Don't Smile at a Crocodile in Rurrenabaque

We were standing around with our tickets to Sucre in hand when I says to meself, ¨hey, self, why are you going to another city when you don't like cities all that much and you have spent the last week stuck in one?¨

A good question indeed, and with 15 hours we had sold the tickets to Sucre, and were on our way north to Rurrenabaque by boat. North of La Paz, Rurrenabaque is a horribly hot town that makes most of Panama look like a ski resort, but is on one of the many tributaries that eventually finds its way to the Amazon. The Madidi National Park has original primary forest still, and the pampas (think everglades - I'd imagine) is a highly dangerous tour where if the crocs, anacondas, and piranhas don't get you there are still plenty of mosquitoes, flesh eating diseases, and the every scary candiru that will track you down.

The three day boat trip took place on our luxury cruise liner (read glorified canoe) that I called the Sloop John B, and despite humming the Beach Boys song for three days the name never caught on. The passengers turned out to be quite the mix of galling French Canadians, cute German girls, a South African couple that were great storytellers, and a pair of hilarious English sisters of which one was so scared of everything it makes me wonder how she got started on the trip to South America to begin with.

The boat trip was fun, except that Dave and I were the only ones to actually bathe for the three days. As accustomed as I was to peeing in large bodies of water it was quite painful to have to hold it for fear of the candiru who's common name seems to be the penis fish. The candiru's brain is wired to swim against a given current, so if one is urinating in the river, you may get an unwelcome parasite to swim up your urethra and expand its spines into the inside of your... *OUCH* For those of you who don't believe me I am not smart enough to make this stuff up, so here is the wikipedia link for further research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candiru.

The boat trip would have been a lot more fun with a libation of choice and an innertube. Canoes are not exactly made for white water, and we spent most of the time avoiding all the fun parts of the river. Even this tributary which is probably 1000 miles away from the start of the Amazon river was huge, and pumped serious volume. I cannot imagine the size of the Amazon at the mouth of the ocean.

One afternoon we went piranha fishing which turned out to be anticlimactic. Before I could get a picture of the only one we caught as a group, the Canadian that caught it threw it back in. We also got to go on a jungle hike in the national preserve that was just like anything we saw in Panama, with the exception of the wild boars. The last day of our trip was Christmas Day, and because of the heat and jungle tour did not feel like Christmas at all. To compensate for the lost holiday we went out and had the traditional holiday meal, pizza.

Reason 327 why I love Bolivia... On a given day you find yourself in the middle of town with nothing to do, so you walk up to the motorcycle taxi stand on the street corner and say, ¨I want to borrow your motorcycle.¨ After assuring the owners that I knew how to ride a motorcycle (I didn't), and talking the price down, I took off my very own motorcycle, rented all afternoon for a mere $10. The crazy part is that I left no deposit or anything of value to insure I would return the bike. They just gave me the bike on good faith that I would not drive it back to La Paz to sell it, crash it, or run someone over. He didn't even ask for the name of the hotel we were staying in. I wish I had some jocular remark to make about the situation but to be honest I'm still dumbfounded.
We drove around town like bandits until we realized why they weren't worried. There wasn't exactly any place to go. After a picnic lunch, watching some lassos fly, and scaring at least one old woman out of three years of her life, we returned the motorcycles without a scratch, that the owners found anyway.

During our afternoon tour we took five minutes to get signed up for a tour of the Pampas. Upon arriving the next day in the swampy bog I immediately realize why I have never been to Mississippi. I imagine this place was similar to the quagmire of the bayou and I have seen leach field that look nicer to swim in. It was miserably hot, muggy, and filled with mosquitoes and toothless locals. The allure of the worlds largest snake, the most infamous carnivorous fish, and the age old question: is it safe to smile at a crocodile? were just too much; we had to investigate. The guide would say that we had a successful trip in that we swam with pink dolphins, fed bananas to monkeys, and saw some amazing birds. Blah-blah-blah, I say the guide is full of bull-pucky. In the one full day we had in the area we saw exactly nothing. I won't be sorry that we did not see an anaconda, but only piranha fishing for 30 minutes was just pathetic. Any fool could have driven the boat to a random spot had us throw lines in the water and claimed, "oops they're not biting today." Not to mention the guides total lack of enthusiasm and gregariousness. Make an effort!

All was forgotten when we got back and found that Oregon State showed why they are the number two rush defense in the nation holding Maryland to a mere 18 yards on the ground as they dominated their bowl game in the miserable San Fransisco rain. Oregon finally got a victory without Dixon so congrats to them, and my money is on a USC route of 21 points or more over the Fighting Illini.

Will someone please explain to me why three teams from the Big Ten which actually has 11 teams (idiots need to go to a better conference to actually learn something) got three BCS bids; including Michigan who finished 8-4 (with a loss to Appalachian State, a Div. 1 AA school), and the Pac Ten only got one bid. Any correct answer will include the phrase 'east coast bias'.

So with that as my final beef for this year, Happy New Years everyone! Even to those of you from the Big Ten, congrats on the strong bowl appearance. It's not your fault you live in the east and can't count. I just hope I never have to drive across a bridge in Pennsylvania that is suppose to be eleven meters long if engineers from Penn State helped to design/build it. To everyone else, I hope y'all go out and makes a new years resolution and then promptly break it. The only good thing about a new years resolution is when one discovers that resolutions are crap and forget about theirs. Thus my new years resolution shall be to find a job.