wet season, there are even more mosquitoes and the river rises up to floor level.

We awoke to a day with none of the warmth and humidity we had so enjoyed previously. The cool air and grey sky were the aftermath of a storm that meant the pampas would be even further underwater than the usual gumboot depth, so we went piranha fishing instead.

Capybara

Much to the amusement of onlookers, our group descended the muddy bank to the canoe below. The normally simple process of getting down became a convoluted ordeal due to the rain-soaked mud which at once had the consistency of both Perkins Paste and motor oil. After twenty minutes of near-misses with the slick slimedirt we found ourselves aboard and relatively clean. Freddo proceeded to motor us ten metres- literally- down river to the fishing spot. People watching were rolling on the walkways laughing at the sight of us so desperately clambering to get into a boat to get to a place that we could have walked to in thirty seconds. Thankfully, nothing was biting there and we had to move on.

Score!

When we found a good spot, lines went out and the frustrating process of being outsmarted by fish the size of pikelets began (not for me- I just took photos and commentated). The little fish were very adept at eating bait without actually touching the hook, a skill that resulted in much angst amongst the group. Freddo managed to haul a few in, then Angie landed a beast, letting him go minus the Rex Hunt kiss. Once everyone whose sense of worth depended on catching a piranha had caught one, we putted off to lunch. The catch turned up at the end of the meal, deep-fried whole like fishy Pringles-devoid of meat- all head, bones and skin.

Meet Pedro

Following a rest to recover form the morning’s battles, we once again boarded the canoe and motored off to one of the most popular pink dolphin hangouts. We were there to swim with these weird fish, but first we had to be introduced to the resident crocodilian life. Pedro was the main man in these parts, two metres of prehistoric handbag fodder that would come when called like a big, ugly waterborne dog. With a few taps of Pedro’s snout, Freddo introduced us and declared the dull brown water safe to enter.

Getting acquainted.

Look just to the left of Angie's head...

Tentatively, three of us stripped down and edged into the water. The dolphins had a cursory glance, but seemed uninterested in a few pale bipeds, and they quickly got back to the business of floating around being dolphins. At the forefront of our minds were not these examples of river fauna; we were more concerned about the piranhas, alligators and any number of insidious parasites that also inhabited this body of water.

The highly excitable Bird of Paradise. They freak out at everything, squawking and flapping about in a most unprofessional manner.

A much more composed bird

After a few minutes of swimming, there was no sign of malicious gators or urethra invading microfish, so the others joined us. The tranquillity of the scene was interrupted by a series of yelps that rose into a panicky crescendo, climaxing with the sight of a thong surfacing next to Angie’s thigh. It seemed that her footwear had secretly removed itself from her foot, and then repeatedly barged into her leg as it shimmied up to the surface. Angie’s terrified shrieks of ‘ohmygodsomethingjusttouchedmeonthelegwhatisitshititdiditagain!!!’ put everyone on edge, and we retired to a riverside pub soon afterwards.


After looking around the hostel/pub for a while, we decided that the people here got a better deal and returned to our dilapidated mosquito nest. Dinner was served and Freddo deemed tomorrow a 5 a.m. start, so we cocooned ourselves soon after.

Frog's Dinner

The camp was lit at night by two, bare electric bulbs. Massive swarms of bugs buzzed and fluttered around the lights, often getting a bit to close and crashlanding into the ground below. These guys were waiting underneath to clean up the debris. They'd sit perfectly still for a few moments, then bounce off when something landed near them. This meant that often, they'd only be in frame for a short portion of the 30 second exposures, leaving only their ghost-like images visible in the photos.

Gator Night

The orange streaks are the eyes of alligators watching us as we floated past through the darkness.

Pampas Tour- Day One

Alligator and stick

Pampas (the Bolivian pampas in this context- the Argentinian pampas are closer to a cold savannah) is a slightly more exotic word than swamp or marsh- but it still describes the same muddy, insect-infested haven for wildlife and masochistic travellers on a nature bender. From the promotional material, our tour of the pampas seemed to include enough jungle-esque environs to be sufficient for us to tick off the jungle and the Amazon from our must-do list in South America (it’s in the Amazon Basin). The tour began with a rattling three-hour jeep ride to edge of the Beni River, which was the lively body of water our next couple of days would be based around.

Turtle scrum

The Beni is a winding line of caramel coloured water that slithers through jungle and the pampas. It supports an incredible amount of tightly packed fauna, most noticeably as we boarded our out-board powered canoe, mosquitos. Millions of viscous, bloodthirsty swarming itch machines- the stuff of La Paz hostel gossip and creators of hideously disfigured English people (for a good laugh/horrorshow, find an Englishman recently returned from the pampas and ask to see his bites).

Birds of Paradise

Once the boat was underway, the mosquitos couldn’t keep up and we were left to enjoy the plague proportions of other, larger wildlife. The first sighting of an alligator caused an excited uproar on the boat. There was a cacophony of shutters snapping and vivid exclamations when the guide steered the canoe closer and closer, eventually beaching us next to the sunbaking beast, who splashed away disgustedly after we almost squashed him.



And that set the tone for the rest of the trip, which resembled something closer to an animal harassing excursion rather than a wildlife tour. When the guide, who we called Freddo (his real name was Wilfredo, but he also sported a remarkable resemblance to the chocolate frog) spotted a gator, he would send the boat straight up beside it. The smart ones would slink away early, but the stubborn ones, who stayed put until the bitter end, would be treated to a splashing of water (or a possible ramming) if they ignored the boatload of firing cameras beside them.


Apart from annoyed alligators, we also saw birds of paradise, cranes and storks, stacks of turtles, pink dolphins, monkeys and capybara, which are rodents the size of a Dalmation, with the build of a wombat and the fluid movements of a rat (but actually very cute). We arrived at out camp, which was a mosquito colony with a few rudimentary buildings slapped up around it. Our new home was basic and filled with the sound of a million buzzing, blood-hungry, invertebrate bastards, but the location, perched on a picturesque elbow of the river, was spectacular.

An uncooperative capybarra

This is a very unspectacular shot of a pink dolphin, but it's the best I could do. At this time of year, the river is low, so the dolphins don't chase the boats and jump out the water like dolphins are supposed to.

After dinner, we grabbed our torches and floated down the inky dark river alligator spotting. The motor was turned off, so Freddo couldn’t charge them, but we were happy just to float along while the orange dots of alligator eyes stared back at us through the darkness. The trees filled with fireflies were a beautiful sight, as was the night sky completely unfiltered by city lights.

Turtle stack!!!

We returned to camp and watched frogs feast on bugs below the bare electric bulbs outside our room, then fell asleep inside industrial mosquito nets, bodies soaked with jungle sweat. Although the rain thumping down on the thatched roof sounded nice, it was not a good thing to hear when you have a day of walking through mud ahead of you….