I spent only a couple days in busy and dirty La Paz, before I flew out to the jungle. There are planes going to Rurrenabaque, a small town in the jungle that is 18h on a dangerous bus ride alternatively, but things get difficult when there is rain. And considering that Rurre is a rainforest town, it rains fairly often. When I got to the airport in La Paz (the biggest in Bolivia but actual tiny!) at 9 in the morning, the first flight scheduled for 6 am had not yet left. I was lucky that there was a free seat on the first 20 seater plane, so I could get onto that in the end 8 hour delayed flight! The plane was the tiniest I had been on so far, no door to the pilot´s cabin and propellers! The landing in Rurre was bumpy because the weather wasn`t great, and there was no airport, just a landing strip and a bus waiting for us and delivering the new passengers. Coming into Rurre by air was quite spectacular as we were flying over jungle and muddy rivers for quite a while before landing in isolation. The place for check-in and check-out was the airline office in town, where the bus dropped us. Rurre is a cute town that almost feels Caribbean with is tropical, hot, humid climate, all the people on the street and 95% motorbikes compared to cars. I enjoyed the heat and the fact that after about 4 weeks in altitude there was actually oxygen in the air. I checked into a hostal and went to find a company to take me to the jungle. Rurre is an exit point for both trips into “las pampas” and “la selva” and I intended to visit both. I first joined a three-day tour to “las pampas”. The landscape is rather boring as it`s all grassland with some rivers flowing through. But the advantage is that loads of animals are living in the trees that grow next to the rivers and therefor it’s very easy to spot them from the water. So we were cruising the rivers in a boat for three days, looking for birds, monkeys, pink dolphins, sloths, caimans, turtles and piranhas, of which all we saw loads and loads! The days were not very active as we just hung in the sun in the boat, but very rewarding anyways. We also jumped into the brown muddy water of the river to swim with the pink river dolphins but it seemed they didn`t care much about us.
After my return to Rurre, I straight organized to go to the jungle the next three days. The “ecolodge” we went to was a lot more basic than the one I visited in “las pampas” (also the trip was half the price…), and we were lucky enough to see the jungle in its best light, with loads and loads of rain, which turned our camp into a very muddy oasis! There was no point in fighting the mud, you could rest assure it only took a few moments for us to “melt in” with nature! The jungle tour was a lot more active, we spent every day on long walks and explorations. We had the best guide we could wish for, to me he appeared like a grown-up Mogli from the jungle book. As soon as he stepped into the jungle, he just melted in with everything surrounding him. He was calm and highly alert at the same time, no sound escaped his ear and he found us everything we could wish for. We saw groups of wild pigs (I counted more than 20), clans of more than 30 monkeys (that`s an estimation), 3 different species of monkeys, great birds, a koati and many small insects in perfect camouflage. We tasted jungle fruits that the monkeys like to eat, and also natural medicinal plants that would totally numb our mouth for a few minutes. We also learned from him how to make jewelry with different seeds from the jungle, got a nice camouflage face paint and a tattoo on the arm (which was still there 7 days later---lucky me has his name on my arm!). We also went on a night walk to find a jaguar. We didn’t find a jaguar but the night walk was a wild experience in its own. There was no moon out, and at times he made us switch off our flash lights and just stand there quietly for minutes and minutes in order to find animals. It was that dark that you could not see your hand in front of your face, you could just guess the canopy far above you by weak shades. Standing in such darkness with all the jungle noises around you makes you feel like being in a different reality all by yourself, an amazing but also frightening feeling! Mogli (or Juan Carlos) received most of his knowledge from his grandfather, who was a shaman living in the jungle. Walking through the dense jungle everyday and hearing about all the plants, their uses and their substances (both used as medicines, hallucinogens but also deadly toxic ones) gave me a slight imagination on what live in the jungle must be like. The jungle is like a huge pharmacy, supermarket, drug store and weapon store in one, perfectly camouflaged in green! From the outside everything looks the same, but there are so many treasures hidden. I could see that the jungle can be a paradise, but in an instant it can also be a deadly trap. It´s amazing how the people in the jungle have discovered all these secrets that are hiding there and transmitted their knowledge from generation to generation without paper and pen. Surely many things were discovered by trial and error that lead to many deaths as well. I was truly amazed to see how closely paradise and death trap are interconnected in the jungle, a place where the duality of everything in this universe becomes so evident.
Three people of my group wanted to discover and experience another treasure/trap of the jungle after the official trip and I joined them. After we had returned to Rurre and rested well in comfy beds for a night, we went to spend another night in the jungle together with shamans and a sacred plant ceremony. I had encountered the sacred plant called Ayahuasca before when I was in Cusco/Peru, but now I was in the jungle, the place where the plants grow and where they have been used for spiritual pilgrimages and healings for thousands and thousands of years by indigenous people. We all kept a strict diet 24 hours before the ritual (no alcohol, no food on the day) and then walked into the jungle to spend the night there. We were told that there is a house in the jungle, where we would drink the juice of the “spirit vine”, but when we got there, all sweaty and hungry anyways, there was nothing but a framework of a house but no walls or roof! It was obvious that we would be outside in the middle of the jungle for the whole night with a jaguar that would roar our minds! We did bring tents to sleep in after the ritual, so that was a small relieve! The shamans also made a fire and hung up some hammocks, and the place started feeling comfy. When it got dark, the shamans prepared the drink for us by burning some special wood and distributing the fume over our heads for protection against bad spirits. We would then all drink a cup of Ayahuasca, which is a brew of two different jungle plants (one of them being the vine) cooked for something between 2 and 10 hours (this one was a mild 2 hour cooked stew). We meditated for a while, trying to concentrate on something we would like to “deal with” with the help of the plant intelligence, and then got comfortable underneath the jungle canopy and all the jungle sounds surrounding us. Obviously, the experiences are very personal, so I will not share them here, but what basically happened for me was that all the things that I had been thinking about within the last weeks, got strongly visualized and the plant had given me answers that I was not able to answer or even imagine myself.
The next morning we returned to Rurre and caught a flight back to La Paz, where our whole 6-people jungle “family” (we had grown quite close till then) boarded a night bus to Sucre, my last stop before Christmas with the intention to intensify my Spanish!
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