Anaconda Hunting in the Amazon Basin

November 17-22, 2007

Before you start reading this blog please get your ipod out, turn it to Guns & Roses - Welcome to the Jungle and press play. Sorry about overloading you with pickies but we just couldn´t choose which ones not to include!

We left La Paz in a small eighteen seater plane bound for Rurrenabaque, a small community on the Beni River, in the Amazon Basin of northern Bolivia. Flights can only operate in certain weather since the runway is made of grass and clay. Given that it´s creeping into the wet season, we were lucky to have some dry weather, even if there were hovering black clouds in the sky. We all made jokes to ease the tension as we boarded the small plane, thinking there was no way we´d make it to Rurre alive. But we did!

We were given the impression that it would get quite cold in the jungle so we came prepared. It was hot and humid the whole time we were there. Our first night we sweltered in our room with mosquito netting for windows and the fan going (when the electricity was actually working). The first night also happened to be the annual community celebration which mean families and kids playing in the streets, people marching with lanterns and street bands playing into the night.

We set off for the pampas the next morning. There are two popular tours from Rurre. A jungle tour and a pampas tour. The main difference is the pampas has less trees, more grass land and is less dense. Because of this it´s more likely you will see the animals and that is what we were here for.

The first leg of the journey was in the back of a ´Toyosa´ 4WD, three hours down a dusty, bumpy, rocky road. Every time we passed another vehicle the driver would rest his hand on the severely cracked windscreen as if to protect it against further onslaught!

We were lucky to have a very diverse and good tour grop and a friendly, knowledgable, local leader called Jazmani. He grew up in a tribe in the Bolivian jungle and has been a tour guide for nine years. His documents say he´s 26 but he doesn´t know for sure and he doesn´t have a birthday. He had two years of schooling as we know it, and now speaks five languages including English and Hebrew. In our group we had two Swedes, two Japonese, two Israelis, one Norwegian, one Icelander and of course two bloody Aussies.

Once we were out of the 4WD we jumped into a long wooden boat with an outboard on the back. We had a three hour journey up stream, stopping regularly and going nice and slow so our cameras could snap away at all the fascinating wildlife we saw along the river. We saw alligators and black caiman, poised for attack on the bank or lurking in the water with their eyes and nose showing. Turtles piled up on top of each other on logs. Squirrel monkeys that came up to the boat and ate bananas from our hands. Big, fat, hairy capibaras which kind of look like wombats but are massive rodents. And loads of birds including stalks, cranes, cormorants, king fishers, parrots, tucans, fishing eagles. This was just the beginning.

Our camp was one of a few ecolodges that line the banks of the river a good distance from each other. It was a small wooden village built off the ground with simple beds with lots of mozzie netting and plenty of hammocks. After dinner and before sleep we went out to watch the sunset and play some football and volleyball with the locals. The football was Bolivia v The World and despite having more players we still lost 4-1. We tried using the common excuse of the altitude used by visiting nations in Bolivia, but it didn´t really hold strong since we were only at about 100m above sea level!

Once the sun was down we were back on the river to witness teh nocturnal side of the pampas. Lots of beedy, red eyes peeping just over the level of the water. It was pretty hard to capture on camera though! You´ll just have to trust us that the red spots are alligator eyes. Our guide was a very experienced croc hunter and managed to wrestle and capture one on the bank. We couldn´t help feeling a bit sorry for it though with cameras in it´s face and flashes going off left, right and centre.

Day two, after a healthy and hearty jungle breakfast we donned our gummies and went anaconda hunting!!! (Much to Fi´s delight given that she is the most ´snakephobic´ person in Bolivia at the moment). Anaconda hunting involves walking around in murky swamp land for about 4-5 hours amongst tall grass with mud and water sometimes waste high. The hunter often feels the anaconda before they see it. Apparently only small anacondas (3-4m long) live close to the river. The big ones (9-10m long who are capable of eating alligators and humans) were further into the pampas so we wouldn´t be getting too dangerous! We got lucky. About 20 minutes in we found an anaconda. Again we had to feel sorry for the poor thing given the onslaught of cameras. We would have been suspicious of it being a pet snake since we found one so soon, if Davo hadn´t have been right behind the guide when he caught it. So the swamp land only got knee deep at most and the walking was less than an hour. Lucky us.

This gave us time to go swimming with the pink dolphins before lunch. I know what you´re thinking... There are alligators and anacondas around, why were we swimming in the river? Well, we haven´t told you about the pirahnas yet! But it´s ok. Anacondas only live beyond the river. When dolphins are around the alligators are not... apparenlty. And the dolphins eat pirahnas so there is no threat of being eaten alive. But simple logic tells us that if dolphins eat pirahnas then they must be in the same place at some point in time? Anyway, we came away in one piece. The dolphins did get a little bit frisky, splashing us a few times because we were in their territory. They were also hard to photograph so you´ll just have to trust that we don´t do drugs and they really do have a pink tinge!

After lunch we went pirahna fishing using small lines, blunt hooks and alligator meat. Fi was the champion, perfecting the whoopering technique flinging the pirahnas into the boat. She definitely came away with bragging rights as Davo only caught one! They were fiesty little things too, bites were frequent as they were attracted to the raw meat but snagging them was another thing. In the pampas there are four species of pirahna - black, white, red and yellow. They don´t get much bigger than the size of your hand but they work in large groups. They are attracted to blood and are capable of cleaning up an injured person in a matter of minutes. But with these little guys you´d have to be very incapable or very stupid to find yourself in that situation. Most people would be able to get out of the water before any serious damage was done.

We had the last laugh and ate the pirahnas for dinner rather than the other way around. The were small and bony but tasty.

Day three, we were up and about at sunrise to wake up with the pampas before our guide shared another of his skills that he´d learned as a young fella in the jungle - jewelery making He made us beautiful necklaces using seeds from the pampas and alligator teeth. We also went for a walk through some of the pampas which was a bit more like what you´d expect in the jungle so we could appreciate some of the flora. We saw some special orchids, plants and trees including the curare which is used for making poisonous darts and anaesthetics. Three drops of the sap would be enough to induce a slow and painful death to a fully grown human. We also got a good dose of mozzies.

We didn´t see any jaguars in the flesh, but our guide heard them close to the camp during one night. The howler monkeys produced an equally frightening sound but they are less threatening in the flesh.

From here we made the boat and 4WD journey back to Rurre. Fi nearly jumped out of her skin when the Toyosa almost ran over a rattle snake poised to strike. She was sure the snake experiences were over! We had one more animal experience left which would be finding the small ticks attached to our bodies when we got home to Rurre.

We had been blessed with beautiful weather for the three days in the pampas but were met by some seriously fearsome rain clouds before reaching Rurre as our lucky streak wore out. This also delayed our mini flight back to La Paz by a bit over a day. But we weren´t too worried. We spent a full day lying around in the hammocks, relaxing, which is what we´re doing now as we scribe this entry about to jump on a tiny plane and risk our lives again.