Me Tarzan, You Jane

When we got back to Rurre, we settled in for a bit of luxury (bed, cocktail, table, you know, the normal stuff) as we were about to venture up river into the Bolivan jungle. This trip was more about the sights, sounds, plants and trees, rather than animals. In the jungle the animals are lot more savvy and so tend to hide away from pesky humans!

We travelled in a fast river boat up the Beni river for three hours until we reached our camp - a very basic home for the next three days. There was only Stuart, myself and Mario our guide, AKA Action Man. He was pretty hardcore! We were sleeping in tents and the only luxury we had was a gas burner for cooking. There was no cover from the rain, no seats and going to the toilet was going to be ´au naturale´ for the next few days!

The first thing that struck me was the noise of the bugs. All shapes and sizes, and all sounds - car alarms, ambulances, whizzing, wurring, buzzing and so on. It was really incredible and the evening was to be even noisier as more bugs come to life.

On the first day we went for a short 2 hour trek through the jungle. I don´t think we went far, but when you´re hacking through plants and trees, it´s pretty hard going. The vegetation is amazing. You really can swing from the vines ala Tarzan as they are filled with water and so have quite a fair amount of flexibility. They´re a good source of water if you can´t find any, and some can contain up to 4 litres in the length of one metre. Beautiful flowers, trees and palms litter the ground and it´s truely a feast for the eyes. It´s pretty amazing, although I spent more time worrying where I put my hands as it was essential to hang onto things for balance whilst avoiding the millions of bugs! This worry soon passed away, when I realised that we were going to be here for the next few days! At one point Mario left us to try and find the way back to camp. He was gone for about 30 minutes and this became particularly eery with the hum of the bugs and distance growls of Howler Monkeys. I almost began to panic thinking that he wasn't going to return. Fortunately we began to hear him chopping through the plants and we were on our way. My imagination at that point had been running wild though - leaving two tourists for dead! When we got back to camp, there was no rest for the wicked and we were set straight to work by fishing for our dinner. Unfortunately we didn´t get anything. I was useless at casting out the line and Stu and Mario kept getting their lines crossed. Luckily the guys on the boat caught a fish at lunch, so we had that.

The next morning we went for another trek through the jungle and as we climbed the steep hill it interesting to see how the vegetation changed from thick plants and vines to more trees. The trees were very strange with ones that look they have legs (Walking Palms) to ones that phallic roots that sprout out half way up the trunk - that certainly got a giggle from us! There are also trees that have garlic smelling bark, rubber trees and menthol vines used for medicinal purposes. We had a couple of goes swinging from vines again and eventually made it back to camp after sweating about 3 litres water each!