Buzios, Sao Paulo, La Paz, and Rurrenabaque

So it’s been a few weeks since we last wrote on this blog. We have been very busy and we have been travelling in areas where there is very limited internet access. We’ve just jumped on a bus for a 12 hour ride from La Paz Bolivia to Cusco Peru, so I’ve got a bit of time now to let everyone know what’s been going on.

When I last wrote we had just left Rio and were planning a few days in a beach town near Rio called Buzios. The town is a couple hours away from Rio and it is quite a vacation town. It is home to the famous Geriba beach which is world renowned for its surfing. We spent a long weekend here and chilled out on the beach watching the surfers and getting a few rays. It was really nice to relax for a while after a busy previous few weeks. The surfing was really neat to watch and I’m really looking forward to learning how to do it in the future. It was a little expensive to do it there unless you had your own board, so our plan is to spend some time in another country (maybe Costa Rica) and learn there.

In order for us to get back on our travel route we needed to head back to Bolivia. Rather than take a 50 hour bus ride across the continent, we opted for a flight from Brazil back to La Paz. Rio was an expensive option to fly from so we jumped on an overnight bus to Sao Paulo, which is just an absolutely huge city. We spend the day in Sao Paulo and then got on our flight. Sao Paulo is really too big to see in such a short time, but we made the best of it. We walked around downtown and visited the huge market there. The market was really interesting. They had all kinds of fish, ,meat, fruits, and vegetable and it was really interesting to walk around. The fruit vendors would offer you samples of weird colorful Amazonian fruit that you’ve never seen before, and I got to eat some oysters and some other good food. The most famous lunch in Sao Paulo is the huge mortadella sandwich. I had seen it before on one of my favorite travel shows (No Reservations) and I knew I had to try it. I counted 28 layers of meat all on a really good baguette. It was as good as I had imagined.

After our flight back to Bolivia, we arrived in La Paz. After our previous experiences in Bolivia we were looking forward to it again, along with the opportunity to speak Spanish again instead of Portuguese. It was as though everything made sense again. We could chat with taxi drivers and ask questions without looking completely incompetent. We were however quite disappointed with the actual city of La Paz. It was a little too big and busy for our tastes. There was also a huge strike going on so there were protests in the streets and people lighting of firecrackers and small sticks of dynamite all over the place. Needless to say we didn’t feel too safe there and we were anxious to get out of the city and on to our next destination which was exploring the amazon basin.

Another thing happened in La Paz that was quite upsetting and made us not appreciate it as much. Joh’s camera got stolen. We were walking around downtown checking out the sights, when a local woman approached Joh and told her that she had noticed two young guys reach into her purse and take the camera. We were pretty pissed off about this. We knew that something like this would happen at some time during the trip, but it is still something that makes you feel quite violated. Joh is in the habit of downloading the pictures every 2 weeks or so, so we didn’t lose everything, just the photos from the last week or so. All the pictures from Buzios and Sao Paulo are gone – so it’s a tough pill to swallow, but there’s nothing you can do except move on, except the loss, and get yourself a new camera. Luckily we found a decent camera for a decent price in La Paz, so we’re back to taking pictures again.

We booked a flight to the small jungle city of Rurrenabaque which is just a short 45 minute flight away from La Paz. The plane we flew in on was really small (it only had room for 18 passengers) and we were all swished in and we could feel every small change in the wind as the plane was jerked to and fro . We landed on a really small landing strip in the jungle and got out and we were immediately overwhelmed with the drastic change in climate. La Paz is one of the highest cities in the world, so there is very little oxygen in the air and it is always quite chilly. Rurrenabaque on the other hand was a jungle city with low altitude and high humidity. It was a nice welcome change. Rurrenabaque is a town that is definitely one of those towns that is quite obviously on the “backpacker trail”. It was fully of other travellers and lots of good restaurants and travel agencies. Typically when travellers come here they use it as a jumping off point for going on jungle safaris. We booked one as well, specifically we booked a 3 day tour of the Yacuma Pampas. We had been recommended this by some of the other travelers we met there.

The tour was really quite interesting. After a 3 or 4 hour Jeep ride we arrived at the launching point and got into our boats. From then on for the next 3 days we were living above the water. We took boats down the river to all sorts of interesting spots. We saw quite a few animals including alligators, crocodiles, capybara, monkeys, sloth, snakes, piranha, pink dolphins, tones of birds, and trillions of mosquitoes and other insects. It was also neat to see the vegetation as well. All kinds of cool trees and vines. We stayed in a small lodge built up on stilts over the river and ate some good food, relaxed in hammocks, and slept in mosquito nets. There were many, many mosquitos. They were really bad in the evening. We all had clothing that covered up as much skin as we could, and we loaded the mosquito repellant on every few hours. We ended up being ok after the trip, but we saw a few other travellers that had thousands of bites all over their bodies. The highlight of the three day trip was definitely swimming with the dolphins. After being assured that there were no alligators or crocodiles around, we jumped into the river and got to swim with the dolphins. We had never known that there were dolphins in the jungle, but there were actually quite a few. They had pink skin, and we saw them all the time swimming in the water near the boats. While swimming, the dolphins would come up to you and bump you or try nibble on your toes. The dolphin ignored Joh and I but many other the other travellers got to feel the dolphins. It was a little scary at times too, because the water is dark and you can’t see much under the water so you never know if there are piranhas or alligators or whatever else there as well. No one got hurt, so I guess it was safe.

After the tour we spent a few days back in Rurrenabaque, while we waited for our departure flight. We had a few nice days to relax in hammocks and get a bunch of reading done. We flew back to La Paz yesterday (Monday) and then booked a bus to Cusco Peru. We plan on being in Cusco for a week and then we hope to start our trek to Machu Picchu on Monday. We’re pretty excited as we’ve heard nothing but good things about it. Should be good. We’ll post when we get back and we’ll tell you all about it.