Rurre is the jungle tourist town where everyone goes to do tours of the pampas or into the Madidi National Park which is pure untouched Jungle. We managed to find a nice hotel which let us camp very cheaply in their garden and spent 3 days researching all our options for tours.

     We met a local Amish American guy who gave us an address in the Jungle where we could go visit on our own without having to do a jungle tour so we settled on doing an organised tour to the Pampas and would drive out to Ixiamas, the last town in the middle of the jungle where we would have access to Madidi National Park.

     The Pampas tour we did involved catching a 4x4 vehicle for 3 hours out to the Pampas and then a boat ride on the River Maduro and staying in a basic lodge for a 2 night 3 day tour. Well our first disappointment was the 4x4 was a Landcruiser!!!! Anyway after packing up and setting off on an exceptionally bumpy ride (as their suspension is almost non existent) we had our first blow out about an hour out. No problem, we put the rather dodgy looking spare on. 45 min later blow out number 2!!!! Unfortunately no more spares and no more traffic for 3 hours. Well we finally arrived 4 hours late!!

     The tour involved boat trips meandering up and down the sort of swamp river with enough mosquitoes to furnish the entire northern hemisphere!! We had repellent but the mosquitoes sort of held their breath and just dived in sucking for all they were worth. We saw all sorts of primates, caimans and hundreds of birds, mainly water birds but did see a few blue and gold Macaws flying around which we were very excited about. On the final day we took a 4 hour walk in the Pampas looking for Capybara (largest rodent in the world) and Anacondas. We saw one family of Capybara, numerous Caiman and no Anaconda. Kerry did find a rather large rattle snake which we tried to annoy to hear it rattle but no such luck.

     On returning to Rurre we hooked up with Ron our new Amish friend to let him know we were heading the 100km north into the jungle where he gave us an address of a young Amish family where we could camp in their garden. As it turned out the youngest daughter Miriam and her husband had just arrived and were heading there so they tagged a lift. This sort of made us feel better instead of just imposing.

     Another 4 hour journey for 100km and we arrived at their place. Their parents lived in the South of Bolivia and Mervin (the 16yr old son) was rebuilding a house for them to sell and there were the three married daughters up at the farm. We had an excellent 3 nights with them taking a jungle walk on the first day with Mervin to another house they own where we had lunch of some sort of rodent soup with the elder sister and her husband. In their garden they had a flock of about 30 green wing Macaws flying around and numerous other parrots. Wow!!

     The next day we took a walk up a river for about 4 hours where we saw fresh Tapir tracks among numerous others. On the return journey we stumbled upon an Ocelot, arguably one of the most beautiful cats in the world, about 30 meters away from us who totally ignored us for about 5 minutes.

     The following day we drove another 70km further into the jungle, basically to the end of a seldom used 'road' on the edge of the Madidi and camped the night on a river bed. Once again we had large macaws and all sorts of exotic birds flying around. Still no Jaguar or Tapir though!!! We then drove back to Rurre after having lunch with the family and missing the last ferry by minutes across the Rio Beni and then spent the night camped on the edge of the river in the middle of the town San Buenaventura.

     A final shopping in Rurre and we started our journey further North to the Brazilian border at Cobija. It was a slow 3 night journey along, once again bad dust roads through first pampas and then jungle. The border crossing into Peru involved entering Brazil first for 100km and then into Peru. After eventually finding the correct offices we did our one day paperwork for Brazil and headed into Peru,