Los Llanos

I can not believe it is October already! My first October adventure starts in los llanos. Aside from my amoeba I was really prepared for a rough weekend. It started on Friday at 5am when we had to wake up and be in the jeep by 6am. We drove, ate a quick breakfast, and continued to drive. We also had to stop for lunch, because we were hungry and our butts hurt with 9 people shoved into a jeep! We had to take our original passports because we were crossing borders from the state of Merida to the state of Barinas. One boy forgot his and it cost him 270 Bs. of bribes to get across the border. When we finally arrived around 5pm to our camp in los llanos, we ate a quick dinner, unpacked in our cabins, which consisted of only hammocks, and got ready for our first night safari! As we started to get into the jeeps, our tour guides asked how are we going to see...so we ended up riding on TOP of the jeeps and just holding on! We drove for a while until our tour guide, Tony, jumped off and went into hip high water to wrestle a cayman. He brought it up to us to show all of us so we could touch it and learn. It was CRAZY! Then we continued on and saw more animals such as the giant anteater(was about 5 feet from tail to nose!), snakes, an ocelot, many different birds, an opossum, and world's largest rodent a chiguires. When we arrived back at camp we had a very relaxing night, we were all tired from the long ride in. During the night we were awoken by a bat flying around trying to get out of our cabin. Once it was out we all slept well! In the morning I took a quick shower in our outdoor shower filled with bugs and frogs, and got ready for the day.

Swimming with the river dolphins.

Our first adventure of the day was a boat ride. We had to keep very still because if you would tip one way or the other, water would be filling our boat. On the boat we looked at a rare species of bird that only eats leaves, big turtles, cayman, piranhas, and more. We got to a spot where the river widens and our tour guide pointed out to us PINK RIVER DOLPHINS! They were incredible, they are the only fresh water dolphins in the world. Then our tour guide jumped in and told us to do the same. All of us thought he was bullshitting us because we know what lives in the water, but besides the piranhas, cayman, turtles, etc. I jumped in. We swam with the river dolphins! Once back in the boat we headed back to start out next activity of the day, anaconda hunting. We took a jeep to where the anacondas roam and our tour guide told us we can either stay on the road or follow him, I thought it would be better to follow him, so we got into a muddy area. This muddy area soon turned into a swampy area, with water almost up to our knees!

Anaconda hunting.

We were showed the area in which the anaconda laid and her trail, but unfortunately we lost her trail and did not find one. In the mean time my friend and I made a joke to the others to "watch out ahead because it is leech infested" Well my joke was not that funny when I got out of the swamp with a big leech on my ankle. One of our tour guides had to pull it off, along with my skin he got. So besides my shoes and socks having mud and muck, there was also blood on them too. After anaconda hunting ,we decided to fish in the river for piranhas. So we baited our very simplistic hook with chicken and tossed it in. I am proud to say I caught a piranha and was the only girl to knock it over the head to kill it before you had to get it off the hook! Then we headed back to camp and to get dry clothes on, have a lunch of piranha (which were incredibly amazing to eat) and prepare for mule riding! I went in the first group, we headed through rivers that the mules do not like because the mules know that there are cayman and they get really jumpy. We had to cross a river where the water was up to our thighs, and we were ON the mule.



Heading through the river!



It was crazy, but of course fun! After mule riding, we had to walk a mile or so back to our jeep. On the way we found a boa constrictor in the mud, so we kept it with us and in the jeep to show the rest of the group back at camp! After a long day we proceeded to have supper and hit the hammock for a great nights sleep. We had to wake up around 6am for a delicious breakfast of pancakes and get in the jeep for a five hour ride to whitewater rafting! We rafted for about an hour and a half. I was in a raft with our guide and 3 other girls. We stopped in the middle to get out because our guide said he wanted to show us something. We climbed a ledge up a cliff where you could only fit one foot at a time on the cliff. We climbed up about 20 feet and he told us to jump into the water. My fear of heights kicked in, but I was the first to jump! It was so fantastic that I climbed up and did it one more time! When we finished whitewater rafting it was time to go home and rest for school the following morning. We ended up getting home around 11pm Sunday night. Also, this trip only cost $153 US dollars. It was incredible.

My first piranha!!