Summer Time

The picture you see above was taken in the most surreal place I visited in my travels: Rurrenabaque, or Rurre for short. In my anxiety to get out of Bolivia soon, I had briefly considered leaving this place out of my itinerary, but boy am I glad I didn't listen to my inner idiot!

After leaving Chaim and Rikki to enjoy their next high altitude, freezing trek, the girls and I flew from La Paz to Rurre. Rurrenabaque is Bolivia's gateway to the Amazon. Before moving on to the jungle though, I should begin with all the surreal surrounding this little town. First, the 30 minute ride on a tiny plane which carries 19 people and lands on a stretch of green field that may as well be someone's back garden.

Then, the realization that we have come to summer! After weeks of layers upon layers of warm clothing, fleeces, blankets, woolen socks, suddenly the sun is not only bright, but also hot! I mean flip flop weather, people. When I decided to leave Israel for a few months, I had secretly been happy to be doing it over the intolerably hot summer months. As time went on however, I found myself wishing for a bit of warmth. Well, I got that and more in Rurrenabaque...

We had been told that we could find the Beit Chabad at a hostel called El Lobo ("the wolf" in Spanish, named after the Israeli owner of the hotel, whose name Zeev means wolf in Hebrew) so there we went, backpacks on our back, sweating under the sun. See the picture of the Rebbe on the wall? Anyway, when we finally got there, we were a little upset to find out the Beit Chabbad had just moved, but we decided to stay anyway. Now here's another little bit of surreal for you:

That's the inside of a room at the hostel. Half finished, with no paint on the walls. And yes, that is a gap you see between the walls and the ceiling. The room had an arched window as a 4th wall, only there was no glass, essentially making it a well aired 3 wall room. The same went for all the rooms in the hostel. We suspect they ran out of money at some point during the construction process and decided to leave it as is and pretend it's an artistic choice. :) No complaints though, the extra air was definitely appreciated with all the heat. Besides, we had a great view from our window/wall:

We had some choices to make re. our visit in Rurre, but first we took some time to sit lazily in our beds and watch the view. An amazing feeling of calm and beauty filled me and I knew this would be one of the favorite places in my trip.

This little resort town is where all the jungle and pampas tours leave from. Before leaving Israel, I was determined to go into the jungle, but I didn't know which one of these tours I should take. During our stay in Cusco we met a lot of people who had been in Rurre and we got a clearer picture of what the tours comprise: the jungle tour is typically an unstructured excursion into the jungle where you get to sleep in makeshift bamboo tents, learn to carve yourself rings from a tree bark and generally walk around the forest to get a feel of the place and pretend you are on Survivor. Without overly generalising, this type of tour seemed to interest males more than females. The pampas, on the other hand, is what the Israelis called a "kindergarten", ie a 3-day tour on a motor canoe where you get to see a lot of animals and relax.

Rikki had always expressed more interest in the jungle, but she wasn't there and I was hesitant. I did want to get a feel of the jungle, but then again our brief "jungle" walk on the way to Macchu Picchu had been rather icky, what with all the humidity, and I had sort of already done the "pick the fruit right off the tree" thing. I also found that I was quite enjoying the vacation feel of this place. So I decided to go the relaxing route and signed up for a pampas tour with the girls (and 5 other Israelis. of course.)

The tour started off with a 3 hour ride on a bumpy gravel road (what else) to the start of the canoe ride. We stopped along the way and continued adding to our repertoire of surreal with this funny looking creature:

anybody who knows what it is, feel free to share. All I know is that he stood in his corner , without moving, for quite a while and posed while everybody snapped photos of him. Our guide warned us that he's been known to attack people, so we stood a fair distance away from him, but he seemed so at home with all the tourists arfound him. The other, much more conventional animal we saw was this parrot, who was no less sociable than the funny creature:

Two animals and we hadn't even started our tour... Next up-crocodiles, monkeys and much more!