Volunteering at La Senda Verde

 Four(ish) years ago when planning our honeymoon, we planned to volunteer at an organisation doing animal and habitat care in South America. We never made it that far. When May heard about a similar organisation near La Paz, we decided to take up where we left off and help out at an animal refuge.
La Senda Verde is located at the end of the "death road", 2000m lower than La Paz, with a subtropical climate. Many exotic animals that are given up or seized from traffickers and markets in La Paz end up here. In general, only rescued animals are kept here and there is no breeding program for the endangered species. All the animals are from lower, warmer jungle areas so they find it a little cool here in the Yungas, but it is prohibited to release animals back into the wild, so these rescuees will live out their days here.

We wake up early each morning to the sounds of macaws, Amazonian parrots, and the amazing Howler monkeys, whose howl sounds like an aeroplane flying above. They can project this sound up to 4.8km in the jungle.

Our typical day looks something like this...
7:15am Meeting of 8-14 volunteers to split up tasks
7:30am Clean out enclosures and feed breakfast to birds, monkeys, tyras, capibara
9am Human breakfast
10:00 Feed snack to monkeys, feed and clean turtles and tortoises
11:00 Fix up bird enclosures, take any English or French tours
12:30 Feed lunch to monkeys, capibara and tyras
1:30 Lunch
2:30 Siesta and cuddles with the spider monkeys
3:30 Clean out enclosures and feed dinner to birds, monkeys, tyras, capibara
6:00 Showers (very necessary by now)
6:15 Sunset wine on the porch
7:30 Dinner
8:30 movie, head to ´town´, hang out, read book, play cards, play pool, etc

Other long-term volunteers had special projects, like the spectacled bears, small big cats, nocturnal monkeys, and caring for the high care sick or baby monkeys.

Capuchin monkey area


Henrietta the Capibara
May's taken charge of Henrietta the Capibara, and possibly the happiest animal on the planet.the capibaras are the largest rodents - though if you saw them swim and play you would never think they were anything short of a ballerina. Henrietta loves corn and banana leaves: she jumps gently up on you with her webbed feet, flaps her ears and does a little bum dance to show she is happy. And her happiness is contagious. She loves swimming and does little rollie-pollies in her pool while fluttering her eyelashes.





Tortoise Time
After breakfast May heads to care for the turtles and tortoises. It's a chilled job, the hardest part being physically moving the tortoises to their food mats and keeping kantuta, the coati, and the monkeys away long enough for our chilled-out tortoises to eat. Tortoises can get cranky sometimes and they make a hissing noise and withdraw into their shell to show their disapproval at being woken up! They're as slow as you have heard, maybe slower, but when a monkey gets near their food , they can team-up and ram it with their shells.














The Birds
La Senda Verde has many beautiful amazonian parrots, macaws and Sam the Toucan. Most days either Sam or May with other vollies check up on the birdies, feed them and clean out their enclosures.

We did a lot of work with the birds, trying to make their lives a bit better - they were in relatively small and temporary enclosures while waiting for a larger aviary to be built. Every day Sam (and whoever he could rope in to help) would fix little things, like broken locks, ripped or missing curtains, perches, etc. May spearheaded the entertainment team that made edible games and picked branches for inside their cages. Apparently part of the money for the aviary had already been donated, but they were waiting for the donating currency  to go up, so they can get more bang for their buck before building it. Other afternoons May helped out feeding and cleaning after the Tyras, which are like big weasles, and love climbing all over volunteers, or eating monkeys.



Monkey business

In the meantime, a lot of new parts were being built into the monkey enclosure, where Sam spends his days, : a "human cage" to allow guests to visit the monkey territories in safety, and see them interacting. There are two main communities: capuchin monkeys and  spider monkeys, plus some howler monkeys, titis and squirrel monkeys. It is a little hairy working in the monkey area, as they regularly swing from being very huggy and affectionate to biting people pretty badly (this happened about 5 times during our two week visit). Plus, rescued monkeys often associate women with former abusive owners, get very protective of their favourite male carers, and really hate children - so only men are allowed to work with them and women are only allowed in with an escort.  That said, we definitely got a lot more bites from the bloody birds than the monkeys.

Pimienta and the Spider Monkey Cuddles

And when we both get a little downtime, there is nothing more relaxing than hugs from the spider monkeys. We sit down with shef, rosie, bobbie and alex and before we know it, they've come to our porch and grabbed hold of you with their tail, then proceed to climb up and nest their head in your chest, ready for siesta. Pimienta makes love noises at may and will crawl under May´s shirt to sleep on her chest. She's snoring in no time. Spider monkeys have scent glands that actually make them smell like roses. they love grooming so when you get cuddles it's probably the cleanest you feel on any given day while working at la Senda Verde. the spider monkeys here are still wild and they can snap and bite any time. our friends got bitten on the neck with puncture wounds to show it.

We've met lots of cool travellers and locals here. All our meals are shared and its a nice time to get talking. If we miss a meal, there's always someone happy to share a bottle of wine at sundown on the deck of our cabin. We also had Toto Tuesdays, the pizzeria is located in the little town of Coroico, which has been built into a cliff face up a steep stone road. We squeeze 20 people in a mini van and 20 minutes later we are eating arguably the best pizza in Bolivia. When the mood took us, Saturday nights we hit the Coroico night scene, at reputable night clubs such as Tropicana, where you share the dance floor with Cholitas and dogs, and can taste the secret tropical concoction if you´re feeling brave. In such labour-intensive volunteering, a good experience hinges on having a great team of volunteers who are willing to help, are reliable and fun to hang out with. We were very grateful to have this!