Toro Toro: Here Be Dinosaurs!

So it's an unspoken rule of travel through South America that at some point you're going to get food poisoning from something you ate or drank. I've had a dodgy stomach a couple times so far this trip but nothing really horrible. That is, nothing bad until my overnight bus ride from La Paz to Cochabamba where I was planning on connecting to Toro Toro National Park. Let's just say, despite the advertisement there was no functioning bathroom on the bus, but that lack of facilities did not prevent me from vomiting up what felt like everything I had eaten in the past month. You can't get much more miserable than being trapped on a night bus in Bolivia covered in your own vomit. Definitely the lowest point of my trip to date. However if for some reason you ever find yourself in this situation, remember, it doesn't last forever, at some point you're going to be able to escape the bus and change into clean clothes and it's going to be the best feeling ever.

In almost direct proportion to how incredibly awful the journey was getting there, Toro Toro National Park was incredibly awesome. I hadn't heard of it until my friend Sarah recommended that I go there. It's pretty remote, about a half days journey by colectivo to get there (which according to our guide is a recent improvement resulting from recent road construction - kind of a funny concept given the state the road still is in, but it used to take from between 1 and 4 days). Tourism is definitely still growing in the area so it's pretty rustic, no phone signal, WiFi, or ATM, but the park is cool enough that once word really gets out, the town is going to explode and become super touristy so I'm glad I got to experience it before that happens. However in anticipation of the tourists coming, they redid the central plaza a couple years ago to feature a life size T-rex among other dinosaurs, so that's pretty awesome.

I had met a few other tourists on the colectivo on the way to Toro Toro so we all banded together to form one group to go on tours together (much cheaper rates). The things to see around Toro Toro once again make you feel like you're on a Discovery channel program, much like the Islas Ballestas did in Peru. We spent the morning crawling through a huge cave in the park. Because it's Bolivia, absolutely nothing was roped off and you could get right up close to and touch huge stalactites and stalagmites. Most of the rooms we were in were pretty big but we also did our share of crawling through narrow tunnels and shimmying between rocks. There was water and little ponds throughout the cavern, and just like you read about in the evolution chapter of your biology book, there were blind cave fish in the ponds that had lost the ability to see over generations of living in the dark.

After a lunch break, we resumed our tour in the afternoon with what I was most excited to see, dinosaur tracks!! There were all kinds and our guide explained which tracks belonged to which family of dinosaur by whipping plastic dinosaurs out of his backpack, which I had naively assumed was filled with water, snacks, first aid kit, things you typically bring on hikes. But no, it was just plastic dinosaurs. I think I'm going to start packing for hikes like that. But in any case, it was really really cool to be walking along the same paths dinosaurs walked millions of years ago. Seeing the tracks made them seem much more real and gave you a much better idea the size the dinosaurs really were. The nerd in me who had books of dinosaur facts for bedtime stories for years was thrilled.

We ended the tour by hiking down into a canyon and swimming in a waterfall, which you know, is pretty cool too. There were even more hikes and excursions you could do around the area, and I probably could have spent a couple more days there except 1) I was running out of cash because I didn't know there was no ATM there and 2) I had to get to Potosí to meet my friend Sarah again! Which will be the next installment in the Rambling Backpacker.