Chola Wrestling in La Paz

Ok, so it turns out I was wrong. Chola wrestling is so wrong, it’s just wrong. Actually, I think it has potential, but will someone please tell me what they were thinking when they decided to make this an ALCOHOL FREE EVENT???????? WTF?

Along with all the other gringos, we had front row seats so we didn’t miss a minute of the cringingly bad amateur WWF style ‘fighting’. It was an experience, that’s for sure (though at over two hours, possibly a little more than I needed). The images should speak for themselves.

Jungley goodness in Madidi National Park

We hung around in Rurrenabaque for a week trying to find some other people to join us for a ten day trip to Alto Madidi, the northern section of the National Park. I’d like to say we spent the week constructively but my birthday got in the way and it turned into a bit of a bender. Luckily there is a hotel in town where you can pay BS20 to use their pool for the day, so we had somewhere to get over our hangovers in peace.

In the end we couldn’t find anyone else prepared to spend 10 days in the jungle, so we decided to take the slightly cheaper option of heading to the park’s southern section, where I first went 9 years ago with Zach. There seems to be much more tourists going into the park than there was back in 2003, but from what most operators told us the level of conservation has been stepped up a bit and there is more wildlife roaming around, and more jaguar sightings than ever. Sadly the park authorities have decided that letting a bunch of gringos loose with machetes is not sustainable practice so we couldn’t get slash-happy : ( Boo.

We spent the first and last night of the trip at the Mashaquipe main lodge, on the Rio Tuichi, an unexpected luxury compared to camping in the forest. From there we travelled by boat south to the Rio Hondo; the plan being to hike back across to the Tuichi and back to the main lodge.

I have to say the trip was easier than I had expected- conscious of the weight we had to carry, our guides Pachi & David held us back at the second camp an extra night so we could eat more and reduce the load. During the morning we’d go for hikes in the forest with Pachi- we saw monkeys (squirrel, capuchin, spider & leoncito), peccaries, capybara, caiman plus an incredible array of butterflies, caterpillars of varying radioactive shades of lurid green and yellow, armies of ants (leafcutters, fire ants-ouch, bullet ants) and other creeping crawling things (but no tarantulas-yay!!).

 

Because the canopy is so far above and so thick, we heard more birds than we saw, but were lucky enough to see lots of macaws, toucan, oropendulas (my favourite birdsong) and at night, a beautiful white downy owl. All throughout the trek we heard the catcalls of the sirenguerro bird- very distinctive and incredibly piercing.

On one of our nightwalks we were sitting by a waterhole when we heard something huge making its way through the jungle and enter the water. Pachi shone the torchlight and it was a tapir!! My first ever one so I was pretty thrilled! They can get up to 200kg or so, but this was a juvenile and at a guess I’d say “only” about a 120kg.

Sorry, no pics of tapir. You'll have to settle for mushrooms!

After a midday swim, lunch and a siesta under the mosquito nets we’d go fishing or go for another late afternoon hike. On our first attempt at fishing Martijn bagged a mamori within about 10 minutes; unfortunately that was the end of our good luck.

I didn’t catch anything for the entire trip, until the last day when I managed to snag two of the tiniest piranhas I have ever seen (so small they had to be thrown back. Crap).

Luckily we weren’t relying on our skills for survival- Pachi and David had better luck and caught an enormous pacu (member of the piranha family) and a catfish within seconds of each other. The pacu was big enough to feed us for lunch and dinner and he was delicious : )

After hiking across the mountain range that seperates the two rivers, we built a raft (I saw we, I mean Pachi & David) and floated downstream a few hours to our next campsite.

Martijn doing his best Survivor impression

As we set out from Rurre we were all pumped up for our first alcohol free stretch of ten days in….ummm, ok well since forever actually. But then pachamama got in the way. Every Friday and Tuesday night, guides from every company in Rurre do a ceremony for pachamama (mother earth) that involves offerings of coca, cigarettes and our old friend 96% alcohol….and what’s good enough for pachamama is good enough for us. One night I left Martijn with Pachi and David drinking and went to bed- turns out 96% booze is a great language tool; not sure what they talked about but there were at it until 2:30am. David looked rough as hell the next morning and Martijn smelt like a metho bottle (although it did mask the other nasty smells that one acquires after 8 days sweating like crazy); I think Pachi is well practiced is the art of consuming toxic liquid, he looked fine.

In addition to some new Spanish flora/fauna words to add to my vocabulary, I also learned two new Bolivian expressions on the trip:

1.       Bolear sin fumar es como bailar con su hermano (Chewing coca without smoking is like dancing with your brother; it just doesn’t feel right).

2.       Mas perdido que un ombligo de gordo (More lost than a fat man’s belly button)

Hasta pronto!!!

La Fiesta de San Ignacio de Moxos

Yep, it’s official; we are all fiesta-ed out. We’ve had about as much processions, blaringly loud brass band music and bull riding that we can handle.

The fiesta of San Ignacio de Moxos is the biggest in Bolivia’s Beni department so while in many ways it was the same as the fiesta in Magdalena, it was definitely better organised and seemed to involve a lot less drinking than the citizens of Magdalena managed to squeeze in. Don’t get me wrong, the people of San Ignacio still got on it….just not with the blind abandon that Magdalenan’s threw themselves into party mode.

One night we went to a local bar and made friends with Seripe and Ignacio, two vaqueros (cowboys) from ranches about 6 hours north of San Ignacio. They were already pretty blind by the time we got there but were definitely still on pace- we sat with them for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. In that time we drank 14 bottles (620ml) between us. The next night we rocked up again and saw a guy sleeping with his head on the table; after a few beers he finally woke up and it turned out to be Ignacio. He’d been there since 11am.

This time around we weren’t the only gringos in town; we hung out with an aussie couple Mitch & Sarah and an English couple Sharon & Paul and gave the Anglo-Saxon reputation as a bunch of pissheads credence.

Weirdly, although the official day of the fiesta is 31 July, all the action took place on the 30^th (maybe to give people a day to get over the hangovers?). We set ourselves up early on the side of the main plaza, ordering round after round of icy cold Paceñas and watching the procession stream past us for hours.

 

The next day we were all feeling slightly tender. A few bottles of water helped. The midday beer helped more. With the procession still spontaneously starting up every hour or so, we continued to hang out in the plaza, people watching and talking shit, until the bull riding started late in the afternoon. We bagged ourselves a table right on the edge of the arena, in the shade, where a very happy beer lady could get to us easily. There was the usual amount of carnage as annihilated Bolivians staggered around in front of angry bulls. We filled crate after crate with empty bottles; between the six of us we managed to put away 18 bottles over the course of the afternoon. When we finally left, the beer lady invited us to come to their bar later. She knew she was onto a good thing.

The Rum Diaries Part VII

We were anxious to restore faith in the Cuban rum industry with a genuine bottle of Mathuselem 7 Años. Unlike the Bolivian knock off, this one actually tasted like rum, good rum!! Much was enthusiastically consumed over the course of the Fiesta de San Ignacio de Moxos.