Sandflies and Mosquitoes @ Jungle

Our next destination was the jungle at Madidi National Park. We wanted to go to a lodge right into the national park, not somewhere outside, but this meant a 7 hour trip on a small boat (there are no roads…*smiley winking*. The landscape was nice, especially early in the morning.

However, the water was not very steep, sometimes only 20-30 cm. As a result, the boat needed to be pushed, lifted and so on… We were quite happy when we finally arrived at the lodge – no, not at the lodge, but at the river near the lodge – another 30min walk through the jungle – dense vegetation, strange plants, green everywhere and – of course, millions of insects.

After some food and rest, Thorsten and me took a rowing boot on the small lake, but we didn’t sort out who rows how much, so we went a lot of zigzag

In the evening, we made a night walk, seeing a lot and especially hearing much more!

At night, we had a really bad surprise, cockroaches in our room, not one, not two, not three… after getting rid of about 15 with the flip flops (uahhhh, we hated it), even more came in from everywhere… so we crawled into our mosquito nets and slept. The next morning, we made sure to change the room and the hut (3 rooms per hut).

All together we stayed 3 nights in the jungle. The days began really early with a breakfast and a looooooong walk (6-7 hours) on different paths through the forest. See some of what we saw:

Next day – again a coooold shower and several hours walk in the jungle to spot some animals…

Again, after so many hours of walking and watching, we were looking forward to lunch and the siesta. However, siesta in a hammock was not a good idea, sandflies (very small, extremely annoying insects) were eating us. Only alternative was the bed with mosquito nets..

By the way, Thorsten is really a poor person. He was dreaming of 6 months on islands with nice beaches, hammocks and so on… Hammocks were there, but no beach… BUT a lake! There are caymans in the lake and some piranhas… No, as a real “Wassermann”, he doesn’t care…

It was then time to say goodbye jungle, goodbye mosquitoes, goodbye sandflies…

Back at Rurre, we took two motorbike taxis (with the backpacks quite difficult to balance on the dirt road) and got on an earlier plane than expected. Especially for Deepak another pic of the airstrip…

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