The Jungle

When I got back from Salar, Amelia and Marie-Ann arrived back in Cochabamba after their month of travelling to collect the stuff they'd left before flying home. It was good to catch up with them. We all went out for pancakes on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, a new volunteer arrived to stay in my house. I was invited to move out of the little annex and into one of the rooms inside. Although I miss having my own bathroom, I don't miss the smelly leaky toilet and the cold nights, and having a double bed and loads of storage space is very nice. Amy, a really lovely 20-year old medical student from St Andrews, moved into the annex. She's come with her boyfriend Kevan, but he's living elsewhere.

I only had to work two days this week - TPA had organised a trip to Puerto Villa Roel in the jungle departing on Thursday morning. In this respect, the trip was a great idea. In another, less so. Jack, Gail and I had been planning on going to Puerto that weekend to visit Alexis, one of the volunteers there, and see the jungle. We mentioned it to Daniela, TPA director, and asked if we could stay in the volunteers' lodgings. She promptly hijacked our trip and turned it into a TPA-wide militarised working weekend. At a meeting on Tuesday night she produced copies of our 'schedule', detailing exactly what we would be doing at every hour of the day. All four days involved getting up at 6.30am at working until 6.30pm, and even stated that we would be taking an 'early night' on Thursday. A little bit put out, Gail and I decided to go to Puerto for the first two days and head to Villa Tunari, another jungle village, on Saturday morning for the weekend. Jack was going to stay in Cochabamba and join us on Friday night in Puerto.

On Thursday morning we drove down from Cochabamba through the mountains of beautiful cloud forest into the lowlands, reaching Puerto Villa Roel, at between 200 and 300m above sea level, some four hours later. Within minutes of getting out of the van, I was sweating pints with a shiny face and ever-fluffier hair. We walked to the volunteers' house along a dirt track by the side of the river, passing fruit trees and even coca bushes. Gail and I were very excited to note that the house had a hammock, as well as cat with a tiny little kitten. Well, Gail wasn't so excited about the cats; she is allergic. The women who worked in the house had prepared a lunch of gloopy overcooked pasta soup with bits of dubious meat, which we picked at. This was to be the culinary theme of meals in Puerto. That afternoon we met Alexis and Jonathon, another volunteer. Alexis was planting and building and generally getting his hands dirty and his legs bitten, whilst Jonathon was working in the guardería, or nursery, in the village, and wearing trousers. We found some machetes and took each others pictures pretending to hack away at a banana tree, and then wandered into the village. We watched some boys playing on a dugout canoe in the river and sat at a little café to sample some chicha de maiz and chicha de maní (drinks made from corn and peanut respectively), which I enjoyed but everyone else seemed to find repulsive.

Dinner for me was a great improvement. After telling the cook that I was a vegetarian, I was presented with a plate of rice, egg, fried bananas, potato, yuca and salad. The other volunteers, faced with a similarly overcooked, gloopy soup, were very envious. It made a nice change. Whilst washing up, someone spotted what looked like a fish on the floor of the kitchen. We all stared at the strange creature for a while, and then were even more amazed when it began to walk (or waddle) across the floor and out of the door. "Let me through I'm a zoologist" Gail identified it as a lung fish. After dinner we went back into the village to find a bar for a drink. On the way, whilst happily chatting to Mel about journalism and suchlike, I managed to fall neck-deep into a ditch, which seemed to entertain everyone immensely. Jonathon and Alexis took us to the best bar in town, which had a ramshackle jukebox and a broken pool table, and - like all the bars in the village - served only large bottles of coca cola and one type of beer. Local children swarmed around me and Gail when they spotted our cameras, so we had some fun taking pictures of them. Mel and Carmen, one of the more fun members of the TPA staff, spent the evening flirting outrageously with Alexis and Jonathon. Gail and I had managed to claim the only spare bed with a mattress in the boys room, so had quite a good night's sleep. We needed earplugs though, to block out the sounds of the jungle. The 12 or so other volunteers were sleeping on the hard tiled floors.

The next morning, thankfully later than scheduled, we started work at the guardería. It was in an awful state. Formerly an abattoir, it was dark, dirty and smelly. There was rat excrement everywhere, even up the walls, which were crumbling badly. The mattresses and blankets for the cots where covered in faeces, pee and vomit. It was hard to believe that children were cared for here. We began by clearing the place out, sweeping up, and cleaning and disinfecting. I spent most of the day mixing cement and filling the holes in the walls so that they could be painted. It was hot, hard work, but with music from the retro ghetto-blaster it was enjoyable. We worked all day, save for a couple of hours at lunch, but without electric lights, by 6pm it was getting too dark to paint. Dinner was fish omlette, made from the same big fish that had been sitting in the sink outside all day, and salad: a marginal improvement on gloopy soup, was the consensus. That evening some of the volunteers took Jonathon and Alexis' English lesson for them, teaching a group of 20 or 30 village children in the main room of the volunteer house for an hour, whilst the rest of us played with the kitten and chatted. Daniela, Jack, Amy and Kevan, along with another member of the TPA staff and her boyfriend, arrived that evening. Gail got ill that night and blamed the fish. She went to bed, her sickness justifying another night on the only mattress, whilst the rest of us went out to the only 'club' in Puerto. It was different from the bar of last night only in the volume of music, which was almost too loud to shout to the waiter how many beer and cokes we wanted. Not wanting to disturb Gail, I slept on the un-cushioned wooden frame of the other spare bunk in the boys' room. It was still better than the floor, and I slept remarkably well. Jack, on the harder floor, did not.

Jonathon arrived just as we all woke up that morning. He claimed he'd been for an early morning walk, but he'd clearly spent the night elsewhere with a Bolivian lady. Evidently neither Carmen nor Mel had succeeded in seducing Alexis, for he slept in his own bed last night. A little while after the other dedicated volunteers traipsed back off to the guardería to get back to work, Jack, Gail and I got a taxi to Villa Tunari. We found a nice hostel with real matresses on the beds, and, finding that a recommended restaurant that served vegetarian food only opened at 4pm, had a yummy pizza lunch. We contemplated rafting or canoeing, but settled for a jungle trek with a crazy guide and his dog, who proved to be even more useful than the guide. I spent the trek wondering why on earth the guide had told me to wear my trainers instead of my flip flops, as most of it was spent wading waist-deep through a river. Gail and Jack had sturdy sandals on whilst a mound of sand was growing in each of my squelching shoes. It was a lot of fun though, clambering through lush, dense jungle and spotting huge brightly coloured butterflies and tuneful birds. We sampled some of the fruit from which chocolate is derived. This red, hard-skinned fruit containing sweet, furry purple beans seems far removed from chocolate, and certainly tasted nothing like it, but was quite nice. Wading through the river was slow work. Before long it got dark (and I mean dark) and we still had three hours of trekking to go, so we got out our torches. We had a bit of a scare when the guide's big lamp died. Jack tried to help by offering to share mine or Gails and give his torch to Jorge, but then promply dropped it in the river. Fortunately it still worked. The veggie restaurant was closed again, so we had a pizza dinner too. My trainers were in a sorry state when we got back.

The next morning we went to visit Parque Machia, a jungle wildlife reserve famous for it's community of monkeys rescued from the maltreatment of owners. They were loads of them, and they were very cute. One took a liking to Gail, and brought her a piece of banana whilst it sat and ate a piece of papaya on her shoulder. Having been warned not to take anything but ourselves beyond the park entrance, Gail had bought a disposable camera to snap the monkeys, but it had a good chew. Another fell in love with Jack and stubbornly hung on to his neck whilst we walked up to a viewpoint. It was clearly in a state of excitement (he was male, we could tell) and gave a jealous squeal if Jack prodded me or Gail. After about half an hour, Jack got sick of having a hot neck and tried to get rid of it, but he had to run from the little bugger who followed him up the path. Fortunately, we thought, it took interest in a little girl when we got to the mirador and climbed up her instead. But the girl panicked and the monkey bit her, quite deeply. We spent the next hour or so trying to keep the monkey, who was now rather agressive, away from her and from another little girl it bit about 10 minutes later, whilst Jack ran off to get help. The girl's family had to take her to hospital. I no longer wanted a monkey as a pet.

That afternoon we played a few games of pool in a bar, found a swimming pool and had a swim, and had a bit of dinner before heading back. The veggie restaurant was closed again, so I had to make do with an omlette. It took six hours to get back because rain had made the unsurfaced roads hazardous.

The next day I had a look at the photos of the nursery taken on Sunday before the others had left. It was almost unrecognisable. The cots, blankets and matresses had been cleaned and the walls were pink, yellow, blue and green, and free of rat poo. I felt a little guilty that I hadn't been there on the Saturday and Sunday, but they seemed to have done a good enough job without us.