Aca estamos.

Well, last Wednesday I packed my bags for Santa Cruz-- which I like to think of as the Texas of Bolivia: oil rich, narco-cowboys, trying to secede from the union, etc. Upon arriving in the office I soon learned that despite earlier assurances (ie. that morning) that would be leaving on a 5pm bus to the eastern part of the country, instead they were going to send me to Rurrenabaque, situated northwest of La Paz in the Amazon basin.

Other than having planned for going to Santa Cruz and established connections with many NGOs there, I am pretty excited to be going to the mystical jungle.

Friday afternoon, after a late-dinner celebration followed by a long night of puking and pooing my guts out (bacteria, not alcohol), I lug my 90 pounds of camping and camera gear down to the street to hail a cab. After passing through airport security where they examined my laptop but ignored my knife and external hard-drive, we spill out onto the tarmac to board the 19 passenger, 2 propeller engine Cessna. I take some footage of the rusted plane graveyard a few hundred yards from our plane until the security man forces me to board. The plane is so small I have to crouch and shimmy down the center aisle. Good news is that all seats are window seats. Bad news is that this plane is the same brand as went down in the crash that inspired the movie "Alive." Luckily I don't know this until afterwards, however, as we are flying over the Andes I am reminded of that movie.

The plane takes off down the runway, rattling and wobbling from side to side. An Irish girl across from me is gripping her seat and praying, which I find oddly reassuring. Then we are airborn, though the air here is so thin it feels like we are held aloft by threads. The city of La Paz spreads out below us, and soon we pass over the jagged, teeth-like peaks of the Andes.
The cabin is not pressurized, and though we are not that high above the mountains, we started at 12,000 feet, so we must be fairly high.

I film my companions and the pilot in our tiny aircraft, and attempt to get some wiggly footage of the Andes yawning below. Then of course I have a panic-attack/vision of the footage being found ten years later after we spiral downwards into the craggy Andes to disappear forever.

The Andes give way to low jungle and wide brown rivers. We are descending. The airway is a strip of green grass with wild pigs ambling on the far end. A few bumps and we are grounded.


Crammed into a Jeep, we take off for town, gawking the whole way at the leafy green vegetation, squawking parrots, and misty mountains. Roger, one of the interns, doesn't fit in the Jeep so he takes a moto taxi (rides on some guy's motorcycle, no touching). By the time we arrive at Pachamama, the local bar right next to our house, Roger is standing there drinking a beer and taking in the views. We don't really know which house is ours, and we have no key, so we decide to have drinks at the bar. We make a mountainous pile of our gear and share beers all around. This is the first anything my stomach has seen since the gut-wrenching illness of the night before, but all's well in paradise.

Eventually Rodrigo, the biologist consultant living in the house, finds us. It's a small town, and word travels fast that the gringo interns are here. Stuff is dragged to our house, a simple three roomed place with white tile, two bathrooms, a stovetop, and a overgrown backyard (which I later "trim" with a machete). Including Rodrigo there are six of us, two bedrooms and five mattresses. I set up my tent inside the house since there is no way to hang a mosquito net from the high ceilings. Home sweet home.