We got up early today for a morning walk at 5.30am. Due to our experience with our guide yesterday, I was a bit apprehensive about what we would see. So we walked through the jungle for 2 hours and saw two trees, one spider web and when the sun came up a jaguar foot print.
There were the dramatic pauses also, but when you don’t point your flash light into the trees, you aren’t going to find anything! No animals, could be due to the fact that we were walking rather than stopping and waiting. So a rather pointless exercise.
After breakfast we did some jewellery making. Not really our thing, but the other two were keen. So we spent about 2.5 hours making a ring out of coconut and a necklace out of seeds. It was ok, good mindless stuff and we weren’t walking around getting hot and sweaty.
After lunch we headed out to the river to catch the boat back to Rurrenabaque. A couple of the blokes that work there carried our bags out. This was good as I wasn’t planning of carrying them myself and wasn’t looking forward to trying to explain this to our ‘english-speaking’ guide.
The boat trip back was rather odd as we stopped about half way back and changed boats and moved the outboard motor too. Why?? Then the motor didn’t work and they pulled out the tools, got it going for about 10 minutes then it stopped again. Getting more unhappy by this stage.
We were discussing what we were going to do when we got back to Rurrenabaque and found out that someone had helped themselves to 200 Bolivianos from The Albatrosses wallet whilst we were at the ‘lodge’. The wallet was in our suitcase which was zipped closed, so they had to go looking for it. This made us quite angry and another black mark against Madidi Travel.
We did see a Capybara on the boat ride back which was the only highlight.
We now didn’t have enough money for our accommodation and dinner tonight. We’d heard and read that the bank in town wasn’t always open so were wondering how we were going to pay (particularly if they didn’t accept credit card or USD). Fortunately the two girls on the trip with us said there is now an ATM (installed a month ago), and it works.
Finally we got back to town and into the office. Our ‘english-speaking’ guide had disappeared, that is, he hadn’t walked with us back to the office, like the other guide did for his group. Annoyed!
Got our stuff and walked next door into the Amaszonia airline office to confirm our flight our tomorrow morning at 9.25am. The office was heaving. We worked out that the last flight of today had been cancelled due to steering problems with the plane. On speaking to the staff, difficult as they don’t have any English, we worked out that the first three (of four) flights tomorrow were also cancelled. We managed to get ourselves on the only flight at 16:25, but it isn’t good for our connecting flight in La Paz. We are trying to see if we can change that flight. Fingers crossed that flight actually leaves.
All rather hectic, we needed to stop and go out to dinner. We had mentioned to the two girls where we were staying if they wanted to catch up for a drink and dinner. We had already wandered out and sat down in a restaurant when I saw them walk past, a quick run after them and we were all seated. I think we had a debriefing session. We all could relax and talk about how fantastic the jungle was, how bad our guide was and if we were going to get out on a plane tomorrow. So some food and 11 big bottles beers (cerveza grande) later we were all happy.
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