Ola, I can’t quite remember where we last left you…. So I’ll just go straight to the cool stuff.
6am on a Tuesday morning, we headed to La Paz Airport to catch out flight to the Jungle. It was a 45min flight to Rurrenabaque which lands us in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon Basin. The plane was tip top, only held 19passengers I think and you can see the cockpit from the seat which was cool. When we got to the Rurrenabaque we got our transfer to the tour office, transfer by the way was the back of a motorbike each for a generous (5bolivianos-50p). Happy Days, once we got there we were loaded into the back of a jeep for a dusty 2 n a bit hour ride to the river, but just before that we purchased an item of clothing that we felt was vital for the jungle experience, guesses on the message board! After the jeep ride was where the good times rolled….. we got on a boat with our group, who by the way were mega cool minus this French couple of yeti`s, we had 2 kiwis who were sound and 2 Canadians also (no competition m-star!) ha. We got on a kind of a large canoe and headed 3hrs up to the camp. It didn’t seem that long because there was heaps of wildlife, we saw, Caiman, Alligators, Monkeys, Dolphins, Turtles and heaps of birds. Was strange being so close to all that wildlife and not being in a zoo. Once at camp it was a quick shower n feed, then back to Sunset Bar another camp which served ´Cold Beer` to watch the sunset over the Pampas. Very cool.
Next day was where it really started though, Anaconda hunting, the sun was shining and there wasn`t a cloud in the sky, boiling, must have been pushing 35degrees, a group of about 15headed out inot the Pampas, up to our knees in muddy water in the search of an Anaconda, despite no one finding one, except the guide, Me and C defo looked more like hunters than anyone else, im sure you`ll agree. But the guide delivered, after about 2hrs, he managed somehow, to find one under these weeds, but then yanked it out and we all got to hold it. Man 1- Wildlife 0

Then we headed back to camp for a feed, got changed, and went hunting for another Amazon creature, this time no walking involved, just a line, hook and bait. Piranha fishing. I won’t talk about this too much, we didn’t catch many as a group, I only caught one, and C failed on this day. But we did all eat Piranha for tea, so happy days. Man 2- Wildlife 0.
That evening was quite strange, a quiet one was on the cards as you`d expect, you’re in the middle of the jungle….. nu uh…. Somehow the 6 cool people from our group got invited to a birthday party of a local family… quite random, but there was beer, food and music and so the good times continued.

The morning after we all got back in the boats, and headed down river to go swimming with the dolphins, now….. As the pictures quite clearly indicate, the river is full and I mean `full’ of alligators and caiman. We stopped in this one area where the dolphins “hang out” but we could see a few alligators within a few meters of the boat, ah well, if the locals say it’s good, that’s good enough for me, so in we all went, some for a shorter swim than other may I add, the dolphins showed every now and again.
After the swim we headed back down river, then back in the jeep and back in the plane to La Paz, a seriously awesome experience in the Jungle a really fantastic place.
With the Jungle recovery involving a lot of beer and sore heads, we booked up to do the Huyana Potosi mountain climb C will talk about that in one moment. But for a little bit extra we could do the “Death Road” mountain biking which was not the experience we had hoped for. Not going to go into detail as it is really not a nice thing to talk about, but basically about halfway down, one of the guides fell from the road/cliff edge and died, it certainly ruined the day and just came as such a shock…..
BUT!!!! Onwards and Upwards literally about 6088m upwards, so over to C man for the Mountain talk……

So onto yet another adventure in Bolivia, this time we had chosen to climb to the top of Huayna Potosi, one of the biggest mountains in Bolivia with a peak standing 6088 meters above sea level (higher than any mountain in Europe!). We had heard from everybody who had done this that it is one of the hardest if not the hardest thing they had ever done, mainly due to the altitude, we knew we were in for a tough time! The trip started at base camp, 4700m high and on the first day we went ice climbing for a bit of fun and to help acclimatize to the altitude, we then went back had tea and hit the hay at about 9pm, a late night compared to the following evening! Next morning it was up, pack up the rucksacks with our gear, the boots, crampons, harness, ice axe etc. We then had a 3 hour trek up to high camp, this was conveniently situated at 5200m and ended with a climb up a pretty steep rocky mountain, just what we needed with a massive backpack on! We arrived here at about 12 midday and had a quick lunch before chilling out and resting until dinner time at 6! We then had dinner and settled down to sleep at about 7!

Due to sleeping most of the afternoon I didn’t really sleep that evening, I don’t think many people did really. We went to bed so early as the top dog of the trip started the following morning at 1am, at 12.30 we all got ready and kitted up, it was freezing cold as you´d expect so many layers we´re on, the groups were very small, 2 people to 1 guide, so it was me, JB and our guide Ishmael, who didn’t speak a word of English, only after we had got back down to base camp did we think it wasn’t the safest thing we´ve done!! We set off at 1am, and started up the mountain, it truly was a grueling experience, we had been walking for about 2 hours, and then looked up and saw that the mountain was still huge and we were miles away….horrible feeling, especially as by the time our feet were like ice blocks, clearly the 3 pairs of socks weren’t enough! We carried on for another hour and it finally looked like we were getting somewhere the mountain was a lot smaller now as we had taken quite a steep track up, we overheard one of the other group ask their guide how far it was, expecting to hear maybe an hour of so…..the guide totally destroys any motivation by letting us know we have another 3 hours!! By this time we were at about 5700m and the altitude really was doing everything except help us, we were stopping almost every 10mins for a minute or so to catch our breath, it wasn’t so much as the walk was aching the legs, it was just we could stop for 1min or 5mins and be fully breathed up, and then start walking again and be out of breath in 10 steps! Silly times! Along the walk we had to step over crevices, some probably went down 100m or more, they were maybe half a meter wide, needless to say we took a bit of care stepping over! We carried on for what seemed like an eternity and finally saw the peak, from here Ishmael said it was about an hour to the top, delighted from here there was no turning back, although many times along the way I had definitely thought about throwing the towel in! The sun had started to appear slightly and we were just climbing a few rocks, when we got to the top, Ishmael made our day and told us there was only about 20mins left, we slowly made our way up the narrow path to the summit, we had made it, it took us about 6 hours but we were there, and it was a pretty spectacular view, you could see La Paz, and Lake Titicaca which is about 4 hours away on road from the mountain, and to top it all off the sun had just risen as we made the top…….over the moon we had made it.

Now it was just the 3 hours back down! We finally arrived back at the high camp at about 10.30am, super tired after 9 ½ hours out in the cold trekking up a mountain! We had to pack up all our gear and make our way back down to base camp, from here we went back to La Paz exhausted and questioning why we had put ourselves through that! Overall it was a good experience but genuinely one of the hardest things I’ve certainly done and Barnesie said the same too. So that’s it for Bolivia for us, were off to Peru tomorrow, looking forward to spending some time in Cuzco before we start the Inca Trail.
Again hope everyone is ok back home,

Cjelf and Barnes

XXXXXXXXX