Holy Wildlife, Batman!

Once again, I stumble back to civilization, dirty, smelly, bug-bitten, somewhat sunburned.... and with more amazing experiences to rant about.

• The goal: visit the Bolivian ¨pampas¨ (sort of a jungle swamp-land teeming with animals)
• The problem: between La Paz and the pampas is The World´s Most Dangerous Road. No joke. Somebody called the Inter-American Development Bank says so. It´s also known as the Death Road - There are an average of 100 fatalities each year.
• The solution: Ride a bike down the road instead of taking a bus. Good idea? I thought so.

We started at an altitude of 15,400 feet, in a snow-covered mountain pass...

and ended up at 3,600 feet, deep in the jungle.

That´s an altitude change of almost 12,000 feet in just 40 miles, which took us about 4 hours. Most of the ride is a bone-jarring one-lane dirt road chiseled into the cliffside. Thus the dangerousness.

The problem with a one-lane road chiseled into the cliffside? Try to get two buses past each other without sending one over the cliff. Easier said than done.

Check out this article if you want to read more about the death-defying ride (or see more photos).

Having survived the Death Road, I got signed up with a 3-day trip into the pampas. I was expecting a lot of wildlife, but I was still.... wow:

There were loads of alligators... Steve Irwin, eat your heart out.

Caimens as well... we went out one night spotlighting them, and managed to catch this guy.

We also went swimming with them... and the piranhas... and the pink dolphins. Yeah. Amazonian river dolphins. They exist. I couldn´t get a good picture of them, but they look like this.

We went traipsing around in the swamp looking for anacondas... it took several hours...

...but eventually we found one. A few, actually. This was the biggest.

There were rats the size of rottweilers (better known as capybaras, the world´s biggest rodents)...

...and my personal favorite... the piranha monkeys. Vicious carnivores. They stripped this guy to the bone in under 60 seconds. Luckily they weren´t still hungry, or I might have been next.