The Amazon

I just got back to La Paz after a trip to the Bolivian Amazon Basin. I did a tour of the pampas where I saw monkeys, lots of birds, some crocodiles, an anaconda, pink dolphins, and some other wildlife. I caught and ate a piranha (their teeth are sharp) and my ass and upper legs are covered with mosquito bites. The pampas was recommended to me by other travelers and I just spent one afternoon in the jungle (where I ziplined over the jungle canopy) and, honestly. I'm trying not to kick myself for not having a jungle tour cause I enjoyed my half day in the jungle more than my 2.5 days in the pampas. The pampas are wetlands/swamps and other than the presence of the dolphins, monkeys, and piranhas it reminded me of the swamps of Louisiana, though I think louisiana is actually more beautiful. The real adventure was getting to Rurrenabaque-the gateway city to the amazon. 

You can take a bus but it takes between 15-30 hours depending on the day and the bus to cover just 400km. A friend took it and it took him 25 hours to get there and "just" 17 to get back. And the buses aren't comfortable & break down. The flight is about $130 and takes 50 minutes. Most people reccommend the flight.

I booked an 8:40am flight but got a call the night before telling me that the flight time had been changed to 12:35pm. At 9:45am I got a call telling me to go straight to the airport cause now the flight was at 11:30 (it takes 30 minutes to get to the airport). I grabbed a cab and hurried there, only to find out that the new flight had actually been at 10:30 and I'd missed it. So I was booked onto the 12:35 flight, which left at 1:30ish. The plane was the second smallest I've ever been on. There was one seat on either side. It only sat 19 people and you could see straight into the cockpit. The plane was so small you could feel all the bumps and turbulence that a bigger plane wouldn't have felt. The windows were all foggy and opaque so it was hard to see out. A ways into the flight there started to be a beeping. The beeping accelerated with time and I wasn't sure if it was a normal beeping or a bad beeping. We broke through the cloud cover and suddenly everything below us was green. It looked like the opening shots from the tv show LOST. We were much closer to the ground than i'd realized and we were still going really fast. The beeping got faster. The pilot said something over the speaker but I couldn't hear him at all. If I couldn't see him I wouldn't have known that he said anything. I really wasn't sure if he was saying we were landing in a few minutes or to brace for impact. We flew low and fast over the trees and then out of no where the Tarmac appeared. We landed and there was NOTHING around us. I couldn't even see the airport. It was warm, tropical, and humid. Couldn't have been more different than La Paz.