aperaexe01: Las Pampas, Bolivia: 3 days on South America's most dangerous tour

Monday, September 12, 2011

Las Pampas, Bolivia: 3 days on South America's most dangerous tour

Filed under: Stories, South America, Bolivia, Camping, Ecotourism, Budget Travel

I think it's when we started hand feeding piranhas to wild black caimans that the reality of the situation really set in. Although this was part of a 4-day "guided tour", I sat there and watched an overzealous Israeli man nearly get his right hand bitten off.

Slightly nervous, I jokingly asked a local guide from an adjacent tour if anyone has ever actually lost their hand. Without breaking his gaze from an even larger predator lurking in the muddy waters behind us, he claimed that last year there had only been 5. Not sure what to make of his blunt response, I couldn't help but remind myself that this is Bolivia, and here, there are no such things as rules. Two days later, this same guide would temporarily remove some alligator eggs from the toothy mother just to get a rise out of her.

The 40-minute flight from the capital city of La Paz to the jungle outpost of Rurrenabaque should have been an indicator of what we were getting ourselves into. Even now I'm still not sure which element of the flight was more disconcerting: landing on a dirt runway that's covered in livestock, cramming 8 people into an aircraft where you sit directly behind the pilot, or passing through the clouds in the Cordillera Real section of the Andes-the first time in my life I've actually been looking up at mountain peaks from the window of an airplane.

Oh, and I'm sharing the aircraft with my wife. Who's afraid of flying. And if that's not enough, this is our honeymoon.

Gallery: The Bolivian Pampas