The Amazon part of Bolivia is 300km north of La Paz with the town of Rurrenabaque the main stop off point for tours etc. It’s a bumpy 16+ hour bus trip on appalling roads so we decided to fly both ways. Apparently almost everyone who goes there by bus returns by air the bus is that bad!
Took a taxi 20 minutes to the airport back up on the Altiplano. The airport is quite small for an international airport. Apart from a couple of regional airlines I think only Lufthansa flies direct to Europe.
Our plane to Rurrenabaque was quite small. Only 18 seats or so and everyone had a window seat. The aisle was narrow and not high enough to stand up in so quite tricky for some of the taller passengers to get to their seats.
The flight over the Andes was too cloudy to see any scenery and after a little turbulence over some ridges the 45 minutes flight was over quickly as we approached the landing strip. I could see the strip ahead through the cockpit and it was a bit unnerving to see a distant field of grass with a little brown strip running along it and the difficulty the pilot was having in keeping it in line with the plane!
We landed safely and had to wait for the bus with the next load of passengers to arrive. The plane couldn’t land at Rurrenabaque because the Landing strip was too muddy so we landed at Reyes, 20 km away.
After an hour waiting for the plane to leave for the return trip to La Paz they finally loaded us on a bus to Rurrenabaque and after a 20 minute detour into Reyes to pick up some cold drinks for the driver and airport staff we bumped our way towards Rurre for a dusty hour.
After the high altitude of the last couple of weeks, the lowlands were very hot and humid. Felt like 40 degrees with 100% Humidity. We found a hostel with a fan and after dinner settled in for a sweltering night.

I had the idea that Rurrenabaque was pretty much a “tourist town” but apart from every third shop selling tours to the Jungle or the Pampas (wetlands) there wasn’t a lot of typical tourist infrastructure. (Picture to the left is a friendly fellow we met in an Internet Cafe.) We practiced our Spanish enquiring about Jungle tours as 4 of the 5 operators we asked at didn’t speak any English at all. The Pampas are apparently where it’s at to see wildlife but the Mosquitos are really bad, it’s a 3 hour drive on the road we had arrived on from Reyes to get there and you spend most of the time on the boat so we had decided to do a Jungle tour. Found an operator who would arrange one for us but insisted that 2 days wasn’t enough time and a 3 day tour was needed. We had a week until the return flight to La Paz so we agreed on this and will be leaving Saturday morning.