¡Hola!

PG: this blog is a little less family-friendly than normal, so you may want to give it a quick check first before reading it with the kids :)

Well, long-time no-write, but that is because both Sarah and I have been busy volunteering at separate projects in Bolivia for the last four weeks.Sarah is going to write a blog about what she has been up to I'm sure, but in the meantime here is what I was doing:

I left Cochabamba and headed East into the jungle to a small town called Villa Tunari, where the very first animal refuge set up by Community Inti Wara Yassi, known as Parque Machia, is situated.The park is home to hundreds of animals, including four pumas, two ocelots, hundreds of birds, spider monkeys, capuchins, tyras and quatis, and a black bear called Balu, all crammed into just 38 hectares of jungle.I arrived at a time when they were short on male volunteers who could stay for a month, so they were very pleased to see me turn up.Only boys are allowed to work with the two stronger, younger pumas, Roy and Sonko, and the cats don't like change very much, so a minimum commitment of a month is usually required.That said, volunteers working with Roy would often have to back out within a few days either because of exhaustion, injury (from falling off a trail), or from freaking out after getting bitten.Three consecutive people before me had had to stop working with him, one of whom was sporting a nasty bite on his legs with four stitches when I arrived, so I was understandably a bit apprehensive about meeting him.However, my first impression of Roy was that he was a lot smaller than I expected him to be (having never seen a puma before), and this made me feel marginally happier about working with him.

Roy is a seven-year-old mountain puma who was confiscated from a market in Bolivia, along with his brother, when they were just six weeks old; they were being sold alongside their mother's kelp.Unfortunately, Roy's brother died shortly afterwards, but Roy has been living at Parque Machia ever since.Apparently efforts have been made in the past to try to release him, but too many bureaucratic obstacles had been put in the way and he will now never be released.So, instead, Roy is taken out for about five hours every day for a 'walk' along trails through the park, and this is what I was doing every day for four weeks.It was rainy season, and these 'trails' were changing all of the time as new tree falls, landslides or rivers would appear each day.The routes were extremely slippy and steep - reminiscent of an army assault course - and downright treacherous in places.In the first few days I was much more concerned about my safety on the trails than I was about anything that puma could come up with.

I was working mostly with a wicked Canadian guy called Jacob, and each morning we would head up into the jungle on the 15-minute hike up to where Roy's cage, stopping on route to collect a selection of the finest blades of grass to give to Roy to chew on when we arrived.We'd shout '¡Hola Roy!' on the way up so he knew we were coming, and we'd stick out hands into the cage so that he could give them a good sniff, and a lick if we were lucky.We'd let Roy out onto his runner (a metal cable running down a small river valley that he was connected to with a lead) so he could go for a crap and mark his territory whilst we would clean out his cage.People who worked with monkeys would spend all morning washing off all the s*** from the monkeys' sleeping blankets; in contrast Roy kept his cage in pristine condition and, apart from throwing out any bits of last night's dinner that might be lying around, we only needed to clean out his food bowls and fluff up the straw in his bed, which just took a couple of minutes.

After packing things up and chewing a bit of coca we were ready to go out for the morning 'walk'.Chewing coca became an essential part of our daily routine, and we came to rely on it heavily; the one morning when we had forgotten to buy bica (bicarbonate of soda, which you chew with the leaves to raise the pH and release the alkaloids) we found seriously tough!As long as you had some coca in your mouth you wouldn't feel any tiredness or hunger, and it would really sharpen up your concentration, which, as you can imagine, was a valuable attribute when working with a 50 kg puma with a reputation for 'jumping'! The main challenge of working with Roy was simply keeping up with him (and not falling off any slippery ridges in the jungle), and the first few days were the toughest whilst my body got used to running the 20-25km per day up and down hills in the jungle.But the toughest points mentally were the 'jumping zones': the parts of the trails where Roy was prone to start acting up and try to 'jump' us.A 'jump' was when Roy would turn around and try to launch himself onto one of your knees and sink his teeth in.This would be accompanied by him wrapping his paws tightly round your leg so it would take two of you to prize him off: the one being bitten would count to three whilst pulling off Roy's paws; on three the other one pull his head away with the rope and lead him off swiftly down the trail.Being a cat, Roy had a very short attention span, and so by the time he was ten metres down the trail he would have forgotten all about it; other times though he would be pissed off about being outsmarted and would jump the other person leading him away, and the two-man process would begin again until he stopped jumping.After working with him for a week or so though we had him nailed most of the time, and he got bored of jumping, but occasionally things would get out of hand if you slipped over or something whilst grappling with him and it would get a bit more complicated.Mercifully though, Roy would never really get his claws out, he would never jump down on you from above (where is the challenge for him in that!), and he would never jump for anything other than your knee - after all, he was only playing and didn't actually want to hurt you.In the end I left with nothing more than a few scratches, from his one non-retractable thumb claw, and a couple of teeth marks on my leg. Roy is a simple opportunist, and so the golden rule was never to let him see the backs of your knees (an easier target since they are out of your sight), and never give him more than a split second when he was on lower ground than you to think about jumping - you simply had to get down there with him and get the lead nice and short before he got a chance to jump.I learnt this lesson the hard way!At the end of the day we'd return Roy to his cage and give him his food: usually a whole raw chicken and some raw beef - yummy!

Roy had a number of tricks up his sleeve which he would occasionally try out to see if he could get a few metres of rope and force a gap between the first and second person.One manoeuvre was called the 's*** and run', which involved - you guessed it - stopping to have a s*** then darting off at full speed without warning once he'd finished.This move was often followed by a '180 slam', whereby, having acquired sufficient length of rope, he would slam to a halt, flip around and jump on the lead person hurtling towards him slipping about in the mud.It was essential that the second person be right behind them in order to put Roy off jumping, so it was his little way of testing our agility and alertness.We envisaged a computer game based on our experiences, whereby points would be accrued by both the puma walkers and the puma, for e.g. a successful 180 slam would give the puma 100 points, or if the walkers successfully put down a potential jump they'd get 100 points etc.There would be different levels based on the various terrains, and there would be coca leaves and medicinal herbs laying about that you'd have to collect to replenish your health.One bad jump on low health it would be GAME OVER man!

I took my camcorder up for a day in the jungle and got a handful of videos, which showed a good cross-section of his behaviour, and I had intended to take it up every day and catch all of his antics; but alas, I dropped in a puddle outside my room after the first day and that was the end of my camera.I made a compilation video from the material I had, which will be on the blog site eventually, but it's not quite what I had intended.

I feel extremely fit now, but I've never been so skinny: I remember weighing about 76 kg in London before I left to go travelling; today I weigh 69 kg and I'm pretty sure I lost three of those just in the last four weeks.So, anyone wishing to go on a diet should consider running a half marathon with a puma everyday - it really works!I'm now happily eating ice cream, steak and cheese every day to compensate.

The social life at the project was great.Every day the volunteers would slowly return from their hard day's work, covered in s*** and mud, grab and ice-cold beer from the fridge and join the others at the cafe.There would often be fundraising meals and other events, and there was a big party every Saturday night with a fancy dress theme, for example: rubix cube night, where everyone had to arrive wearing items of clothing in all six colours of the rubix cube, and by the end of the night had to be wearing just one of the colours.People came and went all of the time, and it was very sad to see good friends disappear, only to be replaced with future good friends that you had to start all over with.Volunteering at the park was a unique experience (where else in the world can you just turn up somewhere with no training and work with a puma), but incredibly hard work for everyone there: volunteers working with monkeys and small animals were getting nasty bites all the time, which often required stitches from the vets, and most people got sick with a parasite or stomach bug at some point.One or two people were also unlucky enough to find a bora bora or botfly larva burrowing under their skin; removing the larva involved suffocating it with some tape over your skin until it comes to the surface and can be pulled out with some tweezers!

Despite the demonstrable successes of the Community Inti Wara Yassi projects in Bolivia, the nature of the park as a 'rehabilitation centre' was highly questionable (they essentially don't release any animals, aside from the odd monkey or bird occasionally), and this was a recurring criticism from the volunteers.But, in its capacity as a refuge for rescued animals - who would have otherwise been sold as pets on the black market - the park worked well, and it was apparent that most of the animals there seemed pretty happy, including Roy.I'd definitely recommend people to go there to volunteer - it was an experience of a lifetime - but just be prepared for crappy accommodation and tough working conditions.

So, it was back to reality for me about my four weeks at Parque Machia, as I travelled back to Cochabamba to see Sarah and stay there for Christmas.Days of lazing about eating nice food and snoozing in a comfortable house, with clean warm clothes on, was beckoning.

R

x