Amazon Adventure

Ok, so it’s a bit late in the telling of this story, but I’ll tell it quickly and then put some photos up for you. So, about 2 weeks ago now we went to do an assessment in Pando, which is in the northern most part of Bolivia in the Amazon basin. We left from La Paz and you fly right through the middle of the Andes, with Lak Titicaca on the left and the snow capped mountain so close. Then we arrived in Pando and it is hot and tropical. The whole area is forest and rivers and is completely flooded along the rivers. To get where we needed to go we had to take an avioneta- little four seater plane. To get a better idea of the flooding we did a fly over of the flooded areas for about an hour. The landscape from above of the flooded forest and rivers looked amazing. The plane was so funny- had little pictures of Jesus and Mary on the steering wheels. When it was time to set down, we literally just landed on a little dirt street in the middle of town. No air traffic control let alone street traffic control, just pulled up and came to a stop where some locals were chatting with their bikes. From there we walked down to the river to the boats, while the pilot took off again and left us to find our way back by land and water. At the river we got into two little long boats and headed up the flooded river for about 2 hours. It was so beautiful with parrots and huge beautiful trees all the way up the river. Finally when we got to the village we were visiting, we had to take the boats in a little passage through the forest just a few metres wide to the village. In the village we did the assessment which included walking through knee deep water and mud with my colleague all the time yelling “look out for the anacondas!”. Then when we left, we had to get to the road to get a car to pick us up. To get to the road, the boats were carried a little way over the higher ground back to the roads which were flooded and we motored along in our boats over the flooded land pushing through trees and shrubs where we needed to. Then we got dropped off at the road but the car wasn’t there to pick us up so we decided to walk until either the car came or we reached the first houses. The first houses came first after about 2 hours walking in the hot sun on a road through the forest. Either side of the road was flooded and all along the way there were things to see – hundreds of butterflies all gathered to gether on the sides of the roads, a dead caiman (small crocodile), big snake tracks, what seemed like hundreds of jumping fish which flipped out of the water, birds, and then we we got to the first houses we were generously given shade and lemonade by a little old man and entertained by his grandchildren. Then the car finally arrived, a little kid got out of the car with those little baby lemurs or whatever they were turned up. We finally drove home in the moonlight and it was the end of a beautiful and adventurous day. It was everything you could imagine an Amazonian adventure would be!