The Feast And The Famine: The Feast

A while ago it was commented that the regularity of my posts can sometimes have a feast and famine nature. In truth the last two weeks have been exactly of that nature with a variety of binges taking over one another at different points from large quantities of alcohol and late nights in La Paz to hammock chill time and binging on sun, swimming and fruit in the Pampas. But first we have the La Paz bus journey to regress over.

I arrived at the station to find the English lads boarding the bus, and that they had populated seats around me. This at least meant that I wouldn't be crammed up against the wall by some overweight bolivian woman and her worldly belongings. We boarded and the bus started off. People were everywhere, arguing about seats and space, and eventually dumping themselves on the floor of the bus, leaving no space whatsoever for my legs. The 20 hours became a prison sentence in my mind, especially when the heater came on in the already stuffy bus and roasted us in our seats. I tried to read to pass the time; they turned off the power so there were no lights. Time passed and my cramped legs began to ache with nowhere to put them, I got irritated and tried to jostle for space with some woman sat on the floor with her bags in my leg area, yet to no avail, she was a pro, I was just another gringo who didn't get the rules. The night rolled on and the temperature dropped, and dropped, and dropped. It was freezing and stupidly I had left my warm stuff in my bag. Hours passed shivering uncontrollably.

We arrived in La Paz beaten by the Bolivian bus system. Up until the point I had had pleasant and interesting experiences on them but this was not one of those. We walked to Loki, the premier party hostel in La Paz, where my mates Adam and Dan were staying. Check in was not for 7 hours but I popped into their room and caught up on the last month while I waited to be given a bed. As it turned out they had a space in their room and I took it. We took off for a hearty breakfast, where I met Peachey and Nick, Australian and South African respectively. This was to be the party crew for the next few weeks.

The next three nights were late, intense and very banterous, leaving me extremely tired and in need to some sunshine. On the second day, Nick and I had gone to the San Pedro Prison in La Paz to do a totally unofficially corrupt tour of the prison, where we were guided around being told about life in the prison by the prisoners, and then chilled in the cell of one of the prisoners for a while, listening to the stories of a South African drug trafficker. A very surreal, strange and unnerving experience, especially due to the fact that this was totally off the record. It was, however, a brilliant and eye opening experience that I'm glad I partook in.

Other than that, days in La Paz mostly passed tending hangovers, eating and strolling around. We booked a 6 person jeep to Rurrenbaque and left on Saturday morning to do the Pampas Tour, a tour through the Pampas river area of the rainforest that feeds the largest Delta in the world. The jeep was good fun with four iPods and an iTrip, in spite of the bumpy roads and hard seats. We arrived in darkness, booked into a rather basic hotel, found hammocks and rolled the first of the many joints that we would be smoking over the next four days. The crickets chirped, the parrots squarked and our hammocks swung us until we were ready for sleep.

The next day we left the hotel immersed in the abundantly clammy heat of the jungle that we were in. For the first time since Brazil I was finally hot, wearing shorts and t-shirt, and ambled along in the sunshine. We booked a tour for the next day and grabbed an old wooden boat to take us to a waterfall down the river. The waterfalls were small, yet had pools below them to swim in, we swam under the shade of the trees and returned on the small boat at sunset. Pizzas and beers followed, before crawling back to our hammocks for an early evening smoke and a long sleep. The next day we were leaving early for the Pampas, pink dolphins, crocodiles, snakes, piranhas and mosquitos.