Captain's log: Stardate 19071.6
We survived and made it home after our short break. We packed a lot in and saw some cool stuff. So before I procrastinate too much and don't write anything like I did for Chile, here is an account of our adventures.
Monday evening we packed our bags (normal day rucksacks) and set off to the bus terminal heading for Santa Cruz. It turns out that there had been bloqueos and so the busses were more expensive than normal. We got tickets on a bus with bed like seats "bus cama" for 110Bs each. This is pretty expensive compared to the previous time we had gone to Santa Cruz, which had cost us 45Bs each, for better seats (3 per row rather than 4). We got our tickets and settled down for up to 14 hours of failing to sleep. Luckily it was only around 11 hours of failing to sleep YAY!
We arrived in Santa Cruz at 0800 on Tuesday morning. We found some cuñapes and orange juice for breakfast from street vendors, and set off in search of a hostel. On the way to the centre of Santa Cruz, we saw two horses cantering down the street pulling a wagon driven by two guys. After a bit of hunting, and fending off a Jehovah's witness, we found a nice backpackers hostel called "bed and bar", not far from plaza principal. Having checked in, and rested a little bit, we went next door for lunch, which Amy termed as "the worst meal I've had in Bolivia". It was a poached egg on dry bread, they added a lettuce leaf and a slice of tomato after she asked. Comparing the food from the rest of the trip with that sandwhich gave us many hours of entertainment and made everything else seem a little better. (note: Bolivia doesn't really do vegetarian, and even their meat dishes aren't great). We later found a couple of museums with some art and stuff, bleh.
That night we made plans for trekking in Parque Amboró. There are tourist agencies in Santa Cruz that will happily charge you $200 each to do two days of trekking with a night spent either in tents or cabins. However that's pretty expensive for us, and so we planned to go to a town near the park, that a lot of trekking is staged out of. There we planned to find a local guide and go from there. The next morning we get up early and take a two hour car journey for 20Bs each to Buena Vista. Where we ask a few people about guides and don't get that far. We had decided we wanted to enter the park around Villa Amboró. We asked a tour agency about that, and they said they don't work with that "town" any more, due to "problems" but said they could take us there and collect us again for 700Bs. Again a massive rip off. We had heard that villa Amboró had everything needed to cater to tourists, and so we decided to just go there ourselves. We find a taxi which is willing to take us as far as the river (about an hour's journey) for 150Bs. Arriving, we pay the taxi driver and look out over this shallow river. According to the guide book Villa Amboró is just on the other side. The river was only a bit deeper than ankle height, so we set off wading across. On the other side, we walk about 2Km down some dust roads, past a horse, until we find the "town". At this point I should clarify that I'm using quotes around the word town, since as we had just found out, "town" meant about 5 wooden huts with thatch roofs, and 5 very empty looking brick cabins, with nobody other than one small child, a horse, a pig and a few dogs around.
After talking to the small child about where we could find some food (we'd read there were places you could buy food), a lady appears. We talk to her a bit, and find that all there is, is two little shops, and no restaurant, however one of the shops might be able to prepare us something if we ask. We follow her directions to the shop: "Just after that horse", and ask, their response was a can of sardines, a can of sweet corn and some crackers. Nom nom nom ... still better than that sandwhich. We ate while watching two cockerels fighting by flying into each other. Now that we were fed, the next step was accommodation. The guide book had said there was camping and cabins nearby. We ask at the shop and head off in the pointed direction. After about 20 minutes, we started to wonder if we had taken a wrong turn, and so we stop and ask some kids playing in a field. Again a lady turns up, who directs us to a house a little way down the road, saying that the husband is a guide and the wife a cook. We head over there, and amongst the barking dogs, baby chickens a lady comes out and says that indeed there is camping and cabins nearby, and her husband is a guide. At that point her husband turns up on a motorbike and so we start talking to him and agree to the relevant costs. He takes us to the cabins / camping which is across a stream, and along a path which is blocked in three places by barbed wire fences.
The cabin were deserted and locked. It turns out they are community owned and only unlocked when tourists appear. Which when we signed the guest book we found that the last one had been two weeks ago, and before that April. So I think we can safely say, we were off the tourist track by this point. We dump some of our stuff, and set off for a half days walk. We at this point enter the jungle proper. We walked up to some "bathing pools" which were a collection of small natural pools, connected with little waterfalls, and on up to the bottom of a giant 50m waterfall. On the way we walked through clouds of butterflies, they were everywhere, it was pretty epic, kind of like that scene in fringe where a guy is swarmed by moths with razor wings and cut to death, but significantly less horrendous. On the way back we see some martin monkeys playing in the trees. I only managed to see one of them, but I'm pretty sure it looked at me. Below you can play spot the monkeys in the photos (click to enlarge).
Arriving back at the cabins, our guide asked if we wanted to cook something. Being the alternative was more canned sardines, sweet corn and crackers, we agreed, and Amy went off with the guide to buy a few bits of vegetables. Which were harvested from the shop keepers garden. On returning, we find out the cabins and in fact the entire village doesn't have electricity, and so we will be cooking by candle light. Additionally we find out that we will be cooking over a wood fire, in a hearth like thing. So a fire gets lit, and the guide disappears to put up our tent (it was cheaper than the cabins) in the dinning room (it might rain, and it'd be quieter in there). Amy and I start chopping the veg and boiling some potatoes, when the guide returned we invited him to join us for food. In the end it came out really tasty, and the perfect amount for three people. Talking with the guide more, we find out that this is how they cook all the time, although they do have gas on occasion. After dinner the guide heads home and we head into the dinning room to drink our one small beer between the two of us. We pretty much went to bed straight after that, since it was too dark to see anything.
I had a dream about how awful sleeping in that tent was. On the nice hard tile floor with only a thin carry mat to cushion us. Then I woke up, still in the tent. I was not overly happy.
The cabins had a plentiful water supply, brought by small pipes that ran out up the trail we had gone the previous afternoon. There was so much in fact, that the water tank was continually overflowing, showering down onto the ground creating a mini waterfall in it's own right. This made a nice change from Cochabamba where water is to be conserved at all costs.
The next day we got up early again, and set out along a path. I noticed that our guide was today carrying a machete strapped to his bag. After a bit of walking we joined up with a river and walked down that for a bit, occasionally wading across it to get to better ground on the other side. We found a cave with vampire bats in, and more monkeys, spider monkeys this time. They were very high up, but I got to see a couple of them through my monocular. At one point there was a tree blocking the path, so we went back down to the river for a while, until the way got a bit too awkward, at which point the guide pulls out the machete and starts cutting a way back through the jungle to meet up with the path again. We found a dead coral snake in the middle of the path, which are apparently pretty dangerous, although our guide in his sandals didn't seem remotely concerned. When we reached our end point, we rested on a rock next to the river for a bit. I was playing with rocks in the river, and pulled out one, which had some sort of 5cm long black segmented creature with lots of legs and pincers on. I stopped playing with rocks after that. We headed back the way we came occasionally stopping to look at interesting stuff.
Back in the cabins once again, the guides wife was in the kitchen cooking for us, and so we packed our bags and rested a bit. After eating (pasta with more canned sardines) we paid up. It came to a total of 505Bs for 1.5 days of the guide, the "camping", the food, some carved wooden fish that the guide was selling and motorbike transport back to the river, for returning back to Buena Vista. We had called a taxi to meet us at the river again, and so we set out on the back of the motorbike, with the guide, me and Amy all on one bike, going down very rocky dirt roads. At least there wasn't any other traffic. On the way we met the guide's daughter who had a 2 litre bottle with the top cut off full of petrol to put in the guides bike. We heard our guide ask if she was off to bath in the river, which she confirmed and then headed out. When we reached the river, we said bye to our guide, and waded back across to wait for our taxi, who, being this is Bolivia was about 45 minutes late. It was a different driver to who had taken us there, as apparently his car had broken down due to the awful road conditions.
Back in Buena Vista, we get a coffee and find transport back to Santa Cruz. We stay in the same hostel as the previous time. All in all including transport, food, guides, .... it had cost us a bit under 1000Bs (£100) so 500Bs each. For what the tour agency wanted to charge us 200$ each. This was Thursday night by this point.
We had decided to go to Vallegrande a small town on the old road between Santa Cruz and Cochabamba, and so the next day we set off for a 5.5 hour journey. Arriving just before dark, we found ourselves a hotel (I know, fancy right, 50Bs a night each). We then went hunting for a restaurant. Which after about an hour of wandering around, we eventually found "the nicest place in town". Amy ate a cheese sandwich and an egg sandwich. They were "fine, and as expected :(" (still better than the sandwich which shall not be named). After that we walked around the town, to find it pretty much dead, no signs of a bar, or anything interesting. There were a bunch of people hanging out in a small square, but nothing was going on. So we sat down, ate some chocolate (maybe the best food of the week) and drank a bottle of wine. Then returned to the hotel and slept.
Saturday, our final day, we set out to see the sights of the town. This town is near where Che Guevara was captured and executed, and so the only touristy things to do were read about that and see where he had been buried up until 2006 when his remains were sent to Cuba. The information was slightly lacking so here is what I learnt:
- He was an Argentinian medical student who liked motorbiking around south America.
- Went to Mexico, and met Fidel Castro, and decided to start a coup in Cuba.
- The coup somehow actually worked.
- He then fought in the Congo for some reason.
- He decided to start a guerrilla training centre in Bolivia as a central staging ground to free the entirety of south America from "yankee imperialism".
- Six months later he and his ~20 guerrillas were caught and executed by the Bolivian army.
We then went to find lunch, we found chifa (south America's version of Chinese food). Lunch involved a giant plate of noodles and vegetables that tasted like they'd been boiled in a vat of soy sauce until there was no minerals or taste left in them (still better than the sandwich). We passed the remaining time doing basically nothing (because there was basically nothing else to do there).
Finally 1800 rolled around and we caught our bus. Which was full, and by full I mean the seats were full, and the aisle was jammed full of standing people too. I later heard one of the standing people who was going to Cochabamba too, being charged the same as we had paid for seats. Most of the standing people got off after a couple of hours, leaving only a couple going the rest of the way, who slept in the aisle. Ten hours later we arrived back in Cochabamba in the not so nice part of town at 0400. Luckily we quickly found a taxi and were home before too much longer.
So yeah, that was our trip, pretty epic, and quite fun.
