Bolivia - The Real Adventure begins... 14 April 2008
I went to bed at 8pm, took 2 sleeping pills and managed to stay fast asleep till my alarm went off at 4:40am for my 7am departure to Cochabamba (Quest Overseas, who arranged my trip here had warned me that I most likely wouldn´t make the connection the day before as the AA flight was always late ... they were right, I would have missed it since I came out of the airport at 7:30am).
The flight to Cochabamba was on time though and only took 30 minutes. We flew near a nice mountain chain, I am assuming, maybe wrongly, that it must have been the Andes... ? We landed on time and I wasn´t worried in the least... but soon got a bit nervous when I realised that my contact was not ´waiting for me with my name on a board by the arrival gate´as stated in my schedule. I waited 20 minutes... nada. IF my phone had been working, I would have texted Miriam, but of course, it was still barred.... So I had to find a phone company that could help me make the call. Then as she could not call me back nor text back even, I had to keep calling her to find out what was going on. Eventually, the girl who was waiting for me, but in the wrong area, found me in a call box. It all took an hour though...
We then promptly set off to Villa Tunari nr the animal sanctuary , in a private mini bus, but the journey was not as smooth as we´d hoped. Within 30 minutes the road was blocked off due to a traffic accident so we had to cut across some dirt roads in some fields to get back on track (it was like being on a safari but without the animals to look at). We then were able to continue fairly ok for an hour, and the scenery became more and more barren (and to my eyes: boring) as we kept going up... But then as we gradually went down, the cloud forest started to appear with much lusher vegetation... and its own problems too. There were many signs that said ´this is not a geologically stable region´and I wasn´t sure what they meant... I assumed earth quakes, but it was in fact land slides. We were 20 minutes away from where we needed to be when we hit this massive traffic jam. Trucks going back miles it seemed... as our mini van was smaller we managed to get to the front of the queue on the other side of the road only to find out that the terrain had collapsed and they had a bulldozer there trying to rebuild the road as quickly as possible. We were lucky, we only waited 30 minutes... some people wait all day depending on the damage. I kept thinking ´good job this didn´t happen on the way back, when I have a plane to catch!´. Landslides are very frequent and most people seem to have experienced them here... My Brazilian nuts came in quite handy as we were all getting quite hungry, waiting over lunch time.
We eventually reached the park and I got my first briefing... and I wasn´t very impressed. ´First of all, you need to understand that this is no fun but hard work. On hot days you will be soaked with sweat, on wet days you will soaked with rain. No photos are allowed in the first 5 days, we want you to stay focused on the animals at all times and if you take photos, you will be distracted too much and not watch their behaviour carefully... You are not allowed to go and have a look at the other animals either, unless you happen to walk the same trails... as we want to offer them stability... and many are in quarantines so ´no go area´. You have a choice of 2 jobs: one with monkeys and one with birds. Any questions!?´.... I said ´well, as much as I like birds, I really had set my heart on working with an ocelot, I booked this trip 18 months ago and for 18 months I´ve been looking forward to working with a cat... if I wanted to work with monkey I could have gone to Africa and paid half the fee, if I wanted to work with parrots, I could have gone back to Brazil... the ONLY reason I came to this park was to work with cats, so I´m pretty disappointed to say the least´... She first said ´we only have 2 ocelots and they already have a volunteer... but I´ll have a chat with the vet, see what he thinks´. They have no jaguars here anymore... I was really disappointed. Most of the jaguars are in the sister park, 300 miles away. I have seen photos of the baby jaguars they used to have and they looked SO cute...
Then she came back and said ´Ok, we can let you work with Millie. She´s already with Vanessa, but she´s a quiet cat. She´s a pretty sick ocelot though, so you´ll need to read her medical files. She has a kidney problem and if she doesn´t drink often she will get an urinary infection. To encourage her to drink, you have to get her to keep walking... if she sits on your lap for too long and doesn´t walk 3 hours a day at least, she will pass blood again´. Poor little Millie sounded in bad shape. Her mother had been killed for her fur when she was 3 weeks old. She had then been sold onto the black market and the park had got a tip off and rescued her. However, because she didn´t get her mother´s milk for as long as she needed, her immune system was much weaker. She also had a tendency to want to suckle on thumbs for comfort. Her file said ´Millie is a very affectionate cat, but she will test you and will turn on you sometimes for no good reason. She is also very playful and likes to chase mice and snakes´. Vanessa told me that the day before she had played with a snake for 30 minutes and then walked away leaving it half dead. Vanessa, who is from South Africa and was used to snakes, said she had to find a rock to finish it off because the poor snake was going to die a slow death and she couldn´t bear it. I know I would have hated to do that... but woud have equally hated to walk away leaving to suffer so much. Vanessa is trying to teach Millie that if she kills anything, she should eat it, not just play with it.
I really like Vanessa, she´s 23 (she could be my daughter, scary or what !?) and she is really keen to keep Millie as happy and comfortable as possible. She is even willing to walk off trail which makes it extra difficult for us, but extra interesting for Millie... she was previously bored with the normal trails and would not walk very far as a result. She has now a little ´pouch´ that we are hoping she will lose with more exercise.
She is a beautiful cat, but I didn´t get to see her until the day after. My first day was just getting to know the sanctuary a bit, and the village next to it. I was shown around the monkey area but one jumped on me straight away and I kind of froze. I feel really uncomfortable around monkeys. They have big teeth and look unpredictable... I did see many coatis though and that was grand. They are so cute... they had a few small ones too. They also have some animals that I´d never seen before and didn´t even know existed...
The sanctuary is doing a great job of rescuing injured animals. Some have been seriously traumatised and need a lot of tender loving care to get past their fear of humans. I didn´t really speak to anyone on the first day (except when I was introduced to Vanessa) but I did notice that most of them looked filthy from top to bottom, covered in mud, and that their hands were covered with mosquitoe bites. However, it seemed that most of them were coming back year after year... as they so loved working hands on with such beautiful exotic animals.
They have a baby puma I was told, but I wasn´t allowed to see it. I did go to the aviary instead and saw many beautiful parrots and macaws and two tucans, all in cages though (but they do let them out sometimes). But it was not as exciting as seeing them fly freely. However, I was told that the day after, about 10 of them would be released back in the wild as they had completed their rehab programme and proven that they could find their own food in the wild. Yipee. Everybody was really excited about that...
I was told that Millie would be fed a small chicken the next day, to see how she would react, and I became very wary. I mean, I never thought for one second, that to look after a wild cat would mean to actually feed them live baits.... I am SO squeamish, and I overheard a lot of volunteers talk on the same lines ´my puma spotted a snake and it was pretty brutal how he played with it´... oh geeee. I felt faint just at the thought of watching it. Millie is kept in an enclosure way up a trail and we were due to bring her the chicken in a rucksack. Poor chicken.
I left the park that day, at 5pm, feeling relieved I was given work with a cat (I would have been SO disappointed if not) but nervous about what it actually meant...
I have an allocated driver for the next 10 days who took me to my hotel afterwards. It is on beautiful grounds and I have a fairly big room but the shower is only luke warm. But all windows are screened and they have a few pets and I made friend with their cat within 10 minutes of checking in. She was on my lap purring as I was waiting for my dinner. They even have a swimming pool and a crystal clear river at the bottom where you can swim safely but I guess I will never have the time to do so... I took another 2 sleeping pills and was fast asleep at 7:30pm for a 7:30am wake up call. The people who work with the cats start at 9am, the ones with the birds or monkeys start at 7am... phew.
I went to bed at 8pm, took 2 sleeping pills and managed to stay fast asleep till my alarm went off at 4:40am for my 7am departure to Cochabamba (Quest Overseas, who arranged my trip here had warned me that I most likely wouldn´t make the connection the day before as the AA flight was always late ... they were right, I would have missed it since I came out of the airport at 7:30am).
The flight to Cochabamba was on time though and only took 30 minutes. We flew near a nice mountain chain, I am assuming, maybe wrongly, that it must have been the Andes... ? We landed on time and I wasn´t worried in the least... but soon got a bit nervous when I realised that my contact was not ´waiting for me with my name on a board by the arrival gate´as stated in my schedule. I waited 20 minutes... nada. IF my phone had been working, I would have texted Miriam, but of course, it was still barred.... So I had to find a phone company that could help me make the call. Then as she could not call me back nor text back even, I had to keep calling her to find out what was going on. Eventually, the girl who was waiting for me, but in the wrong area, found me in a call box. It all took an hour though...
We then promptly set off to Villa Tunari nr the animal sanctuary , in a private mini bus, but the journey was not as smooth as we´d hoped. Within 30 minutes the road was blocked off due to a traffic accident so we had to cut across some dirt roads in some fields to get back on track (it was like being on a safari but without the animals to look at). We then were able to continue fairly ok for an hour, and the scenery became more and more barren (and to my eyes: boring) as we kept going up... But then as we gradually went down, the cloud forest started to appear with much lusher vegetation... and its own problems too. There were many signs that said ´this is not a geologically stable region´and I wasn´t sure what they meant... I assumed earth quakes, but it was in fact land slides. We were 20 minutes away from where we needed to be when we hit this massive traffic jam. Trucks going back miles it seemed... as our mini van was smaller we managed to get to the front of the queue on the other side of the road only to find out that the terrain had collapsed and they had a bulldozer there trying to rebuild the road as quickly as possible. We were lucky, we only waited 30 minutes... some people wait all day depending on the damage. I kept thinking ´good job this didn´t happen on the way back, when I have a plane to catch!´. Landslides are very frequent and most people seem to have experienced them here... My Brazilian nuts came in quite handy as we were all getting quite hungry, waiting over lunch time.
We eventually reached the park and I got my first briefing... and I wasn´t very impressed. ´First of all, you need to understand that this is no fun but hard work. On hot days you will be soaked with sweat, on wet days you will soaked with rain. No photos are allowed in the first 5 days, we want you to stay focused on the animals at all times and if you take photos, you will be distracted too much and not watch their behaviour carefully... You are not allowed to go and have a look at the other animals either, unless you happen to walk the same trails... as we want to offer them stability... and many are in quarantines so ´no go area´. You have a choice of 2 jobs: one with monkeys and one with birds. Any questions!?´.... I said ´well, as much as I like birds, I really had set my heart on working with an ocelot, I booked this trip 18 months ago and for 18 months I´ve been looking forward to working with a cat... if I wanted to work with monkey I could have gone to Africa and paid half the fee, if I wanted to work with parrots, I could have gone back to Brazil... the ONLY reason I came to this park was to work with cats, so I´m pretty disappointed to say the least´... She first said ´we only have 2 ocelots and they already have a volunteer... but I´ll have a chat with the vet, see what he thinks´. They have no jaguars here anymore... I was really disappointed. Most of the jaguars are in the sister park, 300 miles away. I have seen photos of the baby jaguars they used to have and they looked SO cute...
Then she came back and said ´Ok, we can let you work with Millie. She´s already with Vanessa, but she´s a quiet cat. She´s a pretty sick ocelot though, so you´ll need to read her medical files. She has a kidney problem and if she doesn´t drink often she will get an urinary infection. To encourage her to drink, you have to get her to keep walking... if she sits on your lap for too long and doesn´t walk 3 hours a day at least, she will pass blood again´. Poor little Millie sounded in bad shape. Her mother had been killed for her fur when she was 3 weeks old. She had then been sold onto the black market and the park had got a tip off and rescued her. However, because she didn´t get her mother´s milk for as long as she needed, her immune system was much weaker. She also had a tendency to want to suckle on thumbs for comfort. Her file said ´Millie is a very affectionate cat, but she will test you and will turn on you sometimes for no good reason. She is also very playful and likes to chase mice and snakes´. Vanessa told me that the day before she had played with a snake for 30 minutes and then walked away leaving it half dead. Vanessa, who is from South Africa and was used to snakes, said she had to find a rock to finish it off because the poor snake was going to die a slow death and she couldn´t bear it. I know I would have hated to do that... but woud have equally hated to walk away leaving to suffer so much. Vanessa is trying to teach Millie that if she kills anything, she should eat it, not just play with it.
I really like Vanessa, she´s 23 (she could be my daughter, scary or what !?) and she is really keen to keep Millie as happy and comfortable as possible. She is even willing to walk off trail which makes it extra difficult for us, but extra interesting for Millie... she was previously bored with the normal trails and would not walk very far as a result. She has now a little ´pouch´ that we are hoping she will lose with more exercise.
She is a beautiful cat, but I didn´t get to see her until the day after. My first day was just getting to know the sanctuary a bit, and the village next to it. I was shown around the monkey area but one jumped on me straight away and I kind of froze. I feel really uncomfortable around monkeys. They have big teeth and look unpredictable... I did see many coatis though and that was grand. They are so cute... they had a few small ones too. They also have some animals that I´d never seen before and didn´t even know existed...
The sanctuary is doing a great job of rescuing injured animals. Some have been seriously traumatised and need a lot of tender loving care to get past their fear of humans. I didn´t really speak to anyone on the first day (except when I was introduced to Vanessa) but I did notice that most of them looked filthy from top to bottom, covered in mud, and that their hands were covered with mosquitoe bites. However, it seemed that most of them were coming back year after year... as they so loved working hands on with such beautiful exotic animals.
They have a baby puma I was told, but I wasn´t allowed to see it. I did go to the aviary instead and saw many beautiful parrots and macaws and two tucans, all in cages though (but they do let them out sometimes). But it was not as exciting as seeing them fly freely. However, I was told that the day after, about 10 of them would be released back in the wild as they had completed their rehab programme and proven that they could find their own food in the wild. Yipee. Everybody was really excited about that...
I was told that Millie would be fed a small chicken the next day, to see how she would react, and I became very wary. I mean, I never thought for one second, that to look after a wild cat would mean to actually feed them live baits.... I am SO squeamish, and I overheard a lot of volunteers talk on the same lines ´my puma spotted a snake and it was pretty brutal how he played with it´... oh geeee. I felt faint just at the thought of watching it. Millie is kept in an enclosure way up a trail and we were due to bring her the chicken in a rucksack. Poor chicken.
I left the park that day, at 5pm, feeling relieved I was given work with a cat (I would have been SO disappointed if not) but nervous about what it actually meant...
I have an allocated driver for the next 10 days who took me to my hotel afterwards. It is on beautiful grounds and I have a fairly big room but the shower is only luke warm. But all windows are screened and they have a few pets and I made friend with their cat within 10 minutes of checking in. She was on my lap purring as I was waiting for my dinner. They even have a swimming pool and a crystal clear river at the bottom where you can swim safely but I guess I will never have the time to do so... I took another 2 sleeping pills and was fast asleep at 7:30pm for a 7:30am wake up call. The people who work with the cats start at 9am, the ones with the birds or monkeys start at 7am... phew.
posted by Sylvie at 10:44 PM
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