January 02, 2004

New Friend For New Year's

DAY 72: Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, is nestled in the valley of three volcanoes. The lava of these volcanoes have hardened over geological history to form the white-colored rock known as sillar, which many of the buildings were made of -- hence, Arequipa's nickname, "The White City."

According to my Lonely Planet Shoestring guide, "Arequipa has long been overshadowed by the more illustrious and popular Cusco, but the city is fighting back. Arequipa is a proud hip town with a good variety of nightlife, traveler facilities, accommodations and excursions." I had received mixed reviews about The White City. Oscar, the Spaniard from the Sacred Valley tour, lived in Arequipa for a work contract and said it was poor and "nothing like Cusco." However, Debbie from the South American Explorers' Cusco office said she liked it better than Cusco because "it's a real city -- not a city just for tourists." I also remembered a host of PBS' The Travelers show say that he enjoyed Arequipa better than Cusco.

The only thing for me to do was to go there and find out myself -- and by myself, because all the traveling companions I had met so far had already gone their own ways.


MY OVERNIGHT BUS ARRIVED by dawn and I got a taxi to the hostel I reserved over the phone in Cusco. I took a nap after the uncomfortable journey but was up and out by 10 a.m. The Plaza das Armas, the centerpoint of the city -- and every Peruvian city for that matter -- was waking up to a new day, with its fountain, nearby cathedral and surrounding double-tier arch-filled buildings.

In my wanderings of the city's points of interest, I noticed that hidden in the seemingly modern streets were little antique courtyards that hosted galleries and boutiques. One step into one of these white sillar plazas and it felt as if I had stepped into the Mediterranean or something. Later I learned that this was due to the fact that the Spaniards that had founded Arequipa were those influenced by the Moors and their heavy use of arches. The arches were coincidentally a beneficial architectural element because Arequipa lies in an earthquake zone -- there are mild insignificant tremors every 10-15 minutes -- with big quakes in history that have rendered many of buildings destroyed and eventually reconstructed.

The most impressive display of The White City's distinct architecture was at the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, a nun convent taking up an entire city block. Inside the "city within a city," white sillar -- some painted red and blue to reduced the bright glare -- was used to create picturesque colonial buildings, arches and alleys worthy of Arequipa's listing as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. It all looked like it might have been a Hollywood movie set, although no one has been granted permission to shoot there -- except for the occasional still photographer hired to cover a wedding or fashion show in one of the courtyards.


I DECIDED TO GET A GUIDE to show me around the convent -- the areas that were available to tourists anyway -- and I was tagged onto an English speaking group with just one other tourist.

"Hey, you were in Cusco right?" the other one in my group asked me.

"Yeah," I answered. She looked vaguely familiar, and she reminded me that I had already met her and her boyfriend at Norton Rat's on Christmas Day in Cusco. She was at the table with Simion, Axel and Sue, whom I met in the Amazon -- she had traveled with them on the Inca Trail. Her name was Heidi, and she was a 19-year-old from Perth, Australia that had also traveled to Arequipa solo after all the people she met in Cusco -- including her boyfriend Nick -- had either gone home or moved onto another place.

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As our guide Patricia led us all around the convent, Heidi and I snapped photos left and right -- everywhere looked like it might have made a great postcard: shots of the streets, the lanterns, the flowers, the stairs, the fountain, the plants on the wall (picture above). Patricia explained the history of the convent, how young girls entered at the will of their family -- who provided gifts to her to keep comfortable. In the past, nuns moved up in status to the point that each one had her own servant so they could just concentrate on prayer -- or the occasional self-inflicting torture in the event of bad thoughts. Nowadays the convent isn't so medieval -- women come at their own will and servants have been replaced with microwaves -- and many of them lived not too far away from where we were standing.

"The nuns are in there," Patricia pointed out at one building.

"You mean there are actual nuns in there?" I asked. I knocked on the wall but there was no answer.


HEIDI AND I HAD LUNCH in one of the balcony restaurants overlooking the Plaza das Armas. Over lunch conversation we discovered we were both in the same boat; we had both left Cusco because everyone we had met there had moved on and were both caught in the dilemma of trying to find new people to hang out with for New Year's. We were glad to have each other's company.

We decided to book a trekking tour of nearby Colca Canyon, the main excursion out of Arequipa -- what Machu Picchu is to Cusco -- and went to a small tour agency that Heidi had inquired at before. Most tour agencies I had checked out in the morning had the same exact tour -- where you just stayed in a hostel in a touristy little town near the canyon and wouldn't trek down the canyon unless you added an extra day -- but this company, run by two women in the back of a souvenir shop, gave us the option of being at the bottom of the canyon to ring in the New Year. The two women were shocked when Heidi brought me to the office -- in their eyes she suddenly had a new American boyfriend -- which was bad news for the brother they wanted to hook her up with.


AREQUIPA'S OTHER MAIN HIGHLIGHT is the Museo Santuarios Andinos, an archaelogical museum that forbade photography -- and for good reason. Photography might have deteriorated the dozens of fragile artifacts excavated from a nearby mountain. After watching a video presentation produced by National Geographic, our guide led us passed the ceramics and textiles to "Juanita the Ice Princess," the world's best preserved mummy, discovered just in 1995. Juanita was the human sacrifice of an Incan tribe that was taken to the top of a mountain to die -- only be frozen and preserved over time like a microwave dinner. She sat in a double glass box refrigerator unit that looked like something out of a cryogenics science fiction movie -- there was freezer frost on some of her extremities -- which kept her flesh moist. I had seen mummies in museum before, but this was the first time I actually felt like the person might have been an actual person and not just some dead pile of bones in a coffin.


INSPIRED BY THE MUMMY IN A FREEZER, Heidi and I went out for ice cream, followed by beer. We split up after performing our internet obligations, leaving me to wander Arequipa at night, through pub-filled alleys, passed the Plaza das Armas and near the lit up arches. We called it an early night -- our trek would leave The White City in the wee hours of the morning.


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January 03, 2004

Decisions

DAY 73: MY LAST DAY OF 2003 started at one o'clock in the morning. My alarm woke me up twenty minutes before my 1:20 pick up from my guide who would take me and Heidi down Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world, with the lowest point at a depth of 10,433 ft. A knock on my room door at 1:15 signaled me that my guide was running five minutes early, and so I grabbed my smaller bag -- my bigger was locked in storage -- and hopped in the taxi with him. The taxi driver drove us to Heidi's hostel, where we picked her up before continuing onto the bus terminal.

Heidi and I were anticipating hopping a private tour bus with other possible tourists ringing in the New Year in the canyon, but there was none. Our guide left us in the waiting area to get us tickets for a 2 a.m. public bus to the canyon, five hours away. He was a skinny Peruvian lad named Roy who, contrary to what our travel agents told us, didn't speak any English. He led us to our seats on the bus and left us to go look for another trekking group. "[There is another group. The guide with them is your guide, but if they don't come, I will be your guide,]" he said in Spanish. Fortunately I knew enough Spanish to understand him, as did Heidi who had been travelling in South America for four out of six months thus far.

Roy got off the bus to wait for the supposed other group, and shortly thereafter the bus engine started. Heidi and I thought we might have been screwed, but Roy got back on the bus in time and sat in his seat about eight rows up the aisle from us.

"This seems a bit dodgy," Heidi said.

The bus driver drove out of town and continued on a bumpy dirt road through the darkness of the countryside.


MY LAST DAY OF 2002 started just as mostly every weekday in 2002. I woke up around 8 a.m. without an alarm clock -- my internal body clock was already accustomed to waking up at the same time everyday -- to go to work to do the same routine. I flipped around the hundreds of channels on my digital cable TV and as always, there was nothing good on. I took a shower, brushed my teeth and put some clothes on, and head out the door on a chilly morning in metro New York City.

I boarded the PATH train for my 10-minute train ride under the Hudson River into Manhattan with a depressed feeling; another year is about to end and here I am at 28-years-old doing the same thing. Despite the fact that I had accomplished my 2001-into-2002 New Year's goal of getting a travel article published in an established publication -- an article about snowboarding in the New York Post travel section -- I still felt unfulfilled. Certainly there was more to life than this.

The train brought me to my regular stop at 14th Street and 6th Avenue. It was cold enough that I could see my breath in the New York air as I walked down the block and through Union Square park, passed the sidewalk vendors selling "2003" plastic sunglasses without any lenses in them.


THE PUBLIC BUS STOPPED OFF in the first major canyon town of Chivay, the hub of the majority of tourists to the Colca Canyon, for a quick bathroom break. Heidi and I got off the bus to pay the 30 centimos each to use the facilities and reboarded the bus for the additional two hours along the bumpy road that hugged the morning cloud-covered canyon, passed tremendous agricultural terraces. By 9 a.m. we arrived in Cabanaconde, a small town mentioned but not covered in my Lonely Planet Shoestring guide, where everyone still spoke the ancient Incan language of Quechua.

Roy brought us to a small rustic restaurant where he bought us a simple breakfast before leading us through the town, passed the mud brick buildings, passed a cornfield and little children tending sheep, to the beginning of the trail that would gradually take us down the canyon. The sun warming up and was beginning to burn off the cloud layer, so Heidi and I stopped to remove a layer of clothes.

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Heidi looked up at the mountains and down the canyon (picture above), excited for the trek ahead. "Isn't it great when you realize that you made the right decision?" she said. Before the journey, she was debating on whether or not to spend New Year's in the city or the beach, but was now content that she'd spend it with a fellow traveler at the bottom of Colca Canyon. I had the same dilemma and shared her sentiment.

"[Okay, let's go to the beach, kids,"]" Roy said before leading us down the long canyon path to the oasis at the bottom.


MY JOB IN NEW YORK CITY continued the way it always did. I had survived the big dot com layoffs of 2001, only to be moved to a division in my company where I edited educational videos to be put on CD-ROM. I'd sit in front of video footage taped from classrooms, sometimes about kids who can't read well. Sometimes the scenarios were staged, and let me tell you, the only thing worse than sitting through hours of footage of kids who can't read well is sitting through hours of kids pretending they can't read well.

Alice, Mr. MacDowell, Love Penny and other co-workers-turned-Blog Readers who don't post comments (nudge nudge) were in the office with me, continuing the mundane corporate life we had become accustomed to. If you've seen the movie Office Space, you know what I'm talking about. The only exciting thing that seemed to happen in the office was when new snacks arrived in the pantry.

"Are you doing anything for New Year's?"

"No, I just want to stay in," I told them. My big New Year's Eve plan was to -- instead of getting drunk off my ass at yet another New Year's party -- try and figure out what I wanted out of life.

Out of the blue, a thought popped in my head. I suddenly recalled Craig, a Canadian from Toronto (home of Td0t) that I had met on an expedition cruise in Antarctica earlier that year, mentioning that he always traveled with a "little book" called The Alchemist by Paul Coelho, which inspired him to travel. I hadn't heard of or mentioned the book for the ten whole months since he mentioned it to me, and I thought that perhaps the sudden resurgence of it in my brain was an omen of sorts.


ROY LED THE WAY ALONG THE MAIN TRAIL down gradual inclines that hugged the canyonside to the sharp, zig-zags that cut down the canyon like a bolt of lightning. Some stretches of trail were full of loose rocks that made you lose balance and slide down, and it was taxing on the legs and knees to keep from falling down -- or worse, off the edge. The sun beat down on us from above, prompting us to stop so Roy and I could zip off the legs of our conversion pants.

"[After the bridge, it's fifteen minutes to the village,]" Roy said. "[Are you hungry? Because there is no lunch today.]"

His immediate smirk alerted us that he was just kidding.

We descended down to the Colca River and crossed over it with a rickety wooden bridge with cracks in the planks, held together with rusty steel cable. From there, the trail ascended up the other side of the canyon, making our already sore legs really earn their lunch.

"I think my bag just got heavier," Heidi said.


LUNCHTIMES FROM MY NEW YORK JOB had also fallen into a sort of routine. I'd either get sushi, Wendy's, Thai, Subway or pizza and often eat it in the park with robin or in a nearby apartment courtyard with Shea that we dubbed "The Concrete Jungle." Every Tuesday -- American DVD release day -- I'd go with Love Penny (and sometimes dunlavey or Dan) to what we called the "Unholy Trinity," a journey to three stores in the Union Square area with no religious affiliation -- Circuit City, Virgin Megastore and comic book store Forbidden Planet -- to look at new movies, gadgets and comic books.

This lunchtime, I went to another lunchtime staple, the four-story Barnes & Noble bookstore in Union Square, but with a purpose other than browse through magazines and drink coffee with Dtella. I ventured up onto the fourth floor, the fiction floor, and found the book I had heard about from the Torontonian. Although the description of the book on the back cover was a bit cheesy and the fable-like writing style a bit simple, I bought the book and head back to the office.


ROY CONTINUED TO LEAD THE WAY on the canyon trail. There were several forks in the trail that led to other villages, so his guidance was necessary. We ascended a little way up from the river to a flat section, passed cactus fields, wild aloe plants and farm houses. We eventually made it to a stopping house where Roy used the facilities to prepare Heidi and me a lunch of vegetable soup, rice, salad and some sort of pressed chicken patty thing that was pretty good. We would have eaten anything at that point.

There was a Puerto Rican couple about forty minutes behind us, and they caught up with us during the later part of our lunch hour. Jorge and Anna were on vacation from just around my neighborhood on the other side of the Hudson River from Manhattan (Union City and Hoboken, respectfully) and were doing the trail to the oasis to ring in the New Year before heading back to Lima for a wedding they had to attend. For me it was great to joke with fellow people who could mimic the New York subway automated voice recordings -- what a small world it is -- but for Heidi it was far more interesting. She confided in me how excited she was to spend New Year's with Puerto Ricans.

American pop culture is exported all over the world -- particularly in Australia -- and what's American pop culture without Puerto Ricans J.Lo and Ricky Martin? Coming from New York, encountering a Puerto Rican is about as common as encountering an Irishman in a pub, but coming from Perth, Australia, meeting a Puerto Rican is somewhat of a rare and exciting occurence.

"I can't wait to tell my sister that I spent New Year's with Puerto Ricans!" she said.


BACK IN MY OFFICE CUBICLE, I felt a little different -- I had a book in my hands that had popped into my conscience out of apparently nowhere, and the only thing I wanted to do was go home and read it. Luckily, the powers-that-be let us go home early for New Year's Eve. I took the train under the Hudson with Love Penny, wished him a Happy New Year and rushed back to my apartment. I had a quick bite to eat and then sat in my living room with the lights low, the television off.

I read the tale of The Alchemist -- with all of its simple and almost obvious metaphors to modern life -- about a shepard from Andalucia, Spain who follows his dream to visit the pyramids of Egypt. Along his journey, he encounters many people and places that make his life stronger and more fulfilling, from a crystal merchant in Tangiers to an alchemist in a desert oasis. I read the book cover to cover in a single sitting, feeling that it had been writing specifically for me and my doldrums.

What particularly struck me was a quote in the book from a mystical king, in which he tells the young shepard that he is at a point in his life where he's about to give up on his dreams and fall into routine. Reading this, my subconscious reminded me what my dream was. Instilled in my brain from travellers I had met on my little two-week corporate American vacations, I wanted to travel around the world for at least a year if not more, to see the things I had only seen on The Discovery Channel. I made the decision that I would take a grand trip -- a global trip -- and that I would plan and begin by the year's end.


TWO LOCAL WOMEN were transporting goods from village to village with two mules ahead of us. The two women were mildly startling the two donkeys with sticks to go faster, but one veered off to the wrong path and stood there like he didn't want to continue farther.

"[Let's go to the beach,]" Roy joked as he led the rest of the way through villages, passed mud brick churches, and back down the canyon passed a waterfall and over another rickety bridge. Before sundown we arrived at our final destination: one of the encampments at the oasis at the bottom of Colca Canyon, with swimming pools filled by underground mountain water streams and, more importantly, beer.

Heidi and I checked into our bungalow, got some beers and jumped into the warm waters of the pool as a condor flew high above us. "This is the perfect New Year's," I said. A donkey tied near the men's outhouse heehawed.

Joining us on New Year's Eve was a couple on their three-week holiday from the UK and Rudy, on his five-week holiday from Belgium. We ate a decent meal of carbohydrate-filled pasta over a bottle of wine as the sky above the canyon got darker and darker, forming high silohuettes that towered above us. It was dark by 7 p.m. and the guides built us a campfire for us to sit around. Everyone in our camp was dead tired, and with the wake-up time of 3 a.m. to catch the early bus, everyone just turned in. Apparently, New Year's in the world's deepest canyon wasn't a big deal, but Heidi and I were still determined to be up for the turnover. We wanted to jump into the pool at the stroke of midnight, but it had already been drained for a fresh new supply of mountain water the following day.


IT WAS ONLY ABOUT 11 P.M. when I finished The Alchemist. A feeling of rebirth had come over me -- suddenly my life had purpose and it was clear to me: in 2003 I would make preparations to go on The Global Trip in 2004. I was bursting with enthusiasm and I need to share it with someone. Luckily I had an open invitation to a small family gathering at Francis' house where my friend wheat would also ring in the New Year.

I hopped in my little old Honda Civic and drove up the New Jersey Turnpike to the house in the suburbs as the clock on the dashboard ticked closer and closer to midnight like a time bomb. I arrived at the house in Bergenfield, New Jersey where Francis, family and friends were eating and drinking around multiple televisions showing Dick Clark hosting the chaotic festivities in New York's Times Square.

So as not to jinx the promise I didn't know if I could yet keep, I simply confided in wheat that in 2003 there would be "a major change." Little did I know at the time that this "major change" would involve giving up my comfortable apartment and selling the car I had just driven in.


HEIDI AND I SAT ALONE by the fire, wondering if we would make it to midnight. We thought everyone had turned in until Roy and another guide saw us and asked if we wanted to get champagne at a nearby encampment. Roy led us up through the vegetation to the neighboring store where there was no champagne, but two more bottles of beer. Heidi and I snatched them for the last remaining two hours of 2003.

The guides went to sleep so we decided to walk over to the encampment on the other side of ours to see if Jorge and Anna, The Puerto Ricans, were still awake. They were, sitting at a table with their guide, looking quite tired and bored.

"We have a fire going if you want to join us," I suggested.

They walked with us back over to the ffire.

Heidi and I killed another hour talking with The Puerto Ricans about travels in Peru and Cuba and the pronunciation of certain words in Spanish. The flames of the fire kept on dying down so I kept on going out for more pieces of wood -- only straw or bamboo was available though.

Jorge and Anne left for their bungalow around 11:30, leaving Heidi and myself to ring in the New Year alone. The fire died out, so we went back to our bungalow to watch my travel digital clock count down the minutes to 2004. Exhausted and a little buzzed, I dozed off for a little bit, but woke up before the turn of the New Year.


ON THE TELEVISION IN THE KITCHEN, the ball dropped in New York's Times Square at the stroke of midnight. Dick Clark wished America a "Happy New Year."

USING MY FLASHLIGHT, I saw the display on my digital travel clock change from 11:59 to 12:00. We heard distant firecrackers echo through the canyon, coming from either a small village or another encampment in the oasis.

When 2003 rang in, I knew that I was determined to take the trip of a lifetime by year's end, and when 2004 rang in, I knew that the trip had already begun.

Heidi was right -- it is great when you realize you've made the right decision.


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New Year, New Adventure

DAY 74: Usually I wake up on New Year's Day hungover, with a feeling like I am at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the world. When I woke up at 4 a.m. feeling that same way, I realized, "Holy crap man, I am at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the world!"


BY THE EIGHTH HOUR OF 2004 (in our current timezone), Heidi and I had already accomplished a great task -- trekking up and out of Colca Canyon. It was a long three and a half hour trek that made me never want to ever consider buying a Stairmaster. Morning birds chirped as our early morning hike progressed, while the sun rose and burned off the morning canyon mist. We noticed cactus flowers on the edge of the trail -- I had to hold Heidi's bag as she leaned over for a photo so she wouldn't fall over. As we got closer back to the town of Cabanaconde, a local woman in traditional clothes greeting us in Quechua -- I assume she wished us a Happy New Year, but then again she could have been trying to say, "Fuck off pig, you're in my way."

On the outskirts of town, Roy said again "[There is no breakfast," but we knew he was joking. We followed him through a cornfield, like two Hobbits returning to The Shire, back through town where some Spanish-speaking villagers wished us a "Feliz Nuevo Año." We walked to the restaurant where we had breakfast the day before. Rudy the Belgian caught up with us, and we had our meal of eggs, bread and coca tea.

Meanwhile, Roy went to the bus station to get our tickets -- one for the 9 a.m. bus to Cruz del Condor, the popular condor viewing area 30 minutes on the way back; and one for a 10:30 a.m. bus from there back to Arequipa. Roy informed us, "[There is no bus,]" but this time he wasn't joking. Apparently, every tourist that had been told there would be transportation back to Arequipa on New Year's Day had been misinformed -- there weren't enough passengers to warrant the trip. Although there was empty bus parked on the street, it wouldn't depart until at least at 8 p.m., if not the next morning.

Including us, there were about a dozen tourists stranded in Cabanaconde without a way to get anywhere. Rudy checked into a hostel while three Frenchmen with a lot of camping gear simply started walking back. Jorge and Anna The Puerto Ricans finally arrived into town, only to discover the news that everyone else had received. It was worse for them because they had to attend a wedding in Lima the next day, and needed to be in Arequipa by night by any means.

"It's like something out of a movie," Anna said.

"Oh, that Ben Affleck movie with Sandra Bullock," I said.

"Yeah, but we're not trying to break up the wedding, we just want to get there."

Heidi and I asked Roy if there was a way we could get a car to at least the touristy canyon town of Chivay in hopes there would be more facilities there, or better, a bus back to Arequipa. He went off to see what he could find, while I asked The Puerto Ricans if they were willing to go four-way on a ride -- they jumped at the opportunity.


HOURS WENT BY. Heidi and I sat in the plaza with the condor in the center, on a bench where a dog took a nap underneath to avoid the intensity of the sun. Across the street from us was the only telephone in town, and it was funny to just sit there and watch the behavior of people with the solitary pay phone. At times, people had to wait for one person just having a normal chit chat -- sometimes the waiting line would just grow. Heidi got a kick out of women in traditional clothes talk on the modern telephone, or when the phone would suddenly ring and everyone would look confused as to whether or not to pick it up. Usually there was one designated woman who would answer the phone, and yell down the street to get whoever it was for.

"I could watch this all day," she said.

We sat on the bench and watched Cabanaconde life go by, from when cows passed through, to when there was no line for the telephone, to when a dog walked by, to when another group waited for the phone, to when kids playing with a tire ran by, to when a guy ran to the phone from across the plaza after the "town secretary" called him over from far away. The last scene from the bench we saw was when a clunky old muscle car rolled in. Roy had managed to comandeer what seemed to be the only automobile in town to drive us to Chivay for ninety soles total. Of course a town with only one telephone would only have one car.

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The Puerto Ricans, Roy, Heidi and I loaded the trunk with our bags, and filled the big back bench seat, with no room for another group of tourists who didn't take any initiative to get out of town. We were driven by a kind man who, probably not wanting to spend New Year's without his family, brought them along for the ride. He, his wife, son and baby daughter sat in the front with Roy, and we rode up the bumpy dirt road, passed villagers and mules, for the two hours back to Chivay. Along the way, we picked up a hitchhiker at a gas station, who sat in the trunk with the hood over him. The ride was monotonous and with our exhaustion from the morning trek, we all passed out -- including the boy (picture above). Sometimes we'd wake up embarrassingly leaned over on someone else's shoulder.


THE CAR DROPPED US OFF at Chivay's Plaza das Armas, and we trekked again across town to the bus terminal. There we snagged tickets for the last remaining seats for a 3 p.m. bus back to Arequipa and had a bite to eat. Jorge called his bus company for his bus from Arequipa to Lima and sorted everything out so he and Anna could make it to the wedding in time.

While waiting for the bus, Heidi and I sat in the lounge area next to two little kids playing jacks. One of them, a boy with dirty clothes and a runny nose, noticed I was eating M&M's and crawled up on me to get one. I gave him one, which turned out to be a mistake because he just kept on coming back for more. "[No more,]" I told him, but he'd feel the packet and confirm that there indeed was more. Finally I had to empty the packet into my pockets when he wasn't looking.


THE PUERTO RICANS, ROY, HEIDI AND I hopped back on the last bus to Arequipa on New Year's Day. During the bumpy, five hour ride through mountains and vast plains where vicuñas grazed (small animals related to llamas and camels), we slept, we listened to the traditional music on the radio, and took turns sticking our digital cameras out the window to take a picture of the sunset. By nightfall, we had arrived back in Arequipa's bus terminal, and bid The Puerto Ricans goodbye and good luck. Heidi and I split a taxi with Roy to our respective hostels.

"Gracias," I told Roy.

"Vamos a la playa," he joked one last time. We each tipped him twenty soles for his tremendous efforts and bid him farewell.


HEIDI AND I FRESHENED UP and went looking for an internet cafe around 9 p.m., but the streets were dead and practically everything was closed for New Year's. We walked and walked for about an hour desperately looking for an open internet connection -- Can you say addicts? -- until we found one that would close in twenty minutes. I checked out Blog comments and e-mails, while Heidi sent a Happy New Year's greeting to her boyfriend Nick back in Perth and, I assume, an enthusiastic message to her sister saying how she spent New Year's with illustrious Puerto Ricans.

We went out to a diner for a late dinner of hamburgers, milkshakes and hot chocolates, and then went our own ways.

"Thanks for helping me with my traveller's depression, hey?" she said.

"Thanks to you too."

Heidi continued her six-month South American journey northbound, while I continued mine southbound, but I'm sure we'll never forget "that New Year's I spent at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the world."

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My First Stolen Item

DAY 75: Being in a No Internet Zone (aka N.I.Z.) for two days or more often forces me to take an entire day to sit in front of a computer to catch up on The Blog. On my last day in Arequipa, that's what I did.

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After sorting through photos and writing for hours on my laptop in my room, I went down the stairs, passed the roof terrace (picture above) to grab some breakfast. There was a German guy sitting by himself at a table in the courtyard garden, and he invited me to sit with him. His name was Jan, an engineer on vacation for six weeks from his southern Germany job at Siemens. A well-traveled person himself, Jan suggested to me different things I could and should do once I arrive in South Africa and the Middle East. He was an enthusiastic one who also needed entire days to just chill out -- he would spend the day reading Michael Crichton's Rising Sun. I told him my travel plans, about how I was to leave for an overnight bus to Puno that night with the company San Cristobal del Sur.

"Be careful of your stuff on San Cristobal. A lot of the poorer people take that line," he warned. I thought nothing of it because I had taken San Cristobal before with no problems. Jan suggested I take a fancy "royal class" tourist bus for about three times the price. I thought perhaps all his suggestions were based on the fact that he was a traveler on a higher budget scale -- he suggested I rent a car in South Africa rather than taking the backpacker buses.

"I've had no problems with San Cristobal before," I told him. "It was the only night bus I could find to Puno, and I figure I'd just sleep the night and save the money I would have used on a hostel."

He told me the bus trip was only five hours and not all night like the man at the ticket counter who sold me my ticket the night before said.


THE REST OF THE DAY, I wandered around the Plaza das Armas' for a bit where people were setting up inflatable camels and three king mannequins near the cathedral for the upcoming Three Kings Epiphany Day on January 6. I worked on Blog duties, cursing out "Blog" when I kept on crashing or loosing a connection at the cheap internet cafe I was working in. Catching up from two days in an N.I.Z. is a lot of work (especially when you try and get creative on Day 73) and I couldn't imagine what catching up would be like if and when I take a 4-6 week overland tour through Africa.

As I was working in the internet cafe, Cyndi Lauper's "Goonies are Good Enough" came on the radio, one of many pop songs from the 80's that I had been hearing all over Arequipa. A previous night I had pizza in a restaurant that showed old 80's music videos -- which was good for me since I missed out on most of them, not having cable television until the late 90's. (Lionel Richie's video for "Hello" came on and I was surprised when, oh!, the blind woman was sculpting a head statue of Lionel Richie all that time!) During our first breakfast in the restaurant in Cabanaconde, Heidi and I were greeted to the musical stylings of Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and Meatloaf's "Anything for Love." During our second breakfast there, we heard the greatest hits of Aerosmith.

Aside from the 80's pop charts, the music in Peru varies from Latin pop -- including Paulina Rubio, Shakira and this one song that is played everywhere that I am determined to find the name of -- to American pop (Christina Aguilera, J.Lo, Ricky Martin to name a few) to traditional Andean music that sounds like a cross between salsa and traditional music from India, mixed in with plucked harp strings and cheesy Casio keyboard drum samples. Sometimes the traditional Andean music is agreeable, but sometimes it just goes on and on and on, and you get a feeling like you'd rather take a spongebath with sandpaper than be subjected to more of it.


IN THE EVENING I TOOK A TAXI to the bus terminal to hop on my overnight bus to Puno. It was half an hour late, which was to be expected already. I sat on the bus next to a kind but questionable Peruvian guy from Puno, who I chatted with for a while. I kept my guard up, only sleeping with my bag locked, strap wrapped around my leg and my hands in my pockets. Nothing ever happened through the night until I noticed that my rain jacket that I had carelessly just put in the overhead bin thinking it wasn't valuable enough to steal, was missing. I looked around but saw nothing -- I assumed someone who got off the bus at an early stop just snagged it. I blamed myself, but realized it wasn't the end of the world -- it's all just part of the drama of travel.

Jan was right; the bus was only about five hours long, which brought me in Puno's bus terminal at the odd hour of 2:30 in the morning. Luckily I met an Australian on the bus who initially kept his guard up with me until he heard my American accent. Both of us were stuck in the middle of the morning without any hostel reservations anywhere, but luckily a man in the terminal approached us with a hostel brochure that would take us in for 10 soles each in a shared room. Although the Australian planned on just sleeping in the terminal, it was cold -- we were at an altitude of over 12,500 ft. above sea level, higher than Cusco by about 1,500 ft. -- and so he came along.

A taxi took us to the hostel, not far from Puno's Plaza das Armas where we got a double bed room -- but not before the guy from the terminal tried to sell us on a tour around Lake Titicaca to leave just four hours later that morning. I turned him down, but the Australian had limited time and signed right up.

We checked into our decent hostel room with a private bath and got ready to just pass out in our respective beds.

"I'm Erik by the way," I finally introduced myself.

"Dave."

As Dave and I went to sleep, there was creaking coming from the bed on the floor above us that went really slow and then really fast. The guys up there must have been having sex -- or perhaps were just really excited to have a new rain jacket.



ATTENTION NEW USERS SINCE DECEMBER 14, 2003: All the sections of TheGlobalTrip.com should be accessible now. Make sure you check out the photo gallery, videos and that "Would You" slideshow that everyone seems to rave about.


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January 06, 2004

Bargain Hunter: Puno

DAY 76: Dave the Australian was up and out of our room by 7:15 in the morning, less than four hours since we checked in, for his day tour of Lake Titicaca. He left me a ten soles note on my bedside, and with the exchange rate, I felt like a Two Dollar and Eighty Six Cents Peruvian Whore.

I slept in for a bit and then did some writing. There was a knock on the door and it was Julio, the guy from the bus terminal that led us to the hostel in the wee hours of the morning that sold Dave his tour. He wanted to know if I was interested in a tour as well, so I signed up for a two-day tour of Lake Titicaca, which included all but one meal and a stay with a family on one of the islands.

"[It's normally fifty five, but I'll give it to you for fifty,]" he said. Before I could answer, he continued, "[Are you a student?]"

"Si."

"[Forty five then.]"

That boiled down to about $12.86 (USD), which was quite a bargain, considering it included all transfers to and from the port as well.


I HAD BEEN SUGGESTED from many travellers on my journey to avoid Puno and stay in the Bolivian Lake Titicaca town of Copacabana instead, but only Puno was the base to the famous floating islands of Lake Titicaca that I wanted to see. Lonely Planet suggested that Puno might be a bit too chaotic and claustrophobic -- possibly influencing the opinions of the other travelers -- but mentioned its lively pedestrian mall and "good choice[s] of places to stay and eat."

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After uploading Days 73-75, I went out for a stroll on the streets of Puno to see for myself. At over 12,500 feet above sea level, my breaths were short and my heart rate fast, especially when I went up to the Arco Deustua atop a hill, in hopes of a good view. Like almost every other town I had been in Peru, Puno had a Plaza das Armas with a cathedral on one of the sides, but the distinct characteristic of this one was its funky landscaping job. Many of the shrubs were trimmed in round, cartoony ways, like Edward Scissorhands meets Pokemon, and not just in the main plaza -- I found them in front of a hospital, at a rotunda at the Avenida Sol and in the busy Parq Pino (picture above) as well.

Instead of going via the many available bicycle rickshaws, I strolled around town on foot. Despite everyone's warnings, I found Puno to be quite pleasant -- I'd had worse. I walked to the harbor on the lake, passed the many stands that sold candy and sodas such as Inca Kola, the Peruvian bubble gum-tasting soft drink that was the only soda in any country that had outsold Coca-Cola. (Coca-Cola eventually bought out Inca Kola, but kept its brand.)

One of the main reasons travellers told me to go to Copacabana instead of Puno was that Copacabana is more catered to backpackers. While those conveniences are nice, I sometimes just like being in a "real" city where life just goes on -- even though Puno's proximity to Lake Titicaca made it somewhat touristy. I decided to avoid the touristic things of Puno and made like a local -- I went shopping for bargains through the local Saturday markets that pretty much took up every major street in town except for the touristic pedestrian mall. I wasn't looking for souvenirs -- I have no room in my bag -- just supplies that I needed from either being lost or stolen. With the exchange rate, the local market was quite a bargain:

Three new padlocks in various sizes: $1.28 (USD) (total)
Secondhand raincoat, stronger than the one I lost: $2.50
Bootleg VCD movies of current films: $0.71 each
Plastic feedbag of fried chicken, noodles and rice: $0.28
Fresh mangoes to wash out greasy taste of feedbag: $0.43 per kilo
Watching a performance of little kids performing Andean tunes: Priceless. (I didn't have any small coins to tip them with.)

I spent all afternoon at the markets looking for the bargains -- it took me forever to find a good raincoat, and I almost gave up on it -- and head back to my hostel on the outskirts of Touristville. Inside an internet cafe to do some more work, I missed out on a parade out on the streets -- as well as a storm that had come in. It was good that I bought that raincoat after all.

After being amidst the locals all day, I decided to veg in my room as an American again -- by watching American Pie: La Boda (American Wedding) on my iBook (never saw it before) with a big bag of Doritos and a Coke. The movie crapped out five minutes before the ending, but at 71 cents, I suppose I got what I paid for.


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School Days On The Titty Side

DAY 77: Lake Titicaca, the lake that Simpsons' creator Matt Groening once called a place whose name is guaranteed to make kids snicker, lies on the border of Peru and Bolivia at an elevation of over 12,500 ft above sea level -- one of the world's highest lakes. Rachel, a 22-year-old Chicago native working in northern Peru -- and my new roommate for the day -- told me that Peruvians say that the Peruvian side is the "Titty" side, while the Bolivia is the "Caca" side. Now if that doesn't make the kids in your life snicker, I suggest you start making fart noises with your armpit.

I had met Rachel at 8:30 in the morning when she and two Norwegian girls, Loella and Meyliss, came with a transport van to pick me up from my hostel. We were just four of twenty-three tourists on a two-day tour of Lake Titicaca. Other travelers from Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Colombia, Germany, Australia and Peru all met at the port and stocked up on junk food from any of the many available junk food stands before embarking on a boat with our guide Roberto. Roberto was a nice man who spoke in both Spanish and English, and broke the ice for everyone with introductions.

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THE UROS PEOPLE OF THE TITICACA REGION yearned to isolate themselves from the Incan conquest so many centuries ago. They did this by building floating islands made out of the local totora reeds (picture above), an important item of vegetation used for everything from construction supplies for houses and boats to food. The Uros people still live on floating islands today, and have extended the use of totora reeds to make handicrafts and miniature toy boats for the hordes of tourists who come to visit them daily.

Our first stop on our boat trip was one of these floating islands of totora reeds, appropriately named Isla Totora. Walking atop the three-meter thick slab of reeds -- anchored to the lake floor with wooden stakes -- felt like walking on a really big sponge. There was no need to worry about falling through -- Roberto told us in a lengthy lecture that the Uros people put a fresh layer of reeds on top every 2-3 weeks. If there was one thing we were learning about Roberto, it was that he really liked to lecture for what seemed to be excruciatingly long periods of time -- I mean, even a nearby local woman looked bored to death.

All of us hopped on a balsa de totora, one of the boats made by the Uros, characterized by their animal head shapes at the bow. We journed twenty minutes to a bigger, more affluent floating island, with solar power and telephone -- even its own post office. In addition to those luxuries, there was also an observation deck in which visitors could see the view of most of the other floating islands.


OUR CAPTAIN, WITH THE "HELP" OF A LITTLE DANISH FOUR-YEAR-OLD named Daniel on tour with his family, navigated the boat passed the reeds and out to the open water, which stretched all the way to the horizon. "It's almost too big to be a lake," I commented to Ivan, the head of the Danish family.

We cruised the lake, under the unhealthy weather combination of being simultaneously too hot from the sun and too cold from the wind. Three hours later, we arrived at Isla Amantani, a much larger and much more natural island than the manufactured reed ones. Isla Amantani was to be our home for the night, where we'd get in groups of two or three and live with a local family. One docked at the port, it was like trying to be picked for kickball as Roberto matched tourists to a family.

Both Rachel and I had been shortchanged information; she had been told to bring groceries for hosts, while I had been told to bring raingear and flashlights. "You want to pair up? I have an extra flashlight and you have gifts," I suggested. Roberto assigned us to the Calsin family, a single mother named Basilia and her son Jose -- the father had run off with another woman four years prior. Their very humble house up the trail from the port was where we had lunch in the small and very poor-looking mud wall kitchen, if measured by Western standards. Although appreciative of its authenticity, Rachel felt weird, like she didn't belong there.

Despite the lack of a microwave and a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, everything needed to make a proper lunch was available. There is no meat production on the island -- people get by on vegetables, potatoes, grains and eggs -- but Basilia made due with what she had and made us a delicious vegetable and barley soup, followed by plates of french fries, onions and rice and the medicinal muña tea, used to help alleviate altitude sickness.

I was still feeling some effects of altitude sickness so I tried to take a nap before our 4 p.m. meeting time with the group. This was hard to do because Jose, who was on his three-month vacation from school, was bored out of his mind and kept coming to visit our room to look at the postcards I bought from the floating islands. Basilia also came back and forth to try and sell us woven alpaca hats -- I bought one to keep my head warm for the upcoming mountain trek, while Rachel figured she could get a better deal than her 20 soles price.


JOSE, ALONG WITH A REPRESENTATIVE from each family led all 23 tourists to the community area, up a hill that only made the effects of my altitude sickness even worse. Luckily, Roberto passed out sticks of muña (sp), a mint plant whose odor helps alleviate the headaches and nausea from the thinner air. Roberto instructed us to rub it all over the back of our left wrist and take a whiff of it when needed. Needless to say, on our trek higher up the mountain, I had rubbed the muña on the back of my right wrist as well for easier access, and eventually -- cutting out the middle man -- right under my nose.

"It's a placebo, man," Rachel told me at a resting area overlooking the lake.

"Don't spoil my fun."

A storm was coming in from the distance -- January is in the middle of the rainy season -- and being so high up, we were assaulted by a downpour of hail. Actually it was more of a "sidepour" with the wind blowing the pelting hail sideways like rounds of ammunition. At first it was okay to shield yourself with a raincoat hood -- Rachel used my bag raincover -- but soon it got so heavy that we had to take cover behind a trench wall, a la WWII.

At the ceasefire, we continued our way up to the peak of Pachatata, stopping midway in the freezing cold weather for another one of Roberto's lectures about the lake. He was so adamant about giving us the information that whenever someone would talk amongst themselves, he'd stop and say "Excuse me, please" like a strict high school history teacher. We stood for ten minutes in the cold dismal weather as he pointed out stuff on a map he had laminated to make it waterproof, until someone had the balls to interrupt him and say, "[Can we just go up now, it will be dark soon.]"

Professor Roberto said he'd conclude his lake lecture another time.


WE TREKKED UP TO THE TOP OF PACHATATA (about 13,615 ft. ASL) where an ancient ceremonial temple stood in the cold thin air. Rachel bought an orange woven hat from a nearby vendor for the drastic drop in temperature, and then we did the customary walk around the temple three times for supposed good health, but all that good health vanished when Professor Roberto had us sit in the freezing rainy weather for another lengthy lecture. Again he spoke, wanting everyone's undivided attention. Someone who was really getting sick just left Roberto's outdoor classroom.

"Where are you going?!" he scolded. But she just walked down the hill to breathe more oxygen.


"I THINK I SHOULD HIDE MY HAT," Rachel said as we descended down the hill. She was worried that she might offend Basilia if she saw that she bought a hat from another woman.

"It's bad enough her husband left her, and you have to go and buy a hat from someone else," I joked.

After a quick stop in the main plaza, Jose picked us up to lead us back to the house. It was a longer way than we expected, showing us the sheer size of the town. "It's quite a big titty," I said with an unintentional Freudian slip.

"What was that?" Rachel asked.

"I mean, it's quite a big city."

Kids, you may snicker now.


THE FEVER I HAD DEVELOPED over the course of the day, from the altitude sickness and the fickle weather, had gotten worse and I strugged when eating the dinner that Basilia brought up for us -- there was no communal eating area. After the meal and some coca tea, I just crawled up in a ball with all my clothes on, under three blankets. Basilia came to pick us up for the big schedules nighttime tourist fiesta, but with both Rachel and I feeling sick, we asked, "[Is it necessary?]"

"[No.]"

"[I'm very sleepy,]" I told her. Basilia was pleased because she didn't feel like going either.

Jose on the other hand was more enthusiastic about the party. He came to our room to practice his flute for his performance at the fiesta with his group. Killing time before the festivities, he loitered around our room, looking at my postcards again, looking quite bored. I suppose for a kid growing up on Lake Titicaca, the snicker-inducing name of the lake wears off and does get boring after a while. I could have made fart noises with my armpit to entertain him, but I was so sick I couldn't move.


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The Orange Hat

DAY 78: I woke up on a rainy morning on Isla Amantani feeling a little bit better from the night before. Basilia came to our room with a breakfast of bread, eggs and muña tea, and then bid us an early goodbye. "[I have to go to work,]" she explained. Rachel gave her the gifts of such groceries as cooking oil and rice before she head off.

"That goodbye was pretty anti-climactic," I commented.

WITH THE COAST CLEAR, Rachel could wear her orange woven hat that she bought from another woman the day before, freely around the house without offending Basilia. Unfortunately, "work" for Basilia was simply to go into town and buy groceries, many of which were just bigger bags of what Rachel had gotten her. We sat with Basilia in the humble kitchen for small talk to kill time, but Rachel soon got up for some fresh air. "I felt her staring at my hat the whole time."

Later I noticed Basilia telling her son Jose about Rachel's orange hat.


RACHEL AND I BID BASILIA A FAREWELL and then bid one to Jose, who had also gotten sick from the weather. He came out of his room for a bit because Rachel had gotten him a small gift -- a whistle in the shape of a duck. Apparently it was the most exciting thing for him on his three-month vacation from school because he could hear him blowing it loudly as we walked all the way down to the boat port.


"YOU MISSED THE PARTY," Ivan the Dane said. I told him about how sick I was and he filled me in on the details. I sort of wished I was well enough to have went; the Norwegian girls Loella and Meyliss had put on big traditional skirts and danced around for everyone.

After Professor Roberto's make-up lecture, we made our way out on the lake again. However, with the weather still a bit gloomy, the water was too choppy, forcing us to dock for an hour. The hour was sort of a waste of time because when we embarked, the waves bounced the boat up and down anyway. Not only did I have to deal with a mild fever and mild altitude sickness, but now sea sickness was in the picture. It was probably worse for the French woman who tired to use the lavatory during the bumpy ride, who came out simply stating, "Que horrible!"


ISLA TAQUILE, OUR NEXT AND FINAL STOP of our two-day Titicaca tour, was only about an hour south east of Isla Amantani along a wavy route. We docked and walked down the generally flat path across the island to the main plaza, passing by villagers and their oxen, stopping one for another one of Professor Roberto's mandatory lectures -- a little girl looked on and looked quite sad about it. The sun finally came out, which was good news for me, but not for the Spanish woman who caked on sunblock around her lips, making her look a little bit like a clown.

The people of Isla Taquile live in a sort of Communist way. When we got to the main plaza, village men were working together to build a new house, only to be paid equally with community funds. In fact, the restaurant we had lunch in was also run by the community, with all income going into a shared community pool.

Professor Roberto explained in another lecture that every man on the island wore a woolen hat with specific colors to show their marital/dating status: half white, half red if you are single; all red if you are married. If you are a single but have a girlfriend, you move your pom-pom to the left side -- if not, it stays on the right. The Communist-like way of life sure did make the dating scene a lot easier.

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After a glance at the sign post showing the direction and distance to most major world cities, we hiked down the 544 pre-counted steps with our capitalist multi-colored orange and green hats, passed villagers and girls tending sheep (picture above), to the boat port on the other side of the island.


DURING THE THREE HOUR CRUISE back to Puno on much calmer waters, I took a nap on the roof deck before chatting with Ivan and Elizabeth, the Danish parents of 12-year-old daughter Sarah and 4-year-old son Daniel. I was quite impressed with how well-behaved the kids were, backpacking with their parents for seven months, but I was even more impressed with Ivan and Elizabeth's optimism despite the fact that in the their trip so far, they had most of their luggage stolen when "in storage" in Cuba, had their camera stolen in Mexico City, only to find out that their house in Denmark had been broken into two weeks later. Ivan tipped me on a tour company that they booked on with a bus to La Paz, Bolivia, with a lunchtime stopover in Copacabana, which I wanted to at least see.


BACK IN PUNO'S PORT, I bid farewell to the Danes, the French, the Colombians and the German girl with the Peruvian boyfriend. I hopped in a taxi with Rachel, Loella and Meyliss, which dropped me off first at my hostel. I said goodbye to the American and the Norwegians, checked into my room and went off to run some errands.

Lara, whom I met in Lima and spent Christmas with, sent me a message saying that she was in town, so I went to see if she was up for dinner. Her hostel desk attendant informed me she had left for Copacabana.

No matter -- as I walked down the block from Lara's hostel I immediately ran into Rachel, who was just wandering around town, killing time before her night bus to Arequipa. She tagged along with me as I had a cheap chicken dinner, followed by ice cream for dessert. A local boy had apparently been following Rachel all night, because he always turned up wherever we went to try and sell her candy. Eventually she caved and bought five.

Rachel and I parted ways. I, off to the Bolivian "Caca" side, and her to explore more of the Peruvian "Titty" side. I assumed she would continue wearing her orange woolen hat guilt free, away from the islands of Titicaca.


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January 07, 2004

Saved By A Twelve-Year-Old

DAY 79: I was awake by 6 a.m. feeling a little bit better from my illness. I ate a mango for the extra vitamins and gathered all my belongings. As always, I was amazed when I looked around the room to see if I forgot anything, only to realize that everything I would need to get by on a round-the-world trip fit conveniently in two bags.

My bus picked me up right at my hostel and continued to pick up more passengers around town, including the Danish family from the Lake Titicaca island trip who sat up front. I was assigned a window seat next to Eugeu, a 70-year-old Swissman from Basel. He spoke German mostly and wasn't much of a conversationalist with me.

The bus cruised on the road that hugged the southern bank of Lake Titicaca, en route to Bolivia, passing through little lake towns. We stopped in one of these lake towns for a bathroom and money exchange break. Vendors sold warm empanadas out of baskets on the sidewalk.

"You should get one of these, they come with chicken and cheese," Sarah, the 12-year-old Danish girl said to me. "They're good and warm." I took her advice and paid the one sole, and found it just as she said, "good and warm."

Soonafter, the bus took us to the border crossing, which was a much more formal and easier affair than my border crossing from Ecuador into Peru. I simply lined up on the Peruvian exit line, walked with the Danish family across the border (and one hour into the future with the time zone change) to the Bolivian entrance line. No one even read our documents and simply just stamped our forms and passports with a 30-day tourist visa.

"Oh, they let you in too? An American?" Ivan joked. "You didn't check off that you were a terrorist then."

"No, I checked 'no' to all of those," I said. (The questionnaire on the Bolivian immigration form blatantly asked "[Are you a terrorist or involved in terrorist activities? __ YES __ NO]")


(AT THE COPA,) COPACABANA, the first major lakeshore town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, was where we stopped off for a lunch break. Copacabana was recommended to me by many travelers as the place to see the lake, and I immediately saw why -- it was a resort-kind of town with many cafes, shops and restaurants catering to Western tourism, a kind of place where music and passion were always the fashion. I walked passed the main strip of souvenir stores and nice cafes down to the lakeside. I was on lookout for Lara who was rumored to be there, in hopes that I might have the opportunity to start a paragraph in this entry with "Her name was Lara... She was a traveler..." Unfortunately she was nowhere to be found.

"Joven," ("Young one,") an old woman called to me from one of the local food stands facing the lakefront. I went over to her and she pulled a towel from over a bin to reveal the fresh catch of lake trout she had. She told me she'd fry it up and serve it with potatoes and rice for just ten bolivianos (about $1.28). I couldn't pass up such a bargain and complemented it with a big bottle of the Bolivian beer Sureña. Sarah was jealous of me when I told her what I had for lunch. She and her family had tried one of the tourist restaurants on the strip and paid much more for "cold pasta and fish bones."

"I really like food that is good," Sarah said with her 12-year-old Danish accent. "I don't like food that is not so good."

Don't we all.


HER NAME WASN'T LOLA, his name was Joel. And he wasn't a showgirl, he was a chemistry student from Melbourne, Australia, traveling for a bit before heading back to school. I met him back at the bus stop, where we loaded and boarded a new Bolivian bus -- Peruvian buses aren't licensed in Bolivia and vice versa.

Just ten minutes after departure into the Bolivian lakeshore countryside, I really knew it was a mistake to have that big beer at lunch without going to the bathroom. I thought I could just go on the bus, but the new bus didn't have an onboard lavatory. The pressure on my bladder grew and grew like a water balloon stuck on a spigot with the water running and the fact that we were driving up one of the lake's peninsulas didn't help either -- a reminder of water came to me from ahead, left and right. I tried to ignore the pressure by talking with Joel about things to do in La Paz.

Luckily the bus stopped at a town for a leg stretch. Jorge the conductor gave us instructions about something, but all I wanted to do was run off to the bathroom. I got off the bus and ran down the block to the public facilities, and took one of those really long whizzes -- so long that you could have probably started and finished a crossword puzzle before I shook off the after drops. When I got back to the plaza where the bus was, it was gone -- and every familiar face on the bus had disappeared.

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I noticed that buses were being transported over the strait to the other side of the lake on wooden boats (picture above). I also noticed that groups of people, possibly bus passengers, were buying tickets for a motor boat to take them across the lake as well. I saw my blue bus halfway across the lake already and quickly bought a ticket for the people boats. I rode the ten minutes with locals and tourists, including two American girls and two English (?) guys that were in Bolivia doing volunteer work with monkey and trees. I started a debate amongst them over which was more exciting.

On the other side of the strait, I ran to the blue bus I had seen, but soon realized it was the wrong blue bus. I ran back to the plaza and found another blue bus starting to drive off. Luckily it stopped when it saw me coming.

"There he is," Ivan said. "We were almost going to leave without you."

"You can thank Sarah for telling the driver to wait for you," Elizabeth told me. Sarah waved at me and smiled.

"Thanks."

I suppose you should never underestimate the influential power of a twelve-year-old girl. I mean, they already determine most American pop trends, why not Bolivian bus drivers?


THE BUS CONTINUED through the Bolivian countryside and ultimately down the awe-inspiring canyon where La Paz was situated in. The sun was beginning to set down the canyon, highlighting the peaks of the nearby mountains.

The bus had a deal with a nice hotel with cable TV, but it was a little out of budget for me and Joel -- we decided to split a room somewhere. Ivan and Elizabeth decided to stay there to "give the kids a treat" and so I bid the Danish family goodbye.

"Thanks Sarah for holding the bus for me," I said.

"Oh, it's nothing. She stopped a bus in Mexico too," her mother told me.


JOEL AND I took a taxi to a hostel in the Lonely Planet book on the other side of town. There we met the handful of backpackers staying there, including two South Africans about to embark on a 50-hr bus journey to Iguazu Falls and two German guys just hanging out. The courtyard of the hostel had no roof and I could feel the drop in temperature. At almost 12,000 ft ABS, La Paz, the world's highest capital city, gets quite cold without the sun to warm things up. My fever started acting up again with a new painful sore throat.

Sick or not, I had to catch up on Blog duties and went out to find an internet place downtown. It started to drizzle, which wasn't good for my coming sickness. At a pharmacy I asked for "medicina por la grippe, por todas las cosas" and received two tablets of some drug called Refrianex. I went looking for a Chinese food place to get some soup to take with my medicine, but unlike Ecuador and Peru where there is a Chinese food place on every block, there was none. After searching all over my neighborhood, cursing "Where the hell can I get some soup around here?!" I finally found a place with caldo de pollo, a chicken rice soup.

I went back to the hostel and passed out in my bed with a really intense sore throat. I wished I had one of those suction tubes that the dentist uses in the shape of a question mark so I wouldn't have to swallow.

I suppose if I was a twelve-year-old girl, I could have gotten one.


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January 08, 2004

Jackie Chan to the Rescue

DAY 80: Still feeling sick, I just slept in my hostel dorm bed all morning to recuperate. Joel the Australian chemistry student probably thought I was lame because instead of staying a couple more days to hang out like we were planning, he decided to ditch me and the city of La Paz and head south with a bus ticket.

By early afternoon, I was feeling better and, determined not to have a Blog entry with just a picture of me sleeping all day, I decided to wander around town. Walking passed the Plaza San Francisco with its Iglesia de San Francisco, I made my way through La Paz's busy, metropolitan streets down the main Avenida Mariscal Santa Cruz, which turned into the Plaza Venezuela, which fed into the Plaza del Estudiante. It was quite a way and my sore throat had come back with all the exertion. All I craved for was some Chinese soup again.

Since I couldn't find a Chinese place in my hostel's neighborhood the night before, I was determined to find one this day in the more cosmopolitan area of the city. Using the Lonely Planet guide, I walked passed all the roasted chicken stands, passed the Burger King and the In-N-Out Burger, to a point on the map where there was supposed to be a Chinese food restaurant. However, when I got there, it had already been transformed to a Mac-user graphic design shop (the Lonely Planet book is about three years outdated) and the only other Chinese food place I found nearby was closed. So I went wandering around some more -- surely I was bound to run into one.


LA PAZ IS SITUATED IN A CANYON, with the main road running across the bottom of the chasm. This means that whenever you want to go somewhere other than the main road, you have no choice but to go uphill. In fact, walking to anywhere in La Paz involves going uphill -- what goes down, must go back up if you're doing a roundtrip -- and with the thin air at almost 12,000 ft. ASL, going uphill all the time isn't such a hot idea when your lungs have a cold.

I wandered around, walking up and down streets and stair plazas, my heart pumping faster than normal to supply oxygen to my brain. My only mission was to find a Chinese food place and for hours I had no luck. I was about to give up on Chinese food to settle on some caldo de pollo -- until Jackie Chan came to the rescue.


BY "JACKIE CHAN" I don't mean the martial arts star that does his own stunts, the one that may or may not "understand the words coming out of [Chris Tucker's] mouth" in Rush Hour. By "Jackie Chan" I mean some other random Chinese guy with a restaurant in La Paz. A spicy hot and sour soup did my sinuses good, while three cups of hot Chinese tea soothed my throat -- not to mention making me take a really long whiz.

With the help of "Jackie Chan", I was a new man again and continued to wander the city.


"HEY!" I CALLED, waving my hand to the Danish family when I noticed the four of them walking down the main strip at the bottom of the canyon. We chatted for a bit about what we had seen in La Paz so far, and Elizabeth and I agreed that La Paz was nothing like we expected. Perhaps due to the raised expectations spawned from the raves from other travelers and Lonely Planet, we agreed it was "just another big city." Usually I appreciate big cities as much as I do natural destinations, as long as they emit a unique pulse or vibe. Perhaps I felt no vibe because I only felt sick for most of the time.

I parted ways with the Danish family again and wandered around the streets with handicraft shops and the markets that sold everything from chicken to chicken wire. I walked across the chasm and up the hill to the Plaza Pedro Murillo, surrounded by Bolivian government buildings, the cathedral and a busy pedestrian mall. The neighborhood around the plaza was a lot more livelier and traveler-friendly than the one my hostel was in, and so I made a reservation at a different hostel nearby -- conveniently across the street from a Chinese food restaurant.

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SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF POETIC JUSTICE, I plopped a buck down and bought a bootleg Jackie Chan movie from one of the market stands in the Plaza Perez Velasco (picture above) since a bootleg Jackie Chan restaurant helped me earlier in the day. After having a caldo de pollo, I planned to just rest up in my room with a couple of movies on my laptop. However when I got there, I didn't have the room to myself like I thought I would. Joel had been replaced by Bill, an Aussie girl from outside of Sydney in her tenth month of traveling around the world, and in the third bed was Chris from the UK, in his third month of traveling. I chatted with the two as they settled into the room, keeping my laptop away.

Jackie Chan on VCD would have to wait. Rather than having a martial arts star kick around on my laptop screen, I took some antibiotics that kicked into my body and put me to sleep.


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January 10, 2004

Making Peace With La Paz

DAY 81: From what I've gathered, my initial reaction to La Paz is similiar to many other travelers, that it's just a big crowded city with no vibe or coolness factor. However, things started looking up when I left my hostel in the middle of dark alley to a new one in a livlier part of town, which had some amenities that the other one didn't: hot water, toilets that flushed all the time and the absence of some guy who would sing loud opera tunes early in the morning.

LA PAZ, THE BOLIVIAN METROPOLIS, is so big that its layout is divided into three full page maps in my Lonely Planet guide. I had only seen the crowded sections of the city center with its many vending stalls and shoe shine boys dressed up in ski masks, making them look more like bank robbers. Feeling better from the antibiotics and the bottles of vitamin C-enriched Tampico citrus punches I had been taking, I went to explore the other page of La Paz's maps. Down and up the big central Parque Raul Salmon de la Barra, with its views of the Lower Prado and Sopacachi neighborhoods, I made my way to the less dense, residential city neighborhood of Miraflores. Centered around the Temple Semisubterraneo, Miraflores had a laid back feel to it, with its middle class people walking up and down the San Francisco-like hills or through the Plaza San Martin. Walking down the hill with the views of the canyon city around me, I felt that La Paz may not be the depressing city that I, in my sick state, had once thought.

La Paz was really starting to grow on me when I crossed the Puente de las Americas -- with its northwesterly views of the big city park and southeasterly views of the nearby mountain range -- and into the neighborhood of Sopacachi. I must admit that my pre-conception of La Paz was the same of what many media-fed Americans probably had, a crowded, poor city tormented by recent protests and civil disputes. Sopacachi changed that image completely, being an affluent neighborhood of beautiful plazas and parks, fancy hotels and cafes. Sopacachi emitted a vibe that perhaps came from being a former bohemian/artists enclave, overridden by yuppies -- the coolness still remained.

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I walked up and down the cobblestone streets of Sopacachi, first to the Plaza Isabel la Catolica to the plaza named after Eduardo Abaroa, the "defender of Bolivian literature" -- Eduardo didn't seem very heroic with a bird on top of his head. I eventually made my way up the hill to the Plaza Monticulo (picture above), which overlooked the mountains and suburbs of the south. I felt at peace with La Paz at this park and sat on a bench with a book until it started to rain.


BACK IN MY ROOM in my central La Paz hostel, two new roommates filled up the two other beds: Gilbert, from Holland, on holiday in Bolivia for a second time, and Tim, a 33-year-old surfer from western Australia continuing his way down south from San Francisco, USA. We chatted about our travels until there was a knock on the door from the girl Tim had split a cab with. The door opened and revealed a familiar face: Lara, whom I had tracked down in Cusco for Christmas, had tracked me down in La Paz. I thought it might have been pretty badass to say "Well, well, well...Ms. Croft, we meet again..." but after an 11-day hiatus, it was just "Hey!"s and hugs.

I gathered my two new roommates and Lara gathered her one, an English girl named Christy whom she met at (the Copa,) Copacabana. We were joined by a Dutch guy and girl for dinner and drinks. "There's a Chinese food place across the street," I said.

"Chaufa de pollo?" Lara replied. The chicken fried rice-loving Tomb Raider was back.


AFTER DINNER, WE WENT OUT bar hopping, from a bar with a no show from the three Texas Lara met at (the Copa,) Copacabana and invited, to an overly romantic bar with sleepy piano music that made us all want to slit our wrists, to Sol y Luna, a decent bar that served, amongst many drinks, Bolivian mojitos -- mojitos with crushed coca leaves instead of mint. Lara and I caught up on our adventures -- she too had lived with a Titicacan family on Isla Amantani. She figured I got sick from my host family's less-than-stellar kitchen; hers was immaculate -- well, as immaculate as you can get for a mud hut.

We all had rounds after rounds of drinks and conversation until we called it a night sometime in the early morning. It was a great night out after waking up to a dreary day, but I suppose when you're in a city at the bottom of a canyon, you can only go up from there.

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January 11, 2004

Journey to the Moon and the Zoo and Brazil Three Times

DAY 82: Before I left New York in October 2003, I didn't have any visas -- as an American, I can freely travel to most countries, in the tackiest clothes if I choose. Brazil is one of the few countries in South America that actually requires a visa for Americans, and with Rio de Janiero's famous Carnivale coming soon, it was about time I got one.

My Aussie roommate Tim planned on knocking on the Brazilian embassy's door for an application and so I tagged along with him. He informed me that I needed a photo -- he already had one -- so after an early breakfast I paid the 18 bolivianos for some instants at a photo shop. We walked our way down to Sopacachi, where all the embassies were centralized, and eventually found the Brazilian one in a modern building with a bleak feeling to it that most government buildings have. Tim tucked in his shirt to look more presentable, and I wore my glasses to make myself look smart.

Stepping into an embassy technically is stepping on that country's soil, and after a stop at security, the door opened and into Brazil we went. We waited in the waiting room until our numbers were called. A man gave us an application and a laundry list of things to bring back with it -- some of which I didn't have ready or didn't have at all yet.

Basically what Brazil does is play a little game with foreigners trying to get in. This game is in the form of a scavenger hunt -- like CBS' The Amazing Race -- and with the embassy closing at 1 p.m., we only had 3 1/2 hours to rush around for stuff.

Easy enough? On your marks, get set, GO!

9:31: The first item in the scavenger hunt was a ticket proving you will leave Brazil. I only planned to leave via bus, with a ticket I would only buy the day of departure in Brazil, so I had to use the loophole I used on Day 1 at Newark International Airport: buy an outbound ticket which I could get refunded later. We left the embassy and searched for a travel agency. A fancy Radisson hotel was nearby and I asked the concierge for an agency -- there was one right in the lobby. I bought a refundable flight from Rio to Buenos Aires for the last day of February for $350. The woman charged it to my credit card and told me to return in an hour to pick up the actual ticket.

9:56: Most of the documents that we had to provide needed photocopies, so we went searching for a copy shop. There was one right across the street and we had the attendant copy our passports, our international health cards with proof that we had yellow fever vaccinations and our credit cards to prove we had our own money to finance our stay in the country. Tim had his onward ticket copied as well.

10:08: Applying for a visa requires a fee, and the fee is dependent on nationality. Australian Tim had to pay $35 USD while I, the American, was faced with a note on the bottom of the scavenger hunt list:

The visa on U.S. Passport is free of charge. A processing fee of $US 100.00 is being charged in reciprocity for the $US 100.00 fee paid by Brazilian citizens who apply for visa to the United States of America.

Damn, I thought, but fair is fair.

The method of payment is to walk uphill about eight blocks to the Banco de Brasil with your payment slip and pay the bank teller. Tim showed me this slip as we made our way up the hill. "Where d'you get that?" I asked him.

"From the guy. You didn't get one?"

"No."

We walked back down the hill, through the doors and into Brazil again. I waited for my number to come up and then asked for the slip. The man either forgot or was just trying to play a cruel joke with me. I got the slip and left Brazil again.

10:29: We trekked up the hill -- in the rain -- from Sopacachi into Lower Prado and looked all over for the bank. The main road was divided by a grassy barrier and after analyzing the numbers, we realized we had gone too far up on the wrong side. We eventually found the bank and I paid my fee in cash with a $100 note I had on me. We thought that maybe there would be an ATM there for Tim to get his payment, but there was none.

10:38: Back into the rain we searched and found an ATM that would take Tim's card and didn't have people loitering about. The machine wouldn't dispense US dollars, so Tim just withdrew enough bolivianos, hoping they would take the local currency.

10:45: There was a line at Banco de Brasil now, so Tim had to wait on queue for his turn. He eventually got to the teller, who accepted his bolivianos. Both of us now had proofs-of-purchase to include with our application.

11:04: Back down the hill in Sopacachi, we went back to the Radisson to get my ticket -- it was ready by the time we got there. After the woman made an imprint of my card, we went back to the copy shop to get a duplicate.

11:11: With all of our fees paid and required documents photocopied, we now needed to fill out the actual applications. We found a cafe to sit in, where we filled out our papers over coffee, tea and salteñas, the Bolivian Hot Pocket filled with meat, chicken or cheese. The application was fairly straight forward -- mine had an additional page for Americans asking if I was involved with terrorism or if I was involved or a descendant of the Nazis. Uh no, just let me in jerks. Please.

11:40: Tim and I had one hole in our applications: an address of a place to be contact in Brazil. Neither of us had the Brazil section of the Lonely Planet book on us -- I only tear out the pages I need as needed -- so it was off to find an internet cafe, which wasn't too hard at all. I looked up a hostel on Bootsnall -- the gracious hosts of this here Blog -- and got the address of Casa 6 in Ipanema.

11:50: Everything was in order. I had my outbound ticket, we paid our fees, had our documents photocopied and had all the information needed for the application. Great, right? But one thing remained: glue to paste the photo to the application. We scrambled around for a stationery store and, using Tim's handing electronic translator, managed to ask for pegamento after much confusion with the girl working there.

12:01: Back on the soils of Brazil with less than an hour to spare, we sat in the waiting room. We were the only ones there and the guy awaited our things. We hustled to complete our applications and glue our pictures. One by one the guy inspected our documents and took them in. He told me to come back in four days and Tim to return in five.

"I wonder why you get yours on Tuesday," Tim asked me.

"Probably because I paid more."

12:32: Tim and I walked back up to our side of town in time to meet Lara and the Dutch pair, Wouta and Claudia, by exactly 1:00 p.m. like we planned.

A race to Brazil and back three times, all before lunchtime. We hoped we'd win the "prizes" in a couple of days.


THE SUN SUDDENLY CAME OUT -- as if the morning rain was purposely meant to make our scavenger hunt more of a hassle -- and Tim, Lara, Wouter, Claudia and I hopped on the public bus No. 11, which took us down the hill, out of the city and into the suburbs. I thought that maybe the Bolivian affluence I had seen so far might be contained in the city until I saw the nice parks, rich mansions, condominiums and golf courses of suburbia. But I thought I was in a "Third World" country...

The bus went farther out, up and through the mountains and dropped us off at the Valley of the Moon.

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The Valley of the Moon was more moon than valley (picture above). Geologically considered "badlands," the "valley" is a huge maze of eroded mud canyons in the shadows of tremendous pinnacles that jutted out of the earth. I, along with Claudia, Wouter, Tim and Lara, walked the paths around the badlands, careful not to slip on the wet, eroding parts over cliffs or into what looked like bottomless pits. With more than enough people, Lara and I had the opportunity to do the silly "YMCA" pose that we wanted to do at the Tambomachay ruins in Peru, and made like the Village People of the Moon.


THE OTHER "KICK-ASS" attraction in the mountains outside of the city was the Mallasa Zoologico, the "world's highest zoo." Lonely Planet actually called it "kick-ass," and we went to see just to see how kick-ass it was.

Despite the mud and the rain, the zoo was fairly impressive, with animals from South America and some from Africa, including llamas, rabbits, condors, bears, snakes, jaguars, and the old zoo staple, turtles having sex. Being a zoo, I was bound to run into the Danish family again -- 12-year-old Sarah and 4-year-old Daniel ran to greet me when they saw me in the distance like I was an uncle or something. I said my hellos to the parents and told them to check out Sopacachi. "I'll probably see you again," I said, figuring it was bound to happen.

"Probably."

The family went their way to see Sarah off to go horseriding.


BACK ON THE NO. 11 BUS, we rode the thirty minutes back into the city. We stopped off at the Burger King for a snack before walking it off up the hill to the hostel. The Dutch pair went off to watch Lord of the Rings in a theater, while Tim tagged along to fulfill Lara's and my mission to find a tub of ice cream and some Oreos to make homemade McFlurry's back at the hostel. The cookies and cream goodness was a nice end to a long day, but for me it was not over yet.


BLOG READER MOMAN TIPPED ME that travelling Aussies Gabrielle and Marni, whom I crossed paths once before in Lima, were in La Paz, and using Yahoo! Messenger, I contacted them on their one night in the Bolivian city. I met them for a light dinner and drinks to catch up on the 22 days since I'd seen them and to swap tales. The most noticable change with the two in the last 22 days was that Gabrielle had fallen in love with her Colca Canyon guide Raul, who had been travelling with them since.

We had dinner at a mediocre pizza place that Raul had heard of, with a married Argentine couple -- both of them doctors. The woman claimed that one of her elderly patients was also a patient of Che Guevarra when he used to practice medicine in Buenos Aires before the revolution.

The Aussies and Raul called it a fairly early night -- they had an early bus to Cusco, Peru in the morning -- so I just went back to the hostel to turn in. After traveling to the moon and the zoo and Brazil three times, I was exhausted and had no problems falling asleep.

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January 13, 2004

Coca Puffs and Llama Fetuses

DAY 83: Bolivia has been blamed for supplying the international drug trade with its coveted coca leaf -- which is processed with ether and a bunch of chemicals to produce cocaine. However, the coca leaf in its natural form has been infused with Bolivan culture for centuries. Years ago, one of the first things a family would build right after a house to live in was a coca garden, as coca leaves were an integral part of Bolivan life.

All this information was given to me at a visit to La Paz's Coca Museum, where Lara, Tim and I went in the morning.


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ALTHOUGH SMALL, THE COCA MUSEUM (picture above) was a very informative and comprehensive exhibition on all aspects of the green multipurpose plant, from its ancient religious connotations to its medicinal purposes to its transformation into cocaine -- which was widely distributed in the early formula of Coca-Cola. The museum, opened in 1997, was created to educate people on the coca leaf, as it as become the scapegoat of many of the world's drug problems -- George W. Bush plans on using troops to eradicate prospering coca farms in the Bolivian countryside. However, one other aim of the museum is to educate people on the process of cocaine addiction, so that curious ones know without having to try it, in attempts to reduce the problem through education.

Although cocaine hasn't been an ingredient in Coca-Cola for years, one particularly interesting fact I learned from the displays is that companies in 34 countries are legally allowed to produce cocaine -- supposedly for medicinal purposes -- including StePan Chemical, owned by Coca-Cola.


FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, Lara, Tim and I went out shopping around the city. Lara shopped for gifts to bring home while Tim shopped for new boots since the soles in his Sketchers had cracked, allowing water to seep in and stink up his socks. We visited many stores in the artesan district, the shops in modern downtown and even a supermarket back in Sopacachi, but the most interesting shopping experience was at The Witches Market, a strip of vending stands that sold exotic love potions, lucky talismans and, most noticably, llama fetuses, used to put in your house as a form of good luck. I'm not so sure about bringing an abortion in the house could provide such luck, but I suppose if I broke into someone's house and saw a llama fetus on the dining table, I'd drop everything and get the hell out of there.


BECAUSE I RIP OUT THE PAGES of my Lonely Planet book section at a time as needed, to conveniently fold and fit in my pocket -- I hate lugging the entire brick around -- I had been dubbed our gang's "tour guide" when going out. Wouter, Claudia, Tim, Gilbert, Lara and I went out for dinner and using my pages I tried to find a nice restaurant mentioned in the book. However, a "tour guide" is only as good as his outdated Lonely Planet book, and the place was closed when we got there. Luckily there was the Palacio del Inka next door, which was not run by descendants of Incas, but by Koreans. There we had dinner while Cradle 2 The Grave played on a big screen TV in the corner.

After dinner we hung around for rounds of cocktails, learning that Wouter was the baby amongst us at only eighteen years of age. We chatted about songs from the 80s -- Wouter didn't know certain pop songs were actually remakes of old songs I had grown up with -- and made ourselves laugh with really dumb riddles, including one that Lara wanted me to mention on The Blog for readers to guess:

What word can be described with "H I J K L M N O"?

Gilbert had befriended a couple of Bolivian girls in his travels and had them meet us at the pseudo-Korean/Incan Palace. The sisters, Pamela and Giovanna, who lived together in La Paz away from their parents in Elizabeth, New Jersey, knew the city a lot more in depth than any "tour guide" with ripped Lonely Planet pages in his pocket, and so they led the way for the nighttime festivities.


THE GIRLS KNEW OF A CLUB called Dedekos not listed in the Lonely Planet book. In fact, I doubt it was listed anywhere because it was so damn hard to find. It was one of those cool clubs with an unmarked door in the middle of a quiet residential area of Sopacachi -- you just had to be cool enough to know about it.

Once we entered the door, we were transported into what was built to look like a club at the bottom of an underground mine, with rocky walls and mannequins dressed as miners on the wall. The place was packed with young Bolivians partying the night away to American dance and hip-hop tunes, from Dirty Vegas to Dr. Dre.

The eight of us found a nook within one of the "mine shafts" where we camped out with these big bowls filled with juice, vodka, tequila and other goodies, served with six straws. With the exchange rate, one bowl was only about three US dollars -- needless to say, at that price, we had a pretty crazy and not-so-memorable night, if you know what I mean.

I do remember meeting a guy named Junior, a Bolivian-American from Falls Church, Virginia, back in Bolivia to visit his ill grandfather. It was his eighteenth birthday and we helped him celebrate -- it was easy with the opening lines to 50 Cent's "In Da Club." We also met some Israeli girl who was either drunk or high on a certain derivative of the coca leaf, or both. She too had made peace with La Paz -- she had been there for two months thus far.

The music switched around as the night progressed, and Lara and I danced the night away with the Dutchies, singing along to the lyrics we knew. We almost tore our throats out with the ending part to Guns N Roses' "Sweet Child Of Mine," but it was great fun -- Wouter really got a kick out of it.

We partyed there until the morning hours, each leaving at different times in different cabs. In my state I probably would have bought a llama fetus as we drove passed The Witches Market, but in retrospect, I'm glad that even witches close their shops at some point.


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Gags

DAY 84: One of the "Things to See and Do" mentioned in the Lonely Planet book was to visit San Pedro prison by ignoring all guards and police, nonchalantly walking into the prison and asking for someone to take you around for a fee. Lara, Tim and I had planned to do this, but after a night of partying hard amongst the Bolivians, we non-Bolivians needed a day to just rest. For most of the day, that's just what we did. We learned that the prison visits were no longer available anyway.

Wouter informed me in the morning of the events of the night before. Apparently at the beginning of the night he felt a bit awkward in a club of just locals, until he started having a good time just watching Lara and me piss drunk, making quite the fools of ourselves. I filled Wouter in on the escapades of my roommate Gilbert, who apparently had a crazy night with Pamela -- her sister Giovanna was missing and they didn't know where to find her. (She eventually turned up at our hostel that morning.)

Tim and I went out for a nice greasy breakfast of eggs and bacon, which settled me nicely but Tim not so much. Lara also had a really bad hangover -- she had to keep herself from puking all day. This wasn't such an easy thing to do when we went for a leisurely stroll around the city -- she noticed behaviors that almost made her gag, including a woman picking another woman's nose for her, and a little girl just taking a dump in the street in broad daylight. The mention of Tim's gas problems didn't help either -- Lara almost yakked back at the Burger King.

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In the afternoon, Tim and I booked a mountain biking tour for the next day, while Lara booked an intensive Spanish course instead. We were all pretty exhausted and went back to the hostel to just veg in the lounge. I used the free time to catch up on The Blog, but I was easily distracted when American Pie came on -- Lara had to look away when Stifler drank the "pale ale" to keep herself from gagging.


THE DUTCHIES CLAUDIA, WOUTER AND GILBERT went on a day trip to some nearby Incan ruins, but met us back at the hostel to meet for dinner. It was Claudia and Wouter's last night in La Paz, so we went looking for a nice place to send them off. We found Mongo's Cafe down in Sopacachi, yet another example of how hip a place La Paz can be, with its candles and jazzy downtempo music. We had our final meal with the Dutchies there over fine Bolivian wines, careful not to repeat the events of the night before -- although I'm sure Wouter would have enjoyed it.


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January 14, 2004

Dangerous Curves

DAY 85: It has been called the "World's Most Dangerous Road." This route through the Yungas mountain range between La Paz and the little village of Yolosi starts at the peak of one of the mountains at 15,322 ft ASL and dramatically descends down to 4,460 ft ASL over the course of 63 km. The single lane dirt road hugs the mountains for vehicles to travel on -- that is, if they're careful enough not to fall off the edge and down deep into the valley.

It's one thing to ride in a bus along this route, but its another to ride down it on a mountain bike. The trip, offered by about a dozen adventure tour companies in La Paz, had been highly recommended to me from travelers I had met on the road, from Heidi to Sergei the Hamburger (from the Galapagos trip) who called it "the best thing he's done in South America."


Tim and I were up by 6:30 to get ready for our ride along the dangerous road. We walked over to the tour agency we booked at, appropriately named X-TREME BOLIVIA. The company sprung for a continental breakfast at a nearby hostel whee we met Cooper, an 18-year-old from the UK and our guide Juan, who wasn't much for words. We hopped in a minivan with our dual suspension mountain bikes already mounted on the roof.

Our driver drove us out of the canyon of La Paz and up to our starting point, just under the snow line. Outside it was raining and foggy as if we were inside a rain cloud -- visibility was poor. "I think the 'World's Most Dangerous Road' just got a little more dangerous," I said.


JUAN GAVE US THE OPTION to start at the top of the hill or drive passed the rain to the start of the "most dangerous" part -- Cooper, Tim and I agreed the rain wasn't too bad and decided to just wrap ourselves in our raingear under our protective bike gear.

Juan, who was still a man of few words, led the way down the hill. We followed him down the first, asphalt-paved section single file, on the side of the road, through the mist and under the rain, passing through landslide zones and little hamlets. Some portions of the first leg actually went uphill -- something all the tour companies neglect to mention to prospective clients.

"I think...this...is...harder...than...the Inca...Trail..." Cooper said, huffing and puffing.


WE EVENTUALLY MADE IT DOWN to the start of the Ecovia, the start of the stretch of road worthy of the title "World's Most Dangerous." Juan gave us the option of stopping for lunch, but we agreed we'd just eat after conquering the mighty road.

The rain didn't stop like Juan thought it might have, so most of the time we pedaled under the downpour, mud spraying up onto our clothes from the tires. As we descended down the road, it was evident why the road got its name; a majority of the time it was just a one-lane dirt road with short wide sections to wait for oncoming traffic to pass through. Off the ledge of the muddy road was a dramatic drop -- a drop that has claimed lives each year -- but with the incredible fog and cloud coverage, the drop was hidden from us (perhaps for the better.)

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We rode the rainy trail along the ledge, passed some waterfalls and under others, through mountain streams. We stopped for trucks coming up and whizzed passed slower bikers from other tour companies. Near the end, we encountered a thick patch of mud that made it impossible to shift gears -- all it did was splatter mud all over my face.

Our descent was only about three hours and we eventually made it to Yolosi, soaked and full of mud.


AFTER A LATE LUNCH, we stopped for a quick bit in Coroico, a mountain "retreat" town for the citizens of La Paz, before taking the World's Most Dangerous Road back up in the minivan. It almost took as much time going up in a vehicle as it did going down on a bicycle.

Back in La Paz, Tim and I bid Cooper goodbye and walked back to the hostel, trousers looking like we had been mud wrestling all day -- passers-by couldn't stop staring at us. Our laundry wasn't done at the hostel when we got back as we had hoped, so we just went out in our dirty, muddy state for bacon, egg and cheeseburgers. Luckily after dinner we had clean clothes to change in.

We met up with Lara, who had taken Spanish lessons in the day, and went out for dessert and coffee and a walk around nighttime La Paz. Lara and Tim argued over which salty spread was better, Vegemite or Marmite, as I had my coffee and ice cream.

On our way back to the hostel, Lara and I paid some little musician on the street for a picture, but when we tried to take it, he just ran away. Where he was off trying to get to I don't know, but if he was off to play in the mud, I could have shown him the way.


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January 20, 2004

Leaving La Paz

DAY 86: It had been over a week since I arrived in La Paz, and with my Brazilian visa slated to be ready, it was about time to move on. Tim looked on his visa pick-up slip and saw that his was to be ready on the 13th as well, despite that the guy said it wouldn't be ready until the 14th. He tagged along with me on the way back to the Brazilian embassy in Sopacachi.

Picking up the Brazilian visas was a snap; there was no line and the attendant was unusually cheery -- we figured he got laid the night before. We looked at our passports and noticed that I got a five year visa, while Tim got a ninety year visa -- we don't know if it was a typo or not, but we didn't bother to question it.


MEANWHILE BACK AT THE HOSTEL, Lara had booked night bus tickets for the two of us to Uyuni from the friendly and wise man at the desk that we all dubbed "The Oracle" -- he knew anything and everything about La Paz and its surroundings. Tim consulted The Oracle to sort out his plans to see the Amazon jungle while Lara and I went out for a final stroll in the great city of La Paz. The weather, for a change, couldn't have been any better with sunny blue skies.

Lara and I walked across town -- passed the usual characteristic shoe shine boys dressed us in ski masks as if to rob a bank, and the "walking phone booths," people in flourescent green vests holding cell phones you can use -- and up the hill to the Parque Mirador Laikakota, which had a great view of the entire city. The park was a great way for me to soak in some sun after having been sick in rainy weather for a week, and plus, they had swings. The two of us swung on the swings until we realized we might be a bit big for them, and so we wandered over to the big chess board nearby for some photos.

Across the street was the Museo Kusillo, a science museum for children -- and big kids like us. We started off at some Bolivian textile exhibit where a woman demonstrated how to weave yarn into an ojo de dios with two pieces of yarn and some sticks. My support sticks broke and I wove my blue and green pieces. "Yours is shit," Lara teased me.

The actual museum part of Museo Kusillo had exhibits about the human body, from balancing tests to bicycles that translate power information. As we went up the four-story building, the exhibits got more adult -- the top floor had condoms and a video showing a live birth. One boy just sat there, totally mesmerized. However, the funny thing about the video was that it was obviously edited between footage of two different women because as the baby came out, they'd cut to a shot of the woman's face and she'd be all calm, like she was merely getting a pedicure. If only the little boy knew.


FOR THE LAST SUPPER between Lara, Tim and I (at least in Bolivia), we went across the street for Chinese. The Brit, the Aussie and I the American toasted a farewell to our time in La Paz and agreed that we'd "race to Rio:" Tim from the north, Lara from the south and me straight across east. Whether or not it was a real race I wasn't sure, but I did know I would have liked to see them again.

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While Tim stayed an extra night in La Paz to do his "tri-factor" -- watching Lord of the Rings, going to Burger King and getting ice cream from the fancy dessert place we always walked passed -- Lara and I hopped in a taxi and rode to the bus terminal (picture above). The bus terminal was fairly big -- bigger than those I had seen in Ecuador and Peru -- and it almost felt like an airport. Lara and I stocked up on Pringles and Oreos for the long bus journey ahead and waited in the waiting room with the others. We befriended an Aussie named Kate who was quite confused about everything -- she almost misplaced her ticket until Lara found it for her on the floor.

After a couple of hours on the road, we stopped at a small restaurant with really disgusting bathroom conditions -- Kate and Lara told me they had to hold their breath their entire time. Not only were the bathroom conditions bad, so was the service -- it took thirty minutes for Kate to get her sandwich after everyone else and the waiter completely forgot my order altogether.

No matter, Lara and I had Oreos and Pringles and they kept us happy as the bus drove through the night, out of the mountains and into the desert.


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Stand By Me In Uyuni

DAY 87: In Stand By Me, the 1986 Rob Reiner movie about four boys who bond together during a two-day hike along train tracks in search of the corpse of a dead kid, the narrator (played by Richard Dreyfuss) says this: "Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant." This statement also rings true for people on the backpacker trail; you never know when someone you met before will suddenly be in your life again.


I WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT when the bus ride suddenly got extremely bumpy. Lara had her eyes closed, but she was awake as well, listening to her CD Player. As my body shook around like a can of paint in a mixer at a hardware store, I thought to myself, "Jesus, are we even on a road?!" Suddenly it became clear to me why there was no road drawn on the map between La Paz and Uyuni.

Around 6:30 a.m. the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere for what we thought was a flat tire. The conductor and driver got under the bus and jacked it up, but no spare tire was needed -- instead, they just randomly started banging on things under the vehicle for half an hour, leaving us to wander around aimlessly with our cameras. It was the perfect opportunity for me to walk far away from the others to take a photo -- and to release the fart I had been holding in for quite some time. Pringles and Oreos can do that to a guy.

We eventually continued down through the desert to the desert town of Uyuni, the base of tourism for trips into the Bolivian salt flats. As soon as our bus arrived around 9:30, we were assaulted by dozens of tour operators trying to get our business. Lara and I just wanted to check into a hotel and rest up before making any decisions -- the long, bumpy night ride didn't offer much opportunity for sleep -- but one company's deal included a free hostel's night stay before the tour. The woman quoted us $65, and we managed to get it down to $60, which was really good when we found out others were paying $75-$100, some without a free hostel stay. We followed the woman to the Hostel Avenida with other clients she had managed to snag.

Lara and I got a room and settled down our things before going out for breakfast. We ended up at some outdoor cafe run by some woman who didn't seem to care about anything, especially her customers -- getting a menu was like pulling teeth. "Miss Personality" (as we dubbed her) finally served us breakfast after quite some time. Perhaps she was a very disgruntled employee because before finishing her eggs, Lara felt really sick and ran off to puke. Nearby I met two English girls, Sam and Zoe, who had also made the mistake of choosing Miss Personality's restaurant -- they had been treated the same way and worried about saliva in the food.


THE NARRATOR'S STATEMENT IN STAND BY ME rang true when I ran into Simion and Axel, whom I had met in the Amazon and bumped into on Christmas in Cusco. I caught up with the Englishman and the Frenchman as they finished their breakfast, before they went off to sort out a tour. Soonafter another traveler came back into my life like a busboy in a restaurant: Gilbert, my Dutch roommate from La Paz, who was also in town, just having arrived from the town of Oruro.

Like the character Vern in Stand By Me, Lara -- who is in no way, shape or form "the fat kid" -- convinced Gilbert and I to go see a dead body: a mummy at the Museo Arqueologia y Antropologico de los Andes Meridionales. There were four mummies on display, well-preserved with their original hair and teeth. One particular one had a tremendous hair weave coming out of its pubic region, which just made us laugh. "That mummy is in desperate need of a shave," Lara joked. The three of us giggled like schoolchildren looking at the mummy with the apparent uncontrollable bush, and even started singing a childish and immature song that I transcribed into the museum's guestbook:

Her name was Lola
She was a mummy
Still in those clothes she used to wear
With that offensive pubic hair

We all signed it, hoping someone else would find it funny.

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WE BUMPED INTO SIMION, who tipped us on a visit to the Train Cemetary in the middle of the desert about a mile out of town. Gilbert, Lara and I walked down the train tracks like the characters in Stand By Me (picture above), singing the songs of our generation along the way. We eventually found the dead trains and wandered around the iron and steel remains of cabooses and freight cars.

On the way back into town, we heard what sounded like a Nazi rally coming from the nearby military base, but the gates were closed so we couldn't confirm any existance of the Third Reich. Instead, we walked back to the town center, passed the Momumento a Los Heroes del Chaco, to the tour office to finalize our upcoming four-day tour. Lara and I had already paid the $120 dollars for our tickets, but realizing that Lara signed up end the tour on the third day to leave for Chile, she was determined to get some money back. But of course when a tour operator already has your cash, getting money back is like trying to get shoes back from Imelda Marcos. The woman we had dealt with wouldn't give anything back, arguing that there's nothing to see on the fourth day anyway -- it's just a transport day back to Uyuni.

Lara argued and argued, saying that she was paying four days for only three days and was getting quite feisty. The woman called in some guy who had an even worse argument: "We can't buy three-fourths of a chicken, we can only buy the whole chicken." Lara was getting really wound up -- not about the money, just about the principle -- and ultimately got so mad that she just got up and stormed out before really getting nasty with them. Gilbert and I sat across from each other, speechless; Gilbert looked as if he was even a little bit embarrassed by the whole thing.

In the spirit of friendships like in Stand By Me, I calmly sat over with the tour guy to finish Lara's argument. I simply said that we saw his side of the story, but unequal tours shouldn't have equal prices. Eventually he knocked off five dollars off of Lara's price, which wasn't much but something.

While Gilbert signed up to join the tour, I went outside to look for Lara. I thought she might have gone back to our room, but I realized I had the key. It wasn't hard to find her though; she was sitting on a bench all the way down the plaza with her arms crossed, trying to calm herself down.

"I've had three hours of sleep, I have P.M.T., and they want to rip me off?!" she said to me. She was a lot more calm after sitting out for a while and venting. I gave her the five dollars.

"Thanks, mate."

Gilbert came out of the tour office after booking his tour to see how Lara was doing. "I think it's time for cervezas," he suggested. Well said.

We sat at a cafe for a round as the sun began to set down the Bolivan desert. We rushed to walk across town, away from the obstructions of buildings for a good photo, but the sun set before we could make it. On the way back, we bumped into Kate and another Aussie named Joel. We eventually all ended up having dinner together at a place called Kactus where I blindly ordered a pique macho without knowing what it was -- only that it was a regional food. When it came I discovered it was a beef stir-fry platter similar to Chinese food.


WHEN THE NIGHT HAD COME, and the land got dark, Lara and I went back to our room to catch up on our journals -- that is, until the power went out in the entire town and the moon was the only light that we'd see. In the darkness of our room, Lara started singing our song about Lola the mummy with the offensive pubic hair, which made us both start laughing in bed. It was good to hear her in good spirits again after her little tantrum earlier in the afternoon -- but I suppose any song about a mummy with offensive pubic hair does the trick every time.


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Now Entering Dali World

DAY 88: Surrealist master Salvador Dali once visited the Bolivian deserts and salt flats, which inspired him in many of his paintings. Before my trip to South America, I had seen pictures of the surreal landscape that he and thousands of other tourists had visited, and the salt flats became one of the reasons -- if not the reason -- for me to visit Bolivia in the first place. However, I didn't know until my own visit that it wasn't just the visual landscape that had a surreal element to it.


I WOKE UP IN OUR UYUNI HOSTEL feeling a little sick in the stomach but was feeling better after a shower. Lara went running around trying to get a Bolivian exit stamp in her passport while I ordered us breakfast at an outdoor cafe. I was joined by Axel and Simion -- secretly known to Lara as "Mr. Brighton" since that was where he claimed he was from in the UK. Gilbert stopped on it, followed by Sam and Zoe, the two British girls I had met the breakfast the day before. We filled up on food before heading out into the desert.

Soon we were all in 4x4's -- Simion and Axel in one group's, Gilbert in another's, and Zoe, Sam, Lara and I in another's with three Swiss Germans, Pascal, Suzanne and Ester. We all piled in a big red Toyota Land Cruiser with the licence plate "423 DIC" -- Sam just laughed at the "DIC" part and I knew right away that at least another person was at the same maturity level as me and Lara.

The caravan of jeeps drove out of Uyuni and into the desert one by one, but for some reason our driver Primo stopped in the middle of the the desert to gather leaves and branches. He told us that it was to protect the engine from the salt -- it was hard to believe him since no other jeep was doing the same thing. Primo stacked leaves and branches in front of the grill and under the hood, which we all thought was a strange beginning to what would be a surreal day.

All the SUVs stopped in the small town of Colchani, where a local woman gave us a brief demonstration on how salt from the salt flats is processed into a consumable form. From there we were off into the actual salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest with an area of 12,000 sq. km. The landscape suddenly became very bright with intense whites and blues. Big sections of the salt flat had a layer of water over it, creating a perfect reflection of the clouds in the sky. The horizon disappeared, creating a surreal landscape where clouds existed on earth. And as if entering the visual surrealist world wasn't enough, suddenly we heard the DAHNT, DAHNT DAHNT DAHNT, DAHNT DAHNT DAHNT, DAHNT DAHNT DAAOOWNNNN... of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger."

"Now this is salt flat music!" I said as we sped into the whiteness.

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PRIMO DROVE US ACROSS THE REFLECTIVE SALT FLAT with his tape of 80s music until we arrived at the Salt Hotel, a hotel entirely built out of salt in the middle of nowhere. The walls, the chairs, the beds -- everything was made out of compressed and molded salt from the flats. We posed for a couple of photos (other picture above) before moving on back through the whiteness with our 80s mix tape, which included some songs from the 80s that I wasn't familiar with. One of them was Laid Back's cheerful "Sunshine Reggae," which ultimately became one of my favortes -- as well as everyone else's. The 80's party continued outside the car when we stopped in the middle of nowhere for some photos -- it turned into a salt flat disco when Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" came on.


INCAHUASI, also known as the Isla de los Pescadores, is an "island" in the middle of the salt flat -- and the designated lunch place for SUVs on tour. The mound of rock stood in the middle of the whiteness with desert cacti sprouting up from the ground. We climbed to the top of the mound for some panoramics, watching the SUVs speed in as if gliding on an ice field. Around us the scenery continued to be a land turned upside down.

After a surprisingly good meal of steak and mashed potatoes cooked out of the back of our jeep, we continued on through the vast salt world. Each jeep kept its distance from the others, so there was always a feeling of emptiness as we cruised along. Trying to capitalize on the emptiness of the landscape, we tried to think of stupid poses we could perform together. Lara suggested doing a hieroglyphic "Walk Like An Egyptian" pose, so we had Primo stop again in the middle of nowhere to take the picture. I'm pretty sure he thought we were snorting in some of the salt or something.


GRADUALLY THE REFLECTIVITY AND WHITENESS OF THE SALAR DE UYUNI got wetter and browner as we exited the salt flat and re-entered the dusty desert. But the surrealism of the day didn't cease; outside in the middle of nowhere, we encountered some random guy selling sleeping bags.

Lara and I had fun chatting with Zoe and Sam, dancing and singing along to yet another playing of The Village People's "Y.M.C.A." -- Lara finally realized she had been doing the "C" wrong all her her life, never reversing it for the audience. The Swissies in the back bench joined in on aerobic dance as well; I mean, how could you not do the Y.M.C.A.?

After about the fifth time Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" came on, we arrived in San Juan, a small town next to a field of llamas, and our home for the night. We shot some photos of the sunset -- and llamas having a three-way -- before settling down in what we called "the party dorm." We tried to get all seven of us in the room of six beds. Primo suggested that if we were so desperate to do so, that two girls should share a bed -- the girls weren't too keen on the idea.

"Yeah, I'm sure he'd like to see two girls in a bed," Lara said. Despite the fact that perhaps I shared Primo's enthusiasm, Pascal and Suzanne volunteered to take a double room in the other shelter.


"DO YOU HAVE ANY SALT AROUND HERE?" was the joke of the night as the three groups had dinner together in the big dining room. Needless to say, the joke got pretty tired after a while. No matter, our little group was occupied laughing about something else: the really short Peruvian guy with his very tall Swiss girlfriend -- we couldn't stop snickering when Lara secretly referred to them as Gulliver and Mr. Lilliput.

After a nightcap with Simion (aka Mr. Brighton) while watching the stars come out on a clear and cold night, I went back into the "party dorm" where the "party" involved journal writing. We all reminded each other what we had seen and done that first day in Dali World -- the girls made fun of the notebook I bought in Cusco, a simple graph-lined notebook with the advert for baby cream on the cover. I didn't realize it until Lara mentioned it, but the ecstatic-looking baby on the front made me look like I was some sort of pedophile.

One by one we passed out in our beds and off to dreamland, but I was sure no weird dream could have outdone the surrealism that we had seen awake in the real world that day.


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Surreal People

DAY 89: After breakfast, we loaded up all the jeeps and went one by one into the surreal combination of the Bolivian desert landscape and 80s pop music. Each jeep was full of different characters which, over the course of the day, inevitably got secret nicknames from the characters of our jeep.

After a drive through a less impressive salt flat from the day before, we all stopped at a security checkpoint where we had to sign in with our passport numbers -- Zoe and Sam left their documents in storage and improvised. "It really doesn't matter what we put," Sam said. "I should go back and tell them my real name is Cameron Diaz."

Within the cast of characters of the five jeeps, there was a Caucasian guy with a Japanese girlfriend. Of course we referred to them as "John and Yoko."

"Gilbert," I asked the Dutchman when we saw him at the checkpoint. "Did you find out the name of John and Yoko?" (He was travelling in the same jeep as them.)

"Oh, I just call them John and Yoko," he answered.

"To their face?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, when I take a group photo, I say I'll get over here with John and Yoko," he joked.

"SHHHH," I shushed when I saw the Caucasian and the Asian walk near, although Lara thought I might have done it too obviously that they might have gotten suspicious.


PRIMO OUR DRIVER TOOK US throught the Bolivian desert with the other jeeps. The area was so vast and each jeep rode at a different speed, so most of the time we felt we were the only people around for miles. As Sam described, it looked like we were riding through the Old West -- that is, until Men at Work's "Land Down Under" came on the 80s tape and it felt like we were riding through the Australian Outback.

We rode about an hour to the the base of Volcan Ollague for photo opps with the crazy volcanic rock formations. We shot photos through holes in the rock, on top of rocks and inside rocks that looked like dinosaur heads. John and Yoko walked by and Sam quietly starting singing "Imagine," which made us snicker like school children.

Back in the jeep, we sang along -- rather annoying loud and off-key -- to Aha's "Take On Me" as Primo held the steering wheel with one hand and his ear with the other. The Toyota Land Cruiser got some serious 4x4 action on the road and I really appreciated an SUV being used for its rightful purpose. The rough road led us along four flamingo-frequented lakes in a row: Laguna Cañapa, Laguna Hedienda, Laguna Charota and Laguna Honda. It was at one of these stops that we noticed the short Peruvian guy wearing a traditional cone-shaped hat -- walking hand in hand with his girlfriend a foot and a half taller than him, he looked more like an Oompa Loopma (not that there's anything wrong with it). However, we couldn't help but start singing the Oompa Loopma song amongst ourselves. God, we were so immature.

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After seeing one beautiful lake with flamingos, the subsequent ones sort of weren't as exciting -- "been there, done that." We kept ourselves happy with our 80s singalong and a bag of Sour Skittles until the jeep stopped at some crazy rock formations where a colony of vizcachas -- rodents related to the chinchilla -- happily hopped about. We stayed for a while for photos in this area, yet another one seemingly in the middle of the nowheres of Dali World (picture above), so Primo could stitch something under the jeep with some chicken wire.


AFTER ANOTHER DRIVE THROUGH DALI'S DESERT, we arrived at the rock formations near the Arbol de Piedra, a familiar looking "tree of stone" -- it looked like it came right out of a Dali painting... or was it the other way around? I started thinking that Salvador Dali, the so-called master of surrealism, was sort of a fraud; his crazy surreal formations were merely still lifes of objects in the Bolivian desert. We took some photos for a while, but the cold winds started picking up and so we hopped back into the warmth of the Land Cruiser for the final leg of the day -- this time with a new tape that Primo had switched with another driver: a disco mega-mix that probably made our singing more annoying in Primo's ears.


DESPITE ITS NAME, the Laguna Colorada wasn't as colorful as we thought when we got there and its shelters across the road. In fact it wasn't very much a lake either -- more like a big salty, smelly, grey mud puddle. Despite the bitterly cold winds, Lara and I and a handful of others -- including three guys I dubbed "The Mountain Men" because they were perpetually dressed like they were ready to scale a mountain at a moment's notice -- trekked from the shelters to the middle of the "lake". A hardened crust had formed on top of the mud for us to walk on, but some patches were too moist -- we had to keep our shoes from sinking and sliding in. At one point I stood in the muck for a while to shoot some slides of flamingos and I almost got stuck in my stance like I was in a patch of quick-dry cement.

Our shelters for the night were across the road from Laguna Colorada and the hike back was a struggle with the winds blowing against us, pushing us back. We were rewarded at the mess hall with hot beverages, which we drank over tea time conversation and journal note taking. Gulliver and Mr. Lilliput (aka Oompa Loompa) -- who we found out was called "Rumplestiltskin" by Pascal, Esther and Suzanne -- was sitting nearby. We couldn't help but rotate our heads in unison as we watched him walk across the room -- I think his 6-ft. girlfriend might have been suspicious to our immature snickering. Then again, anyone would have snickered when Mr. Lilliput/Oompa Loompa/Rumplestiltskin started braiding one of The Mountain Men's long greasy hair with colored yarn.


WHILE THE OTHERS IN THE SHELTER either slept or worked on their journals, Lara and I decided to go out for a walk in hopes of catching the sunset. We were joined by Axel the Frenchman (whom I met in the Amazon) -- he had the same idea. We left the shelter and its pet baby llama and trekked towards the lake. I suggested we go to this single house we could see off in the distance. The winds blew with us as we walked and talked across the desert plain along the lakeshore -- Lara impressed Axel with this one French sentence she had memorized from her job on the Guernsey/France ferry when she was sixteen. The pink and orange hues of the sky reflected in the laguna and finally made it worthy of its colorful name.

We crossed a stream of stepping stones worthy of a survival game show and climbed up a hill to the house. It was empty and closed, but we were glad we made it to some sort of destination. We shot some pictures of the lake before heading back over the stones and across the plain -- this time against the fierce winds.

"Whose idea was this?" they asked, looking at me.

"You'll thank me later," I answered, wind blasting in my face. In the end, Lara was glad we went; after sitting in a jeep all day, she appreciated the exercise -- plus she finally saw the "colorada" in Laguna Colorada.

The three of us went back to the mess hall just as the others were finishing dinner. We took what was left of the soup and pasta before finishing the night off with coffee, tea and hot chocolates. We turned into our rooms early to rise early the next morning, chatting away in our beds, working on our journals -- except for Zoe who was feeling sick and wasn't in a writing mood. "I don't want to do my journal, I want to live," we heard her from across the room.

There was no light switch in the room; all the lights for the complex seemed to be controlled by one external switch. Eventually someone flipped it, declaring bedtime for all of us -- including Mr. Brighton, Mr. Lilliput and Gulliver, and The Mountain Men. As I lay in the dark, I wondered just what sort of cruel nicknames the others had for us -- I'm sure it had something to do with our annoying off-key singing of cheesy 80s songs.


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Goodbye, Mary Poppins

DAY 90: Our wake-up knock on the door came about half an hour before dawn -- at an hour the girls appropriately called "stupid o'clock." The point of waking at such an hour was to catch the sunrise, and we were disappointed when we discovered it was too cloudy to see it -- but we were already up and it was too late to slip back into bed.

We drove south as the sky got lighter. Everyone was too groggy to do anything, except for Lara who was awake and about as cheery as Mary Poppins. She tried to get us to wake up for a singalong, but no one -- including myself -- was into it so early in the morning.

"Grumpy fuckers," Mary Poppins said.


THINGS STARTED PICKING UP when we arrived at the fumaroles and steam geysers of Sol de Mañana, a prehistoric landscape of steam and sulfuric gases rising from bubbling pools of mud -- it was the perfect setting for singing another one of our standard jeep classics, Eruption's "One Way Ticket" -- which we all were convinced went "one way ticket to the moon" in the chorus. (It wasn't until I looked up the lyrics for this entry that I discovered the actual line is "One way ticket to the blues.")

Steam shot out of blow holes as an earthy ooze bubbled in craters like flasks in a science lab. Sam, who was wearing Lara's towel on her head for warmth making her look a bit like Little Red Riding Hood, described the area as a witches cauldron or The Bog of Eternal Stench from the 1986 movie Labyrinth.

Our next stop was at the thermal baths, with mossy water heated up naturally from the underground percolation of volcanic activity. The seven of us reluctantly stripped down to our trunks and bikinis on that cold morning, but didn't regret it after slipping into the relaxing hot waters. Without shower facilities, it was the closest we could get to a bath for a while.

Breakfast was served out of the back of our jeep as we dressed up in our clothes. Lara, still in Mary Poppins mode, went ahead and prepared scrambled egg sandwiches for the "kids" Sam and Zoe. Just when everything seemed like the place could be normal, a caravan of randon [sic] trucks drove by, seemingly out of nowhere. Yes, we were still in Dali World.


OUR JOURNEY THROUGH DALI WORLD continued when Primo took us south through the surreal desert landscape, passed an area known as Rochas de Salvador Daly (Rocks of Salvador Dali). The rocks, although too far to drive to, looked exactly like the backdrop of many of the artist's paintings. "Man, Dali's such a fraud," I said. The others agreed; the "master of surrealism" simply came to the Bolivian desert and painted still lifes of things he saw. (I wondered if he too rode in a jeep and annoyingly sang disco songs in his driver's ear.) We continued through the landscape and stopped again in the middle of nowhere for a photo opp. The Bee Gee's "Stayin' Alive" suddenly came on, prompting me and Lara to pose in the obvious way against Dali's ripped off background.

"Beat that, Dali," I said, finger in the air like John Travolta.


"IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL," Zoe said as we arrived at Laguna Verde, an aquamarine lake nestled at the base of the Volcan Licancabur, our next stop -- and the final stop of Lara and those going to Chile as it was just around the volcano from the border. For my final moments with Lara in Bolivia, we hiked down the cliff and to the edge of the lake for a better photo, not caring that we were obstructing the view of all the others that were too lazy to climb on down.

Lara's transport jeep to the Chilean border was about to depart, so Zoe, Sam and I bid our Mary Poppins goodbye before she sailed away on a weather vane structure -- it was the closest thing we could find for a prop since no one had an umbrella.

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"Oh no, guess who's in the jeep," Lara said to me. I looked inside and realized she'd have hold in her comments and snickers -- the couple we knew as Mr. Lilliput and Gulliver were in the second row. Sooner than we thought, Mary Poppins and a bunch of others went forth on "Gulliver's Travels." The jeep cruised by the Laguna Verde (picture above) and around the Volcan Licancabur to the land of Chile.

"Okay then," I said to the kids Sam and Zoe, posing as the father Mr. Banks. "Let's go fly a kite!"

Sam smiled and started singing the rest of the words to the Disney song.


LARA'S SPACE IN THE LAND CRUISER was filled with Betty, the woman who had been cooking for us and the people in the other jeep in our company's caravan (where she had been riding in). She wasn't nearly as much of a conversationalist as Lara the Guernsey Girl, but had a good sense of humor nonetheless. She had with her a new tape to listen to, and she laughed at the part where, in the middle of a song, some kid recorded his voice over the music.

We head northbound back towards the way we came, on the stretch of desert near the Rocks of Salvador Dali. In the distance we saw a lone figure walking under the desert sun. We thought it might have been another random guy selling sleeping bags, but as we got closer we realized it was Gilbert. His jeep had left him stranded in the middle of the desert for two hours thus far, without any information that he'd be picked up. Gilbert told us that he started walking towards the Dali Rocks for a picture, not realizing how far they were, only to see his jeep leave him and get farther and farther away. Two jeeps drove passed him as he tried to hitch a ride to anywhere, but no one stopped for him -- until we did.

We decided to wait with him in the middle of nowhere until his jeep came. Primo explained that perhaps his jeep was in a hurry because most of its passengers had to catch the transport to the Chilean border.

Gilbert's jeep finally came without anyone else; all of them were in fact Chile-bound and he was the only passenger left to go back to Uyuni. He hopped into his jeep without complaining, just happy that he didn't have to be stuck inside a Dali painting forever.


THE WEATHER OF THE SURREAL WORLD got even stranger -- the sun was out one second and the next it was snowing. The afternoon desert drive wasn't nearly as fun without Lara -- Sam and I were the only ones doing the "Y.M.C.A." dance while the others slept -- but we were all still in good spirits when the jeep went in reverse, making a funny electronic female voice say, "Attencion! Attencion! Esta coche esta retrociediendo..." over and over.

After a lunch break near a less impressive salt flat, we stopped for a pee break in the little village of Villa Mar where three boys that were in charge of the public toilet followed us around town. We continued onto the Valley of the Rocks, another surreal attraction in Dali World. Huge monumental rock formation surrounded us, one of which I deemed worthy of a "rock piss" (yet another phrase we coined on the trip). The Valley of the Rocks reminded Sam and Zoe of the movie Labyrinth as we walked through it, looking for rocks to do stupid poses with. We found one with a hole in it and went to town with our cameras.


OUR HOME FOR THE NIGHT was at a hostel in Alota, a small village with a lotta nothing going on. As one of the pueblos modelos (model villages) in the region, most of the villagers were occupied constructing the town in hopes of bringing in tourism. I walked the entire span of the town to stretch my legs after the long ride -- this time without "the British nanny" -- until it was time for dinner. We sat over our meal wondering what our Mary Poppins was doing on "Gulliver's Travels." Suzanne told us that she actually spoke to "Gulliver" before for an inside scoop and that the unlikely pair was taking a chance of getting the short Peruvian into Chile -- usually immigration doesn't allow it.

We theorized what the short Peruvian would do if he couldn't enter the country and was stranded at the border: he could live under a bridge like in "Billy Goat's Gruff" or get a job as a construction cone. If his tall girlfriend stayed with him, they could set up a "shell game" with two other cone-shaped hats and charge money.

"That's so mean you guys, they're in love!" Zoe defended. But her sentiment was only short-lived when she thought that maybe the two could join a freak show together.


WE TURNED INTO OUR DORM with our notes and journals until the lights went off with the generator outside. There was no British nanny to tuck us in with her funny sarcastic comments that night, but we were okay. As I told the "kids" earlier in the day, I still had my cookies -- and "just a bagful of Oreos helps the medicine go down."


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Back to Reality

DAY 91: "Hey, check out the flavor of shampoo," I instructed Sam in the bathroom of the hostel. I was referring to the packet of shampoo someone had previously left. Sam looked over and read it: "placenta." We figured it was for that fresh "newborn" feeling in the morning.


OUR FOURTH AND FINAL DAY IN DALI WORLD started with stops in other pueblos modelos (model villages), including the one where Gilbert and Kate the Aussie stayed in -- both of them were traveling solo in individual jeeps as all of their other passengers went off to Chile. We continued down the bumpy desert road as wild llamas ran across the plains to get out of our way. Sam and I continued to jot quick notes to translate into journal entries later -- a technique she was grateful for me teaching her -- all the time continuing to listen to the same 80s songs from the jeep's speakers. We knew the playlists by heart and knew the next song off the top of our heads.

We stopped in the model village of San Cristobal for a snack and pee break and continued onto Amaritas for lunch. Betty the cook impressed us with a simply-made tuna salad.


OUR FOUR-DAY TOUR technically could have been completed by the night of the third, but the tour companies add on the fourth day for transport just in case the rivers are too deep to cross due to unpredictable rains. Besides, crossing a river without a bridge is best down in broad daylight.

Two rivers had to be crossed to get back to Uyuni -- the first wasn't too deep at all and we rode through like it was a big puddle. However, the second waterway was about four feet deep, so Primo stopped the Land Cruiser at the edge to figure out what to do. Coincidentally, the tape automatically switched over to the beginning of Side B with its forceful opening guitar riffs of Survivor's "Eye of The Tiger." It felt like a Rocky moment.

"Let's just crank up the music and go for it!" I suggested -- but Primo wasn't so foolish. Instead, he opened the hood and rewired something with the battery and then took his jacket off and wrapped it around the engine block to help keep it dry. We hopped back in the jeep, turned off the radio to conserve the battery and head down into the river. The brown muddy waters came almost up to the windows, but Primo, a master at the wheel and the stickshift, continued on until we made it to the other side of the water passage. We cheered at the other side, surprised that no water leaked into the car. Primo took his jacket back from under the hood, like an old-fashioned gentleman who had just laid it down over a puddle for a lady to walk over.

"We have to play 'Sunshine Reggae!'" Zoe suggested from the front seat. "Miss DJ" put it on and we all sang along in celebration. Later we learned the celebration was warranted; Gilbert's truck had stalled in the river and actually shifted with the current for a short while.

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ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF UYUNI, we made a stop at the Train Cemetary. Everyone but me hadn't seen it yet, but it was good for me to go a second time; the first time I didn't go as far as the locomotives. The locomotives made for some interesting photos, including a cheesy one of me playing engineer taken by Sam, and an action-packed one taken by Zoe (picture above). The six of us sat around the graveyard of scrap metal with my last bag of Sour Skittles. Zoe, an industrial design graduate, sat with her sketchbook and drew out the ironworks of the once mighty vehicles.


AS WE LEFT THE SURREAL LANDSCAPE of Dali World and went back to reality, we also left the music of the 1980s. Within proximity of a broadcast, Primo turned on the radio for a change of musical scenery, possibly in hopes to shut us up from our singalongs. It didn't work though because we just sang along when Daft Punk's "One More Time" came on.


ONE MORE TIME we went to celebrate on our last night in Uyuni together. The six of us met up in a pizza place where Gilbert, back from his crazy river crossing, joined up as well. There was no electricity in the restaurant, and the waitress said there were no pizza available. We argued that others had pizza at their tables and that the gas-powered oven was still working, but she explained they were out of ingredients. We settled on pasta, which was very good anyway.

Pascal, Suzanne and Esther went their own way, so Zoe, Sam, Gilbert and I continued on for the rest of the night. They accompanied me on a walk across town to check out the buses for the next day, only to find out the offices were closed. We walked back to the town center with a funny little dog we called Benji, who followed us all the way to -- and inside -- the Kactus bar for a round of drinks. He sat under the table as our adopted pet.

I sat with Gilbert, Sam and Zoe at the table, reminiscing about our trip, still wondering about Mr. Lilliput and Gulliver. We exchanged e-mail addresses and I even signed Sam's "yearbook" -- a small book she kept for people to leave her messages.

That night I slept in a comfortable bed back in civilization, away from landscape of Dali World. It was a surreal feeling to be back in reality.


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Hard to Get High

DAY 92: Potosi, the highest city in the world at 13,353 ft. ASL, was supposed to be a "five hour" ride according to the woman I bought my bus ticket from that morning in Uyuni. However I discovered by the end of the day that getting that high wasn't as easy as she said.

Originally the British girls Sam and Zoe were going to get a bus with me and continue from Potosi to Sucre, but both of them were feeling sick and decided to stay in Uyuni another day to look for a doctor. I too had been coughing for most of the previous week -- I wasn't sure if it was the dust in the desert or if I was coming down with bronchitis or something. To be the safe side, I popped another Cipro antibiotic and chased it with the 100% vitamin C-enriched Tampico fruit drink I had come to like. I packed my bags and hopped on the bus bound for the mountains. I was the only foreigner on board, but I welcomed being a lone traveller again after being in big groups for almost two weeks straight with no time to myself.


THE BUS RODE OUT OF TOWN, out of the desert and up the winding roads that zig-zagged through the Cordillera de Chichas mountain range. Nearby wild llamas trotted outside the window as we drove by. The bus ascended up and up under the warming sun and everything was fine for hours, until the bus stalled -- conveniently near a small village. The conductor and driver went under the cab and banged on a few things -- that solution seems to work wonders in Bolivia -- and soon the bus was up and running again.

Despite the fact that the entire journey was along a bumpy, unpaved road, I tried my best to handwrite my journal since I was so behind -- it was easy task to do with a bagful of Oreos. I managed to write coherent chicken scratch until I came to the last page of what Lara called my "pedophile" notebook because of the baby on the cover. I took a break from writing when the bus stopped in a small town for a lunch break. I wasn't hungry after all the Oreos I had, so I opted not to eat and just went for a walk.


WE CONTINUED THROUGH THE DESERT MOUNTAINS and valleys, passing willowing trees and, for one quick moment, a pair of running ostriches. The bus stopped at seemingly random places in the middle of nowhere to drop off passengers at their request. The driver continued along a long and winding road, closer and closer to its destination, until it stalled a second time -- this time in the middle of nowhere on a desert mountain road.

The conductor and driver went out again to bang things around, but the engine wouldn't start. They banged some more and investigated the fuel tank and fuel lines, but the engine still wouldn't start. Two hours of this transpired -- a woman knitting a doily started with nothing and eventually made one about a foot in diameter. I kept my sanity reading the copy of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones that I had gotten in exhcnage for my Dave Barry book back at the South American Explorers' clubhouse in Cusco, Peru. Eventually the day got darker and there was no more light for me to read its pages.

I went outside to take a leak and investigate the progress of the repairs, but I had seen that the conductor and driver were in the front cab, laying back in their chairs, wrapped in blankets. They knew what I soon realized: the bus would be our shelter for the night.


NIGHTS IN THE DESERT GET EXTREMELY COLD, especially when that desert is at such a high altitude. The temperature dropped to what seemed like freezing temperatures, and I kept warm by keeping my arms inside my sweater with the sleeves empty. I huddled into myself with my bag on my lap and accepted that I was in my "hostel" for the night. The other passengers also accepted the truth and bundled up, still hoping a magical taxi would come and bring them somewhere warm. Several gas tanker trucks rode passed in the other direction, but none of them stopped to help us out.

I heard the pitter-patter of rain on the roof as a storm came through. There wasn't much to do -- at least we were inside -- and I just went to sleep.


I WAS AWAKEN AROUND 10:30 -- it seemed much later -- when I saw a red light blinking coming from the front of the bus. It looked like it was coming from a spaceship or something but I soon realized it was the hazard lights of a cargo truck. The driver had stopped to pick up anyone who wanted to hitch a ride into town. Confused, I followed the handful of passengers who seized the opportunity, got my bag from the roof and hopped in the back of the open-roofed trailer with two other Bolivian guys.


THROUGHOUT SOUTH AMERICA, I had seen people ride in the back of big cargo trailers like the one I was in. I had always seen their heads at the edge of the trailer looking out to the road. I then knew why they did that: to keep their balance and prevent them from rolling all around the trailer.

I drizzle of hail came down from the sky so I put on my rain jacket and hood and tried to keep warm. Being in a drizzle on a freezing night in the middle of nowhere wasn't good for my coughing, but at least I was making progress to somewhere -- anywhere. I rode under the night sky, sort of excited that I was doing something out of the ordinary. I thought to myself, "Hey, I'm like, in the back of a cargo truck right now, at night, in the middle of nowhere across Bolivia."

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After forty minutes through the mountains in the back of the cargo truck (picture above), I finally saw signs of hope: the distant night lights of Potosi.

The truck took us through the industrial suburbs and to the outskirts of the city. The driver dropped us off at some truck depot area; I had no idea where I was. Luckily the area wasn't too deserted; an occasional taxi drove by and I managed to hail one down after a few attempts.

After the long, tiring day, I told the driver to take me to the company of Jesus -- the hostel that is, named "Hostal Compañia de Jesus." The description of it in the Lonely Planet made it sound a little bit more than basic, but after what I had been through I decided to go for a little splurge: a whole extra two bucks over my usual $3 night. The room was nice -- cold, but with many blankets. There was a black and white TV in the corner and I turned it on to see what was on late night TV. The reception was crappy but I managed to see part of an Eagles concert where they played "Hotel California," followed by the music video for George Michael's "Careless Whisper."

I tried to figure out if there was some sort of significance of why these two songs came on, so that I could tie them into the conclusion of my blog entry, but I was too tired after my crazy day trying to get to the highest city in the world. I was just happy to be in a bed rather than cramped in a cold bus in the middle of nowhere.


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January 21, 2004

High and On-Line

DAY 93: I woke up on a cold, southern hemisphere summer day in my Potosi hostel. Being in the highest city in the world at 13,353 ft. ASL, mornings are cold year round. With no real agenda for the day but to chill out, I just stayed under my three llama wool blankets in my room.


I HAD BEEN TRAVELLING IN GROUPS of people for about the past two weeks, without much time to spend with my real travelling companion: my journal, personified by the name "Blog." I powered up my iBook -- with too many new desktop wallpapers to choose from -- and spent the entire morning typing away, sorting through over 400 photos, editing and re-editing. I finished six entries in a row and copied the files to my Memory Stick, before heading out into the city.

I had arrived in Potosi in the middle of the night via a cargo truck, without any decent first impressions of the city. One step out of the hostel, I walked into a sunny day in what I soon discovered was a cool little city way in the mountains. What Potosi lacked in oxygen it made up for in beautiful colonial architecture, like its main Plaza 10 de Noviembre and its cathedral and the nearby Plaza 6 de Agosto. It took twice and many breaths to walk around the city streets and pedestrian malls. A storm came through and I found shelter in yet another Chinese restaurant named after Jackie Chan, where a TV played obscure cartoons in Chinese.

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I spent most of the rest of the day at Tuko's Cafe (picture above), the "World's highest Cybercafe," where I uploaded all the photos and stories I prepped up that morning to the BootsnAll servers. I chatted on-line, answered e-mails and even accepted some freelance design work from a previously-existing client of mine.


THE STORM WENT AWAY and I walked passed the kids playing soccer in front of the Iglesia de San Bernardo to the markets where I looked for supplies, including a new notebook with a different looking cover from my old one that people told me made me look like a pedophile. The new notebook had animals on it -- did that mean I'm into bestiality?

For dinner I had some salchipapas (sliced fried hot dogs over fries) from a street food vendor and then called my folks to wish them a happy anniversary. I went back to my room to chill out with the VCDs I had bought in La Paz that I never got a chance to see. Stifler and The Rock gave me a preview of the Brazilian wilderness in The Rundown until I fell asleep.

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January 22, 2004

Erik Trinidad and The Bolivian Temple of Doom

DAY 94: Potosi isn't just the world's highest city; at one point in history it used to be the richest city in Latin America. Its wealth came from the abundance of silver discovered in the Cerro Rico, the big mountain overlooking the town. Mines were created in the 1500's to extract the silver and other valuable metals, to process them and export them. Back in the day, many of the people in the mine worked as slaves that lived under poor conditions, including children -- much like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the 1984 Steven Spielberg classic where Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) encounters a secret Thuggee cult financially supported by underground mines.

I embraced the notion of adventuring like Indiana Jones into the mines when I signed up for a tour, but with my Asian-looking features and my vintage New York Yankees hat, I looked more like his sidekick Short Round. My hopes of traveling in the likeness of Short Round tanked when my guide Alfredo led me and my group to a changing house where we put on rubber boots, helmets, bright yellow pants and pullovers. Rob, a 22-year-old from Scotland, said we looked like The Village People -- I thought to myself, "Oh no, not more references to the Village People!" -- so I tried to convince them that we looked more like The Beastie Boys in their "Intergalactic" video.

Also in my group was Steve, Rob's friend and travelling companion in their four-mouth journey through South America, and Simon, a nice German guy travelling solo. We hopped in a jeep with our new uniforms on, and then Alfredo and the driver took us to the miner's market for gifts and supplies.


IT IS CUSTOMARY WHEN VISITING THE MINES to bring gifts to the workers. The most common gifts are a bag of coca leaves, a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of this liquor they drink with 96% alcohol in it -- it evaporates off your tongue as soon as it hits it -- but one additional option was to bring explosives. We were a group of four boys -- "explosives" was the magic word.

Alfredo took us to an explosives store, which looked like any other hardware store. Collectively we bought four explosion kits -- three for gifts, one to blow up -- each with a stick of dynamite, a fuse and some extra combustible material for extra BANG! Alfredo cracked open a dynamite stick to show us the nitroglycerin inside -- it looked like a big hunk of wasabi and I was careful not to get too much all over my hands.


WITH STICKS OF DYNAMITE IN OUR HANDS, we rode up the Cerro Rico along a winding dusty road. Rob tried chewing some coca leaves while Steve put his stick of dynamite between his legs for a photo. "This one goes up on the wall."

We stopped at an ore processing area, where women sat in sections to literally sort through the rubble. A woman gave us a demonstration of the different ores -- zinc, copper, silver to name a few -- and we gave her a bag of coca leaves for her troubles. Then went on our way up to the top of the mountain to "blow shit up."

Alfredo unwrapped one of the sticks of dynamite and remolded the wasabi-looking nitroglycerin for extra oompf. With a sadistic smile, he attached a fuse to the wad and inserted the wad into a plastic bag with the extra combustible material. He tied it up tightly to form the bomb -- which we all happily posed for pictures with.

Our guide took the bomb a way down the hill to an open area for the "explosives demonstration." He lit the three minute fuse and walked back up to us as we patiently waited in anticipation for the bomb to go off. (This is a 34 sec. QuickTime Movie file.) Needless to say, the demonstration went off with a bang.


NEAR THE ENTRANCE TO THE MINE, Alfredo mixed water and calcium carbonite into little canisters, which we hooked around our belts like Batman. The chemical reaction of the two produced a flammable stream of gas that went up a tube and to the lamps in our helmets, like a propane torch. The four of us were joined by three Bolivian tourists from Santa Cruz from the same tour company, and like seven dwarfs in yellow suits and flames on our heads, we ventured into the mine.


IN INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, the Thuggee cult worshipped the deity Kali, whom they pledged their devotion to with an offering of flesh and blood. In this Bolivian "temple of doom," the miners worshipped a similar deity that was a little more down to earth; they called him "Tio Jorge" (Uncle George) and instead of human sacrifice, they offered him coca leaves, liquor and cigarettes. We paid our respects to Uncle George, spread some coca leaves in his lap, lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth, and poured him some of the liquor we bought -- plus some on the floor "for his homies." With a blessing from Uncle George, we went off into the mines.


THE POTOSI MINES, NOW PRIVATIZED, ARE NO LONGER operated with a state of slavery. The mines are now "cooperative mines," in which workers voluntarily put in hard hours per day to gather materials to split between himself and a smelter. The conditions however, haven't changed; according to Lonely Planet, miners usually die of silicosis pneumonia within ten years of daily work from all the noxious materials in the air. Some tunnels have poisonous chemical reactions on them; others had fibers of pure asbestos.

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The seven of us made our way through the claustrophic underground passages -- it was like being in a human-sized ant colony. We made our way down into little holes, through low and narrow crawlspaces (picture above), over pits with planks of wood and up ladders with rungs three feet apart from each other. Some ladders had broken rungs and we had to be careful not to fall. At times the flame in our torches would go out and we needed to "kiss" another helmet for a light. There was a span of time when the stream of gas coming from my waist canister was weak and I needed to be "kissed" every twenty seconds.

Like the good guys in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, we helped out the miners as they went away with hammers, picks and for some, piledrivers. Since they were all in the mine on their own free will, there was no need to free them like the children in the Spielburg movie -- instead we just gave them cigarettes, liquor, coca leaves and sticks of dynamite. I'm sure the workers appreciated the explosives; at one point, we felt the vibrations of an explosion above us. Well, boys will be boys.

The boys in our group continued to be boys. Using the flames from their head torches, Steve and Rob wrote their names in the rocky walls. Rob even drew a nice big picture of Uncle George in the passageway where men with wheelbarrows went back and forth.


OUR GROUP OF SEVEN SPLIT UP and it was just the four of us who followed Alfredo down a small rabbit hole, which had to be crawled through backwards. The tunnels led out to an area with a big gaping hole that went down about two stories. One by one, we made our way down it with the help of a rope dangling from somewhere up in the darkness. As I reached for the rope, the flame in my helmet came in direct contact with my left hand -- which ultimately left me with yet another scar on my global trip thus far. I grabbed the rope with both hands to rappel down the chasm, but my foot slipped on a rock and I swung to the far side of the hole, holding the rope for dear life the whole time with my injured hand. Eventually I got my bearing and made my way down into the empty, deserted tunnel underneath.

Our guide Alfredo suddenly started feeling dizzy, which wasn't such a good thing when he was the only one that knew the way out of the underground maze of claustrophia and hazardous materials. He took a swig of water and ventured on. We followed him through the narrowness of the mines to a fork in the tube. He made a left, which took us to the light at the end of the tunnel. If he had gone right like Indiana Jones and Short Round had done in the movie, we might have gone on an exciting mine cart chase, but after inhaling God-knows-what for hours, it was just good to be out in the fresh air.


THE REST OF THE DAY wasn't nearly as exciting. I wandered around town, ate some food and bought some bootleg CDs to listen to while working on the freelance design work I had. I took many short breaks from my work to record, watch and rewatch the explosion video from earlier in the day. Watching the big boom from the nitroglycerin didn't seem to get tired -- it's no wonder the miners don't mind working in their conditions; they get to play with dynamite everyday.


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January 23, 2004

Loogeys in Potosi

DAY 95: In the late summer of 2003, Bolivians just about had it with their president. In protest of their leader, they went on strikes, set up road blocks in the countryside and protested, sometimes violently in the city streets -- only to be dealt with the National Police.

Since the changing of presidents in October 2003, peace came back to the country (allowing tourists like me to get in) and without the protests, the National Police put down their "brass" of arms and picked up another type of "brass" -- tubas, trumpets and trombones -- for the National Police Musical Band.

The musical cops set up a free concert as I walked through the Plaza 10 de Noviembre on an overcast day. The band of about twenty-five officers in green uniform played forceful marching band pieces together. I thought it was funny when after their big finale, I heard the corny two-toned honks of a bicycle horn coming from an ice cream cart vendor.


IT WAS ABOUT NOON when I went out to explore the city -- which wasn't good since most of the museums and churches were closed for their mid-day siesta period. Instead, I wandered beyond the crowded city streets and onto the quieter ones. I decided to investigate the big modern observation tower atop one of the big hills nearby that I figured was too new since it wasn't in my book. I walked down the hilly streets, through the poorer sections of town, along the train tracks and up the big hill to the tower.

I discovered that the structure wasn't yet completed; the final touches of moulding and door handles weren't in place yet. Later I learned that the tower was built in hopes that a company would install a restaurant on top. At the time of this writing there were no takers, so the tower just sort of sat there.

I arrived at the base and met some guy working on the elevator.

"[Is this open?]" I asked.

"[You want to climb up?]" said the construction worker.

"Si."

"[You pay me?]"

"[How much?]"

"[One boliviano.]"

I paid him and climbed up the stairs. I knew that I had been scammed because I heard the guy laughing with some nearby woman about me actually paying him money. No matter, the view at the top deck was impressive as I could see the whole city, the countryside behind on one side, the Cerro Rico on the other.

Being at one of the highest points in the highest city in the world, I thought to myself, "Gee, I could really hock a loogey from way up here." I expectorated like I was about to say something in German and spat over the side of the deck. I watched my wad of saliva disintegrate in the wind as gravity took it down -- it was definitely worth the one boliviano.


LONELY PLANET CALLED THE CASA REAL DE LA MONEDA, the Royal Mint, "Potosi's star attraction and perhaps Bolivia's best museum." After siesta period, I went to see this star attraction the only way possible: on a two-hour guided tour. The tour was conducted entirely in Spanish for about 30 or so people, many of which were native in Spanish anyway. Regardless of the language barrier, I felt the tour was a bit boring as the woman led us to Bolivian's first locomotive, the religious art gallery, the minting room and the room of balances.

Things started picking up when we toured the modern art gallery of the works of Cecilio Guzman de Rojas and the old rolling mills, powered by two mules going around in circles to move the main cog, which were later replaced by electric machines imported from Bridgeton, New Jersey, U.S.A. We also toured the archaeological wing, with its ancient artifacts, ceramics and dead baby mummies found inside a crypt under San Bernardo church.


THE MAIN CATHEDRAL finally had its doors open for a look, and I paid for the tour which gave me photographic privileges. An English-speaking guide explained that the cathedral was actually the second cathedral, built over the first adobe one -- some of the relief sculptures from the original were integrated in the new structure.

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My guide showed me inside the church, the big impressive pipe organ and ultimately led me up to the bell tower for another spectacular view of the city (picture above). Unfortunately, the way the roofs below were designed didn't give me a good straightdown shot for another loogey.


THE SUN WENT DOWN and the temperature dropped, so I went out for a crema de pollo (cream of chicken soup) -- the Bolivians are keen on cream soups. As I walked around the streets at night, a drizzle came down from the sky.

I hoped it wasn't anyone from the top of the observation tower with the same idea that I had.

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January 25, 2004

Down to Warmth

DAY 96: At 13,353 ft. ASL, Potosi not only has its cold nights, it has its cold days too. As I typed away in an internet cafe after my complimentary breakfast, it was so cold I had to wear my woolen hat indoors -- I wished I had some gloves.


ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH, so I hopped on a bus bound for Sucre, Bolivia's real judicial capital (La Paz is merely the de facto capital), at a much lower altitude -- and much warmer climate. After a three-hour bus ride down the Cordillera de Chichas mountain range, I found myself at the bus terminal of the much sunnier capital city. The temperature was still a bit chilly, but warm enough for palm trees to exist in town (picture below).

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A taxi took me to the main Plaza 25 de Mayo where I eventually got a decent hostel two blocks away. They assigned me to a dorm with four beds, but I had the room all to myself. I killed a couple of hours catching up on Blog duties in an internet cafe where there was no escape from 80s pop music. In fact, everywhere I went in town -- cafes, shops and pizzerias -- played the likes of Toto's "Rosanna" and Information Society's "Walking Away."


EIGHTIES POP SONGS DIDN'T DOMINATE the capital city though; as I walked through the Plaza 25 de Mayo that night, a free concert was set up by the government of Sucre. A twelve-man ensemble -- three flautists and nine acoustic string instrumentalists -- took position on a makeshift stage to play traditional Bolivian tunes. All the locals seemed to recognize the tunes because they clapped to the rhythm in all the appropriate sections. I was quite impressed with the woodwind/acoustic performance; usually I only heard traditional songs on a tape or CD, but it was totally amazing when I saw it live and realized the concentration needed to keep twelve guys play in harmony.

The concert in the plaza was some sort of Bolivian cultural awareness concert, because after the twelve men played a variety of tunes, they were followed by two dancers that danced the traditional Cueca dance -- a sensual routine in which a man and woman twirled around handkerchiefs as a form of courtship. The dance was followed by the third and final performing group, the Bolivian military band, which played a couple of numbers that sounded like they belonged in a funeral procession in Sicily. Things picked up with them when, out of the blue, they switched from depressing marches to a brass rendition of "Morena de Mi Corazón," the song made popular by Antonio Banderas and Los Lobos at the beginning of 1995's Desperado.


IT WAS ONLY ABOUT NINE O'CLOCK when the free government-sponsored concert finished. With the power of The Blog, I managed to track down Sam and Zoe, whom I met on my tour of the Bolivian salt flats and desert. I met them at Bibliocafe, a small but crowded pub near the main plaza. They filled me in on their past couple of unproductive sick days -- Zoe had food poisoning and Sam had an eye infection. They were glad to be better and out again for their first "real" day out in Sucre.

The live band at the cafe was only up to the par of a high school garage band, so we left after a couple of drinks to a salsa club -- the vibe there wasn't great either. We ended up spending the rest of the night at Joyride, a Belgian-run pub that called itself "possibly the best bar in town." This was probably true because Sam and Zoe had been there four times since they got into Sucre. We sat at a table in the outdoor back patio until the early morning, chatting over drinks, garlic bread and nachos served with guacamole (which Zoe calls "Guatamala sauce"). We reminisced about our trip to the salt flats and continued our inside jokes of the couple we knew as "Mr. Lilliput and Gulliver."

After being in the cold temperatures of high mountain cities for three days, it was great to come down to the warmth of a new city -- and of familiar faces.

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January 26, 2004

Kids in the Park

DAY 97: "¿Puedo tenir un Desayuno de Ch'aqui?" I ordered to the waitress in the Joyride cafe at a table with Sam and Zoe. The "Hangover breakfast" -- an open-faced egg and ham sandwich -- came after a few minutes and it really hit the spot at nine in the morning. It was a very "grown-up" start to what would otherwise be a very juvenile day.


ALTHOUGH NOT MENTIONED IN THE LONELY PLANET SHOESTRING GUIDE, there were posters in every cafe, tour agency and hostel for the Dino Truck, which took willing tourists on a tour of the Cal Orck'o, the site of the world's largest set of dinosaur tracks. The three of us signed up for a mid-day tour and waited for the kitschy-looking truck in and around the main Plaza 25 de Mayo, killing time watching the inauguration ceremony for the new police motorcycle brigade and a Tae Kwon Do demonstration that was so choreographed it looked like a Backstreet Boys video. We also played with finger puppets in a nearby souvenir store, finding characters to represent each of us, as well as the characters we met on the Bolivian salt flat/desert tour. The storekeeper, a grumpy little girl who couldn't have been older than eleven, was way more mature than we were.


IN 1994, JUST A YEAR AFTER THE ORIGINAL JURASSIC PARK hit theaters and put dinosaurs back into mainstream culture, a discovery was made by a group of construction workers just outside of Sucre, Bolivia. What they discovered, according to the paleontologists that later came to do research, was the longest set of dinosaur tracks in the world. Like the character John Hammond in the Michael Crichton novel-turned-Steven Spielburg blockbuster, the evidence of dinosaurs was capitalized on by the tourism industry. In fact, there are plans in the near future to actually build a dinosaur theme park near the site in hopes to generate more revenue.

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Intentionally wearing my dark frame glasses to pose as the character Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum), I waited near the cathedral with Sam and Zoe -- posing as the kids, Tim and Lex -- along with about twenty other tourists that could have posed for any of the other characters in the film. The brightly painted truck with childish drawings of dinosaurs on the side picked us up and took us about thirty minutes out of the city and to the park in the surrounding mountains, made noticable with the concrete dinosaur on the side of the road (picture above, notice me hanging off the tail). The three of us were wondering where the cheesy construction hats were that we saw the tourists wear in the posters, until we got them at the main office at the site and posed for another stupid picture. The other tourists got their helmets as well, and we went off in two groups -- one Spanish, one English -- into the construction site like workers in the quarry on The Flintstones, after a brief demonstration using plastic toy dinosaurs.

Because of the geological forces of the earth over millions of years, the tracks were no longer flat on the ground like conventional footprints. Pressure forced the plates of stone to eject upwards from the ground, making the footprints look as if they went up a wall -- a little boy in our group thought they were Spider-Man tracks. Our guide led us on the short, one-hour tour to the different sets of tracks on the rock wall from the late Cretaceous period, including those from allosauruses, bronotsauruses and velociraptors. The only stupid pose the three of us could think to do with them was pretend we were playing Dino-Twister.


AFTER OUR JOURNEY INTO WHAT WILL SOON BE known as "Cretaceous Park," we arrived back in the city and immediately went looking for the Museo de los Niños, the children's museum, which Lonely Planet implied might be good for a little kiddie fun. We walked across town, passed the Convento de Santa Teresa, to the Plaza Anzures, where we discovered the Cafe Gourmet Mirador, an outdoor eatery with a beautiful view of Sucre's white-walled, red-roofed buildings. We sat at a table for snacks to enjoy the view, listening to Andrea Bocelli, Sade and Louis Armstrong until a live band came to perform traditional Bolivian songs with churangos, drums and flutes. The group looked as it was a family of performers, with three kids seemingly embarassed by their father that would sing and go off laughing like Disney's Tigger at certain parts of the song. The three children looked disgruntled in their traditional clothes, never smiling -- particularly the little girl when she performed a dance solo -- and we figured they were forced into the act by their father. We dubbed them "The Moody Jacksons."


"[YOU KNOW THIS IS A MUSEUM FOR CHILDREN?]" the young lady at the ticket counter said when we asked for three tickets into the Museo de los Niños.

"Si," we told her. She let us in, three for the price of two.

There wasn't much to the children's museum; it was just two big rooms, one filled with displays and interactive exhibitions about energy and transportation. The other room was a lot more fun, with a puppet theater that Sam snuck into and a children's library where, with much determination, I found a copy of Gulliver's Travels to continue our inside jokes of the short Peruvian we encountered on our salt flat/desert tour.

Our admission fee into the children's museum included a guided tour of the nearby gardens, sectioned off into four areas to represent the four environmental regions of Bolivia: the antiplano, the oriente, the chaco and the valleys. The young lady took us around the gardens in hopes that perhaps we'd learn something about her country, but we were too concerned with poses for stupid photos, including one of me getting romantic with a wooden llama.

We had a cocktail back at the outdoor Cafe Gourmet Mirador until it started raining -- the waitress led us away from the nearby arches to the nearby treehouse in the playground for shelter. It was there that we met Rich from the U.K. who ultimately joined up with us for dinner that night at a restaurant with live Bolivian music. The band was a lot more cheery than "The Moody Jacksons" we saw perform earlier that day -- almost too cheery when I secret told them the lie that it was Sam's birthday.

"No wonder why they kept pointing at me and smiling," Sam said. The band played a traditional diddy that integrated Sam's name in honor of her birthday -- two months before the actual day.


WE WENT BACK TO OUR REGULAR HANGOUT, the Joyride Cafe, for coffee and cocktails yet again, this time sitting with a market research guy who interviewed us on the service of the Dutch cafe. With our limited Spanish, we gave them a lot of comments using the words "muy bien" and "tranquilo."

We camped out in the backyard patio with the outdoor heaters until we were too exhausted to carry on and went to our respective hostels. After a dayful of dinosaurs, playgrounds and puppet theaters, even big kids get tired.

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January 27, 2004

Another Day in The Trinidad Show

DAY 98: The thing to do on a Sunday morning in Sucre is to leave the city for the day and go to Tarabuco, a smaller town with its lively Sunday markets. Zoe, Sam and I hopped on a bus to these markets, a one-hour drive away. The "Moody Jacksons," the family musical band we saw perform the day before at the Cafe Gourmet Mirador, was also on the bus ride. Again, the kids played unhappily while their father laughed like Tigger in Disney's Winnie the Pooh at certain parts of the song.


"ARE YOU GETTING A PHONE NUMBER ALREADY?" I teased Zoe as she wrote her lowest price in a notepad, trying to bargain down a woolen handbag from a vendor. She eventually got the 25 boliviano bag down to 17 -- with the exchange rate, even at 30 Bs. it would have been a bargain. We walked around the market
around Tarabuco's plaza with its dozens of vendors selling everything from hardware to the cone-shaped hats that the short Peruvian wore on our salt flat/desert trip. On me, all I needed was it to be a bit bigger with holes cut in the front so I could pose as Mushmouth from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

After having been to the Museo de Arte Indiginia, Sam was keen on buying a small tapistry. Conveniently, as we sat at a small and modest-looking sidewalk cafe for a little breakfast, the shopping experience came to us as dozens of tapistry vendors hounded us for a sale. After Sam bought one she wanted, the table-service vending turned from convenient to fucking annoying.

A familiar face broke up the vending madness: Gilbert the Dutchman, who I roomed with in La Paz and the three of us bumped into at all the stops on our salt flat/desert tour. He had made his way south and looped back north, ending up in Tarabuco as it was the thing to do on a Sunday from Sucre. He joined us for a coffee, served with more of the aggressive salespeople that wouldn't go away.

"Just tell them it's ugly," I suggested. I wasn't even being hassled as much and I was getting annoyed.

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WE SPLIT UP to wander the town at our own paces. I visited the food market, with its spectrum of colors on the ground from fresh fruits and vegetables, to the collection of foosball tables in the center of the plaza -- Bolivians love them their foosball -- to the edge of town where I found some mules waiting around for something to do (picture above). By early afternoon we had all seen enough of Tarabuco and head back on the buses back to Sucre for lunch at our usual place, the Joyride Cafe. Gilbert joined the three of us in the new trousers he bought, but we left him there as he ordered a second entree to satisfy his hunger.

Zoe, Sam and I left Gilbert and went off to the bus terminal. The girls tried to get a ticket for a 5:30 bus to La Paz that day, while I bought a 5:30 ticket for a bus the following day to Santa Cruz. It was smart on my behalf to buy an advance ticket; all the buses to La Paz were full, and so the girls had no choice but to buy tickets for the next day.

"I guess we're going to be characters on your website another day," Sam told me.

"Yeah, it's like The Truman Show," I said, citing the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey as a man whose entire life is broadcasted for entertainment to a large audience.


ALTHOUGH THE YOUNG WOMAN AT MY HOSTEL thought it to be a bit weird, she fulfilled our request to get the girls in my dorm -- I was the only one in there with three spare beds anyway. With an extended night in Sucre and and extended appearance in The Trinidad Show, Sam, Zoe and I left the new "party dorm" and went out for dinner at a pizzeria on the plaza, not far from the beautifully lit up cathedral. For about the eighth time since their arrival in Sucre, the girls and I went back to the Dutch cafe Joyride, where we met up with Gilbert and Torsen, a Dane we met briefly in Tarabuco. We sat at a table in the back patio, watching the dozen drunken British teenagers making fools of themselves doing the Running Man and pole dancing rather unseductively.

"Ugh, do they have to be British?" Sam complained, embarrassed with the youth of her nation.

"Don't worry, just switch the accent and they'd just be annoying Americans," I said. Gilbert felt the same way about some of his fellow Dutchman.


THE INTERNATIONAL GROUP OF THE FIVE OF US went looking for some nightlife entertainment. The only open place on a Sunday night that we found was a humid, scummy nightclub that made my glasses fog up as soon as we got inside. We didn't dig the vibe there and just went to entertain ourselves back in the "party dorm" with a bottle of juice, a bottle of cheap vodka and a deck of playing cards. We spent the night and early morning having fun playing playing drinking games rather annoyingly and loudly.

If we had been in the Joyride Cafe, I'm sure other Brits, Americans, Danes and Dutch would have been embarrassed the way we were with those high school brats. If we really were broadcast on TV like in The Truman Show, I'm sure the ratings would have tanked as well, unless it was on MTV of course.

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Suckers in Sucre

DAY 99: After a late night in the "party dorm," Zoe, Sam and I just slept in until we had to get up for our check-out time at noon. We got our gear together, sorted out our laundry to bring to a laundromat and went back yet again to the Joyride Cafe for much needed "Desayunos de Ch'aqui", the "Hangover breakfasts."

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By the time we were done eating eggs, ham and hash browns, it was siesta period in town, and most of the museums we wanted to check out were closed for mid-day. We killed time in an internet cafe listening to the attendant's medley of 80s songs. After blogging and instant messaging for a couple of hours, we went off to find the Casa de la Libertad near the police station (picture above) for a little culture on our last afternoon in the judicial capital of Bolivia. However on the way trying to find it, we hit a snag -- Zoe realized she didn't have her wallet, and she was convinced someone had snagged it.

We went back through the plaza to the internet cafe to retrace our steps. There was no way anyone could have taken the wallet from Zoe's zippered bag, but it didn't hurt to follow the same path we took to refresh her memory.

"Five hundred fucking bolivianos and my bank card!" a frantic Zoe said. "It's no the money, it's the principle. No, it's not the principle, it's the feeling that someone knicked it!" She went ahead in a frenzy asking people we encountered on the way while Sam and I hung back. We kept our calm sucking on some of the Sour Skittles I had with me.

"I bet you it's in the bottom of her bag," Sam confided in me (later permitting me to write about it here). "But I can't tell her or she'll think I'm patronizing her." Apparently something like this had happened before.

Zoe gave up and went to a phone center to cancel her card in the U.K. Without any money, Sam had to pay for the long distance call. On our way out of the store, Zoe suddenly found something in the "secret" pocket in the back of the new bag she bought in Tarabuco the day before.

"Guys, you won't believe this."

Zoe went back to the phone booth to try and quickly uncancel the card she had all the time. With the day getting shorter and our bus departure times approaching, Sam and I went off to pick up our laundry. "I knew she'd find it in her bag," Sam told me as we stopped off at a street vendor.

"Hey, that woman is breast feeding," I said, my mind obviously somewhere else. I bought three packs of Oreos for my nighttime bus journey from the woman with the baby sucking away at her nipple.


ZOE WAS BACK AT THE HOSTEL when Sam and I arrived like Mr. and Mrs. Klaus with a big bag full of clean clothes. We refolded and rolled our clothes, repacked our bags -- Zoe was a lot calmer than she was just an hour before.

"Sorry about that," she unnecessarily apologized to me.

"That's okay," I answered. "It's going to be on the internet in two days."


THE THREE OF US split a taxi to the bus terminal together but split up for our two separate 5:30 buses.

"I guess this is goodbye again," Sam said.

"You know where to find me," I answered.

We bid our farewells to each other and hopped on our respective night buses: theirs bound sixteen hours west to La Paz, mine bound sixteen hours east to Santa Cruz. Two of my sixteen hours were killed with a Spanish-subtitled screening of Romeo Must Die on the video monitors. I watched it while munching on some of the Oreos I bought from that breast-feeding vendor, wishing I had some milk to go with it like her baby did.

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January 28, 2004

Keeping Cool in Santa Cruz

DAY 100: My night bus from Sucre drove along a bumpy dirt road through the night, under the desert moonlight that made the shapes of cacti look like ghosts in the desert. As the darkness of morning turned into dawn, the ambient light revealed a change of scenery -- we had made it out of the desert and into the lush, tropical green landscape of the jungle. The bus made it to the Santa Cruz terminal one hour ahead of schedule on a sunny morning of what would be a scorcher of a day.

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A taxi took me to the Alojamiento Santa Barbara, a hostel four blocks from the main plaza (picture above). I arrived at the same time as a big Hungarian guy who had just flown in from Mexico City. Later I found out he was Zolly, an animator and Greenpeace activist -- we decided to share a room before I knew anything about him. We got the room with two beds and then head out to a nearby cafe for breakfast.


SANTA CRUZ, LIKE IQUITOS, PERU, is different from the other mountain cities in its country. On the eastern end of Bolivia, Santa Cruz lies in the Oriente, with its jungle-like conditions that seems a bit more like the Carribean or Southeast Asia. Along with the jungle-like vegetation comes the hot, balmy climate, this day more than normal -- the cover story of the local newspaper was about its 41 degree celsius highs.

Zolly and I went back to the hostel, our temporary home and that of others, including young Argentines and Japanese backpackers who were just sitting around the courtyard.

"Usually I think the people who stay in the hostel are lazy, but it's so hot, I am going to be lazy," Zolly said. He took a nap while I went off to an air-conditioned internet cafe to catch up on Blog duties.


WITH THE ARRIVAL OF THE EARLY AFTERNOON came sweltering humidity and temperature. It was the kind of weather where no one was in the sun, where people tried desperately to get under any kind of shade or shadow. As the sunblock melted and dripped off my skin, I went around for a walk anyway, through the main Plaza 24 de Septiembre and its nearby colonial architecture of the Convento San Francisco, to the more modern Parque El Arenal with its phone booths in the shapes of tropical animals. The heat really got to me and I found refuge in a cafe with a nice chocolate milkshake.


SOME OF THE SEAMS IN MY BOOTS had torn from their soles and rather than buy new shoes, I went to go have them repaired for a fraction of the cost. I went off to a shoe repair shop on a street where there were dozens of shoe repair shops -- I figured it was the Shoe Repair District. While waiting for the repairs, my sandals and I went to the Museo de Arte Sagrado, inside the cathedral. The religious museum had displays of vestments and paintings and artifacts made out of silver from the mines of Potosi -- but the most impressive thing there was the air conditioning.

The afternoon sun was still coming down on my head and I figured it was about time I got a trim from what Blogreaders markytand Christy referred to as my "Hobbit hair." I went to an old-fashioned barber who cut down my locks with non-electric manual tools, taking off the unnecessary warmth -- and weight -- off the top of my head.

I picked up my boots and met Zolly at the hostel. I helped him search for a cheap MP3 player in the electronics stores -- there were no good ones -- and then went off to the Victory Bar for ice cold beers, food and conversations ranging from different animation software packages to perilous bus journeys. While most of my stories were of mechanical failure, they were pale in comparison to Zolly's -- his bus in Mexico was actually pulled over by banditos, and they all ended up in the automatic gun crossfire between cops and robbers. Some bad guys ended up as corpses on the side of the road.


THE NIGHTS IN SANTA CRUZ were almost as bad as the days -- hot and sticky. Without an air conditioner or even a fan, we just kept the door open to let any sort of air in the room. Aside from the bites and buzzings-in-my-ear of mosquitos, we couldn't sleep because of the loud Spanish and Argentines out in the courtyard drinking and chatting it up with their loud radio playing. I mean, granted, I was one of these kids in Sucre, but at least we had the courtesy to confined ourselves in a closed room -- these guys were yelling across the courtyard rather than sit next to each other. And if that wasn't bad enough, the Japanese guys started playing a makeshift digeridoo that they had made that afternoon. Nothing says "No Sleep" than the sounds of a guy learning the digeridoo.

Zolly got so fed up that he got out of bed to yell at the youths to quiet them down. He was only met with mocks later on that made fun of his use of the word "fucking" in his Eastern European accent.

Although I felt bad for the Hungarian, I just stayed in bed and tried to relax myself to sleep, knowing that keeping my cool in Santa Cruz doesn't necessarily mean getting a haircut or an ice cold beverage.

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January 29, 2004

Money Matters in the Mountains

DAY 101: After a quick breakfast of empanadas de pollo, Zolly and I split a taxi to the bus station for our day-trip to the nearby mountain town of Samaipata, a popular weekend getaway town for Santa Cruzians. It was possible to get there and its surrounding highlights on a bus tour, but we decided to wing it with public transportation. However, when we got to the bus terminal, we found that no public bus went to Samaipata.

Using my 100-day old Spanish, I asked around to figure out what our options were with a local woman and some guy on vacation from Rio de Janiero who warned us about all the "stealers and killers" in the popular Brazilian metropolis. Zolly and I were eventually led to a group of collectivos (public carpool services) where we got a car that would take us to the mountain town. The car, although a Japanese Toyota, was probably imported from the U.K. or Australia because the dashboard was on the righthand side with the steering wheel ripped out and sloppily reinstalled on the lefthand side.

We picked up three other passengers at a designated stop of the collectivo agency to fill up the car and make it the trip worthwhile at 25 Bs. (bolivianos) per person. With us was a Bolivian woman, a German woman and an Englishman named John, on holiday from his job as a geography professor for the royal family of the United Arab Emrates. The driver took us the tiring two and a half hours down the modern city highway to the two-lane mountain road, up to Samaipata at 5,250 ft. ASL. The driver dropped Zolly, John and I off in the main plaza before driving the ladies to their nearby respective destinations.


THERE WASN'T TOO MUCH TO SAMAIPATA. As a weekend destination, it was pretty dead on a weekday. The weather was very hot, so Zolly and I got a couple of cold ones and had them under the shade of a tree in the plaza. We had a quick lunch and met John back at the town square for our ride. I, posing as translator for the other two, had asked our driver to come back for us at one o'clock to bring us to the nearby ruins.


EL FUENTE, A PRE-INCAN CEREMONIAL SITE in the mountains about 10 km. from Samaipata was where our driver took us next. No one knows exactly why the ceremonial site was made and several theories exists -- including one of exterrestrial use. Zolly, John and I walked around the site, seeing the ruins of what could have been the place to be before the arrival of the Incas. Under the blazing sun, we needed to cool down for a bit, so I, again using my 100-day Spanish, had the driver take us to the nearby waterfalls.

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STOPPING AT THE PACHA WATERFALLS (picture above) was a nice and refreshing way to break up the journey back to Santa Cruz. The waterfalls had been capitalized on as a pay-to-use swimming hole. Zolly went into for a dip in the trunks he had brought with him, alongside an American family that was trying to keep cool as well. I just waded around in the cool water and admired the nearby mountains with Professor John.

The way back to Santa Cruz seemed a lot longer, even though it wasn't. The driver was only suppose to take us back to the collectivo stop, but I had him take us across town to the main plaza where our hostels were. The driver charged us 200 Bs., total for the three of us for the return trip, including all the touristy stops along the way. That broke down to about 67 Bs. per person, about nine dollars (US). Considering that the driver was pretty much our personal chaffeur for the day, having waited in the car for us while we hiked and swam, having driven us to wherever we wanted, I thought that was okay -- Zolly didn't feel the same way.

"It's too much," he complained before I paid the man. "It should only be about forty," he said after doing the math in his head to calculate the gas prices, ignoring the "waiting"/"time is money" thing that I factored in.

"Sixty seven is only about five pounds," Professor John said, also willing to pay the driver the asking price.

Zolly started to get really mad. "I hate it when Americans and British say that," he said. "It's cheap to Westerners, but it's expensive here. If he charges us sixty-seven today, he'll charge seventy or eighty to the next, and the price will always go up because you just pay what they ask." While Zolly did have a point, in my head I was thinking, "Well, if you're so keen on bargaining down the price, learn the language so you can do so." -- but I let it lie.

In the end, Zolly just paid the 67 Bs., still with a feeling of being ripped off.


WHILE ZOLLY COOLED DOWN in the hostel, I cooled down in an air-conditioned internet cafe to catch up with "Blog." When I got back, Zolly was a happy Hungarian again and we went out for dinner and beers. Professor John was supposed to meet us at "8:30," but we were ten minutes late and he never showed. Zolly figured that as a teacher he was the punctual type and gave up after not seeing us.

Like Zolly, the temperature cooled down a little bit that night, although we still had to sleep with the doors wide open to let any sort of air in. The loud Argentines from the night before had gone, and the Japanese guys didn't play their digeridoo. If they had started playing perhaps I would have been willing to pay for them to shut up, but then again, even I know that would have been a rip off.

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