Life in Bolvia - Cochabamba to Ambue Ari

After leaving Potosi, I headed to Cochabamba to get a visa extension, and then to Villa Tunari to volunteer at the refugio de animales. Villa Tunari turned out to be chock full of volunteers, so after a day of working mostly on construction, I took another night bus to Ambue Ari, the recently developed refuge about six hours from Santa Cruz.

In Cochabamba, I went with my compañeros to the theatre, and then to what is reputed to be the best Italian restaurant in the city, for a last evening of culture and fine dining before the month in the jungle. The food and service were splendid, and we met a film director and his businessman brother. Bolivian prices are similar to in Thailand -- the bill for starter, main, dessert and wine came to about AU$15 each.

Market, Cochabamba

Not all of my culinary experiences in Bolivia were so positive. In my first three weeks there, I had food poisoning three times, each of them worse than anything I’d had in my other travels. The first time was on the Uyuni salt flats, and responded well to tablets from my travel first aid kit. The second was in the refuge and was accompanied by a fever so bad I took the bus to the hospital in Guayros to be checked for malaria or other serious jungle affliction; the doctor wrote me five prescriptions all variously related to the things living in my stomach, but fortunately I was already feeling much better on the way home, and able to return to work the next day. The third time, I went to bed after dinner at the "nice" restaurant in Guayros feeling tired but fine, and woke up in the middle of the night feeling terrible. I managed to make it far enough out of bed to throw up in my shoe while searching for my head torch.

Guayros

Life at the refuge was very basic. There was no electricity or phone, and the nearest major town was nearly an hour away via an erratically scheduled bus. We worked 6 1/2 days each week. One night I borrowed a tent and spent the night in the jungle next to my puma's cage; it was much more comfortable and quiet than my room (which featured a variety of wildlife including once the pig breaking in in the middle of the night, and monkeys that constantly broke in at all times of day). One bonus, though, was that we had access to a well, and thus to what must be one of the only reliable sources of clean, drinkable tap water in Bolivia.

Nathan (Canada), Laurel (US) and Junior (Bolivia)

Myself, Junior, & Romi (Austria)

Jaime, Agrapina, Ruru (Bolivia)

Cendric and Melissa (France)

Constructing the new park entrance

Myself and the animals co-ordinator, Noemi (Bolivia)

One night Laurel (my partner in puma-walking) and I decided to try catching a motorcycle-taxi back from Guayros to the refuge. Sailing through the night, I noticed that our speedo was broken as we swerved to overtake a pair of other motorcycles, each bearing two riders. One of them went over and started sliding across the tarmac. It had collided with a giant cayman, the reptile's body stretching across nearly the entirety of one side of the road. After a moment, we realised our driver wasn't going to stop to assist, and prompted him to do so. We returned to the scene; the cayman was gone and two Bolivians were holding up their injured friend, trying to persuade him to stand up and walk. There was blood all over his face and one of his arms was obviously broken. It was difficult to see immediately how bad his injuries were, but they were clearly serious. I eventually managed to explain through a combination of mime and bad Spanish that it was better to let the victim lay still while we waited for help. None of the Bolivians had any idea of basic first aid, trying to shake the victim to keep him awake, and moving him around roughly. An ambulance was out of the question for the finances of the family, so we sent our driver back into Guayros to fetch a taxi. He asked to be paid for our journey so far; I gave him the 10 bolivianos (AU$1.50). We did what we could to help the situation, starting a motorcycle to provide light to steer oncoming vehicles out of the way, talking to the victim to calm him and ascertain he was still coherent, and trying to stop his friends from doing things like lifting him by his broken arm. I sacrificed a jacket for him to lie on; none of the other motorcyclists had one.

Everything was strangely tranquil until the victim's family turned up, and his female relatives started screaming. Eventually the taxi turned up. We asked about Jose, the victim, in the hospital a few days later. He'd been moved to a larger town in stable condition.

The next time we returned from Guayros at night, we stopped to help an overturned truck. This time there was about twenty volunteers all trying to help; I mostly stayed out of the way.

Trinidad

After about three weeks, I needed to withdraw more money from an ATM. I'd ended up with slightly less cash than planned, because over 400 bolivianos of the money I'd obtained from a Cochabamba ATM turned out to be counterfeit. A friend and I used our half-day off to hitch a ride into Trinidad, at three hours away the nearest significant city. We caught a ride on the back of a ute loaded with pineapples, sharing a plank seat with a pair of coca-chewing locals. The breeze from being outside was a welcome relief from the stifling heat, but it was sad to see large swathes of freshly cleared jungle as we made our way closer to Trinidad. Along the way, we stopped to pick up biscuits and soft-drinks, which we shared with the others, attempting to make conversation about the pineapple-vending business.

Trinidad was a dusty, run-down town with many dirt streets, although the main square was quite pleasant. Both of the "nice" restaurants recommended by the guidebook had closed, but I managed to get a tasty (and huge) steak meal from a restaurant on the square, a welcome relief from the bland vegetarian fare at the refuge. We ordered too much, and shared the excess with the square's homeless population. After the meal, we noticed a jaguar skin on the restaurant wall.

Restaurant, Trinidad; the illegal fur trade is quite blatant in Bolivia

Replenished with protein and money, we took a late bus back to the refuge. The woman selling tickets overcharged us by 10 bolivianos, and tried to shortchange me by the same. On the bus, we slept for a while, until I woke about half an hour before the park. There were people sleeping along the whole length of the aisle, so to reach the front of the bus I had to clamber from seat to seat. I talked to the driver to make sure he knew where the park was, and that he needed to stop there. He assured me that he did. I went back to sleep, and awoke just before we arrived in Santa Maria, a small village eight kilometres past the refuge. We tried unsuccessfully to persuade the bus to turn around and drop us off, and disembarked in Santa Maria instead. It was about 1am, and they had turned off the village's generator, so there was no light anywhere. We tried unsuccessfully to find a taxi driver that was still up, or somewhere that sold bottled water - we'd forgotten our water bottle in Trinidad, and I was parched with thirst. We talked to some locals who were sitting quietly in the dark at the bus stop, smoking, and explained our predicament, anticipating a long walk home. At first they were unable to help, but eventually someone disappeared into the dark and returned with someone with a motorcycle who was willing for us to pay him to take us home.

Santa Maria

Local children, Santa Maria

Rain

I was at the refuge for the first part of the rainy season, but the first three weeks were remarkably dry. One day, though, after days of anticipation, it started to pour. It was still raining at breakfast time the next morning, when one of the other volunteers burst into the comedor, requesting help to rescue a truck from the ditch up the road. Several of us left, carrying boards of wood, walking about halfway there before we and our timber were able to hitch a ride with a local truck. Our attempts to get the truck back up the bank were unsuccessful, though, so we decided just to unload the truck's cargo - a newly arrived puma named Popular.

Popular had been liberated from a circus under animal rights laws, and trucked straight to us. It took eight of us to carry him and his metal travel cage up the bank, across the road, down the other bank and down the jungle path to his new cage. I was in front, facing away from the cage, but I could feel the puma gently batting my hand with his paws as we walked. I was more concerned about someone dropping the cage on me on the way down the bank, though.

The rain transformed the jungle. Every path was flooded, the spiders went into hiding and the frogs came out in force, and the thunder of the rain hitting the tree canopy drowned out the usual jungle sounds. We tried to walk Yuma in the morning, but the path was too flooded and she wouldn't cross the deepest parts. I spent the morning widening the path with a machete, or building bridges from jungle materials, to make the path passable for the cat. In the afternoon, we were able to walk and swim with her again. My bridges were terrible, and certainly not anything I would walk on, but our cat padded across them with sure-footed grace while we trudged through pools of rapidly stagnating water.

It rained every day for the next week. Every morning I would optimistically wring out my painstakingly hand-washed clothes and leave them on the line, but things dry slowly in the humidity, and in any case they would be soaked again by nightfall. The best thing about leaving the jungle for Santa Cruz at the end of the week was having clean, dry clothes again.

Main jungle path after the rain

Path to Yuma's cage

Some volunteers wore hats, veils, and gloves to guard against the mosquitoes