Day 17

I will try my best to start getting caught up with this, but we are leaving soon to head to the market so my post may end abruptly....

Saturday we went to the jungle! It's called Chapare and I got up about 3:50am because we were supposed to leave at 4am. Well, typical South American time, we left sometime before 5am. We took a microbus, which is much bigger & nicer than a trufi but not as big as a greyhound bus or anything. It was beautiful and I have some awesome pictures of it that hopefully I can put up sometime soon. I'm way behind on the picture posting, I know. We stopped to get out and take pictures around 9am and then had breakfast at a restaurant nearby. The breakfast consisted of chicken or beef, soup, rice, noodles and some yuca. Needless to say, nothing like the typical American breakfast and I actually split one with 2 other girls. I had snacked on a bit of trail mix earlier anyway...

From there we walked (some rode the bus but all the guys and Bri & I walked) to the beginning of this nature preserve. The monkeys there were all over the place! They would come up and try to take your stuff. They jumped on the bus almost as soon as we arrived there! I have several pictures of them. :-) After paying to get in, we started to walk back in. It was funny because a monkey was sort of leading us in, as if he was going to be our tour guide. Then it climbed onto Iris's head! They had several different types of monkeys there that we saw. These little yellow ones were really cute and most of us wanted to take one home. After walking our way around the monkey section we walked back to go towards another area. We saw a tejón or Coati (in English) and it's kind of like an anteater in the face and has a bushy tail kind of. I got a couple of pictures of it. I had never even heard of the thing before.

We saw some beautiful birds and I have a picture with them. Then we took a bit of a hike to the top for an amazing view! Apparently there was a puma but I didn't see it. The pictures at the top are like postcards and I can't wait to share them! After a few pictures, we headed back down and then left to eat lunch. We went to another local place where our end of the table had fish, deer and armadillo. I had a little bit of it all and the armadillo was definitely better than I expected. Someone joked that our meal consisted of roadkill. haha But Iris told me they are just all the animals of the jungle.

After lunch we tried to go to this park area but it was for little kids and you had to pay to get in, so instead we went to this little swimming hole area. A couple of the guys went in but the rest of us just sat outside and enjoyed the fresh air and a book. Once everyone was done swimming and such, we all piled into the bus. It was rather humorous as we all sat in the bus eating cereal & milk before we left. We headed back home and got in about 10:30PM so we were all exhausted!

We survived the jungle, malaria (and for the most part bug bite) free! It was really cool to see and I would defintely go back!