Aotearoa to the Andes South America by Motorcycle

The tour began with a lazy three hour boat ride up the river. It gave us a chance to relax, enjoy birdlife, and, most importantly, nature (that's why I come up here). We disembarked for a short walk to our base camp surrounded by abundant foliage. Almost there, I was busy reflecting how pleasant life was when suddenly I noticed small black things swarming my jandals. Screams erupted and suddenly everyone was trying to run. I realised why when I felt a sharp pain and a burning sensation on my left toe. I joined in the stampede and thought to myself, WELCOME TO THE AMAZON JUNGLE.

incongnito

We were in Parque Madidi, in the heart of the Amazon Basin, just outside Rurrenabaque taking a few days to experience some jungle fever. After changing into appropriate footwear (this included the all important tucking of socks into pants) I was ready to get me some wild animals. However I realised we weren't at some zoo and seeing anything could be extremely difficult. For one thing the park was 18,958 square kilometres large, but more importantly there were seven of us bumbling through the forest smelling strongly of bug repellent. I didn't think anything would hang around long.

Well I hadn't factored in our guide Senom. With his supersensitive hearing that would make Ray Charles jealous and his Aragorn like tracking skills we were soon on the hunt. To hone in he would imitate bird and animal calls and we would hear them call back. It was crazy, here's this guy making caw caw sounds and then all of a sudden you hear the same caw caw in the distance, it was amazing. With him by our side we saw three different types of monkeys, plenty of birds, some wild pigs and even the claws of an escaping jungle black cat. Sadly it wasnt the right month to find jaguars or pumas but we did see some fresh pawprints.

We returned to our base camp that night elated and enjoyed a tasty dinner and some cards, that's when I started hearing a different kind of call - the screams of the ladies as various bugs flew out of the darkness and dropped on our heads. Given the amount of hair I now have, even if something did fall on me, I wouldn't have noticed.

When it hits your lips, its so good

The following day was more walking and by this time my new hero Senom gave us a personal episode of Man vs Wild. As we walked he would teach us what plants had fruits we could eat, what plants would be used for what ailments and even showed us a tree that stored water and had a natural filtration system releasing delisious water.

Demonstrations went something like this:

Senom (Spanish) - This plant has a natural anaethistic, if you needed to remove a tooth, you would chew on this. Would you like to try some?
Reece (Bad Spanish) - Haha, good one, that`s not going to work, but I'll try some.
Reece (English now) - bwhawhawha wha (what the hell my mouth is completely numb)
Senom (Spanish) - Dont worry it will wear off in about 5 minutes

He also showed us some really interesting flora, like this tree that literally walked. It would slowly shoot new trunks in a particular direction and let the old ones die so that it slowly moved a particular way.

The walking tree

Our digs

It was late afternoon when we started trying to think of appropriate jungle theme songs as we explored. However other than the intro for Hooked on a Feeling and The Lion Sleeps Tonight, we couldn't think of any, so feel free to throw out suggestions (I have only now thought of Jungle Boogie). It did mean that for the next day all anyone had in their head was The Lion Sleeps Tonight and at any time someone would start with a ohhhhweeeeee and everyone would chime in.

We spent the afternoon making jewellry of things from the forest and also took a walk at night where we saw plenty of interesting spiders, the occasional bat and some eyes peering back at us.

Before we knew it our jungle time was up, whilst we hadn't seen much close up, we had seen it in the wild, in the real jungle and in their real habitat. A memorable experience - Reece

A wimba weh, a wimda weh, a wimba weh, a wimba weh, ahhhhhhh weeeeeeeeeeeeeee

After the jungle trip we decided to also go on a Pampa`s trip, to explore the wetlands of the Amazon. We mostly sat on a boat and were driven through swamps seeing vast quantities of wildlife. While it was more touristy and less wild than the Jungle, we did get to swim with pink dolphins, see monkeys up close and also help catch an anaconda, here's some photos below.