Week 0. 13:02 on 2 May 2019. 32 km NW of San Ramon, heading toward and beyond Ascension de Guarayos, Bolivia

To my untrained eye, the gray clouds of the sky look like they could drop rain through the bus window and onto my laptop at any moment. I am traveling through the rainforest, after all. Maybe the 4-year-old girl who keeps turning around to closely stare at me will close the window if the rain starts.

Gone is my luxurious 8^th floor AirBnB in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Gone are the paved city streets, traffic lights, and staggeringly plentiful micros (vans) and buses. Outside I see green – all the green of vegetation that I’ve really only seen in nature documentaries. I see what appear to be big palm trees, trees with beautiful pink flowers, trees with long, droopy leaves, and all of the other unknown flora.

As we pass through communities, I notice that many homes have some sort of grass or palm roof. Other than the road upon which we’re traveling, the roads are all dirt. Out of the roughly 40 people on the bus, I’m the only person with light-colored hair. Naturally a little girl on a rural bus would be staring at the sole ginger.

Gone are the penguins of Antarctica, the various scenes of Chile and Argentina, and my desert life of the past 3 weeks.

No, it’s time for a break from life on the road; it’s time for a completely different sort of adventure. As much as I love seeing everywhere I possibly can, I need to slow down and stay somewhere for a little while. The rainforest of northeast Bolivia seems like a good place for that.

It feels extremely strange to not be in Homer, Alaska, to prepare for another Bering Sea field season right now. Sometimes life takes a little redirection from God to provide what the spirit needs, though. I’d figured I’d head back to Alaska for the boreal summer, but because of hiring glitches that I won’t get into, I still don’t know when I’ll return north. It’s for the best, though; lately I was feeling a little like I’d fallen into a routine that was lacking new experiences. If I’d returned to AK Maritime, my options would have been St. George or Buldir – two places that I love but also places in which I’ve spent multiple seasons. My heart wanted something different.

That’s what makes it so perfect that I´d only purchased a one-way ticket to South America last November.  With no flight or job calling me back, I’ve been free to make up my plans as I go, which is how I now find myself heading to work in a very different ecosystem.

Before leaving the U.S. I knew that I’d be visiting Bolivia in my post-Antarctic field season travels. I’d heard about how beautiful and cheap it was from talking with fellow Patagonian travelers last year, so it only made sense to go. The only question was whether I needed to get the yellow fever vaccine that was ‘required but not really enforced’ for entry to Bolivia.

What great news, then, that the U.S. was in short supply of the vaccine! Only one place in Alaska had some, and it wasn’t in Fairbanks. Excellent!

Enter my Chilean friend Renato, a guy with whom I hadn’t spent a field season in Antarctica, but who had spent multiple seasons there and could swap stories about Cape Shirreff with no problem. Knowing vaccines could be cheaper in South America, I asked if he thought I could get a yellow fever vaccine in Punta Arenas or Santiago.

While he was looking into that and corresponding with me on WhatsApp, he casually mentioned how I should volunteer for an organization called Comunidad Inti Warra Yassi. A Bolivian NGO that operates three wildlife sanctuaries, volunteers are always needed to work with jaguars, pumas, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, ocelots, spectacled bear, peccaries, tapirs, exotic birds, etc. that have been injured.

Thinking that I couldn’t give the minimum time commitment of 2 weeks, it seemed awesome but unlikely. Well, life happens, and here I am 5 hours into my bus ride from Santa Cruz to Ambue Ari. In another couple hours, I’ll be arriving at Parque Ambue Ari, my rainforest home for the next 2 months. I’d managed to get a yellow fever vaccine at a medical clinic in downtown Houston, Texas, during my 8 hour layover on my trip south back in November, so I was clear to volunteer in the jungle.

I honestly don’t fully know what I’m getting myself into. Volunteers are assigned a primary animal for whom to care, and while my hopes are for a jaguar, I’ve read that monkey caretakers climb trees with their monkeys. Really, any experience here will be brand new and exciting.