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Rurrenabaque

So, we got up at the crack of dawn to ride a little microbus for four hours up into the mountains near La Paz. They dropped us off at 5000 meters and were to ride downhill all day until we got to 1000 meters. The road was incredibly frightening, a cliff going up next to you and a half a mile straight down on the other side. It was raining when we started but they assured us it would clear up once we got to lower altitudes. Yeah right. It rained nonstop the whole way down until maybe 20 minutes before we finished. They gave us little rain coats that did absolutely nothing to stop us from getting wet. To make the rain and mud roads even more exciting, our brakes barely worked. You had to hold the back brakes as hard as possible the whole way down to go a comfortable speed down the windy, muddy, tropical mountain roads. Our guide's brakes went out and he waved us to go ahead. Reilly took the lead and led us down. He got into the speed enough that he was flying down the road and left us all trailing. I had to stop for a sec because my brakes came apart. I got them fixed and came around a corner to see a few other riders helping Reilly stand up. He had blood all over his shirt and some crazy look in his eyes. It took me a minute to realize that his bike was gone. He had cut a corner too tight, hit a rock, and flown over the edge. Luckily, he had his wits about him well enough to grab onto whatever plants he could get hold of. The bike flew down about 200 yards but Reilly only went down a few. He managed to only get a concussion and a really big, nasty cut on his chin. It was a bad one. I felt all weak when I saw it and I'm not usually too squeamish. Reilly wasn't the only one shaken up by the ordeal, everyone kind of lost the motivation to go on after that, but there wasn't room in the van for everyone who wanted to quit. It was a sudden reality check that we were riding down the most dangerous road in the world. Regardless, we all crept down the rest of the trip and Reilly, our new friend Mike, and I went up the hill to the hospital in Coroico to get him fixed up. I swear Reilly was the least freaked out of the whole tour, maybe because he had the adrenaline rush giving him some sort of body buzz. Who knows? We stayed in Coroico for one day but I wish we could have stayed for more. It was the closest I can imagine Paradise. Our hostel was right at the top of the mountain surrounded by jungle. There were crazy birds flying around and banana trees and the whole bit. The hostel was run by an extremely friendly German guy, who set us up with a half price buffet and free steaks for the three of us. Oh yeah, quick side note: Mike was on the same tour we were on and also was going on to the the jungle tour with us also. But anyways, we had bus tickets and had to leave paradise after only one day. We took a short truck ride back down to the bottom of the mountain to wait for our bus to Rurrenabaque. They could only give us a vague time because it depended on how long it took to get from La Paz on that crazy road. It took them about 10 hours to get to us from La Paz, this is important because it was the same driver the whole time including the 16 hours we were on the bus. The daylight part of the ride wasn't too bad, probably because I was on the side where I couldn't see over the cliff. Mike was unlucky enough to be over there, and he was a mess. We stopped for dinner and continued on towards the Amazon Basin. This time, I was on the cliff side and it was getting dark. The road was only wide enough for one small car, but they managed to fit this 4 wheel drive bus up, having to stop and back up every time there was another bus or truck full of cows. The mud road was eroded away in many parts and we would just drive real fast over it, some times with the wheels on one side not having road to grip. There was on e part in particular that I will never forget. There was a part eroded away on the cliff side and huge ruts so the driver couldn't speed through it. The uneven ruts made the bus rock back and forth about 5 feet. Right when it rocked too far and was about to tip over the cliff, it tipped over onto the dried mud that had been squished out of the rut. It scraped along, halfway on its side, until it bobbed back upright. I have never felt so close to death unto that point. I decided to open my window and one on the other side, so that when the bus was going to tip over, I could jump out the window and survive. I am glad we didn't come very close again because I would have jumped and then suffer the humiliation of running to catch up and explain to the bus driver what happened. I kept bugging the normal patrons of the bus and they were convinced there was no problem. One dude got tired of me bothering him and moved away. I stayed awake the whole time readying my jumping stance whenever the bus started rocking and listening to classical music to calm me down. We got in to Rurre at dawn and I was all cracked out and irritable, we all were. We paid some kid in bare feet to push a cart with our packs to the hostel and crashed out. We had to wait for a day for our tour to leave, so I went hiking while Reilly relaxed in the hostel. When our tour finally left, we rode a jeep for two hours further into the jungle then took a boat for another two hours. We saw eagles, toucans, turtles, capybaras, pink dolphins, caimans, a big dead anaconda (yes, the one in the picture is dead, I had to), and some monkeys that we got to feed bananas. There were a lot more animals but those were the main ones. The mosquitoes were like nothing you'll never see unless you go to the jungle. I swiped about 50 mosquitoes from the back of one of the other guys, in one swipe. They were horrible, luckily we were out of the malarial area. We were going to swim but the water was too nasty from the yearly flood, we just happened to be there in the wrong time, 2 weeks later would have been better, oh well. We hiked out across the pampas in water up to our waists out to a little island in the hopes of finding anacondas. We found two babies and some eggs, but, personally, I wasn't too let down about not seeing a huge killer serpent monster. The babies were creepy enough. We communicated with caimans and went fishing for piranhas and giant catfish. We had no success on our fishing excursion because of the murkiness of the water. Normally, everyone catches a fish. We drank tea made from the bark of some tree like nature's Imodium-AD. We chased down capybaras, and tried to see an caiman nest but it was too flooded and they could move faster than us in the water, so we refrained from proceeding closer. On one evening I thought I would chill out in the boat and watch the sun set. I sat for a few minutes and turned around to see a bright green snake slithering it's way into the boat, right between me and the land. I couldn't jump into the water because I was afraid of the piranhas, so, I started screaming like a little girl for our guide. He came running over and got a really nervous look in his eyes. He grabbed a stick and cautiously moved close enough to it to whack it on the head. It was some manner of poisonous snake, I didn't bother to learn anything more than it was a dead snake. We came back to Rurre after 4 days. We refused to take the bus back so we got a ride back with the Bolivian air force line. The plane took off and landed from a grass runway with pigs and a cow roaming around in it. We got back to La Paz and met up with our friend, Dylan, and partied for a few days until we decided to head out to the Salar De Uyuni, or the Salt Flats of Uyuni.