I had an exciting morning on Tuesday. First, I was asked to take photos of a couple of interviews, which was mildly exciting. But most excitingly, there was a road block just outside of Cochabamba, and Noe (one of the photographers in Los Tiempos) took me along to cover it. The people of a poor barrio (district) were protesting because the government had not completed the surfacing of a main road linking it to Cochabamba city, and the completion of the road was not included in any of the newly published city plans. When we arrived at the site of the road block, at about10.30am, we were faced with queues of traffic that had been waiting to pass for five hours, including several large intercity passenger buses. A melee of campesinos were sitting on benches and standing together lengthways across the road to block the traffic, holding homemade placards imploring the government to complete the road. A couple of hundred metres back from the protesters, groups of armed police were stood around their riot vans preparing for action. There were some agressive verbal confrontations between some angry protesters and a few policemen, and sometimes between the protesters and frustrated car and bus drivers anxious to get moving. But it was only towards midday when things started to happen. The police began to line up with their shields and their guns at the ready, and Noe told me to go and wait out of the way in case it got dangerous. Sure enough, the police began to fire shots into the air and released canisters of tear gas, dispersing the crowds and sending people fleeing in all directions clutching their noses and mouths. There was lots of shouting and the threat of violence, but there was I think only one injury. Within half an hour, the police were able to usher the traffic through again. I'm not sure what will happen regarding the uncompleted road. I got a lift back home on the photographer's motorbike.
Wednesday night, the shortest night of the year, was the Aymara new year's eve. Traditionally (or not, if you listen to my host father) the Aymara people stay up all night and welcome the sunrise, and by extension the new year, with open arms. I'd heard that many people climb up to the Inca ruins in Sipe Sipe, about an hour and a half out of Cochabamba, on Wednesday night and welcome the sunrise from the top of the hill on Thursday morning. Despite much persuasion, I could only persuade Jack to come with me, as poor Gail was ill again. We got a few hours of sleep before leaving at 2am by bus to Sipe Sipe. We'd been told it would take no more than an hour to walk from the village plaza up to the top of the hill, but this turned out to be another Bolivian mis-estimation. It took us two and a half hours to reach the top, one and a half of which were spent stretching our lungs and working our calves to capacity hiking up one very steep mountain. I very much regretted going to the gym earlier that evening, and wished I'd opted for a small bottle of vodka instead of lugging four glass litre-bottles of beer up with us.
It was worth it though, to see hundreds of people wrapped up warm drinking, singing and playing guitar clustered around little bonfires waiting for the sunrise. Some students recognised Jack from his English classes and invited us to sit around their bonfire and share the beer. Unfortunately they weren't bonfire experts so, except for periods of a few seconds when lighter fuel was poured over the embers to produce vigorous flames, we spent the next hour or so gazng hopefully at a few dimly glowing but very smokey twigs. Eventually, light from the sun began to appear and intensify, so we followed everyone else in making our way towards the edge to watch the sunrise and the coming of the new year. It was a magical occasion, as everyone raised their palms towards the yellowing sky, arms outstretched, silently waiting. The atmosphere was only interrupted occasionally when an inebriated youth clumsily tripped over a rock and fell over. The festivities ended quickly and everyone began to disperse once the sun had fully risen. We found a trufi that was heading for Cochabamba, and had breakfast in town before returning back home for a pre-lunchtime snooze.
Jack and I had been planning to go to Sucre for the weekend, and we'd managed to persuade Amy and Kevan to come too. Getting to the bus station 45 minutes before the buses are due to depart is usually plenty early enough to buy tickets, but this time we were unlucky. Obviously everyone was travelling to friends and family for the festival of San Juan on Saturday, and there was no space with any of the companies. I felt a bit responsible for getting Amy and Kevan to the bus stop in anticipation of a fun weekend away and then failing to find space it the buses for them. We decided to postpone Sucre for a week and use this weekend to see more of Cochabamba. Disheartened, we made straight for a bar and spent the evening eating pizza and pancakes, drinking sangria and playing pick-up-sticks. Someone else had Jenga. I'd even been looking forward to the bus journey.
The next day I met Jack early with the hope of finding a tourist agency that hired bikes so we could go exploring the surrounding countryside. No such luck. Instead, we caught a bus to Quillacollo, the original site of the old city of Cochabamba, to see a festival of maize that my host sister had told me about. It was taking place at the Inca maize storage towers just outside the town. It was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours. On the way up in the taxi we passed hundreds of youngsters dressed in traditional clothing (including brightly coloured Andean hats) running from Quillacollo to the site of the festival in a historic race to mark the occasion. Policemen and women, seemingly with nothing better to do that day, tripped over themselves to explain the history, cultural importance, and uses of maize to us, which they'd obviously memorised, or in some cases just read, from the noticeboards behind them. We sampled some real chicha (beer made from maize), chewed some coca leaves, and watched ceremonies performed to win the favour of Pachamama (Mother Earth). Since Jack had a burger at the festival, we had lunch in a vegetarian restaurant back in Cochabamba, and spent the rest of the afternoon searching for an outdoor swimming pool. Two were empty of water, but we eventually found one that was open and functioning and paid our 20Bs entry. It was brain-freezing cold. Not even the most frenzied swimming could make it bearable. So we sampled the eucalyptus and camomile flavoured saunas before calling it a day and going to the cinema. We had a choice between Shrek 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3, so for no particular reason we opted for the latter. It was a bad film, bafflingly surreal at points, but quite entertaining thanks mainly to Jonny Depp. That night the family were having a barbecue at home, which, along with bonfires and fireworks, is the traditional way of celebrating San Juan. I got a cheese sandwich washed down by a couple of glasses of vino caliente (hot wine) and some delicious hot egg-nog type drink made from condensed milk, coconut, and cane sugar liquor, before hitting the sack.
I had a little chat with my host father about San Juan and the Aymara new year. It went much like our other little chats: I mention where I've been and what I've seen, and how interesting and fun all these events seem, and he attempts to destroy my enthusiasm with his cynicism. I said how nice it was that everyone celebrates San Juan, and he replied that it's not a traditional Bolivian festival at all but a recent Spanish import, and that whilst in Spain the fireworks and bonfires are nice affairs, here the festivities are out of control, with people setting off fireworks in the streets and setting fire to everything. I suggested that the Aymara new year festivities are a nice symbol of how traditional Bolivian culture is being kept alive and that perhaps they help to provide a sense of unity and nationhood, but he said that it's all lies, that the solstice has only recently been celebrated and that nobody really knows anything about how things used to be done. Hermán maintained that it's not at all a force for unity, because only a small portion of the population is Aymara, and the people of the Cochabamba area are all Quechua, if anything. He suggested that if he went into the street on the eve of the Aymara new year and killed a dog, he'd be applauded, because people consider it 'traditional' and 'Andean' to sacrifice animals, and how barbaric this is. To conclude, he referred to the birth of the Andean cultures on Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca, where supposedly the Andean society was formed around three laws: do not be lazy, do not steal, and do not lie. According to Hermán, those who claim to be descendents of the historic Andean cultures and who glorify their ideology, the supposedly 'indigenous' majority of Bolivia, are lazy thieves and liars. For Hermán, this is perfectly evidenced by the protests of the campesinos blocking the road to Quillacollo on Friday. Instead of working hard to earn their living and feed their families, these people expect and demand gifts from the government, leeching off the good industrious Bolivians, like Hermán I imagine. Such are the divisions in Bolivian society.
As agreed, I met Jack at 8.30am the bottom of his street in my sports gear to run to the bottom of the hill with the giant statue of Chirst, and up the 1250 steps to the top. We'd attempted it the previous week, at a far less sociable hour of 6.30am, but only made it half way up before we had to return in order to make it to work on time. It had been knackering, for me especially because I was trying to keep up with Jack who, at over 6ft, has legs about twice as long as mine. This time, we had no time limits, and I was setting the pace. After half an hour of running before getting to the start of the steps, we were already pretty tired, but we went for it. I ended up just climbing as fast as I could walking, but Jack tried to run and beat me to the statue. It was exhausting but it felt good to get to the top. I hadn't brought my camera, assuming that the statue wouldn't be open to climb up so early, so (after a long break to let our heart rates return to something approximating normal) we ran back down and back to my house to get it. We got a bus back to the base of the hill, but being the exercise junkies we both are, we refused to take the cable car and climbed it again. It was good training for Huayna Potosí.
The inside of the Cristo is really pretty grim considering the majesty of the well-kept, white statue. It's just dirty bare concrete and loose handrails running up the rusting cast-iron spiral staircases, with graphic signs warning visitors not to urinate inside. Barbed wire fences now prevent tourists from getting too close to the person-sized holes at the end of each arm, from which a few people have reportedly committed suicide. It is no longer possible to climb up into the head of Jesus, but only up to his shoulders, but the views are great from the small holes in the walls of his chest. Or they would be, were it not for the thick borwn-grey cloud of smog that hangs over the city, almost obscuring from view the beautiful green mountains that enclose the city. The viewholes, which from the outside make it look as though Jesus quite likes acupuncture, were at just the right height for me. I'm not sure whether it's a good or a bad thing that I seem to be the same height as the average Bolivian.
I had lunch with the family that Sunday for the first time since my first weekend in Cochabamba. Sunday is Vicky's day off, so Cristina cooks. It was a classic lunch of eggs, cheesy rice, baked bananas and salad. I caught up with Jen, who was busy conducting interviews and reading as research for her book. I can't wait to read it. Amy had gone with Kevan on a tour to the Inca ruins at Sipe Sipe that day, but they (probably sensibly) had opted for a four-by-four ride to the top, rather than climbing the mountain. That afternoon, Jack and I went to a park in the centre of town with our books to chill out after our strenuous morning. We'd wanted to go and lounge in the botanical gardens, but it was shut, so we had to resort to the smaller and busy municipal park. Typically for our weekend, on the one day we wanted to chill out in the sunshine, it was cloudy for the first time in weeks. We stayed anyway. The swings proved irresistable and (should I be admitting this?) the highlight of the afternoon. We endured the drumming band that had chosen this park and this day to rehearse and the campesinos squeezing their hooters to remind us every 5 minutes that they were selling ice-cream, and read our books whilst watching the kids go round the concrete paths on their go-karts (one spoilt little brat even had a motorised version). When it got too dark and too cold to sit out any more, we found an ice-cream parlour and had some cake. Globos need a lesson in what is and what is not a brownie; fruit-of-the forest chocolate cake most definitely is not. I'd been looking forward to that brownie all day. Going to bed at 10pm almost made up for it.
Monday, June 25, 2007
The Jungle
When I got back from Salar, Amelia and Marie-Ann arrived back in Cochabamba after their month of travelling to collect the stuff they'd left before flying home. It was good to catch up with them. We all went out for pancakes on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, a new volunteer arrived to stay in my house. I was invited to move out of the little annex and into one of the rooms inside. Although I miss having my own bathroom, I don't miss the smelly leaky toilet and the cold nights, and having a double bed and loads of storage space is very nice. Amy, a really lovely 20-year old medical student from St Andrews, moved into the annex. She's come with her boyfriend Kevan, but he's living elsewhere.
I only had to work two days this week - TPA had organised a trip to Puerto Villa Roel in the jungle departing on Thursday morning. In this respect, the trip was a great idea. In another, less so. Jack, Gail and I had been planning on going to Puerto that weekend to visit Alexis, one of the volunteers there, and see the jungle. We mentioned it to Daniela, TPA director, and asked if we could stay in the volunteers' lodgings. She promptly hijacked our trip and turned it into a TPA-wide militarised working weekend. At a meeting on Tuesday night she produced copies of our 'schedule', detailing exactly what we would be doing at every hour of the day. All four days involved getting up at 6.30am at working until 6.30pm, and even stated that we would be taking an 'early night' on Thursday. A little bit put out, Gail and I decided to go to Puerto for the first two days and head to Villa Tunari, another jungle village, on Saturday morning for the weekend. Jack was going to stay in Cochabamba and join us on Friday night in Puerto.
On Thursday morning we drove down from Cochabamba through the mountains of beautiful cloud forest into the lowlands, reaching Puerto Villa Roel, at between 200 and 300m above sea level, some four hours later. Within minutes of getting out of the van, I was sweating pints with a shiny face and ever-fluffier hair. We walked to the volunteers' house along a dirt track by the side of the river, passing fruit trees and even coca bushes. Gail and I were very excited to note that the house had a hammock, as well as cat with a tiny little kitten. Well, Gail wasn't so excited about the cats; she is allergic. The women who worked in the house had prepared a lunch of gloopy overcooked pasta soup with bits of dubious meat, which we picked at. This was to be the culinary theme of meals in Puerto. That afternoon we met Alexis and Jonathon, another volunteer. Alexis was planting and building and generally getting his hands dirty and his legs bitten, whilst Jonathon was working in the guardería, or nursery, in the village, and wearing trousers. We found some machetes and took each others pictures pretending to hack away at a banana tree, and then wandered into the village. We watched some boys playing on a dugout canoe in the river and sat at a little café to sample some chicha de maiz and chicha de maní (drinks made from corn and peanut respectively), which I enjoyed but everyone else seemed to find repulsive.
Dinner for me was a great improvement. After telling the cook that I was a vegetarian, I was presented with a plate of rice, egg, fried bananas, potato, yuca and salad. The other volunteers, faced with a similarly overcooked, gloopy soup, were very envious. It made a nice change. Whilst washing up, someone spotted what looked like a fish on the floor of the kitchen. We all stared at the strange creature for a while, and then were even more amazed when it began to walk (or waddle) across the floor and out of the door. "Let me through I'm a zoologist" Gail identified it as a lung fish. After dinner we went back into the village to find a bar for a drink. On the way, whilst happily chatting to Mel about journalism and suchlike, I managed to fall neck-deep into a ditch, which seemed to entertain everyone immensely. Jonathon and Alexis took us to the best bar in town, which had a ramshackle jukebox and a broken pool table, and - like all the bars in the village - served only large bottles of coca cola and one type of beer. Local children swarmed around me and Gail when they spotted our cameras, so we had some fun taking pictures of them. Mel and Carmen, one of the more fun members of the TPA staff, spent the evening flirting outrageously with Alexis and Jonathon. Gail and I had managed to claim the only spare bed with a mattress in the boys room, so had quite a good night's sleep. We needed earplugs though, to block out the sounds of the jungle. The 12 or so other volunteers were sleeping on the hard tiled floors.
The next morning, thankfully later than scheduled, we started work at the guardería. It was in an awful state. Formerly an abattoir, it was dark, dirty and smelly. There was rat excrement everywhere, even up the walls, which were crumbling badly. The mattresses and blankets for the cots where covered in faeces, pee and vomit. It was hard to believe that children were cared for here. We began by clearing the place out, sweeping up, and cleaning and disinfecting. I spent most of the day mixing cement and filling the holes in the walls so that they could be painted. It was hot, hard work, but with music from the retro ghetto-blaster it was enjoyable. We worked all day, save for a couple of hours at lunch, but without electric lights, by 6pm it was getting too dark to paint. Dinner was fish omlette, made from the same big fish that had been sitting in the sink outside all day, and salad: a marginal improvement on gloopy soup, was the consensus. That evening some of the volunteers took Jonathon and Alexis' English lesson for them, teaching a group of 20 or 30 village children in the main room of the volunteer house for an hour, whilst the rest of us played with the kitten and chatted. Daniela, Jack, Amy and Kevan, along with another member of the TPA staff and her boyfriend, arrived that evening. Gail got ill that night and blamed the fish. She went to bed, her sickness justifying another night on the only mattress, whilst the rest of us went out to the only 'club' in Puerto. It was different from the bar of last night only in the volume of music, which was almost too loud to shout to the waiter how many beer and cokes we wanted. Not wanting to disturb Gail, I slept on the un-cushioned wooden frame of the other spare bunk in the boys' room. It was still better than the floor, and I slept remarkably well. Jack, on the harder floor, did not.
Jonathon arrived just as we all woke up that morning. He claimed he'd been for an early morning walk, but he'd clearly spent the night elsewhere with a Bolivian lady. Evidently neither Carmen nor Mel had succeeded in seducing Alexis, for he slept in his own bed last night. A little while after the other dedicated volunteers traipsed back off to the guardería to get back to work, Jack, Gail and I got a taxi to Villa Tunari. We found a nice hostel with real matresses on the beds, and, finding that a recommended restaurant that served vegetarian food only opened at 4pm, had a yummy pizza lunch. We contemplated rafting or canoeing, but settled for a jungle trek with a crazy guide and his dog, who proved to be even more useful than the guide. I spent the trek wondering why on earth the guide had told me to wear my trainers instead of my flip flops, as most of it was spent wading waist-deep through a river. Gail and Jack had sturdy sandals on whilst a mound of sand was growing in each of my squelching shoes. It was a lot of fun though, clambering through lush, dense jungle and spotting huge brightly coloured butterflies and tuneful birds. We sampled some of the fruit from which chocolate is derived. This red, hard-skinned fruit containing sweet, furry purple beans seems far removed from chocolate, and certainly tasted nothing like it, but was quite nice. Wading through the river was slow work. Before long it got dark (and I mean dark) and we still had three hours of trekking to go, so we got out our torches. We had a bit of a scare when the guide's big lamp died. Jack tried to help by offering to share mine or Gails and give his torch to Jorge, but then promply dropped it in the river. Fortunately it still worked. The veggie restaurant was closed again, so we had a pizza dinner too. My trainers were in a sorry state when we got back.
The next morning we went to visit Parque Machia, a jungle wildlife reserve famous for it's community of monkeys rescued from the maltreatment of owners. They were loads of them, and they were very cute. One took a liking to Gail, and brought her a piece of banana whilst it sat and ate a piece of papaya on her shoulder. Having been warned not to take anything but ourselves beyond the park entrance, Gail had bought a disposable camera to snap the monkeys, but it had a good chew. Another fell in love with Jack and stubbornly hung on to his neck whilst we walked up to a viewpoint. It was clearly in a state of excitement (he was male, we could tell) and gave a jealous squeal if Jack prodded me or Gail. After about half an hour, Jack got sick of having a hot neck and tried to get rid of it, but he had to run from the little bugger who followed him up the path. Fortunately, we thought, it took interest in a little girl when we got to the mirador and climbed up her instead. But the girl panicked and the monkey bit her, quite deeply. We spent the next hour or so trying to keep the monkey, who was now rather agressive, away from her and from another little girl it bit about 10 minutes later, whilst Jack ran off to get help. The girl's family had to take her to hospital. I no longer wanted a monkey as a pet.
That afternoon we played a few games of pool in a bar, found a swimming pool and had a swim, and had a bit of dinner before heading back. The veggie restaurant was closed again, so I had to make do with an omlette. It took six hours to get back because rain had made the unsurfaced roads hazardous.
The next day I had a look at the photos of the nursery taken on Sunday before the others had left. It was almost unrecognisable. The cots, blankets and matresses had been cleaned and the walls were pink, yellow, blue and green, and free of rat poo. I felt a little guilty that I hadn't been there on the Saturday and Sunday, but they seemed to have done a good enough job without us.
I only had to work two days this week - TPA had organised a trip to Puerto Villa Roel in the jungle departing on Thursday morning. In this respect, the trip was a great idea. In another, less so. Jack, Gail and I had been planning on going to Puerto that weekend to visit Alexis, one of the volunteers there, and see the jungle. We mentioned it to Daniela, TPA director, and asked if we could stay in the volunteers' lodgings. She promptly hijacked our trip and turned it into a TPA-wide militarised working weekend. At a meeting on Tuesday night she produced copies of our 'schedule', detailing exactly what we would be doing at every hour of the day. All four days involved getting up at 6.30am at working until 6.30pm, and even stated that we would be taking an 'early night' on Thursday. A little bit put out, Gail and I decided to go to Puerto for the first two days and head to Villa Tunari, another jungle village, on Saturday morning for the weekend. Jack was going to stay in Cochabamba and join us on Friday night in Puerto.
On Thursday morning we drove down from Cochabamba through the mountains of beautiful cloud forest into the lowlands, reaching Puerto Villa Roel, at between 200 and 300m above sea level, some four hours later. Within minutes of getting out of the van, I was sweating pints with a shiny face and ever-fluffier hair. We walked to the volunteers' house along a dirt track by the side of the river, passing fruit trees and even coca bushes. Gail and I were very excited to note that the house had a hammock, as well as cat with a tiny little kitten. Well, Gail wasn't so excited about the cats; she is allergic. The women who worked in the house had prepared a lunch of gloopy overcooked pasta soup with bits of dubious meat, which we picked at. This was to be the culinary theme of meals in Puerto. That afternoon we met Alexis and Jonathon, another volunteer. Alexis was planting and building and generally getting his hands dirty and his legs bitten, whilst Jonathon was working in the guardería, or nursery, in the village, and wearing trousers. We found some machetes and took each others pictures pretending to hack away at a banana tree, and then wandered into the village. We watched some boys playing on a dugout canoe in the river and sat at a little café to sample some chicha de maiz and chicha de maní (drinks made from corn and peanut respectively), which I enjoyed but everyone else seemed to find repulsive.
Dinner for me was a great improvement. After telling the cook that I was a vegetarian, I was presented with a plate of rice, egg, fried bananas, potato, yuca and salad. The other volunteers, faced with a similarly overcooked, gloopy soup, were very envious. It made a nice change. Whilst washing up, someone spotted what looked like a fish on the floor of the kitchen. We all stared at the strange creature for a while, and then were even more amazed when it began to walk (or waddle) across the floor and out of the door. "Let me through I'm a zoologist" Gail identified it as a lung fish. After dinner we went back into the village to find a bar for a drink. On the way, whilst happily chatting to Mel about journalism and suchlike, I managed to fall neck-deep into a ditch, which seemed to entertain everyone immensely. Jonathon and Alexis took us to the best bar in town, which had a ramshackle jukebox and a broken pool table, and - like all the bars in the village - served only large bottles of coca cola and one type of beer. Local children swarmed around me and Gail when they spotted our cameras, so we had some fun taking pictures of them. Mel and Carmen, one of the more fun members of the TPA staff, spent the evening flirting outrageously with Alexis and Jonathon. Gail and I had managed to claim the only spare bed with a mattress in the boys room, so had quite a good night's sleep. We needed earplugs though, to block out the sounds of the jungle. The 12 or so other volunteers were sleeping on the hard tiled floors.
The next morning, thankfully later than scheduled, we started work at the guardería. It was in an awful state. Formerly an abattoir, it was dark, dirty and smelly. There was rat excrement everywhere, even up the walls, which were crumbling badly. The mattresses and blankets for the cots where covered in faeces, pee and vomit. It was hard to believe that children were cared for here. We began by clearing the place out, sweeping up, and cleaning and disinfecting. I spent most of the day mixing cement and filling the holes in the walls so that they could be painted. It was hot, hard work, but with music from the retro ghetto-blaster it was enjoyable. We worked all day, save for a couple of hours at lunch, but without electric lights, by 6pm it was getting too dark to paint. Dinner was fish omlette, made from the same big fish that had been sitting in the sink outside all day, and salad: a marginal improvement on gloopy soup, was the consensus. That evening some of the volunteers took Jonathon and Alexis' English lesson for them, teaching a group of 20 or 30 village children in the main room of the volunteer house for an hour, whilst the rest of us played with the kitten and chatted. Daniela, Jack, Amy and Kevan, along with another member of the TPA staff and her boyfriend, arrived that evening. Gail got ill that night and blamed the fish. She went to bed, her sickness justifying another night on the only mattress, whilst the rest of us went out to the only 'club' in Puerto. It was different from the bar of last night only in the volume of music, which was almost too loud to shout to the waiter how many beer and cokes we wanted. Not wanting to disturb Gail, I slept on the un-cushioned wooden frame of the other spare bunk in the boys' room. It was still better than the floor, and I slept remarkably well. Jack, on the harder floor, did not.
Jonathon arrived just as we all woke up that morning. He claimed he'd been for an early morning walk, but he'd clearly spent the night elsewhere with a Bolivian lady. Evidently neither Carmen nor Mel had succeeded in seducing Alexis, for he slept in his own bed last night. A little while after the other dedicated volunteers traipsed back off to the guardería to get back to work, Jack, Gail and I got a taxi to Villa Tunari. We found a nice hostel with real matresses on the beds, and, finding that a recommended restaurant that served vegetarian food only opened at 4pm, had a yummy pizza lunch. We contemplated rafting or canoeing, but settled for a jungle trek with a crazy guide and his dog, who proved to be even more useful than the guide. I spent the trek wondering why on earth the guide had told me to wear my trainers instead of my flip flops, as most of it was spent wading waist-deep through a river. Gail and Jack had sturdy sandals on whilst a mound of sand was growing in each of my squelching shoes. It was a lot of fun though, clambering through lush, dense jungle and spotting huge brightly coloured butterflies and tuneful birds. We sampled some of the fruit from which chocolate is derived. This red, hard-skinned fruit containing sweet, furry purple beans seems far removed from chocolate, and certainly tasted nothing like it, but was quite nice. Wading through the river was slow work. Before long it got dark (and I mean dark) and we still had three hours of trekking to go, so we got out our torches. We had a bit of a scare when the guide's big lamp died. Jack tried to help by offering to share mine or Gails and give his torch to Jorge, but then promply dropped it in the river. Fortunately it still worked. The veggie restaurant was closed again, so we had a pizza dinner too. My trainers were in a sorry state when we got back.
The next morning we went to visit Parque Machia, a jungle wildlife reserve famous for it's community of monkeys rescued from the maltreatment of owners. They were loads of them, and they were very cute. One took a liking to Gail, and brought her a piece of banana whilst it sat and ate a piece of papaya on her shoulder. Having been warned not to take anything but ourselves beyond the park entrance, Gail had bought a disposable camera to snap the monkeys, but it had a good chew. Another fell in love with Jack and stubbornly hung on to his neck whilst we walked up to a viewpoint. It was clearly in a state of excitement (he was male, we could tell) and gave a jealous squeal if Jack prodded me or Gail. After about half an hour, Jack got sick of having a hot neck and tried to get rid of it, but he had to run from the little bugger who followed him up the path. Fortunately, we thought, it took interest in a little girl when we got to the mirador and climbed up her instead. But the girl panicked and the monkey bit her, quite deeply. We spent the next hour or so trying to keep the monkey, who was now rather agressive, away from her and from another little girl it bit about 10 minutes later, whilst Jack ran off to get help. The girl's family had to take her to hospital. I no longer wanted a monkey as a pet.
That afternoon we played a few games of pool in a bar, found a swimming pool and had a swim, and had a bit of dinner before heading back. The veggie restaurant was closed again, so I had to make do with an omlette. It took six hours to get back because rain had made the unsurfaced roads hazardous.
The next day I had a look at the photos of the nursery taken on Sunday before the others had left. It was almost unrecognisable. The cots, blankets and matresses had been cleaned and the walls were pink, yellow, blue and green, and free of rat poo. I felt a little guilty that I hadn't been there on the Saturday and Sunday, but they seemed to have done a good enough job without us.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The Salt Flats, Sunsets and Shooting Stars
I'm getting rather behind with this blog. It's Tuesday 19 June today, and I went to Salar two weekends ago. Hopefully I can remember it accurately.
It was a long awaited trip. I'd had it penned in my diary since my first day with TAPA, when I managed to persuade Ximena to let me plan some time off to visit the salt flats on the condition that I write an article about it, and that we keep it a secret from the rest of the volunteers and director Daniela. Not much of a penalty really. We'd had a look on the calendar and decided that if I made use of the public holiday of Corpus Christi, on 7 June, I would only need to take one day off to do a full four-day tour.
Although I'd have been happy to go alone (I was kind of hoping to group up with some Israeli men...), I'd been half-heartedly suggesting to selected others that they take time off and join me. I didn't really think anyone would be able to, so I was very glad when Jack told me on the Monday that he'd managed to rearrange his Friday classes for Wednesday, which was "The Day of the Teacher", or in other words a day off for teachers. Having done very little research (I'd learnt my lesson from planning for La Paz last weekend), we left on Wednesday afternoon by bus to Uyuni via Oruro. The first bus was fine, if a little hotter and smellier than usual, but the second leg was an overnighter in a very shitty bus along one of the bumpiest roads I've ever experienced. We had to spend a good 10 minutes when we arrived searching for our things at the other end of the bus among the snoozing campesinos and their big bundles of God knows what. We'd been warned it got cold, so we'd taken our sleeping bags on board, and sure enough, by the early hours of the morning ice was forming on the insides of the windows. After a sleepless night, we arrived into the frigid, sleepy town of Uyuni at sunrise.
At 6.30, nothing was open in this tiny little place. We considered following the advice of the Lonely Planet and camping out in the office of the bus company for a while and taking advantage of their gas heater, but it was full of locals doing the same, so we decided to take a wander into "town". Before long, tour agencies were beginning to open their doors and agents were wandering the streets looking to prey on unprepared travellers. This suited us well. Under the premise of shopping around a bit, we accepted several invitations to come inside agency offices and take a seat in front of their gas heaters whilst they gave us their spiel. There's not a great deal of variation between the agencies, and we were to discover that most of them grouped their tourists together to fill the jeeps, but we knew we wanted to leave that Thursday morning on a 3 or 4-day tour that perhaps incorporated a bit of exercise and ideally in reverse so we got the long day of travelling out of the way first and had more time on the salt flats at the end. After seeing what numerous agencies had to offer, we we torn between a 3-day tour in reverse and a normal 4-day tour that included climbing a volcano. Over breakfast, in a deserted hostel canteen, we decided on the latter. We took a quick shower in another of the hostels (we weren't confident of having another chance for the next four days), had a quick wander round the market, and bought water and snacks, and then we were off. As we should have expected, the two Argentinian girls and two American guys with whom we shared a jeep, had booked through different agencies, but it didn't really matter.
First stop was the train graveyard, a strange place near the edge of the salt flats where a dozen or so old trains lay rusting. Jack quite liked it; Dad you'd have been very excited by it. I suppose the old wrecks did make for interesting photos. It didn't take long in the jeep before we were on the salt flats themselves. It was almost too soon to appreciate. We spent half an hour trying on daft hats in the artesan stalls and climbing the mountains of salt that had been piled up near a salt processing plant before driving to the middle of the Salar. We had a bit of time next to a field of evenly spaced-out pyramids of salt shovelled up to allow the salt to dry, each of which was surrounded by a perfect square of shallow water reflecting clearly the bright blue sky and fluffy clouds. We stopped for lunch at the Palacio de Sal, a hotel constructed entirely from salt, in the centre of the flats. The place is amazing; we didn't go for more than two minutes without a "wow" or two escaping our lips. Standing beneath a bright blue sky on a perfectly even, frozen sea of brilliant white salt stretching as far as the eye can see is a surreal, otherwordly experience, and difficult to describe. As we walked, the salt crunched satisfyingly with each step, and tinkled magically when shards were dislodged with a little kick. Inspired by photos taken by previous visitors that we'd seen (mainly on Facebook), we took advantage of the illusory landscape and attempted several perspective photos. I hung in miniature from Jack's finger, a tiny version of Jack stood on my shoulder and whispered into my ear, he held me in his hand, and we both sat in my walking boot. At one point, an aeroplane landed not far from where we were. Eating was an odd distraction; each time I looked up from my plate I was amazed anew by the incredible landscape. One of the Argentinian girls made the inevitable joke: "Is there any salt for the chips?"
It took several hours to reach the little hamlet where we were to spend our first night, across miles and miles of seemingly endless salt, which dries in curious perfectly tesselated hexagons. The hostel was, as described, very basic: metal beds, with blankets (thank God) but no heating, and only with electricity for about two hours between 7pm and 9pm. We headed out, well-wrapped up, past the herd of llamas and/or alpacas grazing near the hostel and the smelly pink flamingoes doing their thing on the water at the edge of the flats, to see the sun set over Salar. As the light faded, the sky turned from blue to pink, purple and orange, and the sun cast its vivid colours over the mountains in the distance and across the sea of frozen salt. All was reflected in the still water at the edge of the flats. It was beautiful. After dinner (including welcome bowl of hearty soup), we put on even more clothes, grabbed our torches, and braved the cold again to see the stars. Clambering over the stepping stones was a little trickier in the pitch blackness, but it was worth it. The night sky was not dark at all but twinkling with millions upon millions of stars, and it didn't take long to spot a few shooting stars. The Milky Way was unmissable; a broad cloudy smear across the sky. We lay on the salt for a while, gazing up, before the cold became unbearable and we got numb bums and had to go back inside.
Jack woke me up in the morning as my phone alarm hadn't gone off to wake me up in time for sunrise, but we made it outside before the sun had arrived from beyond the horizon. Although not quite as beautiful as the sunset, it was impressive. That morning we set off to explore Volcano Tunupa at whose based we had camped. We wandered into a cave in the mountainside where several shrivelled but well-preserved mummies sat curled up, before hiking up to a viewpoint with great vistas over the flats. This, apparently, was "climbing the volcano". We managed to hike a bit further before we had to return, but the terrain was less than ideal, involving trampling over very spiky and very painful hardy little shrubs. Waiting by the jeep, we thought we'd have to interrupt our philosophical discussions about animal rights, religion and such like to send a search party out for one of the Americans, who had gone off to hike up the volcano on his own, but he eventually turned up fine. We drove off across the salt flats again, this time to the Isla Pescado (Fish Island), a name I never quite understood as there were no fish to be seen. Rather, it was a rocky mound in the middle of the even white salt flats covered in giant San Pedro cacti. Entrepreneurial Bolivians had set up a shop, toilets and a restaurant, and planted a giant Bolivian flag on the top. We hiked round the mound and took a few more perspective photographs before our time was up and we had to board a different jeep and meet our new crew and travel buddies. The guide and cooks were much the same - slightly grumpy and not very talkative. We were now sharing a jeep with two middle-aged Austrian women, one a teacher and the other an executive, a friendly short-haird Hong Kong girl and a very quiet South Korean guy, both in their early 20s. We drove off again towards the little village of San Juan, amusing ourselves with a game of i-spy and taking photos through the windows of the Bolivian army who seemed to be doing training exercises in the middle of this barren nowhere.
San Juan is a cold, windy, brown-grey village which claims to have 1,000 inhabitants but surely can't be home to more than 200. Somehow it feels remeniscent of the wild west; I expected a Bolivian cowboy to swagger out of one of the houses into the street and say, "Oi, gringo, this town ain't big enough for the both of us". It really wasn't. We paid a visit to the tiny museum there, and in the eerie twilight explored the strange tombs of fossilized coral in which ancient mummies had been preserved, huddled up as if sheltering from the cold. Despite there being no more than about 4 streets in the place, we managed to get very lost on the way back to the 'hostel'. We were entertained during dinner (soup again, but this time a bottle of wine to share) by a group of local boys of perhaps 10 years old playing various musical instruments and singing poorly rehearsed songs. Bored, Jack and I headed out to find the bar featured in a well-read leaflet that had been thrusted into our hands on the way to the museum, advertised as the most happening place in the vollage. It took a fair bit of finding, and we were the only visitors that night. It was worth it for a few glasses of the vino caliente (hot spiced wine) and to hear the proprietor warble to Bolivian tunes on his Andean flute. It was cold that night.
The next day we drove through desert landscapes, fascinating rock formations and stopping at beautiful but austere lakes, snapping flamingos and vicuñas. One stop was at the famous Arbol de Piedra, or 'tree of rock', surely one of the most photographed rocks in South America. Dutifully, we got photos of that too. We stayed that night at the shores of Laguna Colorada, or 'coloured lake', so called because the algae in the water often makes it appear bright red. We watched another beautiful sunset, but the night was even colder than the previous nights, so even with twenty layers on we couldn't stay outside watching for shooting stars for more than 10 minutes. With six people in the dorm, the night was just about bearable. We had an early morning start the next morning, leaving the hostel at 5.30am, in order to reach the geysers just as the sun was rising. Despite the rotten-egg stench, standing in the sulphur-infused steam from the ferocious pools of boiling mud and water was actually quite pleasant given the freezing conditions. Not for the first time, I was reminded of Iceland, except for the absence of any safety cordons to prevent sleepy visitors wandering straight into these hellish holes in the earth. On we drove up to another lake, at the shores of which was a naturally heated bathing pool. Silly me had forgotten to pack my swimming costume, but Jack was brave enough to strip down to his trunks in the sub-zero temperatures and take his cup of tea down for a dip. He seemed to enjoy it enough for the both of us.
We stopped at several more lakes en route to the 'bus stop' for the bus to Chile, where we lost the two Austrians and the Hong Kong girl, but gained a lovely Swedish girl with green hair called Boel. She'd been studying in Val Paraiso, in Chile, and now had two weeks to travel round before returning home. She spent the day asking us questions about where we'd been in Bolivia, and wrote down all our recommendations. I think we've inadvertently planned her entire two weeks for her, even down to which hostels to stay in. We had lunch in another tiny adobe town whose most interesting feature was the tail end of an aeroplane perched up in the rocks that overshadowed the village. We arrived back into Uyuni in the early evening, but because of problems with my phone we ended up having to stay another night. I'd left my phone in the hostel at Laguna Colorada, and it had been sent back to Uyuni with another tour guide. He apparently had four or five wives and mistresses, and although we knew he was back in Uyuni we didn't know which woman he was with. We evenutally arranged to have my phone sent to me on a bus the next day, but by the time we got to the bus station there were no spaces left in the bus back that night, unless we wanted to sit in the aisles (which we really didn't). On the plus side, it meant I could collect my phone in person the next morning, the promiscous man having returned home. So we had to head back to Cochabamba on Monday, and finally arrived back early on Tuesday morning. We opted for bus cama ('bed' bus) thinking it would be more comfortable, but far from it. Although the seats reclined a long way back, the base of the seats themselves were positively sloping, so it was a constant fight to stop sliding off them. I thought Lord of the Rings would make insomnia slightly more tolerable, but it cut out half way through. To top it off, there were two babies sat in the seats in front and to the side, who wailed frequently and whose mothers insisted on changing them during the journey to let us all smell what the inside of a Bolivian nappy smells like. Ah, Bolivia.
It was a long awaited trip. I'd had it penned in my diary since my first day with TAPA, when I managed to persuade Ximena to let me plan some time off to visit the salt flats on the condition that I write an article about it, and that we keep it a secret from the rest of the volunteers and director Daniela. Not much of a penalty really. We'd had a look on the calendar and decided that if I made use of the public holiday of Corpus Christi, on 7 June, I would only need to take one day off to do a full four-day tour.
Although I'd have been happy to go alone (I was kind of hoping to group up with some Israeli men...), I'd been half-heartedly suggesting to selected others that they take time off and join me. I didn't really think anyone would be able to, so I was very glad when Jack told me on the Monday that he'd managed to rearrange his Friday classes for Wednesday, which was "The Day of the Teacher", or in other words a day off for teachers. Having done very little research (I'd learnt my lesson from planning for La Paz last weekend), we left on Wednesday afternoon by bus to Uyuni via Oruro. The first bus was fine, if a little hotter and smellier than usual, but the second leg was an overnighter in a very shitty bus along one of the bumpiest roads I've ever experienced. We had to spend a good 10 minutes when we arrived searching for our things at the other end of the bus among the snoozing campesinos and their big bundles of God knows what. We'd been warned it got cold, so we'd taken our sleeping bags on board, and sure enough, by the early hours of the morning ice was forming on the insides of the windows. After a sleepless night, we arrived into the frigid, sleepy town of Uyuni at sunrise.
At 6.30, nothing was open in this tiny little place. We considered following the advice of the Lonely Planet and camping out in the office of the bus company for a while and taking advantage of their gas heater, but it was full of locals doing the same, so we decided to take a wander into "town". Before long, tour agencies were beginning to open their doors and agents were wandering the streets looking to prey on unprepared travellers. This suited us well. Under the premise of shopping around a bit, we accepted several invitations to come inside agency offices and take a seat in front of their gas heaters whilst they gave us their spiel. There's not a great deal of variation between the agencies, and we were to discover that most of them grouped their tourists together to fill the jeeps, but we knew we wanted to leave that Thursday morning on a 3 or 4-day tour that perhaps incorporated a bit of exercise and ideally in reverse so we got the long day of travelling out of the way first and had more time on the salt flats at the end. After seeing what numerous agencies had to offer, we we torn between a 3-day tour in reverse and a normal 4-day tour that included climbing a volcano. Over breakfast, in a deserted hostel canteen, we decided on the latter. We took a quick shower in another of the hostels (we weren't confident of having another chance for the next four days), had a quick wander round the market, and bought water and snacks, and then we were off. As we should have expected, the two Argentinian girls and two American guys with whom we shared a jeep, had booked through different agencies, but it didn't really matter.
First stop was the train graveyard, a strange place near the edge of the salt flats where a dozen or so old trains lay rusting. Jack quite liked it; Dad you'd have been very excited by it. I suppose the old wrecks did make for interesting photos. It didn't take long in the jeep before we were on the salt flats themselves. It was almost too soon to appreciate. We spent half an hour trying on daft hats in the artesan stalls and climbing the mountains of salt that had been piled up near a salt processing plant before driving to the middle of the Salar. We had a bit of time next to a field of evenly spaced-out pyramids of salt shovelled up to allow the salt to dry, each of which was surrounded by a perfect square of shallow water reflecting clearly the bright blue sky and fluffy clouds. We stopped for lunch at the Palacio de Sal, a hotel constructed entirely from salt, in the centre of the flats. The place is amazing; we didn't go for more than two minutes without a "wow" or two escaping our lips. Standing beneath a bright blue sky on a perfectly even, frozen sea of brilliant white salt stretching as far as the eye can see is a surreal, otherwordly experience, and difficult to describe. As we walked, the salt crunched satisfyingly with each step, and tinkled magically when shards were dislodged with a little kick. Inspired by photos taken by previous visitors that we'd seen (mainly on Facebook), we took advantage of the illusory landscape and attempted several perspective photos. I hung in miniature from Jack's finger, a tiny version of Jack stood on my shoulder and whispered into my ear, he held me in his hand, and we both sat in my walking boot. At one point, an aeroplane landed not far from where we were. Eating was an odd distraction; each time I looked up from my plate I was amazed anew by the incredible landscape. One of the Argentinian girls made the inevitable joke: "Is there any salt for the chips?"
It took several hours to reach the little hamlet where we were to spend our first night, across miles and miles of seemingly endless salt, which dries in curious perfectly tesselated hexagons. The hostel was, as described, very basic: metal beds, with blankets (thank God) but no heating, and only with electricity for about two hours between 7pm and 9pm. We headed out, well-wrapped up, past the herd of llamas and/or alpacas grazing near the hostel and the smelly pink flamingoes doing their thing on the water at the edge of the flats, to see the sun set over Salar. As the light faded, the sky turned from blue to pink, purple and orange, and the sun cast its vivid colours over the mountains in the distance and across the sea of frozen salt. All was reflected in the still water at the edge of the flats. It was beautiful. After dinner (including welcome bowl of hearty soup), we put on even more clothes, grabbed our torches, and braved the cold again to see the stars. Clambering over the stepping stones was a little trickier in the pitch blackness, but it was worth it. The night sky was not dark at all but twinkling with millions upon millions of stars, and it didn't take long to spot a few shooting stars. The Milky Way was unmissable; a broad cloudy smear across the sky. We lay on the salt for a while, gazing up, before the cold became unbearable and we got numb bums and had to go back inside.
Jack woke me up in the morning as my phone alarm hadn't gone off to wake me up in time for sunrise, but we made it outside before the sun had arrived from beyond the horizon. Although not quite as beautiful as the sunset, it was impressive. That morning we set off to explore Volcano Tunupa at whose based we had camped. We wandered into a cave in the mountainside where several shrivelled but well-preserved mummies sat curled up, before hiking up to a viewpoint with great vistas over the flats. This, apparently, was "climbing the volcano". We managed to hike a bit further before we had to return, but the terrain was less than ideal, involving trampling over very spiky and very painful hardy little shrubs. Waiting by the jeep, we thought we'd have to interrupt our philosophical discussions about animal rights, religion and such like to send a search party out for one of the Americans, who had gone off to hike up the volcano on his own, but he eventually turned up fine. We drove off across the salt flats again, this time to the Isla Pescado (Fish Island), a name I never quite understood as there were no fish to be seen. Rather, it was a rocky mound in the middle of the even white salt flats covered in giant San Pedro cacti. Entrepreneurial Bolivians had set up a shop, toilets and a restaurant, and planted a giant Bolivian flag on the top. We hiked round the mound and took a few more perspective photographs before our time was up and we had to board a different jeep and meet our new crew and travel buddies. The guide and cooks were much the same - slightly grumpy and not very talkative. We were now sharing a jeep with two middle-aged Austrian women, one a teacher and the other an executive, a friendly short-haird Hong Kong girl and a very quiet South Korean guy, both in their early 20s. We drove off again towards the little village of San Juan, amusing ourselves with a game of i-spy and taking photos through the windows of the Bolivian army who seemed to be doing training exercises in the middle of this barren nowhere.
San Juan is a cold, windy, brown-grey village which claims to have 1,000 inhabitants but surely can't be home to more than 200. Somehow it feels remeniscent of the wild west; I expected a Bolivian cowboy to swagger out of one of the houses into the street and say, "Oi, gringo, this town ain't big enough for the both of us". It really wasn't. We paid a visit to the tiny museum there, and in the eerie twilight explored the strange tombs of fossilized coral in which ancient mummies had been preserved, huddled up as if sheltering from the cold. Despite there being no more than about 4 streets in the place, we managed to get very lost on the way back to the 'hostel'. We were entertained during dinner (soup again, but this time a bottle of wine to share) by a group of local boys of perhaps 10 years old playing various musical instruments and singing poorly rehearsed songs. Bored, Jack and I headed out to find the bar featured in a well-read leaflet that had been thrusted into our hands on the way to the museum, advertised as the most happening place in the vollage. It took a fair bit of finding, and we were the only visitors that night. It was worth it for a few glasses of the vino caliente (hot spiced wine) and to hear the proprietor warble to Bolivian tunes on his Andean flute. It was cold that night.
The next day we drove through desert landscapes, fascinating rock formations and stopping at beautiful but austere lakes, snapping flamingos and vicuñas. One stop was at the famous Arbol de Piedra, or 'tree of rock', surely one of the most photographed rocks in South America. Dutifully, we got photos of that too. We stayed that night at the shores of Laguna Colorada, or 'coloured lake', so called because the algae in the water often makes it appear bright red. We watched another beautiful sunset, but the night was even colder than the previous nights, so even with twenty layers on we couldn't stay outside watching for shooting stars for more than 10 minutes. With six people in the dorm, the night was just about bearable. We had an early morning start the next morning, leaving the hostel at 5.30am, in order to reach the geysers just as the sun was rising. Despite the rotten-egg stench, standing in the sulphur-infused steam from the ferocious pools of boiling mud and water was actually quite pleasant given the freezing conditions. Not for the first time, I was reminded of Iceland, except for the absence of any safety cordons to prevent sleepy visitors wandering straight into these hellish holes in the earth. On we drove up to another lake, at the shores of which was a naturally heated bathing pool. Silly me had forgotten to pack my swimming costume, but Jack was brave enough to strip down to his trunks in the sub-zero temperatures and take his cup of tea down for a dip. He seemed to enjoy it enough for the both of us.
We stopped at several more lakes en route to the 'bus stop' for the bus to Chile, where we lost the two Austrians and the Hong Kong girl, but gained a lovely Swedish girl with green hair called Boel. She'd been studying in Val Paraiso, in Chile, and now had two weeks to travel round before returning home. She spent the day asking us questions about where we'd been in Bolivia, and wrote down all our recommendations. I think we've inadvertently planned her entire two weeks for her, even down to which hostels to stay in. We had lunch in another tiny adobe town whose most interesting feature was the tail end of an aeroplane perched up in the rocks that overshadowed the village. We arrived back into Uyuni in the early evening, but because of problems with my phone we ended up having to stay another night. I'd left my phone in the hostel at Laguna Colorada, and it had been sent back to Uyuni with another tour guide. He apparently had four or five wives and mistresses, and although we knew he was back in Uyuni we didn't know which woman he was with. We evenutally arranged to have my phone sent to me on a bus the next day, but by the time we got to the bus station there were no spaces left in the bus back that night, unless we wanted to sit in the aisles (which we really didn't). On the plus side, it meant I could collect my phone in person the next morning, the promiscous man having returned home. So we had to head back to Cochabamba on Monday, and finally arrived back early on Tuesday morning. We opted for bus cama ('bed' bus) thinking it would be more comfortable, but far from it. Although the seats reclined a long way back, the base of the seats themselves were positively sloping, so it was a constant fight to stop sliding off them. I thought Lord of the Rings would make insomnia slightly more tolerable, but it cut out half way through. To top it off, there were two babies sat in the seats in front and to the side, who wailed frequently and whose mothers insisted on changing them during the journey to let us all smell what the inside of a Bolivian nappy smells like. Ah, Bolivia.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Nicky, Bolivian Festivals and surviving The Most Dangerous Road in the World
Last Sunday was El Día de la Madre, or Mothers Day, over here. I was in Potosí cycling to some hot springs, but dutifully I'd left a card and a box of Bolivia's finest chocolates (so the streetseller told me) for both Cristina (my host mum) and Vicky (my maid). To celebrate the occasion, TAPA organized a meal for all the host mums and their children on Monday night. It was very pleasant, I managed to hold a conversation about various things, though mainly politics (it always seems to revert to politics over here) in Spanish. Went out for a drink after with some of the volunteers, so was very tired for work the next day.
Nicky (fellow volunteer in Trujillo) came to Cochabamba on Thursday! It was really lovely to see her and catch up. She arrived late so we went straight out for a pizza and a beer (like the old times) and then met some of the gang in town. It was a huge crowd in Casablancas, including the Americans I've met a few times before who are volunteering building stone ovens for rural citizens, and two Dutch guys who have been sent over by their university to re-programme a robot arm that was sent to San Simon University of Cochabamba in 1987 and unused. Apparently they're on the lookout for uses to which to put their robot arm, so we had a giggle coming up with some ideas. One drink led to another, and since Nicky and I hadn't seen each other for aaages, we just had to go out. After trying out a club that seemed more like a big house than a public venue, except for the fireman's pole, we ended up in Pimientas. After an hour in Briazilian Coffee for some chocolate cake to finish off the night, it was about 5.30am when I got to bed, very drunk. Needless to say I didn't make it into work the next morning. Instead, I met up with Nicky for a very nice lunch before we went our own ways at the weekend. Whilst waiting for her sat on one of Cochabamba's plaza benches, a tall grey bearded gringo sat down next to me and started chatting to me. You do get some characters amongst global travellers, but he was pretty special. When I managed to redirect the conversation away from me and onto what he was doing in Cochabamba, he told me that he was persuing two lines of entrepreneurial business, one of which he saw as his calling, the other provided the funds to follow it. It turned out he was primarily an evangelist, preaching to any schools and universities that would let him about "human moral values" and spreading the word by distributing his book across the continent. He funded this mission of his through his second occupation as a "professional gambler". If he recognised the irony he failed to show it.
Nicky (fellow volunteer in Trujillo) came to Cochabamba on Thursday! It was really lovely to see her and catch up. She arrived late so we went straight out for a pizza and a beer (like the old times) and then met some of the gang in town. It was a huge crowd in Casablancas, including the Americans I've met a few times before who are volunteering building stone ovens for rural citizens, and two Dutch guys who have been sent over by their university to re-programme a robot arm that was sent to San Simon University of Cochabamba in 1987 and unused. Apparently they're on the lookout for uses to which to put their robot arm, so we had a giggle coming up with some ideas. One drink led to another, and since Nicky and I hadn't seen each other for aaages, we just had to go out. After trying out a club that seemed more like a big house than a public venue, except for the fireman's pole, we ended up in Pimientas. After an hour in Briazilian Coffee for some chocolate cake to finish off the night, it was about 5.30am when I got to bed, very drunk. Needless to say I didn't make it into work the next morning. Instead, I met up with Nicky for a very nice lunch before we went our own ways at the weekend. Whilst waiting for her sat on one of Cochabamba's plaza benches, a tall grey bearded gringo sat down next to me and started chatting to me. You do get some characters amongst global travellers, but he was pretty special. When I managed to redirect the conversation away from me and onto what he was doing in Cochabamba, he told me that he was persuing two lines of entrepreneurial business, one of which he saw as his calling, the other provided the funds to follow it. It turned out he was primarily an evangelist, preaching to any schools and universities that would let him about "human moral values" and spreading the word by distributing his book across the continent. He funded this mission of his through his second occupation as a "professional gambler". If he recognised the irony he failed to show it.
Unusually, I'd actually made plans for the weekend. I managed to persuade Dutch Charlotte and hilarious Irish Gail to join Jack and I on a visit to La Paz to mountain bike down "The Most Dangerous Road in the World" (according to US statistics), visit Tiahuanaco, Bolivia's best pre-colonial ruins, and see the festival of the Gran Poder. Whilst recovering from Thursday night I booked us a room in a hostel, places on the bike tour, and four bus tickets. I wish I hadn't; it was more trouble than it was worth. Apparently the bus tickets (at under $6 each) were too expensive for Charlotte, as was the cost of the bike tour, despite us agreeing that we'd rather pay a bit more to go with a company with a better reputation. She made no comment about the hostel, thankfully.
Typically, the bus was an hour or so late getting into La Paz on Saturday morning, and the roads were closed for preparations for the festival later, so I had to call the tour company and promise that we'd come as soon as we could. We got our equipment (motorcycle-style helmets, shiny overtrousers and flourescent visibility jackets, and gloves) and were loaded into a minibus to head up to the starting point. We were all very nervous. Apparently only a month or so ago a couple of Israelis had met their ends when they missed one of the many sharp corners biking down "The Death Road", as the road from La Cumbre (4640m) down some 3345m to Coroico (1,315m) is also known. The safety briefing wasn't reassuring. Fortunately, the first section of the road was asfalted, so I was able to get over my fears and enjoy the ride a bit more after a few minutes. The only problem was the weather, which was less than brilliant. It was misty, rainy and dusty - so either our sunglasses got speckled and fogged up, or it was a struggle to keep our eyes open to see the road. There were a few uphill bits too, which provided welcome relief from breaking and the opportunity to overtake the group of local guys from Cochabamba who'd been zooming down the roads at breakneck pace. The second half of the descent was unasfalted, and, especially given the weather, a lot more scary. If the weather had been with us we'd have had some awesome views. From the bleak, freezing, dramatic heights of the altiplano to the lush steamy vegetation of the cloud forest at Coroico, the scenery is spectacular. We could only take their word for it. Instead, we could just about make out the edges of the road, and before long were drenched in mud and rain. But we all loved it, all 5 or 6 hours of adrenaline and exhilaration. Even Charlotte had fun, I think.
Making it back to our hostel was a challenge and a half. By the time we got back to La Paz the festival was in full swing. I'm not sure exactly what it celebrates, but it's something to do with the coming of Jesus I believe, despite what my host father says about it being a pagan fiesta. There were drunk campesinos staggering around everywhere, it was very amusing. Not so amusing was having to wait in a queue for about half an hour to cross the street because of the processions. We finally made it to the festival, which originally had been Jack's reason for coming to La Paz this weekend, at about 11pm, after much-anticipated showers and a pizza. It was a strange feeling to eat with a group of friends in the same restaurant in which about a month earlier I had eaten alone, with my book, unsure of what was to come. Good pizza though. The festival was very impressive. It was really cold, but we resisted it for a good few hours to watch the colourfully clad participants dance past, sometimes wearing little more than underwear. Some of the costumes were amazingly elaborate. Some were dressed as the devil, with masks and headresses, others were dressed formally in suits playing instruments in bands; some were well-composed and impressive, others were downright wasted. That said, some of the costumes were so heavy that even the sober dancers were struggling to stay upright. The costumes of some of the dancers are so valuable that they are protected by bodyguards against robbery. One lady on the news admitted that the jewels she was wearing were worth some 6 million Bolivianos. We didn't just watch either - various dancers dragged us off, in our ski-jackets and woolly hats, to dance in the parade.
The next morning we said goodbye to Charlotte before catching a micro to Tiahuanaco. Despite leaving our hostel at about 8am, we only got to Tiahuanaco at about 2 in the afternoon, after much dawdling in the busy market streets of La Paz. They might be Bolivia's best pre-colonial ruins, but the Lonely Planet was right to say that if you've been to Peru you'll be a little disappointed. We didn't even manage to have fun finding a guide. We were planning to audition the numerous candidates that the Lonely Planet promised would be queuing up to take us round - "Gu-idol", you could have called it - but we struggled to find even one. Nevertheless, it was a fun afternoon, if a little long. We had an entertaining return journey watching Gail tease a very cute and very happy little Bolivian kid, who was fascinated with her i-pod headphones. It was quite an effort to stop her trying to eat them instead of listen to the music coming out of them, but when she finally figured it out she was entranced. We were shown two sides to the Bolivian attitude to tourist on the way back. The choffer of the bus tried to overcharge us, probably thinking he could take advantage of our ignorance, but the father of the little girl we'd befriended insisted that he give us the change we were due, and various other Bolivian passengers asked us if we'd been charged the right price too. I can't imagine that happening on the train in England.
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