Welcome to the Pampas

Tuesday April 29th

Today we left the town of Rurrenbache to travel deep into the jungle to stay in a jungle lodge for two days. Or at least we thought it was the jungle. In fact it turns out it is the Pampas. To me its no much of a distinction, there are still rivers, trees, monkeys and so on.

Our trip started with a few hours in a jeep on some more dodgy roads, followed by lunch in the strangest restaurant I have been in. The restaurant had deer, pecary (types of pigs), parrots and even a monkey all wandering round while you ate. Its probably best not to think about how unsantiary it is, although in some ways it is no different to any other South American place where there are always dogs and/or cats hanging around as you eat.

After lunch we transferred to boats and sailed the rest of the way to the lodge. This was where we really began seeing wildlife. The boats were fairly slow going, so we saw lots of birds, aligators and caiman, some capaybara (the largest rodent in the world) and the highlight, some pink freshwater river dolphins.

Overall the trip took about 3 hours, and we then reached our destination, a lodge on the side of the river. It was fairly basic, although better than a couple of the camp sites we had been in. We even had a set of cooks rather than having to do it ourselves. And they did a good job immediately providing us with popcorn on arrival, and later a pretty amazing meal.

After dinner we went out for a night time safari, again on water. To be honest its pretty surreal, you don´t get to see much, except some eyes staring back at you from the water. We did see on big gator on a bank, and we sailed in close, until we got a little too close and he bolted. Of course we all jumped higher than he did, but luckily we didn't really rock the boat.

The rest of the night was spent drinking around the camp fire. Pretty OK, until on the stroke midnight, when amazingly the wind changed direction and suddenly became cold. All of a sudden the temperature dropped 10 degrees and so we all scattered and went to bed. And got into our sleeping bags. They told us to bring them, and we all laughed thinking why would you need them in the jungle, and now we know why.