Two in a row?!? It can't be!

Actually, it can. I told you I don't have much to do, so I'm trying to stay committed to this blog for at least a few days. After a long time of saying I should do it, I finally went to a crossfit gym today. Rather than typical weightlifting, as I've been into for a couple years now, crossfit basically aims to get you into top shape in every sense- strength, endurance, speed, flexibility, agility, power, etc. I would say 8 of about 12 people in the class were women, and so naturally I thought I was gonna be the man and show everybody whats up. Wrong. I got my ass kicked. My endurance is awful and I'm SOOOO slow. This dainty little 30 year old woman made me feel like I was walking when we had to do sprints, so needless to say, I'm going to get into crossfit so that never happens again.


When I left off, we were in a stranger's truck in the middle of nowhere in Bolivia, about 3 hours away from civilization, surrounded by scrubby brush and some seriously horrifying looking cattle, with no idea of where we were headed or control of the situation (Dad, check on mom, is she still breathing? Good). Finally, we pull up to what appears to be a small campsite at a river basin, and there are about 15 30-foot long motorized canoes tied up to the shore. Our driver tosses our bags off the roof onto the ground and speeds off. As we struggled to grasp the reality of how absurdly hot it was outside, a small Bolivian man named Jose walks up and introduces himself as our guide. Let me take a second to describe Jose. He was about 5'5", had ripped muscles, wore a black sleeveless undershirt, camouflage cargo pants, had at least a couple gold teeth, a flattop haircut, big black combat boots, and a solid 10" knife hanging from his hip. If he had a machine gun, he would be Rambo. Jose led us and 3 young Belgian girls down to one of the canoes and told us to load it up with our stuff. At this point, after a flight, a bus ride, and a 3 hour Land Rover expedition, we thought we were already there. We were wrong.


We took the canoe for a casual 3 MORE HOURS up the river. As we headed deeper into the wilderness, the scary desert wasteland mentioned earlier quickly turned back into a semi-tropical forest, and we found ourselves surrounded by alligators, caimans (another type of alligator, just as scary), monkeys, capybaras (literally just 200lb guinea pigs), exotic birds, turtles, and more. Alligators/caimans were not a rare species, and by that I mean there was probably one of them every 10 feet or so as we traveled along...for 3 hours. It was pretty scary because you could see them swimming towards the boat and suddenly they would submerge and completely disappear. Truly horrifying. Here are a few pictures I took during the canoe ride:

Exotic bird (a hoatzin), a bad shot, but this thing was sweet. There were tons of them.

Adorable little monkeys. The little guy up at the front walked down that branch almost onto my shoulder, but when I stuck my arm out and touched his head he scrambled away.

If you click this for a larger view, you can see some capybaras hangin out by the shore, apparently trying to get snacked on by some gators.

Either gators or caimans, doesn't really matter, neither of them likes you anyway. I bet that if I took a picture every 15 seconds as we traveled along, 3 out of every 5 photos would have a similar number of gators in it. Also, you can see some turtles climbing on rocks/logs in the foreground.

Finally, we pulled up to our very humble abode- a camp sitting atop a small hill next to the river. The camp was comprised of about 3 sleeping cabins, a bathroom cabin, a kitchen/dining cabin, and a hangout cabin- all connected by catwalks raised about 6 feet off the ground "so that you don't stumble across gators in the middle of the night" according to Jose. Here's some more pictures:

Our sleeping cabin on the right, catwalks in the foreground, and bathroom cabin in the back left.

Our sleeping cabin. The green things come down as mosquito nets, of course.

The hangout cabin

View of the river from the camp

We had a blast exploring the camp for a while and getting a small amount of rest after a seriously long day. We were called into the dining cabin for dinner, where a woman had prepared an excellent meal for us. As she put the plates down on the table she said with a wink and a smile, "Cuidado con los monos" which means "Be careful with the monkeys". Now you would think that by this point, after all of the stuff we had been through and seen, we would no longer assume that everybody was joking with us and we would actually take people seriously with such a warning. Well we didn't. A few minutes pass and we start to hear a light pitter-patter on the roof towards the other end of the cabin. Suddenly a couple branches on an outside tree start swinging and we see some monkeys climbing around and being monkeys. As we are all watching these adorable little animals play around, their friends sent a flank attack from the other direction and stole our food right off of our plates. I didn't actually see it happen because they were so quick, but a girl shrieked and as I turned around I saw 2 or 3 monkeys scramble up a support post and climb out the window with some biscuits and veggies in hand. I'm pretty sure I saw one of them smiling and giving us the finger as he ran away, too.


The series of events that follows were some of the coolest I have ever experienced, so I'm going to save them for another post. Plus I might give Mad Men a shot before I pass out tonight. Cheers everybody, goodnight.