Las Pampas

Rurrenabaque is a small town approximately one hour by plane north of La Paz. We took the tiny 10-seater, extremely turbulent Amaszonas aircraft through the spectacular mountains only a few kilometres to our side and over the vast blanket of trees that is the Amazon, into the stinking heat of sea level.

Once we found out that the hostel we wished to stay at, the one recommended in the guidebook, no longer existed, we made our way to the closest available room elsewhere. Instead of glass windows, it had mosquito nets and a beautiful view of the Rio Beni. At two o’clock in the morning, I moodily knocked on the neighbour’s door. All night he had been watching TV at high volume and with no glass to shut out the noise, mixed with the heat, I had lost my patience. The guy was asleep, not even realising the disturbance he was making. After that I slept well, until the morning when I got locked in the communal toilet; sick from something I had eaten the night before. Unfortunately, that sickness carried on for the next 5 days.

We left town in a rusty, dented four-wheel drive and drove 3 hours along a bumpy, dirt road, inhaling dust though our mouths, noses and ears until we finally arrived to Pampas del Yacuma, upstream of the Rio Beni. We couldn’t get there sooner. Other tourists crowded the lawn as we waited to board our motor canoe-like boat. Once cruising down the river, we lost sight of the other groups and soon we were alone in the wilderness, if not for the native animals.

The banks of the low river were filled with them soaking up the mid-afternoon sun; from alligators to turtles to the Capybara (the largest of the rat family) to an extraordinary array of bird life including local types of ducks, eagles, storks, chickens, herons, birds of paradise, you name it. We washed the sweat off our hot skin in the muddy water as Pink (Amazon River) dolphins swam around us. As kings of the river, neither alligator nor piranha dares come near.

At the lodge, we settled into our room, filled with mosquito net-covered beds and again, no glass windows. There was no electricity after 9pm anyway so there wasn’t any risk of being kept awake. The water for lodge came from rainwater so showers had to short and all the huts were elevated on stilts. Apparently the river rises so high in the rainy season that it floods the nearby pampas plain and hence the huts sit on water, with alligators swimming rather close by.

Yes, apparently the scenery is completely different in the rainy season of summer as opposed to the dry season of winter/spring. The water is said to reach 2 metres above the pampas grassy flatlands where we went to have a cold Paceña beer and watch the sunset. Lucky for us, because with the rain comes the mosquitos and with the banks of the river further away, the animals are suppose to be harder to find. Unfortunately for us though, the sloths only come out in summer.

The following day we set off early through the natural fields in search of an Anaconda. After a painstaking search through the tall grass, one of the guides found a baby, maybe 2 or 3 metres in length. They are non-venomous snakes so there was nothing to be afraid of. It seemed more scared of us if anything. There are other types of snakes and nasties hidden in the lush greenery so we wore gumboots for protection, and also so as not to get our feet wet. It may have been the dry season but the grass did well to keep in the moisture. It was already 30 degrees at 10am when we headed back to camp.

After lunch we went piranha fishing. They’re intelligent little things that nipped away at the meat without so much of a pull on the string. If someone did catch one, photos would be taken and the fish plopped back into the water. Further along the river and further away from camp, we came across howler monkeys whose loud howl woke us up at the crack of dawn each morning.

That night we floated along the river without the motor blasting out and listened to the eerie stillness. Then, out of no where an alligator would jam his jaws shut with an horrendous thud that made everyone in the boat shuddered. Without our flashlights, we could just make out the reflective, metallic eyes of those giant, reptile predators.

We watched the sunrise on the other side of the bank and listened to the music of Mother Nature in the morning. Everyone seemed to be out, except for the alligators. We saw toucans and macaws, and little yellow squirrel monkeys came right down to the edge of the bank to greet us. We rested from the heat in the hammocks before it was time to go back down the never ending bumpy, dirt road, once again filling ours lungs with dust and giving me heat rash across my chest and back, onto the tiny airplane and out into the cold, high altitude air of La Paz.

Note: The Pampas area within the limits of the Beni River is home to more than 1,000 species of birds, 300 species of mammals and 200 species of reptiles. If you want to see strange animals, it is much harder to find them in the Amazon.