Rain Delay

Thursday May 1st

Well we were able to get up at 5am this morning and find some macaws. But first you should have seen the size of breakfast the cooks prepared for us. We are seriously thinking about kidnapping them and bringing them on the truck to do our lunches and dinners when we are camping.

Anyway we travelled for 2 hours to try to find parrots, and although we saw all the same animals as before, we didn't see any macaws. So we headed back to the camp, and when we got back, wa dozen macaws flew over. Needless to say the group that didn't bother getting up early to go see the macaws were very amused.

We then had lunch at 9am. I'm not sure how my body copes with it all. But we had to leave early because our flights out of the grass field airport were at 3pm. The trip back was pretty much the reverse of the trip there, with loads of gators and capybara on the banks, sometimes very close. And the roads were as bad. Due to the previous days rain I was down to my swimmers as my only shorts to wear, and because I wasn't used to how they sit on me, I didn't manage to suncream my legs properly, so I managed to get a little sunburnt while on the boat and in the jeep home.

And that is where the fun started. We got back to the airline office in the town before heading out to the airport, only to discover that they whole of the previous days flights had been cancelled because of the rain, and those people were now on our flights.

The last thing we needed to hear, given how little clean clothes most of us had left, was that we had to stay another day. Actually it was worse than that, not only were we stuck in this jungle town with no clean clothes for the next day, we were no longer going to be able to clean our clothes in La Paz as we would now only be overnighting there.

We did manage to get 3 of our group out on a military plane, including one guy who was finishing on the tour that day. Ironically if I hadn't signed up for the next leg of the tour I would have been getting out at the same time. But I wasn't so stuck I was with the rest. Luckily Marika, our tour leader, was able to find decent accomodation, not an easy job at short notice for 16 people.

Due to the general disappointment in the group, there wasn't that much done that evening, we had a meal and a drink but that was about it.