Miss Maps Goes Solo

This is just one of those random posts, there´s another new one below too.

In Bolivia, in fact in almost all countries I´ve visited, if you give someone a large note to pay for something they react as if you´ve just taken their first born.  They´ll spend at least 10 minutes dramatically insisting they couldn´t possibly give you the change.  Then, when they realise they´ll lose the sale, they miraculously produce the cash.

Customer service doesn´t exist.  If you´re asking the lady behind the counter what time the bus leaves and how much it is and someone else comes up, you´re likely to stop being served while she has a natter with them.  One morning in Uyuni I ordered my pancake and coffee just as 10 army guys came.  They all politely buenos dias´d me as they sat at the next table, stinking of aftershave.  The snail pace waiter acted like he had a rocket up his ass and my little order was entirely forgotten until all the soldiers had their eggs.  Admittedly the 15 rifles propped up against the wall may have had something to do with it.

Having said that, Bolivia isn´t as hard for travellers as I expected.  The people are very friendly and straight forward here.  The physical act of travelling is more tricky than say Peru, only 5% of the roads here are sealed.  Also there isn´t as much to do for backpackers because they haven´t fully realised their tourism potential yet.

Bolivia is known for drugs.  It´s a shame.  For thousands of years Bolivians (and other South Americans) have grown coca.  Coca leaves are a huge part of their society and tradition.  They drink it as tea, chew it and exchange the leaves rather than shaking hands.  Coca has absolutely no negative affect on health and to become addicted you would have to chew a shed load of it.  I wouldn´t have coped with the altitude without chewing coca leaves.  Then North America got an appetite for putting the refined stuff up their noses.  Demand grew and so did supply.  Now Bush, with his war on drugs, is pumping money into finding and eradicating the coca growers.  But of course the supply only moves from region to region because as long as North Americans want it, South Americans will grow it.  Ironically, the new Bolivian president comes from a family of coca growers!

Despite all this stuff, I feel like right now Bolivia has the most potential of all the countries I´ve seen.  I´ve thought about how I can do my little bit when I get home by donating to charity but in this continent it is an absolute minefield.  With all of these corrupt governments, getting help to the right people seems almost impossible sometimes.  But right now Bolivia is the poorest country with the most promising government it´s ever had.  It feels like a country on the verge of much better things.

I´ll get off my soapbox now.

Luckily valentines day isn´t a big deal over here, not a tacky Andrew Brownsword bear in sight.

On my birthday we went to see some dinosaur footprints.  The cynical me assumed they weren´t real!  For some reason Jurassic Park filled my mind and I´d subconciously reached the decision that dinosaurs are fictional.  No Sharleen, that´s dragons.

The prints were found on a vertical wall by the workers who were blasting the area for cement.  That was back in the 40s, they didn´t know what they were looking at but word got around and by 1994 (no-one rushes here) the paleontologists came over from Europe to check it out.  Now the workers are still dynamiting very close to the wall.  We even felt a couple of explosions while we were there.  We wandered around the site as our guide pointed out the different tracks.  At first I said ¨they have to be fake, how did they walk up a vertical wall?¨  Our guide explained it was once flat, then the tectonic plates moved and pushed it up, whatever.  About 6 different types of dinosaurs hung out here, it was a busy little spot.  We saw tracks of mothers and babies walking together and some where the dinosaur had broken into a run.  The stone is soft and constantly falling away so new tracks show up all the time.  It was really interesting and, of course, real.

In the evening we went out for a mediocre dinner vastly improved by a bottle of wine and swapping embarrassing teenage stories.  Sometime later I found myself being sung happy birthday to by the entire bar whilst wearing a silver hard hat with a lit candle on it and drinking a flaming shot through a straw!  Random.  It was a great night, I even managed to dance a bit of salsa with a local and fall into a wall on the way home.  The rest of my time in Sucre is a blur of shopping and watching cable TV.  Rolf Harris is much better dubbed into Spanish.  There was also an interesting incident when we tried to use the gas oven in the hostel and I lost the hairs on my right arm.

Now I´ve had to say goodbye to the girls.  That was really sad, travelling with someone for 2 months is a pretty intense way of forming a friendship.  I don´t know how I would´ve managed the food poisoning and fear of the dark in the depths of Peru without them.  They made Christmas and New Year really special too.

After saying our goodbyes I headed to Santa Cruz, about a half hour flight away.  I was only supposed to be here for one night and I´d booked a 4 star hotel to treat myself.  It turned out to be 3 nights because of problems with the airline, life´s hard.  It was lovely: swimming pool, air con, things I could steal from the bathroom.  Only problem with staying in such places is you don´t meet anyone.  None of the other guests want to interact, they´re older and on business so it can be a bit lonely.  The flight to Sao Paolo in Brazil was pretty frought, lots of turbulence and what felt like 3 attemps to descend for landing.  I didn´t have an onward ticket to Rio but was desperate to get up there quickly and managed to get on a flight within 2 hours.  Another interesting one which involved fork lightning and even more turbulence.  I felt like I was in that film Airplane, I thought any minute now we´ll all have to line up to slap the most hysterical passenger.

I finally hit the hostel at about 10, having met some great people to share a cab with.  It felt so daunting to arrive in a new country, again.  On my own, again.  With the bloody language barrier, again.  Daunting but actually really refreshing.  I feel like I did in my first few weeks, all timid and lost but too scared to ask anyone because I don´t know the words!

From the little of seen of Rio so far it´s amazing and totally different to anywhere else I´ve been.  Next Brazil update should be mid or post carnival, depending on how nocturnal I become!

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