Go!

Departure day is here and we are really excited to get this adventure underway! Thanks so much to all of our family and friends for sending us off with lots of love and good memories.

We have a few stops on our way to San Borja, Bolivia (14.8583 º  S, 66.7475º W). We leave from Charlotte, NC, stop in Miami for a couple of hours and then head non-stop on a 6 and a half hour flight to El Alto, La Paz, Bolivia, the site of the world's highest elevation airport at approximately 4,061 meters, or 13,323 feet. Having made the flight 3 times before, it is quite the adjustment and a bit disorienting coming off the plane into that elevation.

We will land at 9 pm, go through customs, head to a hostal in La Paz, then turn around and head back to the airport in the morning for a 10 am 40 minute flight to Rurrenabaque, a small town on the edge of the Amazon. Rurre is the launching point for many nature adventure companies that take people on tours into Madidi National Park, one of the largest protected nature reserves in the world. The plane we'll take is a tiny 12 seater and due to the elevation of the airport in the Andes, you feel like you barely ascend, fly between some Andean peaks, and then the mountains drop out from beneath you and you are above the Amazon - quite a view to behold.

From Rurrenabaque, we will take a 5 hour taxi ride to San Borja, and we will be in our launching off point to the communities we will do research in. However, before we can start the research, we have 30 days to get our residency applications in, which we will do in Trinidad as the process there is a bit faster than in La Paz.

We'll post some pictures of all of these steps when we get settled in San Borja. Hopefully everything goes smoothly, and we have safe and fast travels.