Rurrenabaque: gateway to the Bolivian Amazon

Rurrenabaque Airport

In Rurrenabaque, a wooden shack poses as the airport and a strip of grass poses as a runway. The only planes that land here are dinky small - 20-seats only - and the pilots are also flight attendants and ground crew: they welcome you on board, open the door when you land, roll out the stairs to the runway, and check the wings and the propellers. The ground crew unload the baggage and leave it on the grass for you to collect. Then they manually push the plane forward and give it some gas for the return journey. It's perfect really. You don't want to fly into the Amazon and find a state of the art airport where 50 hectares of protected forest used to be, do you?

The canopy of the Amazon from our dinky small plane

It took us just 45-minutes to leave the dizzying heights of La Paz behind. Now the smog-filled chaotic streets of the Bolivian capital feel like a world away. The flight took us through the spectacular snow capped peaks of the Andes and directly over Amazon. The deep green canopy stretched as far as we could see, broken only by long snaking rivers that link this part of the Amazon basin with the Rio Amazonas.

We're now just 105m above sea level, the weather is hot and humid (finally!), and we're surrounded on all sides by jungle. Dirt bikes whizz past us on the dirt roads. Mosquitoes buzz in our ears. Every bar and restaurant claims to have the 'coldest beer in town'. And everything happens on Rurrenabaque time. Yep, I think we're going to love this crazy jungle town.