The first day in Santa Cruz we decided to go to the Santa Cruz Zoo. We asked at our hotel how to get public transport to the zoo, which turned out being cheaper and easier than we thought! So what happens is a small bus will run along a route, and everyone pays the same price no matter if you go 0.2km or 10km and the price... 1.75 Bolivianos each (which is about $0.27 each) so that was awesome. Entry to the zoo was also cheap - yay for the cheap backpackers - at 10 Bolivianos each. We spent about 3.5 hours in the zoo and we saw everything from ardvarks through to toucans and even a sloth with her baby (roving free in the trees over the playground).

After the zoo we made it back and decided to go exploring a little and after much looking found a tour adviser. We ended up decided not to go with his tour and instead went to a town called Samaipata the following day. We then went to the restaurant that the tour operator had suggested and found that well South Americans just really run on a different time span to us. Dinner time starts at 8pm and not really any earlier so we played cards and had some cocktails until they were ready to take our order and we can tell you what the wait was soooooooooo well worth it! Karl had a steak with pan fried potatoes and sauted vegies, Jane had a 1/4 chicken with a tomato and wine jus and mashed potatoes. all up our very luluxuriouseal including all our drinks came to a mere $38 - Bolivia is a fantastic place if you want to be cheap!

Our trip to Samaipata consisted of waking eating and then walking for 1/2 an hour to a taxis stop, where it cost us 30 Bolivianos each for a 3 hour taxi ride - shared with 2 others - to Samaipata. It was a pleasant ride up Santa Cruz is at about 100m above sea level where as Samaipata is located at about 1500m so not a huge difference and it wasn't going to cause problems we have both suffered with at around 3500m. The trip, once you're out of the city is really pretty too. Its about 100kms from Santa Cruz (3 hour drive!) along a valley, passing through a few little towns and going past mountains, it's quite a spectacular view.

Once we had settled and relaxed a little, we realised we were in a hippie commune, which was alright, some Swiss/Italian girls had organised a tour to a local ruin for the late afternoon and we joined them. Al Fuente is one of the best organised ruins of South America it is a huge about 1/2 the size of Machupicchu but with a history dating back to around 500 - 200 b.c. and covering the many religions of that region of South America. Including being used as a fortress for the Spanish conquistadors. This ruin really did supprise Karl who was feeling a bit blase about going to (more) ruins, but turned out to be well worth it.

The real appeal of going to Samaipata was that there's two rather large national parks nearby. So for the Thursday we organised a tour to Parque Nacional Amboro (Amboro National Park). No one else was going (apparently there's a bit of slow peak tourist season for Samaipata this year) so we had a private day tour of the park. It was amazing - our guide, Elva, turned out to be a botanist who went to the big university in Bolivia. The park is massive - approx 640,000 square hectares! So we just walked through a very small part of it. It's not like Australian national parks with walking tracks etc - this track has been cut out by the guides who run tours through the park. It was a great walk, made even better by having a botanist as a guide! She told us about the different defense mechanisms of some of the trees, what could and couldn't live in the area and the different periods the trees came from. In this part of the park there's giant ferns - which are hundreds of years old - apparently they grow 0.5-1cm a year and range up to 3m tall. They are Jurassic (Triassic? well, she was telling us about this, but we didn't have time to take notes!) and have no root system, but have bags of water in them. So if they fall, they just start growing up again. It was pretty spectacular.

We went up and down a few valleys and there were different types of forests in the different valleys (all similar, but some from different periods). On top of this amazing vegetation, when it was not too dense and we could see out from the path, the view of the surrounding valleys and mountains was amazing! So much green after being in the desert for almost a month!

For a large part of the afternoon we were climbing up, using a stream-bed as our walk way. Karl noted that it looked like a waterslide (it was all a smooth rock) and Jane translated this idea to Elva (the guide). Elva said that she'd love to have a go on that type of water slide. So Jane commented that she'd need to put some padding on her bum to do that. At least, that's what Jane intended to say! Turns out that what Jane said was more like, "Well you'll need some protection on your sphincter for that". At which, Elva burst out laughing for a few minutes! Never trust a Spanish person to teach you Spanish! They speak so crassly that you end up saying sphincter instead of bum! This caused many giggles between the three of us (and Jane learnt the real word for bum - trasero).

The last bit of the day we ended up at a lookout, right at the very top - where besides a few cows that had made it in (all that vegetation to eat!!) it felt like we were the only people in the world! The ranges all around were the park and it was a fantastic (if very windy) view - similar to a sea of green. All in all, the day in the national park was beautiful, educational and tiring! We got back to the hostel, showered, and had an early night.

The following day we needed to head back to Santa Cruz - we were going to look at some waterfalls on the way back, but it was overcast and blustery so we just went straight back to Santa Cruz. All we will say about the trip back was.... we survived it.... it took about 2hours and 15 minutes (instead of 3 hours!) and the driver was fairly crazy! (Not as crazy as another tourist's driver, who said that their taxi driver in Santa Cruz snorted coke off the steering wheel of their car as they were driving!).

That night would have been Pete's 60th (in NZ time - Pete is Karl's dad). So in his honour we went out for a nice dinner and then hit up dessert street. So there's this street (literally the street we were staying on) that has shop after shop of dessert restaurants - Jane has nicknamed it Diabetes Alley. So we hit up one of these shops and got some cake and ice cream and wished Pete a happy 60th.

Saturday morning, our time, we jumped into a cab, got out to the airport and got on our flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina!