Disastrous holiday….

Warning. Long wingeing blog ahead….
I now remember why I don’t go in much for adventure holidays. First because there is often a little too much adventure and not enough holiday and second because it just feels a bit too much like a work trip. So my one week adventure holiday in Bolivia planned for the last week I think was fair to say was fairly disastrous. Cursed in fact one might say. I finished work on Wednesday and was due to fly to Rurrenabaque (Rurre for short) in the Amazon basin on Thursday. I then had a five day tour booked, 3 days in the savannahs (pampas), 2 days in the jungle (selva), with the plan to fly back on Wednesday and take my international flight Thursday. So, the first Thursday arrives and I am informed that my flight has been cancelled because, low and behold, its raining. The plane can’t land when its raining they tell me because the landing strip in Rurre is only dirt, no tarmac, so any rain and flights are off. They tell me to call at 8am the next day to find out when the next flight is. The travel agent says don’t worry I can still do 3 days pampas, 1 day selva. 8am the next morning I call, call back at 12 they say, at 12 its call back at 1, at 1 its call back at 2, you see how its going. Couldn’t do anything else useful with my day. At 2pm they finally say yes a flight will go, be at the airport at 3 for a 4pm flight. Hooray. Success, or so we think. The plane departs at 4.30pm and it’s a small 20 seater with single rows down each side. We fly up over the Andes, so close in our little plane you can touch them, and then we head into clouds and you can’t see anything. 40 minutes later we start a bumpy descent, still in the clouds but this time the clouds are seeping into the plane, cold mist is swirling in through the floor and the roof. The plane starts bumping up and down and we along with it, so rough our heads nearly hit the roof some times. I have a new appreciation for seat belts in planes. Suddenly we pop out of the clouds and there is a very large mountain next to the window, beautiful and green and jungle covered, but oh way too close to comfort. It’s raining a little. The pilots announce we are going to land and down we go skimming the tops of the palm trees and next thing we know we are going up again…. Up up up… until the pilots say, ladies and gentlemen it was raining on the runway, so we will be going back to La Paz! Swearing emanates from the passengers (well me at least). We arrive back in La Paz 7pm and I go out and drown my sorrows with a friend over a couple of Pisco Sours and decide whether to cut my losses and what else to do with my holiday if I abandon Rurre. By the morning however, day 3, I have some renewed determination and I figure bugger it, I’ll try again. I’ll still have 3 days pampas, but then I am advised if I want to be sure to make it back for my international flight I should return a day earlier and cut a day off the end, so now my tour is down from 5 days to 2 days…. I go anyway. Finally on Day 3 I get a flight at midday and off we go to Rurre, we arrive safely and it is nice and sunny, Rurre is a tiny little tourist town on the edge of the Amazon, surrounded by beautiful lush mountains and on the side of the River Beni. Lots of tourist and tour groups coming and going. Some of my fellow plane passengers and I went out to celebrate our arrival with some beer and pizza before setting off the next morning on the tour to the pampas. Next morning head off on the tour to the pampas, weather is good, the trip takes 3 hours by road to reach the river where we head up to a campsite. We get there at lunchtime and then the holiday part actually starts… I’ll tell you about that separately though, right now I’m indulging in my tale of woe. After just 24 hours in the pampas, the tour has to start the journey back to Rurre at midday the next day… So off I go back again to Rurre. First bad bit of the trip back is my group is changed from really nice people (who are staying for 3 days) to a group with a really annoying bunch of young catalan girls who proceed to annoy the hell of out of me the whole way back. Once we’re off the river and back on the road, the 9 of us and two tour guides get in a crappy old vehicle with no air and no suspension and drive the 3 hours back down the bumpy road to spine numbing effect. We arrive back in Rurre and its still sunny and I see the afternoon plane loading at the airport as we drive past. I think, maybe I should get off here and see if there is space on today’s plane, in case there is a problem tomorrow, but the van keeps driving and I see the plane head off overhead. I get back to Rurre and confirm my flight for the next day. 3pm they say and don’t worry, there will be sun for the next week, no problems with flights, the weather is lovely. I book a half tour jungle tour to make the best of my remaining time. That night I don’t get very much sleep. First a bunch of drunk Israelis are letting of fire crackers outside the rooms. Then at about 1am in the morning it starts….. the rain… oh my the rain, it was serious torrential rain, that heavy and continuous kind you just know is not going to stop for a week. So I lay awake most the night thinking bugger, how am I going to get back in time for my flight. I really don’t want to miss my flights and be stuck in Rurre in the rain for an underdetermined time. The next morning I get up and go to the airline office who confirm that there is no chance any planes will fly today and probably not for a week…. I run into a German girl in the rain and she too needs to get an international flight, so we agree to rent a jeep together which is the only other way back to La Paz, that or the local bus for 18 hours. The trick is the jeep is expensive ($350USD) and we need to find other people to share the cost. After an hour or two of cruising the streets in the pouring rain pouncing on anyone looking as desperate as us we have a posse of 6, me, German girl number 1, German girl number 2, an Australian couple one of whom turns out went to my high school and a French/Spanish gentleman of 62 years old and good humour which is fortunate for the two German girls cos it turns out they are pretty skint of cash so the nice Frenchman bank rolls them the way the La Paz. So, 10am we have our posse and I am keen to go as its supposed to be a 12 hour drive, and the last 3 hours is the “Death Road” which I don’t want to be doing in the middle of the night (though that seems inevitable). But first German girl number 1 has some stuffing around to do for about an hour, then at 11am German girl number 2 realises she’s lost her camera and we spend the next hour looking and trying to convince her that no its not really feasible for her to phone that remote little village on the road to the pampas to see if anyone found it…. Finally at about 12 noon we pile in the jeep, again poor suspension, little leg room or seat room and no pillows and start off on what is promised to be a 12 hour drive. After about just 2 hours we stop for lunch. The driver has been informed that there have been landslides ahead so we should eat now as we don’t know how long we’ll have to wait for the landslides to clear. It was then as I sat down in the rain in a crappy eatery with the most disgusting of toilets with a bunch of strangers to eat standard Bolivian lowlands fare of fried chicken and rice that I had flash backs to work trips and realized the irony of choosing to take a holiday which was just like a work trip… We finish lunch and go back to the car only to find the driver has the wheels off and is adjusting the breaks. Never a comforting indicator of safety… After another half hour we hit the road again, with the smell of bad breaks and black smoke in our wake. We start passing landslides. The rain has been so torrential that the rainy season has not even started properly and there are landslides all along the road. This does not bode well for later in the season disaster wise… again this is starting to feel reminiscent of work trips in which landslides feature heavily. It also does not bode well for us… but for a while most of the landslides are being cleared and we can pass. Then at about 5pm we hit the big one. A whole portion of the road has been washed away and there is no way around it whatsoever. It will be 2 days before it is mended they tell us. No way forward, only way is back. Bugger that I say. No way in hell am I going back another 5 hours to sit in Rurre to wait for the rain to clear while my flights home leave without me. We go down and inspect the gap and I see some kids playing down the bottom. Well, if they got down there we can too I say. Let’s cross on foot and find a new form of transport on the other side. Just one problem, there is another landslide about 1km down the road. Oh well, we’ll just have to cross that one too. So we unload the jeep, get our packs and start to climb down into the path of the landslide and up the other side, of course to the amusement of all the locals thinking we extranjeros are crazy of course. So off we go, we make it past the two landslides and in our one stroke of luck on the other side of the second landslide is a nice older man and his wife sitting in an empty jeep waiting to cross. Given they can’t cross for two days we make them an offer to take us to La Paz which they accept with glee and an extraordinary price and off we go. They just first have to go home and unload their fruit boxes off the roof so our luggage can go on top. Its just 40 minutes away they say…. 3 hours later we reach there house and unload their fruit boxes which means we can now have a seat each instead of on top of each other and recommence the journey to La Paz. The good thing is that our driver is an older gentleman and very safe and cautious… a good thing given we are now driving the very unsafe roads of Bolivia through the middle of the night. So onwards we go on what seems like an interminable drive across Bolivia, but thankfully without further incident. Without incident, but not without the fear of incident. At around 3am in the morning we finally hit Coroico, which marks the beginning of “The Death Road”. People who have traveled in Bolivia will know the death road because hundreds of tourist choose to cycle down it, but I suspect few choose to drive it in a car at 3am… It is called the death road because it has the highest number of fatalities each year and is completely terrifying. Its about an hour of a small, narrow road winding up the mountains, with sheer drops of an indescribable height on the side, with no barriers between you and the drop, its just the road and the abyss…. The climb is admittedly spectacular. It’s where the lowlands of Bolivia, leading from the Amazon basin dramatically climb up into these tropical mountains, lush and green and jungle covered until they then transform themselves into the snow capped and humongous Andes mountains. At 3 in the morning the view was different, dark but still spectacular. It was a full moon which lit the view for us, below the river, the valleys and crevasses were filled with mist and the mountains we black and looming above. And the in the moonlight the abyss at the edge of the road remained truly terrifying. It was one of those moments where you are at once breathless from the astounding beauty and at the same time unable to breathe from fear. I felt completely sick with my heart in my mouth the whole hour or so up that winding road but in complete awe of the experience. Finally by about 4am we made it up there and I was very grateful for our slow and cautious driver that we were at the top and not over the edge. I dozed off for about half and hour and awoke to find the car parked on the side of the road next to a huge snow covered mountain. It was freezing, 4.30am and we had about an hour to go until we reached La Paz. So close… but yet so far. The effort of the death road had taken it out of the driver and he had decided it was time for a nap, had pulled over and was out to it. No sign of waking up in a hurry. We all sat there in a dilemma… of course he needed to sleep, but we were so close and wanted to finally arrive…. Finally German Girl number one reached the point where she had only an hour and a half to make it to the airport to reach her plane and so the driver was awoken and on we went through the beautiful snow covered Andes until we descended into La Paz. I finally reached my hotel at 6am after 19 hours in the jeep. I sleep until 12, reconfirm my flights out of the country do some last minute shopping and go for dinner, more wine and lots of laughter with some friends and at 5.30 this morning hopped up and headed for the airport again, and now here I am in Santiago waiting for the plane to New Zealand. So, there was beauty and there was plenty of adventure in my holiday, but there was also a good amount of frustration and a feeling that things were just never going to go my way. There was not much of a holiday in there and ultimately in my 7 days of holiday, there was 24 hours of holiday and 6 days of just trying to get there and back… in the end probably not worth it but this is the way we learn isn’t it. So the lessons learned? I decided that perhaps it was just fate reminding me that you can’t always have things go your way, some things are just beyond your control and the only way to deal with such frustrations is to accept it and ride through it until it is finally over, survive it. Lesson No 2, never plan a trip to Rurrenabaque unless you have an unlimited amount of time to sit and wait for the sun to shine and the planes to fly!