From our brief stop in La Paz we were not entirely looking forward to our 20 hour bus journey to Rurrenabaque (Rurre for short). The bus was very old, made some pretty weird noises and literally did not go faster than 10mph the whole way!! We were travelling along the world's most dangerous road and some other roads that must have been in pretty close contention! The road was a dusty single track for most the way, with only a few passing places, which made it very interesting when we met a lorry coming the other way, particularly due to the 600m drops that the bus tyres were inches away from! However, the scenery really made the journey. It was stunning, we started off at very high altitude with the snow capped mountains that surround La Paz, then as we dropped down in altitude the vegetation became much lusher with flowers of every colour. For most the journey we followed the River Beni which is at the bottom of a very steep valley with breath taking views and there were several settlements dotted along it which use the river for washing and cleaning.

Rurre is a small town on the River Beni in the Amazon Basin, completely set up for the tourist Pampas and Jungle tours that are operated from there. Despite that it was not too touristy and the people were the friendliest we have come across in Bolivia. The weather there was 30oC every day, very hot and humid, which was bliss and a good chance to top up our fading tans!

We were at Rurre to do a Pampas tour with the recommended company Indigena Tours. We were really looking forward to the three day two night tour which would take us into the Pampas and show us lots of amazing wildlife. We booked the tour and payed up straight away with US$ that we had got out of the bank in La Paz, the notes were brand new and crisp and we laughed when the man checked the notes several times to ensure they were not fakes. However the day of our tour we turned up at the office to be told that they would not accept the $100 we had payed with because it was a fake! The note they showed us was no way ours, it was folded and written on whereas ours had been brand new. I thought Lee and Andrew were going to punch the man over the desk! It was only after Imogen and I were pretty much in tears and shaking that they finally backed down! So we set out on the tour with our opinion on Indigena Tours in tatters!

We had a really good group for the tour, there were nine of us in total, us four, two recently qualified doctors from Manchester and three medic students from London, So if we had an accident we would have been pretty well looked after! The tour started with a three hour drive along the dustiest and bumpiest road ever in a little minibus to Santa Rosa, where we then all got in a motorised wooden canoe, which took us along the River Beni. We saw so much wildlife caiman, alligators, monkeys, capybaras (big guinea pigs!), lots of different birds, pink river dolphins, terrapins, it was amazing to see them in their natural habitat. The first night we went to see the sunset over the pampas and then went caiman spotting at night, all you could see were their eyes shining red in our torch light!

Our lodgings were on the water front, with a pet one eyed caiman that obviously knew he was onto a good thing with all the left over scraps of food! We slept in dorms with mosquito nets over our beds, which were really needed as the mosquitos and other nasty biting bugs were everywhere!

The second day we went on a walk across the Pampas to spot Anacondas. It was quite hard work trekking through marsh land which smelt really bad! Unfortunately the only Anaconda we did see was dead, it had been handled a few days earlier by a tourist with deet on their hands and it had poisoned the Anaconda, you could see the oily hand prints left on its body! It was quite sad because it would have died really painfully and tour groups are not supposed to handle the animals in the wild just observe them! In the afternoon we went swimming with the pink river dolphins, which was very cool. At one point there were about eight of them circling around us. There were also lots of little biting fish as well that were making meals of the swimmers!

The final day we got up very early to see the sunrise over the Pampas and then we went piranha fishing. It was quite hard though because our hooks were so big so we mainly just fed them! But the group did manage to catch four piranhas, Andrew caught one of them and was very pleased with himself! We then had to head back to Rurre, two hours back on the boat and three hours in the jeep, we got back very tired, dusty and in desperate need of a shower!

It was Bolivia's Independence Day on the 6th August and there was a big celebration in the cental plaza in Rurre, it looked like they started early though as many drunk men were being carried home by 1pm!! We had to get the 20 hour bus back to La Paz because our budget could not stretch to the expensive flight, but armed with food and books (Andrew has brought me the final Harry Potter book as an early birthday pressie!) we were ready for it! This time the bus was moving faster, which was an improvement and meant we could have longer stops to stretch and get hot food and drinks. However it seemed that after one of the longer stops our bus drivers thought it would be a good idea to go to a bar and get drunk!!! We only realised this when he had driven along the really dangerous part of the road in about an hour where as it had taken us three hours before! Then once he got back to the tarmac he was going so fast that he lost control of the bus, it tipped one way then he over corrected, it was like something out of a disaster movie, people were screaming and shouting at him to stop. It is the Bolivian women with all the balls, as the men just sat there the women dragged the driver off the bus and demanded answers, there was a full blown row going on in Spanish, so we could only understand half of it! The driver actually went to hide in the luggage compartment he was so scared, plus he could hardly stand or look straight! We all got off the bus and were stranded at 1am four hours from La Paz with no one to drive the bus. Passing buses and lorries would not stop to help. The police were called but never turned up. In the end another driver was called and drove us to many shouts of tranquilo (slowly)! It was a very scary moment and we are very lucky it did not end in disaster, but makes a good story now! So we finally got back to La Paz at about 6am, next mission to find a hostel!!!

Lots of Love S&A xxx