Well well well... Look who finally made it to the Amazonas!
Yes, the Pampas is actually a part of the famous Amazonas river. Fortunately, it´s approachable by 2 ways – the famous death road (unsafe) and the famous death plane (a bit less unsafe… maybe…). I chose the second way, but took the more adventurous flight company – the military TAM. The flight took off from the Bolivian air force base in La paz (funny) and landed in the monkeys infested runway of Rurrenabaque – the jungle city.

From there you can take 2 famous tours – the Jungle tour (my next entry) and the Pampas sailing tour.

Our first day out of three at the Pampas was rainy and dark… We arrived at the river bank after seeing a bus stuck on the way (not surprising considering that the ¨road¨ there is a muddy landslide). We hopped right into the small motor boat with our guide and sailed away to our destination – the camp. On the way we already began to spot some birds and monkeys and even had a nice encounter with squirrel monkeys. One of the b******s decided to s*** on my head, how lovely…

We got to the camp and saw, to our surprise, a huge alligator waiting for us. Apparently it´s the camp´s pet. Although it has no name, it´s being fed regularly and hadn´t bitten anyone yet… So he´s just there, for now… It really is creepy, but the camp is built on wooden planks which makes it above water. So I think he can´t get up there, unless crocs can climb stairs. Can they?

Anyway, we discovered that the food is amazingly stylish and surprisingly tasty… However those mosquitoes are unforgiving and nasty, especially at night!

The next morning we had a healthy breakfast and then went on to catch some Anacondas. That´s right, we went out on a boat to a few muddy puddles to LOOK for Anacondas, rather than to look out from those creatures. Oh well, if that´s the itinerary then that´s fine. We began our hunt by catching a tiny irrelevant snake, but then on the second island I witnessed a hilarious episode. 3 guides were out with 3 groups looking for snakes. All of the guides suddenly shout ¨Anaconda!¨ and start running with all the groups behind them. 5 seconds later – all of the guides run the other side and yell ¨Run! A poisonous snake¨! Well, surprise surprise… we found an incredibly dangerous rattle snake. The guides were terrified and decided to kill him so that he won´t get them the next time… And so here´s the funny photo of 3 Indian guides holding a huge stick and a machete trying to kill a snake. They succeeded, so we all took photos with this killer snake.

About 15 minutes later we finally caught our Anaconda. An impressive 2.5 meters specimen was brought down from a tree by a guide (He was smoking a cigarette the whole time), so we managed to hold and kiss this lovely beast.

Later on today we went Piranha fishing. Another strange activity where you´re not sure whether you´re the one who´s supposed to attack or run… Well, it was pretty much like normal fishing, except the raw meat we used as bait and the fact that what we were trying to catch has 2 rows of teeth and that a pack of them are capable of completely devouring a horse in about 20 minutes.

One of us (Shlomi) managed to catch 1 piranha and 1 small catfish, and all the rest were unlucky. Fortunately for us, our guide was quite experienced and managed to catch 7 more piranhas, which was perfect since there were 8 of us. Yes, we ate them. Yes, they taste very good :D

At night we set out on yet another ridiculous adventure – catching crocodiles in the dark. Apparently their eyes glow in an amazing orange glow under the flash light. It seems as if they glow independently, making them a not so good predator at night (against prey with a flash light, that is).

It took us about an hour to spot one, and then our guide backed the boat all the way into the trees and suddenly just left the boat into the swamp. We stayed there alone, wondering if we can steer the boat back into the camp in these croc infested water… Eventually he came back with an amazing baby croc in his hands. About 10 days old, but extremely feisty. So there´s another successful mission impossible :D

The next day we were about to go on our final adventure – swimming with pink dolphins! Well, we saw the dolphins the day before, although it was very difficult to take photos as they jumped out of the water for just a second, but they really were pink. Seemed like gay dolphins to me…

The rain was terrible so we decided to get into some sort of a sport activity before swimming with the dolphins – mud volleyball. Lots of fun! No shoes, pouring rain, mud everywhere… much better than the sand volleyball anyway :)

When the rain was over we came across another problem - no one told the pink dolphins we were coming… So we saw none of them. But that´s ok – the piranhas were still there! (we swam at the same area we did fishing the other day), so we ended up with swimming with piranhas instead. Hmm…

Our fantastic adventure ended on the third day when we packed our things and left the mosquito infested Pampas river and came back to the mosquito infested Rurrenabaque. On the way back we saw many more birds and a HUGE family of fat ugly Capybaras. They look like rats with terrible eating disorders… Yuck…

Now we´re done with the river adventure, it´s now time for the jungle tour! Less animals, less mosquitoes and a hell of a lot more insects! Yay… :D