Tree and Joggin Tobloggin Explore The Deep South: Santa Cruz and Parque Amboro

Arriving in Santa Cruz was one of the most difficult driving experiences I’d ever had. The city is huge, with traffic for kilometers in all directions outside of the city center and very poor signage. And, once you get close to the center, the downtown area is organized in giant traffic rings, so every few hundred meters was like a 4-lane, turned 8 lane, traffic circle to fight through. And between the circles were a bunch of one way streets with no parking and a plaza in the middle that all the roads just dead ended at with no warning. Very difficult.

We ended up staying in this dingyish hotel, that cost a bit under $10 USD for both of us. In our rush to get our paperwork together for a Bolivian visas we had purchased airline tickets to Santiago, Chile, where we were flying out of to meet the Vivio family in Europe, so we had some time to kill in this city. Unfortunately, it wasn’t too exciting. We ate some pizza, attempted to shop for some clothes that would make us a bit more presentable to the family, enjoyed some legit coffee, made the terrible decision to make bloody marys with tomato paste, walked really far to find a park office that didn’t actually exist, and that might be about it.

With 3 days before our flight we decided to drive to a nearby town, called Buena Vista, where we planned to enter a national park for some camping and trekking. On the way there we had two major predicaments. The first had to do with the police, who is surprised on that one? We didn’t have a fire extinguisher, so were forced to pay 100 Bolivianos ($14USD) , as a fine/bribe. The other was a bit more serious. We needed gas, but all of the stations we went to couldn’t serve us because we had foreign plates. We were sent all over this crossroads town (which had loads of gas stations). Finally, an hour later, we found a station that agreed to fill a gas can for us that we could them fill our tank with. In Bolivia foreign plates are charged 3x as much for gas (the unsubsidized price?), but all of these stations couldn’t change the price of gas in their computers, so couldn’t serve us. But if they sell it to a foreigner in a can, it’s the local price. So our hassle did save us like 30 bucks or so.

We arrived in Buena Vista fairly late, grabbed dinner, found a hostel and went to bed. The next morning I wandered around the market before Acacia was up and discovered a few cow’s heads as well as cakes and coffee. Acacia and I ended up going out to breakfast at the same place we had dinner, since it had wifi, and then coordinated a jungle trip with a French guy staying at our hostel. We found a guide, then wandered around the town to find the national park office to get permission to enter the park, and then headed towards one of the entrances to the park. Upon reaching a large river that people where wading across, it was pretty clear we wouldn’t be driving to that entrance. Our guide informed us that one option would be to ride in the back of a horse drawn cart for 4 hours, or spend an hour driving to a different entrance. We opted to go to the different entrance since it would give us more time hiking.

However, the locals at the other entrance were not allowing visitors to sleep in the park, so we had to sneak around the main trail by following a river bed to the entrance of the park. Unfortunately, we were spotted by more than one local. Thus, we had to sleep at this lodge on the outskirts of the park.

Our secret hike in

We were only camping, and ended up being charged 35 Bolivianos each. While that isn’t expensive in American dollars, it is pretty pricey for Bolivia (example: right now we are staying in a large hotel, we have our own room with decent beds and a clean shared bathroom for 20 each). Anyway, that night we went on a hike to try to spot some nocturnal animals. It was too windy for us to hear anything, so we likely scared anything away before we got close enough to see it. There were some large spiders and John got himself attacked by ants. We closed the loop by walking back through the river again, where we saw more than a few fresh jaguar prints and our first mammal of the night, a tapir.

The next day we woke up early to do some more hiking. We sat in a tree for awhile above a wetland watching birds, saw a cayman, more jaguar prints, some giant trees, a viewpoint, and some monkeys. We ended up having to rush back because this whole time it had been raining and our guide was worried that the river was going to rise too much for our transportation to come and pick us up.

Back at camp we packed up and had lunch and began our walk out to meet the jeep that was probably not going to make it across the main river. After 2 hours of walking and more than a few rivers to wade through we met the jeep, on our side of the river. So our walking had been unnecessary, but I still enjoyed it.