After a few days of horrible traveling, my week at La Senda Verde was the most dramatic turnaround imaginable. The place was paradise. It’s an animal refuge that was started 8 years ago by a couple named Vicky and Marcello, who are the most kind, welcoming couple imaginable and have devoted their entire lives to working with animals. The park has over 200 animals ranging including birds, tortoises, monkeys, turtles, coatis, a caiman, a snake, a fox, and a bear and most of them were running around everywhere. Its tough to walk through the refuge without having some kind of cheeky animal jumping on your shoulder, especially in the monkey area.
Azucar, the most anxiety ridden animal I have ever met
But LSV isn’t a petting zoo. All of the animals living in the park have been either rescued from poachers, the black market, or abusive homes. Resultantly, many of the animals have serious psychological and behavioral issues. Many of the birds pluck their own feathers out, some of the animals have scars and permanent marks, and many of the monkeys are so pugnacious that they will attack women if they come anywhere near (often that is who would abuse them during the day while men were at work).
Aruma the spectacled bear
To take care of all of these animals takes long, exhausting days and I got thrown in right away. Two hours after I arrived one of the volunteers asked me if I wanted to go feed the bear, and I found an Andean Spectacled bear eating peanuts out of my hand. There were anywhere from 6 to 15 volunteers at the park while I was there, with 200 animals. Pecho, Anneke and Dee, the long term volunteers would initiate the newer volunteers on how all the work was done, so it was an interesting learning process. We would work from about 8AM to 5PM everyday. My first few days were spent cleaning and feeding the tortoises, feeding the bear (I got to hand feed a bear NBD), feeding the dogs (yes, they are animals too), and feeding the fox. All the animals have a specifically tailored feeding and cleaning schedule, with food measured out to the gram. Hours everyday were spent cutting and measuring food. And the animals ate well.
The fourth day I worked with the birds, some of whom can be vicious. Anneke, one of the volunteers staying for 6 months showed us numerous bite marks and bruises that she got from trying to feed the birds.
The last three days at the park I worked with the monkeys, easily the best animals to take care of. We worked with the capuchins, an incredibly smart monkey (when cleaning their enclosures they would take the brush from me and start doing it themselves). It was a bit exasperating to feed them actually because there would constantly be monkeys jumping on my head stealing the other monkeys’ food. But it was an incredible experience to sit down in the monkey area and have a monkey come lay in my lap and start grooming my hair and digging through my pockets.
The location of the animal park was in a river valley in a mountain range a few hours from La Paz and down the mountain from Coroico where we stayed after death road and where I ran up to one day. Beautiful and rustic. All the volunteers lived together in a volunteer house, and unfortunately, just a few days before I left a bunch of cool volunteers from South Africa, Israel, England, Ireland and France showed up.
Gilad's arm full of sandfly bites
The only major downfall to working at the parks was sand flies, small biting insects that would eviscerate any exposed skin on a human body.
Just as I was getting settled in my ephemeral stay stole me away from the park and on my journey home.
Check out La Senda Verde’s website
I added a slide show at the bottom so you can check out the rest of the pictures I took.
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where i can have it?