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!!!