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Following an easy border crossing, except that the Bolivian border control had decided on that day to only give everyone a 30day visa, rather than the 90 we're entitled to, we arrived in La Paz. Driving into the city is beautiful with the city spreading through the valleys of the surrounding snow capped mountains. La Paz in the highest capital city in the world at around 4000m above sea level. We had a few days to explore the city, including seeing one of Bolivia's numerous festivals, which consisted of indigenous people dressed in bright costumes dancing in parades along the streets and drinking lots of beer all day!
After a couple of days we heading East to Coroico where we spent one night enjoying beautiful views across the valley from the hotel swimming pool! The next day we headed down hill in a taxi to La Senda Verde (LSV) (in English the green trail)! LSV is an animal refuge centre run by Bolivian couple Vicky and Marcelo who rescue animals who are kept illegal as pets or for the tourist trade or are being sold on the black market. They started 8 years ago with one Capuchin monkey, Ciruelo (plum) and they now have over 250 animals with over 50 monkeys. We were greeted by Elena, who had already volunteered at LSV once and had returned two weeks early to spend another month there! Elena showed us round and introduced us to the staff, volunteers and animals. The centre is set in a beautiful location in the valley below Coroico right on the side of a river. The area is separated into two sections, the main centre with most of the animals, places for visitors to stay, the restaurant and the monkey area up by Vicky and Marcelo's house; and on the other side of the river the volunteer house and Quarantine area. As volunteers we separated into four groups responsible for different animals: birds, monkeys, quarantine and miscellaneous; as well as people who did special projects such as repairing cages, improving enclosures and any other ideas to improve the lives of the animals. Miscellaneous animals included Aruma, the spectacle bear, the Andean fox, turtles and tortoises, the four dogs who became like pets to all the volunteers and the two tiny kittens (Coast and Vida- Coast and Life)!
The experience was hard work but amazing!! We had the time to learn the stories of all the different animals, where they had come from and why they were at LSV. Sadly in Bolivia the law makes it really hard and very expensive to release animals back into the wild, and sadly lots of the animals particularly the monkeys are too domesticated to survive in the wild, and so LSV is their home for life. Everyone had their favourite monkeys- mine was Pepino (cucumber) who was quite shy particularly with men, but jumped straight on my shoulder, and Will's was Uva (grape) a particularly crazy monkey who liked to wrap herself around the necks of new people she met and scream loudly in their ears in excitement! The only way to get her to be quiet was to blow a jet of air into her mouth which she likes to catch and then makes a really sweet bubbling noise! If you do this to another monkey Leo he sticks his tongue out as far as it will reach!!
There were six different types of monkeys at LSV, an Owl monkey and a Lion monkey, squirrel monkeys, spider monkeys, howler monkeys and capuchin monkeys. We had the responsibility of looking after the Capuchin monkeys who are among the cleverest monkeys and can use stones as tools to break food open. Nico found a particular obsession with my belt and could open it but never worked out how to put it back on! And Martin who was really clever could open buttons on volunteers' shirts and then do them up again!
One of the other jobs we had was to feed Aruma the bear. He was a spectacle bear like Paddington, except from Bolivia not Peru! Feeding and cleaning his enclosure included one person enticing him to the top of his enclosure with peanuts and sitting with him (behind the electric fence, which sometimes worked!!) whilst the other person or people entered his cage and cleaned it out and put fresh food in! Never thought we´d be entering a bear´s cage!!
Our two weeks at LSV gave us some of the most amazing experiences of our lives!! It's not very often that you have two monkeys having a play fight over you head with their tails wrapped around you neck; or you spend the day fixing new holes in the food preparation room ceiling because one of the spider monkeys managed to get in again; or you go to the toilet in the morning only to see the head of Warya the spider monkey peering at you under the door; or you have Canelo (cinnamon), the male howler monkey, sleeping on your lap with Chocolate (spider monkey) and one of the squirrel monkeys trying to wake him up for a play fight!
The two weeks went so quickly, we had a great group of volunteers and life a LSV is really full on! You only leave once a week to have a meal in town and a few minutes to use the internet. Luckily one of these evenings was the same day that Amelie Rose Owen was born and so we were able to see pictures of our beautiful little niece the day she was born!!
It was very hard to leave LSV and we were sad to say goodbye to all the animals, but after two weeks we headed back to La Paz, with one of the other volunteers, Inez, to visit the Salt Plains.
Uyuni is a very strange town in the middle of the desert near the salt plains left as a result of an ancient inland sea. The day we arrived we searched through the tour operators, there are about 60+ in town all offering the same tour and all with reports of bad service and quality. We eventually settled on one (which later turned out to be a bad choice!!) and the next morning set out on a three day jeep tour across the salt flats and the surrounding amazing landscape.
Day one gave us a glimpse of what was to come when our driver initially failed to say hello and then eventually upon arrival at our first stop briefly said his name was Max and we had 5 minutes! The first stop was a strange surreal place named the train cemetery where old trains are pushed along lines which end in the middle of the desert and they are left their to rust. We felt jealous of the local children who had this great playground just outside town! We continued on from here, battling against the very rude Max about not wanting to listen to his one awful CD when the company had said we could use our ipods!! Next stop was onto the salt flats another surreal experience of what looks like snow spreading perfectly flat for miles enclosed in the background by towering mountains. We stopped at an island in the middle with massive cactus plants and hills offering great views of the salt plains, which appeared more like the sea they used to be! From here we continued on to our first nights stop in a salt hotel. The hotel is made from bricks of salt, with a carpet of salt across all the floors and all the tables, chairs and beds also made from blocks of salt! It was really beautiful and seemed surprisingly stable!
Day 2 consisted of driving across moon like scenery, visiting beautiful high altitude lagunas, watching flamingos and seeing a smoking volcano (from a distance!) We stopped for lunch by the famous Arbol de Piedra (tree of rock) painted by Salvador Dali. Again we had issues with our guide and the whole group had to practice complaining in Spanish to someone who really didn't care what we thought!
Another nights sleep, and a very early start and we were driving through the sunrise into a valley full of geysers! It was absolutely freezing as we stood and watched the steam shooting straight out of the earth! We managed to warm up after this with a dip in the hot springs! Although we did feel like those mad people who go to the Arctic, then get undressed and jump in the water! At least our water was hot though!! After breakfast we visited a final laguna right by the Chilean border before we started our drive back to Uyuni.
After a lazy day in Uyuni, the three of us headed back to La Paz and then back towards Coroico to meet all the other LSV volunteers at an old Spanish castle in the middle of a beautiful valley for a three day psytrance festival! The setting was beautiful and the approximately twenty pound ticket cost even included en suite hotel rooms for two nights! The festival was great, if not a little unorganised Bolivian style! By day three though they had managed to run out of food, or were just refusing to cook it because it was raining! (Apparently here people cannot cook when it rains!!) And so nearly starving(!) we headed back to La Paz in search of the giant pizza that Elena and Bimala had told us so much about!!
We are now still in La Paz, we had planned to leave today but forgot that it is a national holiday for the Day of the Dead, when people celebrate the lives of lost loved ones by going to cemeteries and partying and drinking lots! Therefore the buses are not running properly today and so we are leaving tomorrow to visit Copacabana on the lake side of Lake Titicaca before heading back to Peru!
- comments
Jane (Mum) This is abrilliant blog - really well written and informative. Can't even find a spelling mistake! Love the photos that go with it too, the monkey santuary sounds like heaven on earth. I can't understand how they can afford to run it. Will made the spider monkies sound like such yobs but they look seriously cute!