Yesterday was an interesting day. It began with more car racing – they zoomed up the hill right next to my house, and everyone gathered outside to watch. Out in my residential neighborhood, people set up little stands selling food and drinks and people brought little chairs out of their houses, which they set up inside the yellow tape. Some people had radios and would warn others when a car was about to arrive so that we could hug the buildings as the cars screeched around the curve.
There was a new guy who got to the volunteer house yesterday, so we walked down to the plaza, had to walk in tons of circles and loops because we kept being barricaded in. Eventually found lunch, which was hard because the world shuts down on Sunday – even the usually bustling central market was fairly empty. There were no museums or anything to go to, so we walked over to sit in the grass at the kid’s park. Not long after we sat down, a guy started to put on a show in a concrete circle. He spoke really quickly in Spanish, so we were mostly just really confused about what was going on. He started out by sticking a bunch of large safety pins in a stuffed rabbit and thought that was hilarious. Then came a stuffed snake out of his bag that he moved as if it was alive and kept kissing it and scaring all the little kids. More and more people gathered in a circle around him. He had a walking puppet of some sort of animal, that really upset someone’s pet dog – the owner had to hold back the pup from lunging at the puppet. It was eventually clear that the performer was doing a improv comedy show, but his daughter decided she wanted to be part of the show too and ran into the center and started jokingly biting him, which he said was better than a dog bite. But then it kept going and going, the girl wouldn’t stop biting and hitting and lunging at her dad, over and over again for way too long, but she thought it was hilarious. For a while, it was like we were just watching a show of father-daughter wrestling. After making some other jokes that didn’t make sense to me, he started stripping off his shirt, belt, hat, shoes. He put on a traditional vest from another area of the country and pulled on a pair of ridiculous looking stripped pants and a different hat.
Then came the fire. His first act was to drink a mouthful of what was probably gasoline, light a metal stick on fire, and blow on it so that it looked like he was breathing fire. The bursts of flames were huge and the kids loved this, so he did it quite a few times. After running the flame through his hands and across his arms (which I don’t understand how he managed), he put the fire out by putting it in his mouth and then breathing out the smoke. I could only understand bits and pieces of what he said because he was speaking quickly and to a large audience, and it’s much easier to understand someone when they are speaking directly to me. He said something about needing a volunteer and wanting a woman from the crowd, but nobody volunteered. Suddenly, he got excited and said that he should choose a foreigner, and kept making slit throat gestures and laughing. We were the only foreigners there, so I got dragged onto my feet and into the middle of the circle, having no idea whatsoever what was going on. He asked where I was from and then said that his brother was from Virginia and that it was x km from California. He asked me if that was right and I had no idea, so everyone had quite the laugh that he knew more about my country than I did. I was then told that he would set his head on fire and I would have to help him and he gave me some rapid confusing instructions on what to do. He had me practice with no fire, but I hadn’t really gotten the message of what I was supposed to do. He had his daughter try to show me, but she just goofed off so the wife demonstrated how I was to put a towel over his face and head. He then had me sit down for a bit while he circled the crowd and got coins from them as he spouted out some propaganda. He kept joking around, and it was unclear if the money was for poor kids or his family, or for both, as he kept saying. I sat there having no idea how long this was going to last. I was smack in the middle of the crowd, everyone staring at the gringa in interest. Eventually he finished his money round and came bit, lit his stick on fire, counted to 3, rubbed it on his head so that his hair was flaming, counted to 3 again, and then I threw the towel over his face and hair to put out the fire. Everyone cheered and the show was over. His hair was definitely a bit singed and the whole act was really odd and confusing, but it was definitely not how I expected to spend my afternoon! On the way out, I kept hearing the word gringa, but I don’t know what they were saying about me. News spreads here really fast and they love to talk about anything out of the ordinary, I hope people don’t point me out on the street!
My kids this morning were fun, but they are so badly behaved. The teacher showed me the weekly schedule, which has ridiculously huge blocks of not much to do, and I talked to her about the need to have much shorter segments with structured activities. She seemed to understand, so hopefully things will start to change. But today, we had 1.5 hours to review colors (using only a clown toy and whatever little games I could come up with), and then it was supposed to be another 1.5 hours for song time. I was with a group of 4-6 year olds, some of whom knew their colors pretty well, but most of them just kept running off and beating each other up and refusing to listen. I tried to teach them Old McDonald translated into Spanish, but they do not know how to sit still unless they are yelled at by one of the teachers and thrown into a corner, often not even knowing what they have done wrong. I got a few of them to participate, and did it again a bit later too, so hopefully they will at least be able to focus on something for a short time.
The other volunteer and I took a group of eight outside with some hula hoops. I gave them a little lecture before we went outside that they needed to listen to us no matter what when we were out there, and they all agreed. They had fun chasing the hoops and getting their energy out, and I showed one of the girls how to use her hoop as a sort of jump rope and she liked practicing that. But the kids kept running off where they weren’t supposed to. They didn’t care at all when we threatened them with losing their outside privileges. Tried to get a game of red light-green light going, but they had no focus and wouldn’t even listen to the rules of the game. We’ll try again when we don’t have any toys outside with us – though one of the boys was absolutely awful the entire time and I told the teacher that he can’t come outside with us anymore. Getting them back inside was of course a struggle.
We then took the tiny guys to lunch, but lunch wasn’t ready so they were expected to sit in their chairs for 20 minutes doing nothing. I played a bit of touch your nose with one finger, touch your ears, etc for those who were responsive, but half of them were in their own little world. When the food was finally ready, they ate their soup better than the day before, but their segundo was steaming hot and ridiculous to expect them to eat, so that meant more waiting and crying and violence. I wish these kids had a little bit more structure and discipline instilled in them so that I at least could start from somewhere above the bottom, but even sitting in a circle is impossible to do, let alone have everyone focus on an activity for even a few minutes.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Car Racing and The Best Playground Ever
5/28/11 1:22pm
I’m sitting in a gazebo in the central plaza, surrounding by the sounds of roaring motors, whistles, and cheers. I walked over here this morning, intending to visit a few museums, but was met instead by a huge commotion as people were preparing for the race to begin. Blowup advertisements and signs along the roads, balloon sellers, beer stands, cell phone promotions, and of course the usual vendors, dogs, and masses of pigeons. Many boys had climbed up trees or statues to get a better view. There were countless sports cars brightly painted and covered in advertisements of phone, beer, and cement companies. Groups of men with helmets and women in stilettos and bright spandex racing suits surrounded each car as they made the finishing touches to the engines and wheels. People pressed against the blue gates that made up the sidelines, but some news announcers with microphones and cameras were allowed in the street. People around me held radios or listened to the rapid Spanish sports broadcast on their cell phones. When the whistle was blown, the car revved up and sped down the street and around the corner, sometimes making awful popping sounds as it went. The street where the race started was gated off from people, but the following streets were not. People stayed in the street to watch up close for as long as they could, till the car turned the corner and a guy with a yellow flag blew his whistle ferociously until everyone jumped to the sidelines at the last minute possible as the car smoked past. After a few minutes, the whole spectacle began again with another car, and another.
After watching a bit, I wandered more through the city, passing again by the bustling central market and walking till I reached the area of Parque Bolivar. The kids area looked like an amusement park and I was surprised there wasn’t a charge to get in. It was basically an amazing playground with some added on amusement park bits. There were countless swing sets and slides of every color imaginable for kids of all sizes. Brightly painted climbing structures and trampolines with big balls to bounce on. There were little Bugs Bunny and dinosaur bouncy houses and a blowup slide. In the center was a little café shaped like a castle and around the back of it were teens playing foozball. Grassy hills where people napped in the sun or played with their dogs, who were clearly owned in that they all wore sweaters. There was one bit where people could pay a small fee for a few rides, from a small Ferris wheel to an electrical worm train that rode in circles to little flying cars that went round and round. But mostly, the kids were happy bouncing between all of the structures in this huge vibrant park, complete with flower beds and tall trees.
As I roamed around, I came across a small kitten sitting in the middle of a bed of flowers. He was maybe 3 months old, all white with one green eye and one blue. The kitten clamored over scattered hoses and made his way over to where I sat so that he could give me a thorough inspection and nuzzle against my leg. I’m still surprised to see so many cats here, all so social, but it was especially odd to find this little white kitten alone in the middle of a flower bed. A nearby vendor soon called to him and he sprinted over to her to get a little snack, and then went prancing around again as kittens do, tossing dirt, pawing at bikes, trying to climb into bags and trash bins. A little bit later when I was swinging in the shade nearby, I saw a few little boys tormenting the poor guy, chasing him and grabbing his tail.
I walked across the road to the adult portion of the huge park, where I climbed a narrow and dizzying spiral staircase to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It’s a miniature replica built by the same person who constructed the original. I had to walk across a little bridge to reach the tower because it was surrounded by a moat, where a guy in rubber boots waded around and scooped out all the garbage. (Random side note – two sisters around eight and ten just came to sit in the gazebo, the younger with a Hello Kitty purse and the older one carrying a coach purse with a tiny Pomeranian puppy stuffed inside. The pup is wearing a little shirt that says Best In Show. Quite odd to see here, but parts of this city are definitely on the wealthier end.) Anyway, back in the park, there were European-looking pathways with tons of trees and flowerbeds, signs saying to care for the park, trash cans and even recycling bins, and many locals resting on benches or walking around. There was one stretch with artisan booths, food vendors, a company offering to improve ones reading and comprehension skills, and lots of ice cream stalls. Across the street were brilliantly white government buildings that stretched across entire blocks.
As I headed back towards the central plaza, I walked with a guy who teaches Spanish at another of the schools in the area. He spoke in English and I spoke in Spanish, except when we corrected each other’s mistakes. It was interesting to hear that he had three dogs who all lived in his house and backyard and never roamed out on their own. There are so many different classes of people and animals here, but not much of the rich taking care of the poor.
Back in the central plaza, I sat down with a vegetarian saltena and an ice cream to type and watch the continuing bustle of the race. During lunchtime, the cars took a break and the motorcycles did their run, but now the cars are back, zooming around like crazy. From what I can understand, this is a two day long event and the finals are tomorrow, when the winners will receive a trophy and a money prize.
Of the three big cities I’ve seen so far, Cochabamba was by far the most Europeanized, with fancy boutiques, outdoor cafes with wifi, a huge university, and many families with their own cars. Most Bolivians that are able to travel abroad are from Cochabamba, that’s where the money is. Though there were definitely those very sketchy areas of the city by the train station, there always will be those sorts of places. In La Paz, I didn’t see the wealthier part of the city, but the part where I was based was constantly bustling with people in traditional dress and had lots of interesting streets and old fashioned buildings. Everything was nice and cheap, but it was really hard to find much vegetarian food or even a trash can. There were almost no privately owned cars – the streets were filled with microbuses, taxis, and the occasional stoplight that everyone ignored. Here in Sucre is a nice in between with many remnants of traditional culture, a mix of private cars and taxis, and food on all ends of the spectrum. Everyone congregates together in the central part of the city around the many plazas filled with fountains, trees, and statues. As you stray into the more residential areas, the socioeconomic lines are very clear by the condition of the houses, the number of dogs roaming the streets, and the proximity to paved or easy to walk roads.
Vroom, these speedy cars are ridiculously loud.
I’m sitting in a gazebo in the central plaza, surrounding by the sounds of roaring motors, whistles, and cheers. I walked over here this morning, intending to visit a few museums, but was met instead by a huge commotion as people were preparing for the race to begin. Blowup advertisements and signs along the roads, balloon sellers, beer stands, cell phone promotions, and of course the usual vendors, dogs, and masses of pigeons. Many boys had climbed up trees or statues to get a better view. There were countless sports cars brightly painted and covered in advertisements of phone, beer, and cement companies. Groups of men with helmets and women in stilettos and bright spandex racing suits surrounded each car as they made the finishing touches to the engines and wheels. People pressed against the blue gates that made up the sidelines, but some news announcers with microphones and cameras were allowed in the street. People around me held radios or listened to the rapid Spanish sports broadcast on their cell phones. When the whistle was blown, the car revved up and sped down the street and around the corner, sometimes making awful popping sounds as it went. The street where the race started was gated off from people, but the following streets were not. People stayed in the street to watch up close for as long as they could, till the car turned the corner and a guy with a yellow flag blew his whistle ferociously until everyone jumped to the sidelines at the last minute possible as the car smoked past. After a few minutes, the whole spectacle began again with another car, and another.
After watching a bit, I wandered more through the city, passing again by the bustling central market and walking till I reached the area of Parque Bolivar. The kids area looked like an amusement park and I was surprised there wasn’t a charge to get in. It was basically an amazing playground with some added on amusement park bits. There were countless swing sets and slides of every color imaginable for kids of all sizes. Brightly painted climbing structures and trampolines with big balls to bounce on. There were little Bugs Bunny and dinosaur bouncy houses and a blowup slide. In the center was a little café shaped like a castle and around the back of it were teens playing foozball. Grassy hills where people napped in the sun or played with their dogs, who were clearly owned in that they all wore sweaters. There was one bit where people could pay a small fee for a few rides, from a small Ferris wheel to an electrical worm train that rode in circles to little flying cars that went round and round. But mostly, the kids were happy bouncing between all of the structures in this huge vibrant park, complete with flower beds and tall trees.
As I roamed around, I came across a small kitten sitting in the middle of a bed of flowers. He was maybe 3 months old, all white with one green eye and one blue. The kitten clamored over scattered hoses and made his way over to where I sat so that he could give me a thorough inspection and nuzzle against my leg. I’m still surprised to see so many cats here, all so social, but it was especially odd to find this little white kitten alone in the middle of a flower bed. A nearby vendor soon called to him and he sprinted over to her to get a little snack, and then went prancing around again as kittens do, tossing dirt, pawing at bikes, trying to climb into bags and trash bins. A little bit later when I was swinging in the shade nearby, I saw a few little boys tormenting the poor guy, chasing him and grabbing his tail.
I walked across the road to the adult portion of the huge park, where I climbed a narrow and dizzying spiral staircase to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It’s a miniature replica built by the same person who constructed the original. I had to walk across a little bridge to reach the tower because it was surrounded by a moat, where a guy in rubber boots waded around and scooped out all the garbage. (Random side note – two sisters around eight and ten just came to sit in the gazebo, the younger with a Hello Kitty purse and the older one carrying a coach purse with a tiny Pomeranian puppy stuffed inside. The pup is wearing a little shirt that says Best In Show. Quite odd to see here, but parts of this city are definitely on the wealthier end.) Anyway, back in the park, there were European-looking pathways with tons of trees and flowerbeds, signs saying to care for the park, trash cans and even recycling bins, and many locals resting on benches or walking around. There was one stretch with artisan booths, food vendors, a company offering to improve ones reading and comprehension skills, and lots of ice cream stalls. Across the street were brilliantly white government buildings that stretched across entire blocks.
As I headed back towards the central plaza, I walked with a guy who teaches Spanish at another of the schools in the area. He spoke in English and I spoke in Spanish, except when we corrected each other’s mistakes. It was interesting to hear that he had three dogs who all lived in his house and backyard and never roamed out on their own. There are so many different classes of people and animals here, but not much of the rich taking care of the poor.
Back in the central plaza, I sat down with a vegetarian saltena and an ice cream to type and watch the continuing bustle of the race. During lunchtime, the cars took a break and the motorcycles did their run, but now the cars are back, zooming around like crazy. From what I can understand, this is a two day long event and the finals are tomorrow, when the winners will receive a trophy and a money prize.
Of the three big cities I’ve seen so far, Cochabamba was by far the most Europeanized, with fancy boutiques, outdoor cafes with wifi, a huge university, and many families with their own cars. Most Bolivians that are able to travel abroad are from Cochabamba, that’s where the money is. Though there were definitely those very sketchy areas of the city by the train station, there always will be those sorts of places. In La Paz, I didn’t see the wealthier part of the city, but the part where I was based was constantly bustling with people in traditional dress and had lots of interesting streets and old fashioned buildings. Everything was nice and cheap, but it was really hard to find much vegetarian food or even a trash can. There were almost no privately owned cars – the streets were filled with microbuses, taxis, and the occasional stoplight that everyone ignored. Here in Sucre is a nice in between with many remnants of traditional culture, a mix of private cars and taxis, and food on all ends of the spectrum. Everyone congregates together in the central part of the city around the many plazas filled with fountains, trees, and statues. As you stray into the more residential areas, the socioeconomic lines are very clear by the condition of the houses, the number of dogs roaming the streets, and the proximity to paved or easy to walk roads.
Vroom, these speedy cars are ridiculously loud.
Friday, May 27, 2011
My Beginnings in Sucre
5/26/11 9pm
Starting to get settled down in the place that I will call home for the next three weeks. Yesterday was a holiday and most everything was closed, so I just got some food from the supermarket and rested after the long journey. There are holidays here constantly – the 25th of May was Sucre’s anniversary, and tomorrow is Mother’s Day, so things will be closed again, though not to the extent they were yesterday. There are four others staying in the house I am at, and I went out with three of them last night. Had papas a la huancaina, a dish that I had constantly in Peru with potatoes and eggs and a cheesy sauce, but here it was very different with a peanut sauce. My room here is on the lower level so it’s really cold down here, so hard to get out of the blankets in the morning! It’s a shared room, but each area is segmented off so I pretty much have my own area with a bathroom right across the hall. The water took a while to get hot this morning, but I was able to take a hot shower, such an important thing! Upstairs, there is a kitchen for the family and their living areas, and on the third level is a little kitchen that we can use. Dishes, pots, pans, and a stove, so cooking is definitely limited, but I’ll manage something, especially because food around here is more expensive than La Paz (I was spoiled by starting there) and I definitely don’t want to be eating out all the time. I miss having a microwave, they make life so much easier!
Yesterday, I was told that I would find out today about my volunteer placement and where to go, and that I would leave around 9am. This morning, though, the opposite of Bolivia time happened – I was heading upstairs to get some breakfast at 8:15 when there was a knock on the door and one of the workers from the day care was there to take me along. I was completely surprised and not really ready to go, but grabbed a piece of bread and off we went. She at first suggested a taxi, but it seemed crazy to have to take a taxi to work every day, so she showed me the way with the micros and walking a bit, which took about half an hour. Hopefully I’ll remember the route on Monday when I go back, people don’t really know street names much aside from the central areas, it’s just landmarks and memorization.
At the daycare center, called the guardaria, there are a total of 36 kids enrolled between the ages of 1 and 6, though there were only 20some today. The little ones stay all day, and the oldest only stay through lunch and then go to school in the afternoon. I don’t know much about the org, but it seems like they are mother children of single working mothers who pay a tiny bit per month, but very little considering that meals are included. Walking there and speaking to the woman who picked me up, I got the sense that it was pretty organized – there were three women taking care of the kids plus a cook, they split the kids into age groups, had activities, etc.
But when I got there, that was all proved wrong. There was definitely less chaos and more supplies than in Tanzania where I had 90 kids with nothing but a concrete yard, but it was still quite the madhouse. Right now things are apparently a little different than usual because there are some students from a university doing development assessments of the kids individually, so that offsets things a bit. But still, there was almost no structure whatsoever. Four walls and lots of crazy kids. They do have a few smaller rooms and hopefully we will separate the kids by age once with assessments are done, but from what I’ve heard from the other volunteers there, even normally they don’t have scheduled activities or anything. The kids got breakfast, wrestled around for a while, and then were all shoved around a tiny table and given photocopies of a spongebob coloring page. For the next hour and a half, the only input the staff had was telling the kids every once in a while to color pretty. You can’t expect kids to sit still and color on a single piece of paper for that long, but apparently that happens daily. I sat with a small group and tried to work on counting things in Spanish with them, and one of the other volunteers went over colors. After a snack of oranges and the kids got restless, the teachers put all the kids against the wall and told them to sit down, and then went off who knows where. There were some books on the shelves, so we each ended up with a pile of kids to read to in Spanish.
They were all getting so restless and crazy, so we asked if we could take them outside – apparently, they don’t have any outside time! The teacher seemed very surprised at the idea of it, but went to ask someone else and then allowed two of us to take seven kids and a ball out to the nearby yard. The first seven were allowed out the door, and the others were shut in without an explanation. They had lots of fun chasing around the ball outside, but dragging them back in was another story – they didn’t behave well for that part, and that was all the teacher saw of our outside adventure, not the part that they had fun and it wore them out. They are disciplined by being dragged by the arm somewhere usually, but we aren’t about to do that and they don’t understand that if they behave then they will get to keep having outside time. But hopefully this will be allowed again, maybe with more kids or with several different groups, and I’ll try to teach them some simple games like red light green light. Also need to come up with different interactive songs and games, just to have some structured activities during the day rather than just one set thing that they get bored of in ten or fifteen minutes.
I went with one of the teachers to take the youngest ones across the path to the cafeteria for lunch; they definitely need to get there way before the others because they take forever to eat. They each get a bowl of soup and have to finish that to get their main dish. We had 7 or 8 one to three year olds, so there was quite a lot of spoon feeding, playing with food, and violently refusing food, but we eventually got it down them. The segundo (main dish) was rice with veggies and meat, but apparently it had a pretty spicy sauce and a lot of the kids were not fans – though once the older kids came in, a few of the boys kept acting like big macho 5 year olds and saying they liked it spicy, though the girls would only eat their rice.
I left after everyone finished eating and headed into the central part of the city – basically, got on the bus and got off when I saw a bunch of other people get off. After the usual confusion and difficulty reading a map, I eventually found the central market and spent a long time wandering there. There is everything, from stalls with clothes to cleaning supplies to electronics to every little thing you’ll never need, and the aisles of meat, the piles of fruits and veggies, the aisle of many types of fresh bread,the fresh juice area (which will definitely be my favorite place to go, though today I got a fruit salad with yogurt because I hadn’t had lunch yet). There’s the spices area, with open piles of everything you can think of, and the eating area that’s a bit like a crowded open air farmer’s market where everyone is selling the exact same dishes and the tables are crowded with locals downing big plates of cheap food (unfortunately at lunchtime, all meat). Wandered lots around central Sucre and got semi-oriented to the area.
I’m in Sucre through a program called Fox Academy, which primarily provides English and Spanish lessons but also sets up housing and volunteer placements. My primary things were of course the housing and volunteer placements and I said I would think about Spanish lessons. But when I checked my email around 3:30 today for the first time in several days, I had an email from the director saying that she had set up my first lesson as a two hour session for 3pm today and the teacher would be waiting. Um… Well, I found my way over there and felt a bit obligated to explain myself and take the second hour. People typically come here with very little Spanish experience and take four hours of lessons a day and even though it’s cheap, that adds up and I don’t need that level of intensity, I can communicate perfectly well! I talked with the teacher for an hour and she complimented my Spanish quite a bit, even saying that my tenses were mostly correct when I thought they had been mostly off. It would be helpful to work a bit on Spanish with her, but I’ll probably just end up losing it again as soon as I leave Bolivia and stop practicing. I’m still debating what to do, but I think after tomorrow, I’ll probably back out of it and try to just work some grammar on my own.
Fox has Spanish classes for travelers and cheap English classes of different levels that meet nightly for locals. The English teachers are Bolivians who have learned English and gotten certified to teach, but they use volunteers to supplement their lessons. I set up to work with a class at 6pm, and ended up staying for the 7pm class with the same teacher. The classes were tiny – apparently not everyone showed up tonight, but we only had 3 students in each class. They had a workbook with similar activities to what I had in Spanish at UCSD. The first class was at a lower level and we worked on ‘who’ questions and a bit of the verb to be. The teacher was pretty distracted and texting a lot, but I went around and worked with them on the exercises individually, needing to use Spanish to explain most of it since they knew very little English, but managing to get my point across pretty well. The second group were a bit further ahead in the book and we focused on telling time, which got pretty confusing for them (and the teacher got confused too!), but I think after testing them with a ton of examples, they started to get the hang out of it (translating from the Spanish version in their head to both six fifteen and quarter past six) and will hopefully practice a bit tonight. The students seemed to like having a native English speaker in their class and were both excited and shy to talk to me when I walked with them and asked basic questions in English after class. One girl who I thought was about my age was just sixteen – which is awful to know because I constantly see girls here looking that age carrying a baby or two of their own. I talked to Cinthya, the teacher, afterwards, and she just turned 19 and this is her first English course that she has taught; she recently got her certification and says that she is pretty unsure and nervous about what she is doing. Her classes are every weeknight 6-8, so I’m going to co-teach with her while I’m here/probably end up leading most of the lessons and using her help for the more in-depth Spanish explanations. So it’ll be working with the little ones in Spanish from 8 or 9 till around 1, wander around the city during the afternoons, and then teach English in the evenings. This weekend I’ll just stay in the city and see some of the museums, but I may do a trek or trip to nearby villages next weekend. After all my explorations of the city today, by the time I finally headed home at 8pm, I actually knew where to go, even in the dark with the hills and winding streets. It was about a 15 minute walk to the house where I’m staying, which is in a residential area on the edge of the city. It would be nice to have a little shop across the road to easily get water or bread if I run out, but I’ll be going into the center daily and Sucre is a really safe area to walk around, known to be one of the safest cities in Bolivia. There are even lots of streetlights - I’m having a hard time looking to see if the light is red or not rather than just darting in front of cars when I get the chance like I’ve had to do elsewhere!
5/27 – I went over to Fox for the Spanish lesson today intending to just do today’s lesson and then stop, but my teacher didn’t show because her son was sick. I talked to Jorge, one of the director’s and the dad at my house, and he is going to set up an “intercambio” for me with one of the people who has graduated from their English classes. I’ll meet for an hour every once in a while with this person and we’ll talk half an hour in Spanish and half an hour in English, which will be good for both of us to practice, and it won’t cost anything.
Starting to get settled down in the place that I will call home for the next three weeks. Yesterday was a holiday and most everything was closed, so I just got some food from the supermarket and rested after the long journey. There are holidays here constantly – the 25th of May was Sucre’s anniversary, and tomorrow is Mother’s Day, so things will be closed again, though not to the extent they were yesterday. There are four others staying in the house I am at, and I went out with three of them last night. Had papas a la huancaina, a dish that I had constantly in Peru with potatoes and eggs and a cheesy sauce, but here it was very different with a peanut sauce. My room here is on the lower level so it’s really cold down here, so hard to get out of the blankets in the morning! It’s a shared room, but each area is segmented off so I pretty much have my own area with a bathroom right across the hall. The water took a while to get hot this morning, but I was able to take a hot shower, such an important thing! Upstairs, there is a kitchen for the family and their living areas, and on the third level is a little kitchen that we can use. Dishes, pots, pans, and a stove, so cooking is definitely limited, but I’ll manage something, especially because food around here is more expensive than La Paz (I was spoiled by starting there) and I definitely don’t want to be eating out all the time. I miss having a microwave, they make life so much easier!
Yesterday, I was told that I would find out today about my volunteer placement and where to go, and that I would leave around 9am. This morning, though, the opposite of Bolivia time happened – I was heading upstairs to get some breakfast at 8:15 when there was a knock on the door and one of the workers from the day care was there to take me along. I was completely surprised and not really ready to go, but grabbed a piece of bread and off we went. She at first suggested a taxi, but it seemed crazy to have to take a taxi to work every day, so she showed me the way with the micros and walking a bit, which took about half an hour. Hopefully I’ll remember the route on Monday when I go back, people don’t really know street names much aside from the central areas, it’s just landmarks and memorization.
At the daycare center, called the guardaria, there are a total of 36 kids enrolled between the ages of 1 and 6, though there were only 20some today. The little ones stay all day, and the oldest only stay through lunch and then go to school in the afternoon. I don’t know much about the org, but it seems like they are mother children of single working mothers who pay a tiny bit per month, but very little considering that meals are included. Walking there and speaking to the woman who picked me up, I got the sense that it was pretty organized – there were three women taking care of the kids plus a cook, they split the kids into age groups, had activities, etc.
But when I got there, that was all proved wrong. There was definitely less chaos and more supplies than in Tanzania where I had 90 kids with nothing but a concrete yard, but it was still quite the madhouse. Right now things are apparently a little different than usual because there are some students from a university doing development assessments of the kids individually, so that offsets things a bit. But still, there was almost no structure whatsoever. Four walls and lots of crazy kids. They do have a few smaller rooms and hopefully we will separate the kids by age once with assessments are done, but from what I’ve heard from the other volunteers there, even normally they don’t have scheduled activities or anything. The kids got breakfast, wrestled around for a while, and then were all shoved around a tiny table and given photocopies of a spongebob coloring page. For the next hour and a half, the only input the staff had was telling the kids every once in a while to color pretty. You can’t expect kids to sit still and color on a single piece of paper for that long, but apparently that happens daily. I sat with a small group and tried to work on counting things in Spanish with them, and one of the other volunteers went over colors. After a snack of oranges and the kids got restless, the teachers put all the kids against the wall and told them to sit down, and then went off who knows where. There were some books on the shelves, so we each ended up with a pile of kids to read to in Spanish.
They were all getting so restless and crazy, so we asked if we could take them outside – apparently, they don’t have any outside time! The teacher seemed very surprised at the idea of it, but went to ask someone else and then allowed two of us to take seven kids and a ball out to the nearby yard. The first seven were allowed out the door, and the others were shut in without an explanation. They had lots of fun chasing around the ball outside, but dragging them back in was another story – they didn’t behave well for that part, and that was all the teacher saw of our outside adventure, not the part that they had fun and it wore them out. They are disciplined by being dragged by the arm somewhere usually, but we aren’t about to do that and they don’t understand that if they behave then they will get to keep having outside time. But hopefully this will be allowed again, maybe with more kids or with several different groups, and I’ll try to teach them some simple games like red light green light. Also need to come up with different interactive songs and games, just to have some structured activities during the day rather than just one set thing that they get bored of in ten or fifteen minutes.
I went with one of the teachers to take the youngest ones across the path to the cafeteria for lunch; they definitely need to get there way before the others because they take forever to eat. They each get a bowl of soup and have to finish that to get their main dish. We had 7 or 8 one to three year olds, so there was quite a lot of spoon feeding, playing with food, and violently refusing food, but we eventually got it down them. The segundo (main dish) was rice with veggies and meat, but apparently it had a pretty spicy sauce and a lot of the kids were not fans – though once the older kids came in, a few of the boys kept acting like big macho 5 year olds and saying they liked it spicy, though the girls would only eat their rice.
I left after everyone finished eating and headed into the central part of the city – basically, got on the bus and got off when I saw a bunch of other people get off. After the usual confusion and difficulty reading a map, I eventually found the central market and spent a long time wandering there. There is everything, from stalls with clothes to cleaning supplies to electronics to every little thing you’ll never need, and the aisles of meat, the piles of fruits and veggies, the aisle of many types of fresh bread,the fresh juice area (which will definitely be my favorite place to go, though today I got a fruit salad with yogurt because I hadn’t had lunch yet). There’s the spices area, with open piles of everything you can think of, and the eating area that’s a bit like a crowded open air farmer’s market where everyone is selling the exact same dishes and the tables are crowded with locals downing big plates of cheap food (unfortunately at lunchtime, all meat). Wandered lots around central Sucre and got semi-oriented to the area.
I’m in Sucre through a program called Fox Academy, which primarily provides English and Spanish lessons but also sets up housing and volunteer placements. My primary things were of course the housing and volunteer placements and I said I would think about Spanish lessons. But when I checked my email around 3:30 today for the first time in several days, I had an email from the director saying that she had set up my first lesson as a two hour session for 3pm today and the teacher would be waiting. Um… Well, I found my way over there and felt a bit obligated to explain myself and take the second hour. People typically come here with very little Spanish experience and take four hours of lessons a day and even though it’s cheap, that adds up and I don’t need that level of intensity, I can communicate perfectly well! I talked with the teacher for an hour and she complimented my Spanish quite a bit, even saying that my tenses were mostly correct when I thought they had been mostly off. It would be helpful to work a bit on Spanish with her, but I’ll probably just end up losing it again as soon as I leave Bolivia and stop practicing. I’m still debating what to do, but I think after tomorrow, I’ll probably back out of it and try to just work some grammar on my own.
Fox has Spanish classes for travelers and cheap English classes of different levels that meet nightly for locals. The English teachers are Bolivians who have learned English and gotten certified to teach, but they use volunteers to supplement their lessons. I set up to work with a class at 6pm, and ended up staying for the 7pm class with the same teacher. The classes were tiny – apparently not everyone showed up tonight, but we only had 3 students in each class. They had a workbook with similar activities to what I had in Spanish at UCSD. The first class was at a lower level and we worked on ‘who’ questions and a bit of the verb to be. The teacher was pretty distracted and texting a lot, but I went around and worked with them on the exercises individually, needing to use Spanish to explain most of it since they knew very little English, but managing to get my point across pretty well. The second group were a bit further ahead in the book and we focused on telling time, which got pretty confusing for them (and the teacher got confused too!), but I think after testing them with a ton of examples, they started to get the hang out of it (translating from the Spanish version in their head to both six fifteen and quarter past six) and will hopefully practice a bit tonight. The students seemed to like having a native English speaker in their class and were both excited and shy to talk to me when I walked with them and asked basic questions in English after class. One girl who I thought was about my age was just sixteen – which is awful to know because I constantly see girls here looking that age carrying a baby or two of their own. I talked to Cinthya, the teacher, afterwards, and she just turned 19 and this is her first English course that she has taught; she recently got her certification and says that she is pretty unsure and nervous about what she is doing. Her classes are every weeknight 6-8, so I’m going to co-teach with her while I’m here/probably end up leading most of the lessons and using her help for the more in-depth Spanish explanations. So it’ll be working with the little ones in Spanish from 8 or 9 till around 1, wander around the city during the afternoons, and then teach English in the evenings. This weekend I’ll just stay in the city and see some of the museums, but I may do a trek or trip to nearby villages next weekend. After all my explorations of the city today, by the time I finally headed home at 8pm, I actually knew where to go, even in the dark with the hills and winding streets. It was about a 15 minute walk to the house where I’m staying, which is in a residential area on the edge of the city. It would be nice to have a little shop across the road to easily get water or bread if I run out, but I’ll be going into the center daily and Sucre is a really safe area to walk around, known to be one of the safest cities in Bolivia. There are even lots of streetlights - I’m having a hard time looking to see if the light is red or not rather than just darting in front of cars when I get the chance like I’ve had to do elsewhere!
5/27 – I went over to Fox for the Spanish lesson today intending to just do today’s lesson and then stop, but my teacher didn’t show because her son was sick. I talked to Jorge, one of the director’s and the dad at my house, and he is going to set up an “intercambio” for me with one of the people who has graduated from their English classes. I’ll meet for an hour every once in a while with this person and we’ll talk half an hour in Spanish and half an hour in English, which will be good for both of us to practice, and it won’t cost anything.
Quite The Bus Ride
5/25/11
Early yesterday morning, left the hostel to take the bus back to Cochabamba. We of course get there early just in case, but there’s a need for that here – on time is plenty early. The bus was less crowded this time with fewer people and things in the aisles and there were seven foreigners on the bus, most of us sitting together. The bus sputters along, the engine chugging and making awful noises. About half way through, out in the middle of nowhere, we come to a stop at the bottom of the hill and some of the guys get out and mess with the bus a bit before we grumble our way to the top. This happens again at the next hill, and the next. Finally, the bus just gives up and dies. The road is really narrow with a ridge on one side and plants on the other, so there was a huge build up of cars and another bus behind us. We didn’t really know what was going on but sat there for over an hour, unsure of what was going to happen. I stuck my head out the window and caught bits of pieces of what was going on – siphoning gas or some other fluid into the car, people getting out stools and just sitting on them outside, the driver trying the engine over and over to no avail. We thought we would be stuck there much longer, but eventually the bus started moving and kept on going even with steep hills; it was apparently some sort of mechanical problem related to the diesel. I kept thinking that we would have to stop again at the next hill and was confused when we suddenly stopped and people started shouting in the middle of a downhill stretch. A few guys sprinted off the bus and ran back towards where we had come, and we noticed that one of the luggage doors underneath us had swung open. I was expecting them to come back with a suitcase or two, but instead, they ran back holding two sheep on a rope. Apparently they had been riding with the luggage the entire time and took the opportunity when we started moving to escape. It was an amusing yet sad site to see the sheep being shoved back under the bus. From there, though, the bus ride went smoothly.
Got lunch and spent the afternoon with a few of the others from the bus, and then headed off for my overnight bus to Sucre. We stopped for dinner along the way and I got huge-eared corn with a big piece of soft cheese, a quick dish that most people were buying. It was an uneventful bus ride and I somehow slept most of the way on the bus, aside from when I really, really needed to pee. The driver compartment was closed off from the passenger area so I kept banging on the door to ask them to let me out. The door was eventually opened and they said we would be in a town in 5 minutes. I said all I needed was a tree, but they just closed their door and kept on driving. Ten minutes later, I banged on the door again and after another five, they stopped in a town to let me out. I asked where the bathroom was and they just pointed into the lighted street – why head all the way there when there were plenty of trees on the dark roads? Grr. Another fifteen minutes later, we stopped at an actual bathroom. Oh, Bolivian time.
Arrived at the station at 5:20 this morning but it was too early to head to the house. There was somehow free wifi there, so used that for a bit, took a taxi, and am sitting here now waiting for others to wake up so that I can find out what I’m doing and where I can find some breakfast.
Early yesterday morning, left the hostel to take the bus back to Cochabamba. We of course get there early just in case, but there’s a need for that here – on time is plenty early. The bus was less crowded this time with fewer people and things in the aisles and there were seven foreigners on the bus, most of us sitting together. The bus sputters along, the engine chugging and making awful noises. About half way through, out in the middle of nowhere, we come to a stop at the bottom of the hill and some of the guys get out and mess with the bus a bit before we grumble our way to the top. This happens again at the next hill, and the next. Finally, the bus just gives up and dies. The road is really narrow with a ridge on one side and plants on the other, so there was a huge build up of cars and another bus behind us. We didn’t really know what was going on but sat there for over an hour, unsure of what was going to happen. I stuck my head out the window and caught bits of pieces of what was going on – siphoning gas or some other fluid into the car, people getting out stools and just sitting on them outside, the driver trying the engine over and over to no avail. We thought we would be stuck there much longer, but eventually the bus started moving and kept on going even with steep hills; it was apparently some sort of mechanical problem related to the diesel. I kept thinking that we would have to stop again at the next hill and was confused when we suddenly stopped and people started shouting in the middle of a downhill stretch. A few guys sprinted off the bus and ran back towards where we had come, and we noticed that one of the luggage doors underneath us had swung open. I was expecting them to come back with a suitcase or two, but instead, they ran back holding two sheep on a rope. Apparently they had been riding with the luggage the entire time and took the opportunity when we started moving to escape. It was an amusing yet sad site to see the sheep being shoved back under the bus. From there, though, the bus ride went smoothly.
Got lunch and spent the afternoon with a few of the others from the bus, and then headed off for my overnight bus to Sucre. We stopped for dinner along the way and I got huge-eared corn with a big piece of soft cheese, a quick dish that most people were buying. It was an uneventful bus ride and I somehow slept most of the way on the bus, aside from when I really, really needed to pee. The driver compartment was closed off from the passenger area so I kept banging on the door to ask them to let me out. The door was eventually opened and they said we would be in a town in 5 minutes. I said all I needed was a tree, but they just closed their door and kept on driving. Ten minutes later, I banged on the door again and after another five, they stopped in a town to let me out. I asked where the bathroom was and they just pointed into the lighted street – why head all the way there when there were plenty of trees on the dark roads? Grr. Another fifteen minutes later, we stopped at an actual bathroom. Oh, Bolivian time.
Arrived at the station at 5:20 this morning but it was too early to head to the house. There was somehow free wifi there, so used that for a bit, took a taxi, and am sitting here now waiting for others to wake up so that I can find out what I’m doing and where I can find some breakfast.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Off The Beaten Path
5/23/11
Well, it’s been a crazy, crazy couple of days. From La Paz, after getting my camera fixed because the lens was acting up and wandering around the ridiculously crowded streets, I took an overnight bus to Cochabamba. I had a seat that laid back most of the way, but I couldn’t sleep thanks to a very loud couple behind me and some wonderful motion sickness. Felt really sick when I got to Cochabamba so instead of exploring the city as planned, I got a cheap hostel room and slept for the day. Finding the buses to Torotoro was an adventure, going through an awful part of the city and trying to find a bus that still had seats. Eventually got a bus and it was a bumpy six hour ride to Torotoro. I was the only gringo on the bus. It was ridiculously crowded, the aisle filled with passengers and crates of tomatoes and sacks of sugar. When the bus stopped for a bathroom break, people had to climb to the front by standing on all of the armrests and monkeying their way through – it was amazing how all the women with babies were able to do this! It was a super cramped ride, but eventually arrived around 1am, got my bag from the roof of the bus, and knocked on the door of a nearby hostel. The sleepy owner let me in and gave me in a room, and a really sweet puppy followed me upstairs and I hung out with him a bit.
In the morning, I wandered the tiny town to find the tourist office where I could get a guide to see the area. I ended up joining a group that was staying at a different hostel, so went and ate breakfast over there while waiting for the tour to leave. After several days with no English speakers, it was nice again to see other gringos – some from Canada, others from Portugal, England, Ireland, France, and one from the US. Our first stop was the dinosaur footprints and our guide talked about which were carnivores and herbivores and the sizes of each. He only spoke Spanish so some of the technical terms were hard to understand, but I got the gist of it and people in the group translated bits of it for the rest of us. There were some footprints that were indented into the stone as you would expect, and others that sat above the ground, supposedly due to sediment sticking to the bottom of the dino’s foot on one type of soil and then coming off the foot on a drier soil type. We saw quite a few sets of footprints and there are apparently a lot more – those currently exposed are slowly worn away due to erosion and others appear.
Next we hiked up to the viewpoint of the Torotoro canyon. We passed by a stone walkway over a ledge and several of us walked across it, much thicker than a balance beam but a huge drop below. After an exhausting hike in the sun, we got up to the mirador (viewpoint). They recently built a bridge that circled above the canyon – it was really cool to stand on the bridge and see the canyon far below and on every side. The guide (who we later found out was only 16!) talked a bit about the different tectonic layers from all different periods, but it was mostly just an incredible view.
Our last leg was down to El Vergel, a waterfall down in the canyon. We didn’t know beforehand that the hike be so tiring with almost no shade, so preserving water was definitely an issue and I only let myself have tiny bits at a time. We walked down 800 stairs and climbed up and around rocks as we followed the trail. We reached a swimming hole that we thought was our final destination but nope, we kept walking, rock hopping a bit through the creeks and rivers, over more rocks. Finally, we plopped down in the shade by El Vergel, which was a really nice waterfall with areas to wade around and rocks to jump from into the deeper water. The water was cold but was nice relief from the hot sun so I walked under the waterfall, waded around with really soft sand under my feet, and jumped off one of the rocks. I had swam in my clothes so tried to dry off in the sun, but since we were in such a deep canyon, the sun soon disappeared and I was freezing for a bit till we started to hike again. I was really dehydrated on the walk up to the point where my mouth was sticking to itself and little gulps of other people’s water didn’t do much to help. It was a gorgeous hike as we ascended the canyon and headed back to town, but I was very glad to be back and immediately downed a bottle of water. We only walked 6 or 7 km, which was nothing compared to Isla Del Sol, but having more water during the hike would have made it a bit less painful!
I was the only person at my hostel so switched over to the one where the group I had been with was staying. Because I absolutely love zippers, the one of the main compartment of my backpack popped open as I was packing my things to move. Spent a long time trying to get it back on but couldn’t get the zipper to catch, so safety pins it is for now. I just have to hope it can withstand two bus rides and being tossed around without spilling my things all over the place. I’ll be in Sucre for a few weeks and should be able to find someone there to fix it. Still can’t fix the zipper on my jacket either!
We wandered the tiny town a bit before dinner. It’s definitely poor but wasn’t as impoverished as I had expected. There was a nice central area with a big restaurant and several shops, much more modern looking than the rest of town. Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, so he has been putting a lot of money into the small towns, the countryside. There are trash cans around and signs to keep the area clean – though it would have been nice to have them around in La Paz too!
Breakfast and dinner at the hostel are served family style and Lily, the owner, packs us nice lunches for outings during the day. She’s made vegetarian versions of everything for me and helps us arrange the tours for the day. Dinner was a traditional Bolivian dish, paccha manca, which is meat, olives, boiled egg, thick homemade French fries, onions, bell peppers, and tomatoes all mixed together. I had a plate minus the meat with lots of chunks of Bolivian cheese instead, and we topped the dish with a sauce of beer, homemade spicy sauce, vinegar, and salt.
I hadn’t been planning on spending another day here, but really wanted to see the caves, so spent the night and had a really amazing day today. Most of the others had been here longer and left this morning, but I went with two Canadians, Sarah and Georgina, on a tour of the caverns and caves. Our guide for today, Victor, didn’t speak English and had a bit of an accent with his Spanish because his first language was Quechua, of which he taught us some phrases, but I got the gist of what he was saying. We started out with a drive way up into the hillside on winding dirt roads, past a few tiny towns with maybe two dozen buildings, past grazing sheep and herding dogs who decided that our car needed herding too. It was funny to watch the dogs race alongside the car, barking as they tried to keep up but eventually trailing behind and returning to their sheep. We got out of the car and hiked further up into the hills. It was a landscape like I’ve never seen before. People from yesterday who had already done this had said that the waterfall trip was beautiful but the cavern and cave route was breathtaking the entire day; they were definitely right. As we hiked, the guide pointed out different plants and sedimentary rocks. We reached a series of tall caverns and massive rocks called the city of Itas. The area is hard to describe and pictures don’t do it justice, but I still took quite a few. We definitely felt the altitude, but it was a nice cool day so it wasn’t too bad. Endless mountains in the distance with 3D clouds backed by layers of blue sky and other clouds. The hills around the town of Torotoro are one after another, nearly symmetrical and side by side, each with many semicircular layers of sedimentary rocks and plants, each a distinctive color so that you can clearly make out the layers from kilometers away (yes, I’m turning to the metric system). After the caverns, we continued to hike through the area, climbing up to high lookouts and when it seemed like we were as high up as we could get, we kept going and got even higher, towering over the gorgeous landscape below. We scrambled over rocks and occasionally used the strong rope the guide carried as leverage to climb up steep ledges. Canyons and ridges of many shades of reds and greens, endless layers of rocks, canyons, hills, mountains, clouds. Because the land was so sloped, many of the sedimentary rocks were tilted at different angles from where we stood way up top.
Back in the car, we wound back through the countryside, took a different dirt road for a bit, and then got out to hike towards the cave. We spent about two hours caving in the Cavern of Umajalanta, one of the more explored of the 35+ caves in the area. The sunlight gave way to complete darkness in the cave and we used our headlamps to navigate up and down and around all the rocks, to see the stalagmites and stalactites, to avoid steeping in the muddy pools of water. Most areas were large enough to stand up in, though we often had to crouch or crawl as we made our way across the rocks, slippery from sand or water. There were some smooth areas where I crouched down and used my hands to push off as I slid down the rock as if skating, turning slightly to navigate. We used a few ropes and ladders to help with our descent deep into the cave, but mostly got pretty dirty using our hands and knees. There were some really narrow areas that required twisting and turning, stepping and holding in certain locations to make our way through. My favorite parts, though, were the tiny tunnels that we had to shimmy our way through. Some were bigger than others and I made my way through doing an army crawl. One, though, was so small that it didn’t look like anyone could even fit through. We didn’t think that it was the path that we were going to take, but the guide told us to try to crawl through, so I headed in, flat on my stomach, and glided forward bit by bit. From what the others were saying and hoping from the room where I came, I thought that it was a joke and the path didn’t really go anywhere, so tried to figure out how to turn around (not that that was very possible to do!) But the guide sent the others in after me and I continued to slide on through the sandy tunnel headfirst as it gradually headed down and curved at times. I climbed out into another open room and after the other two crawled out, the guide appeared from a different, much larger pathway that he claimed was only for guides! Not that I minded.
..to be continued
Well, it’s been a crazy, crazy couple of days. From La Paz, after getting my camera fixed because the lens was acting up and wandering around the ridiculously crowded streets, I took an overnight bus to Cochabamba. I had a seat that laid back most of the way, but I couldn’t sleep thanks to a very loud couple behind me and some wonderful motion sickness. Felt really sick when I got to Cochabamba so instead of exploring the city as planned, I got a cheap hostel room and slept for the day. Finding the buses to Torotoro was an adventure, going through an awful part of the city and trying to find a bus that still had seats. Eventually got a bus and it was a bumpy six hour ride to Torotoro. I was the only gringo on the bus. It was ridiculously crowded, the aisle filled with passengers and crates of tomatoes and sacks of sugar. When the bus stopped for a bathroom break, people had to climb to the front by standing on all of the armrests and monkeying their way through – it was amazing how all the women with babies were able to do this! It was a super cramped ride, but eventually arrived around 1am, got my bag from the roof of the bus, and knocked on the door of a nearby hostel. The sleepy owner let me in and gave me in a room, and a really sweet puppy followed me upstairs and I hung out with him a bit.
In the morning, I wandered the tiny town to find the tourist office where I could get a guide to see the area. I ended up joining a group that was staying at a different hostel, so went and ate breakfast over there while waiting for the tour to leave. After several days with no English speakers, it was nice again to see other gringos – some from Canada, others from Portugal, England, Ireland, France, and one from the US. Our first stop was the dinosaur footprints and our guide talked about which were carnivores and herbivores and the sizes of each. He only spoke Spanish so some of the technical terms were hard to understand, but I got the gist of it and people in the group translated bits of it for the rest of us. There were some footprints that were indented into the stone as you would expect, and others that sat above the ground, supposedly due to sediment sticking to the bottom of the dino’s foot on one type of soil and then coming off the foot on a drier soil type. We saw quite a few sets of footprints and there are apparently a lot more – those currently exposed are slowly worn away due to erosion and others appear.
Next we hiked up to the viewpoint of the Torotoro canyon. We passed by a stone walkway over a ledge and several of us walked across it, much thicker than a balance beam but a huge drop below. After an exhausting hike in the sun, we got up to the mirador (viewpoint). They recently built a bridge that circled above the canyon – it was really cool to stand on the bridge and see the canyon far below and on every side. The guide (who we later found out was only 16!) talked a bit about the different tectonic layers from all different periods, but it was mostly just an incredible view.
Our last leg was down to El Vergel, a waterfall down in the canyon. We didn’t know beforehand that the hike be so tiring with almost no shade, so preserving water was definitely an issue and I only let myself have tiny bits at a time. We walked down 800 stairs and climbed up and around rocks as we followed the trail. We reached a swimming hole that we thought was our final destination but nope, we kept walking, rock hopping a bit through the creeks and rivers, over more rocks. Finally, we plopped down in the shade by El Vergel, which was a really nice waterfall with areas to wade around and rocks to jump from into the deeper water. The water was cold but was nice relief from the hot sun so I walked under the waterfall, waded around with really soft sand under my feet, and jumped off one of the rocks. I had swam in my clothes so tried to dry off in the sun, but since we were in such a deep canyon, the sun soon disappeared and I was freezing for a bit till we started to hike again. I was really dehydrated on the walk up to the point where my mouth was sticking to itself and little gulps of other people’s water didn’t do much to help. It was a gorgeous hike as we ascended the canyon and headed back to town, but I was very glad to be back and immediately downed a bottle of water. We only walked 6 or 7 km, which was nothing compared to Isla Del Sol, but having more water during the hike would have made it a bit less painful!
I was the only person at my hostel so switched over to the one where the group I had been with was staying. Because I absolutely love zippers, the one of the main compartment of my backpack popped open as I was packing my things to move. Spent a long time trying to get it back on but couldn’t get the zipper to catch, so safety pins it is for now. I just have to hope it can withstand two bus rides and being tossed around without spilling my things all over the place. I’ll be in Sucre for a few weeks and should be able to find someone there to fix it. Still can’t fix the zipper on my jacket either!
We wandered the tiny town a bit before dinner. It’s definitely poor but wasn’t as impoverished as I had expected. There was a nice central area with a big restaurant and several shops, much more modern looking than the rest of town. Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, so he has been putting a lot of money into the small towns, the countryside. There are trash cans around and signs to keep the area clean – though it would have been nice to have them around in La Paz too!
Breakfast and dinner at the hostel are served family style and Lily, the owner, packs us nice lunches for outings during the day. She’s made vegetarian versions of everything for me and helps us arrange the tours for the day. Dinner was a traditional Bolivian dish, paccha manca, which is meat, olives, boiled egg, thick homemade French fries, onions, bell peppers, and tomatoes all mixed together. I had a plate minus the meat with lots of chunks of Bolivian cheese instead, and we topped the dish with a sauce of beer, homemade spicy sauce, vinegar, and salt.
I hadn’t been planning on spending another day here, but really wanted to see the caves, so spent the night and had a really amazing day today. Most of the others had been here longer and left this morning, but I went with two Canadians, Sarah and Georgina, on a tour of the caverns and caves. Our guide for today, Victor, didn’t speak English and had a bit of an accent with his Spanish because his first language was Quechua, of which he taught us some phrases, but I got the gist of what he was saying. We started out with a drive way up into the hillside on winding dirt roads, past a few tiny towns with maybe two dozen buildings, past grazing sheep and herding dogs who decided that our car needed herding too. It was funny to watch the dogs race alongside the car, barking as they tried to keep up but eventually trailing behind and returning to their sheep. We got out of the car and hiked further up into the hills. It was a landscape like I’ve never seen before. People from yesterday who had already done this had said that the waterfall trip was beautiful but the cavern and cave route was breathtaking the entire day; they were definitely right. As we hiked, the guide pointed out different plants and sedimentary rocks. We reached a series of tall caverns and massive rocks called the city of Itas. The area is hard to describe and pictures don’t do it justice, but I still took quite a few. We definitely felt the altitude, but it was a nice cool day so it wasn’t too bad. Endless mountains in the distance with 3D clouds backed by layers of blue sky and other clouds. The hills around the town of Torotoro are one after another, nearly symmetrical and side by side, each with many semicircular layers of sedimentary rocks and plants, each a distinctive color so that you can clearly make out the layers from kilometers away (yes, I’m turning to the metric system). After the caverns, we continued to hike through the area, climbing up to high lookouts and when it seemed like we were as high up as we could get, we kept going and got even higher, towering over the gorgeous landscape below. We scrambled over rocks and occasionally used the strong rope the guide carried as leverage to climb up steep ledges. Canyons and ridges of many shades of reds and greens, endless layers of rocks, canyons, hills, mountains, clouds. Because the land was so sloped, many of the sedimentary rocks were tilted at different angles from where we stood way up top.
Back in the car, we wound back through the countryside, took a different dirt road for a bit, and then got out to hike towards the cave. We spent about two hours caving in the Cavern of Umajalanta, one of the more explored of the 35+ caves in the area. The sunlight gave way to complete darkness in the cave and we used our headlamps to navigate up and down and around all the rocks, to see the stalagmites and stalactites, to avoid steeping in the muddy pools of water. Most areas were large enough to stand up in, though we often had to crouch or crawl as we made our way across the rocks, slippery from sand or water. There were some smooth areas where I crouched down and used my hands to push off as I slid down the rock as if skating, turning slightly to navigate. We used a few ropes and ladders to help with our descent deep into the cave, but mostly got pretty dirty using our hands and knees. There were some really narrow areas that required twisting and turning, stepping and holding in certain locations to make our way through. My favorite parts, though, were the tiny tunnels that we had to shimmy our way through. Some were bigger than others and I made my way through doing an army crawl. One, though, was so small that it didn’t look like anyone could even fit through. We didn’t think that it was the path that we were going to take, but the guide told us to try to crawl through, so I headed in, flat on my stomach, and glided forward bit by bit. From what the others were saying and hoping from the room where I came, I thought that it was a joke and the path didn’t really go anywhere, so tried to figure out how to turn around (not that that was very possible to do!) But the guide sent the others in after me and I continued to slide on through the sandy tunnel headfirst as it gradually headed down and curved at times. I climbed out into another open room and after the other two crawled out, the guide appeared from a different, much larger pathway that he claimed was only for guides! Not that I minded.
..to be continued
Friday, May 20, 2011
Where the Sun Was Born - Top of the World
5-20-11 1:15pm
Where I left off, I hiked up Cerro Cavalria to see the sunset. It was quite the difficult uphill hike, but it was worth it. Amazing view from the top, though a completely different view from the other peak earlier in the day. The sun was in the distance over the lake, surrounded by all the mountains and hills and some low fluffy clouds. It was really cool to watch the sun disappear into the horizon and the shadow descend slowly over the lake, engulfing more and more of the water until it covered the area I was standing. I stayed for a few minutes more, but couldn’t watch too much of the color spreading through the sky because I had to hike back down – even with my headlamp, doing that in the dark wouldn’t be fun.
In the morning, I left my bag at the hostel and after a quick breakfast, went down to the water to catch the boat to the island. I sat on the benches up on the top of the boat and had to bundle up, it was freezing cold, especially with the wind over the water, but the views were really nice. The ride took longer than it should have because our motor kept turning off and we stopped and spun in circles for a bit before we started off again. There was another boat that left at the same time we did and must have gotten there half an hour before, we could see it speeding ahead in the distance. On the boat, I met an English guy who was also staying the night on the island, not just doing a quick day trip like most people were, so we hiked the island together. Started out intending to head to ruins at the north of the island, but ended up losing the trail at some point and finding out from some locals that we weren’t heading towards the ruins – per a woman working in the fields, all there was in that direction were potato fields! It turned out that we had accidentally turned onto the eastern leg of the island. It was a pretty long route that we took, but it was nice to see the side of the island that tourists never go to, just lots of grazing donkeys (including one really cute long-haired one) and women surrounded by piles of different colored potatoes; there are countless varieties of potatoes here.
Back in the area where the boat had dropped us, we figured out which way was actually north and headed up to the Chicana ruins. It was a really, really intense hike, both because it was at 3900 meters and the trail was kept winding up and down, up and down. We kept thinking we were there, but nope, around more and more bends. Eventually made our way up to the ruins and they were more than worth the painful hike. Many people had guides, but we just used my guidebook and got by pretty well. The first thing we saw were these big oval “footprints” in the stone path that are said to be the first footprints of the sun on earth after it was born. Then came a ceremonial table that was used for human and animal sacrifice, though there is debate whether the Incans actually sacrificed humans. It took a little while to get oriented because the guidebook used directional terms to describe where everything was, but I found the famous rock, Titi K’harka. It is said to be the birthplace of the sun, and people come here in swarms every June 21, winter solstice, to visit the site. The book described the rock as looking like a crouching puma and I’m usually awful at seeing that sort of thing, but after figuring out the general area, I found a tail and from there found a face and was able to see the figure of the puma really well. It is from this rock that the lake was named Titicaca, and it is one of the most sacred places for Bolivians. Up at that point, we were at one of the highest points in the area, over 4000 meters, and you could see everything on all sides, surrounded by a quiet beautiful paradise. After the rock came the labyrinth, which was a really huge maze of ruins. It reminded me of portions of Machu Picchu minus the huge crowds of people pushing from behind. There were endless doors, big and small, to walk through, and views through the stone window of the lake, mountains, and other islands. At one point, I got lost in the labyrinth, following door after door and eventually ending up in a dead end and having to trace my way back out.
We climbed back down to Ch’allapampa, the place where the boat had left us, and took a break sitting on the beach there. My book had described another beach further along as being straight out of a Greek island, but it was this beach that fit that description - clear calm water with shades of blue and green and soft white sand like I’ve never seen. After a rest at the beach, we started on the long journey to the south of the island. There were two routes, one up on the ridge that tourists take more often, and one along the eastern coast that winds through pueblitos (little towns). We asked a local along the way and he recommended the coast route, so we went that one. It was 11km about took us about 4 hours including plenty of little breaks when we were dying from the hills and altitude. The hike was really, really painful and by the end, I ached all over and still do the day after, but it was worth doing. Each side of the island had very different views as it curved around and around. There was tons of going uphill, some of it on slippery rocks, small stones, lots of unstable gravel, and there were some nicer bits with smooth big stones of red or white covered with a light coating of sand. I wanted to look around me the whole time, but sometimes it was a matter of just making it up the hill and looking only at the ground in front of me. We’d get to the top of the hill and think that around the curve we would find a flat or downhill slope, but nope, there were always steeper hills to come, again and again, never ending. Many people skip the walking the island bit of the trip, just take a boat to the north, see the ruins, and take a boat to the south before returning to Copacabana, but you don’t really get to experience the area that way. Along the entire trail, we were the only people there, aside from the occasional locals we crossed path with. The little towns were not touristy, they just had cute little houses, kids playing in the yard or walking home from school.
At one particularly difficult uphill stretched, I stopped along the side to rest and a little girl of five or six came up to me and said something that I didn’t understand. I spoke to her in Spanish, but she didn’t understand me, simply grabbed my hand and then held onto my arm with all her might using both of her hands. I didn’t know what she wanted, maybe was just excited to see a foreigner, but she kept smiling and giggling away. I tried to tell her I had to keep walking, so she walked with me for a little bit, still clinging tightly to my arm. We came upon some other girls who were a little bit older and one of them spoke a small amount of Spanish. I found out that they spoke Aymara, one of the two traditional languages of people in the area. The girls weren’t dressed in typical attire, but all of the women were – they have long ruffled skirts, a brimmed hat, a buttoned sweater, and either a shawl around their shoulders or a blanket filled with items tied in a certain way and carried on their back. Later that day, I passed a little girl who must have wanted to carry a pack like the other women were, but hers held only a teddy bear. Anyway, I couldn’t communicate much with the girls because they didn’t know much Spanish, but I pulled myself away by giving them each a stick of gum – they had never seen one before, but it seemed like they understood my phrases and motions to chew the gum, not eat it or swallow it.
We eventually reached the southern end of the island and the community of Yumani, where we dumped our bags at the first hostel we saw, eager to at least get rid of some weight. We then headed down to the ruins at the southern end. We were told that it would take 30 minutes to get there so thought okay, that’s nothing compared to all that we have walked today. It was a really steep walk, heading mostly downhill with a very unstable path – my legs felt like they were going to buckle, but at least I could breathe, unlike on all the uphill bits. We kept going round and round the hills until we finally got there, but were dreading having to walk all the way back up. The ruins there weren’t nearly as nice as the Chicana ruins, but it was still a pretty well formed building. There were several doors, each of which went into one room and then connected to one or two other rooms that were pitch black because they had no windows or doors open to the outside. They had indented areas for windows and doors and I felt my way around and stepped into the entry way of some of the doors, but then just got stuck at a stone wall and had to turn around. I don’t know what the significance of the building was, my book doesn’t say much about it, but it seems to go by many different names; I’ll look it up later. We had gone through an open gate to get into the ruins, but going out, we found that the gate was bolted shut and no one was around. The only option was to hop the gate, which was made of really unstable wood. I climbed over the gate no problem, but my jacket didn’t want to come along and the back of it got stuck on one of the posts. Somehow, that made the zipper in front pop off completely – I need to find someone with pliers somewhere to snap it back on, I can slide it back on but it won’t stay because the sides are open too wide. Zippers are such fun… The hike back was pretty hard and my legs started going out on me so I stumbled a couple times but eventually made it to the top and collapsed into my bed for a bit. We went outside to watch the sunset for as long as we could bear in the freezing cold, and then went into a restaurant to get dinner. I wanted to get a quinoa veggie cheese dish and asked the owner of the restaurant if it was vegetarian and she said no, it had meat – then why didn’t the menu list that? There was a vegetarian pizza on the menu so we split that – the things on top were pretty much straight from a salad – cucumber, tomato, green beans, herbs, and tons of cheese. Walking outside, we could see every star in the sky – I hadn’t seen a sky like that since my kayak trip to Bahia de los Angeles in Baja four years ago. Got my headlamp to walk an Israeli girl who had joined us for dinner back to her hostel since it was pitch black, and then collapsed into my bed. In total, we walked about 20km during the day, from 10:30am until 5:30pm.
This morning, had muesli with fruit and yogurt again for breakfast, but instead of the typical puffy grain cereal, it was cocoa puffs, strange! We wanted to see the last of the ruins on the island, the Incan stairs, which were on the way to the port. They were ridiculously disappointing – it was just a set of stone stairs that had clearly been touched up along the way, and it was the path that everyone used to get from the port up into the hills – if I didn’t know it was ruins, I would have thought it was just another set of stairs. At the start of the stairs on the bottom, there were two sculptures of Incan warriors, painted colorfully but clearly done very recently. Had to wait for quite a while for the boat to come – usually, they board people 15 minutes early, but even though there were a ton of boats just sitting there doing nothing, we didn’t board until 20 minutes after we had to leave. Still need to get used to Bolivian time. Bought my bus ticket to La Paz, got my luggage, and here I am now on the way back. Soon, we will pass again through the point where we have to get off and our bus takes its own ferry across a portion of the lake.
Where I left off, I hiked up Cerro Cavalria to see the sunset. It was quite the difficult uphill hike, but it was worth it. Amazing view from the top, though a completely different view from the other peak earlier in the day. The sun was in the distance over the lake, surrounded by all the mountains and hills and some low fluffy clouds. It was really cool to watch the sun disappear into the horizon and the shadow descend slowly over the lake, engulfing more and more of the water until it covered the area I was standing. I stayed for a few minutes more, but couldn’t watch too much of the color spreading through the sky because I had to hike back down – even with my headlamp, doing that in the dark wouldn’t be fun.
In the morning, I left my bag at the hostel and after a quick breakfast, went down to the water to catch the boat to the island. I sat on the benches up on the top of the boat and had to bundle up, it was freezing cold, especially with the wind over the water, but the views were really nice. The ride took longer than it should have because our motor kept turning off and we stopped and spun in circles for a bit before we started off again. There was another boat that left at the same time we did and must have gotten there half an hour before, we could see it speeding ahead in the distance. On the boat, I met an English guy who was also staying the night on the island, not just doing a quick day trip like most people were, so we hiked the island together. Started out intending to head to ruins at the north of the island, but ended up losing the trail at some point and finding out from some locals that we weren’t heading towards the ruins – per a woman working in the fields, all there was in that direction were potato fields! It turned out that we had accidentally turned onto the eastern leg of the island. It was a pretty long route that we took, but it was nice to see the side of the island that tourists never go to, just lots of grazing donkeys (including one really cute long-haired one) and women surrounded by piles of different colored potatoes; there are countless varieties of potatoes here.
Back in the area where the boat had dropped us, we figured out which way was actually north and headed up to the Chicana ruins. It was a really, really intense hike, both because it was at 3900 meters and the trail was kept winding up and down, up and down. We kept thinking we were there, but nope, around more and more bends. Eventually made our way up to the ruins and they were more than worth the painful hike. Many people had guides, but we just used my guidebook and got by pretty well. The first thing we saw were these big oval “footprints” in the stone path that are said to be the first footprints of the sun on earth after it was born. Then came a ceremonial table that was used for human and animal sacrifice, though there is debate whether the Incans actually sacrificed humans. It took a little while to get oriented because the guidebook used directional terms to describe where everything was, but I found the famous rock, Titi K’harka. It is said to be the birthplace of the sun, and people come here in swarms every June 21, winter solstice, to visit the site. The book described the rock as looking like a crouching puma and I’m usually awful at seeing that sort of thing, but after figuring out the general area, I found a tail and from there found a face and was able to see the figure of the puma really well. It is from this rock that the lake was named Titicaca, and it is one of the most sacred places for Bolivians. Up at that point, we were at one of the highest points in the area, over 4000 meters, and you could see everything on all sides, surrounded by a quiet beautiful paradise. After the rock came the labyrinth, which was a really huge maze of ruins. It reminded me of portions of Machu Picchu minus the huge crowds of people pushing from behind. There were endless doors, big and small, to walk through, and views through the stone window of the lake, mountains, and other islands. At one point, I got lost in the labyrinth, following door after door and eventually ending up in a dead end and having to trace my way back out.
We climbed back down to Ch’allapampa, the place where the boat had left us, and took a break sitting on the beach there. My book had described another beach further along as being straight out of a Greek island, but it was this beach that fit that description - clear calm water with shades of blue and green and soft white sand like I’ve never seen. After a rest at the beach, we started on the long journey to the south of the island. There were two routes, one up on the ridge that tourists take more often, and one along the eastern coast that winds through pueblitos (little towns). We asked a local along the way and he recommended the coast route, so we went that one. It was 11km about took us about 4 hours including plenty of little breaks when we were dying from the hills and altitude. The hike was really, really painful and by the end, I ached all over and still do the day after, but it was worth doing. Each side of the island had very different views as it curved around and around. There was tons of going uphill, some of it on slippery rocks, small stones, lots of unstable gravel, and there were some nicer bits with smooth big stones of red or white covered with a light coating of sand. I wanted to look around me the whole time, but sometimes it was a matter of just making it up the hill and looking only at the ground in front of me. We’d get to the top of the hill and think that around the curve we would find a flat or downhill slope, but nope, there were always steeper hills to come, again and again, never ending. Many people skip the walking the island bit of the trip, just take a boat to the north, see the ruins, and take a boat to the south before returning to Copacabana, but you don’t really get to experience the area that way. Along the entire trail, we were the only people there, aside from the occasional locals we crossed path with. The little towns were not touristy, they just had cute little houses, kids playing in the yard or walking home from school.
At one particularly difficult uphill stretched, I stopped along the side to rest and a little girl of five or six came up to me and said something that I didn’t understand. I spoke to her in Spanish, but she didn’t understand me, simply grabbed my hand and then held onto my arm with all her might using both of her hands. I didn’t know what she wanted, maybe was just excited to see a foreigner, but she kept smiling and giggling away. I tried to tell her I had to keep walking, so she walked with me for a little bit, still clinging tightly to my arm. We came upon some other girls who were a little bit older and one of them spoke a small amount of Spanish. I found out that they spoke Aymara, one of the two traditional languages of people in the area. The girls weren’t dressed in typical attire, but all of the women were – they have long ruffled skirts, a brimmed hat, a buttoned sweater, and either a shawl around their shoulders or a blanket filled with items tied in a certain way and carried on their back. Later that day, I passed a little girl who must have wanted to carry a pack like the other women were, but hers held only a teddy bear. Anyway, I couldn’t communicate much with the girls because they didn’t know much Spanish, but I pulled myself away by giving them each a stick of gum – they had never seen one before, but it seemed like they understood my phrases and motions to chew the gum, not eat it or swallow it.
We eventually reached the southern end of the island and the community of Yumani, where we dumped our bags at the first hostel we saw, eager to at least get rid of some weight. We then headed down to the ruins at the southern end. We were told that it would take 30 minutes to get there so thought okay, that’s nothing compared to all that we have walked today. It was a really steep walk, heading mostly downhill with a very unstable path – my legs felt like they were going to buckle, but at least I could breathe, unlike on all the uphill bits. We kept going round and round the hills until we finally got there, but were dreading having to walk all the way back up. The ruins there weren’t nearly as nice as the Chicana ruins, but it was still a pretty well formed building. There were several doors, each of which went into one room and then connected to one or two other rooms that were pitch black because they had no windows or doors open to the outside. They had indented areas for windows and doors and I felt my way around and stepped into the entry way of some of the doors, but then just got stuck at a stone wall and had to turn around. I don’t know what the significance of the building was, my book doesn’t say much about it, but it seems to go by many different names; I’ll look it up later. We had gone through an open gate to get into the ruins, but going out, we found that the gate was bolted shut and no one was around. The only option was to hop the gate, which was made of really unstable wood. I climbed over the gate no problem, but my jacket didn’t want to come along and the back of it got stuck on one of the posts. Somehow, that made the zipper in front pop off completely – I need to find someone with pliers somewhere to snap it back on, I can slide it back on but it won’t stay because the sides are open too wide. Zippers are such fun… The hike back was pretty hard and my legs started going out on me so I stumbled a couple times but eventually made it to the top and collapsed into my bed for a bit. We went outside to watch the sunset for as long as we could bear in the freezing cold, and then went into a restaurant to get dinner. I wanted to get a quinoa veggie cheese dish and asked the owner of the restaurant if it was vegetarian and she said no, it had meat – then why didn’t the menu list that? There was a vegetarian pizza on the menu so we split that – the things on top were pretty much straight from a salad – cucumber, tomato, green beans, herbs, and tons of cheese. Walking outside, we could see every star in the sky – I hadn’t seen a sky like that since my kayak trip to Bahia de los Angeles in Baja four years ago. Got my headlamp to walk an Israeli girl who had joined us for dinner back to her hostel since it was pitch black, and then collapsed into my bed. In total, we walked about 20km during the day, from 10:30am until 5:30pm.
This morning, had muesli with fruit and yogurt again for breakfast, but instead of the typical puffy grain cereal, it was cocoa puffs, strange! We wanted to see the last of the ruins on the island, the Incan stairs, which were on the way to the port. They were ridiculously disappointing – it was just a set of stone stairs that had clearly been touched up along the way, and it was the path that everyone used to get from the port up into the hills – if I didn’t know it was ruins, I would have thought it was just another set of stairs. At the start of the stairs on the bottom, there were two sculptures of Incan warriors, painted colorfully but clearly done very recently. Had to wait for quite a while for the boat to come – usually, they board people 15 minutes early, but even though there were a ton of boats just sitting there doing nothing, we didn’t board until 20 minutes after we had to leave. Still need to get used to Bolivian time. Bought my bus ticket to La Paz, got my luggage, and here I am now on the way back. Soon, we will pass again through the point where we have to get off and our bus takes its own ferry across a portion of the lake.
Una Ducha Caliente!!!
5/18/11
Accidentally slept in this morning, but it ended up being okay because this is a lazy tourist town with not much to do, though its absolutely beautiful here. Had a huge expensive breakfast (well, double the price of what it would be in La Paz, everything here is) of coffee, papaya juice, a fried egg with bread, and a small bowl of muesli with yogurt, papaya, and banana. To my surprise, I was joined at breakfast by a very friendly, well-groomed Siamese cat. I rarely see cats in South America, and definitely never see cats with well defined breeds. He talked to me for a bit and wanted some attention before he went back inside.
I then headed to the trailhead for Horca del Inca, ruins of an Incan astronomical lookout. There were signs through the town pointing to the trailhead, and then steps carved into the stone. The hike was really tiring because of the altitude so I had to take lots of breaks, but the view just got better and better as I got higher, with the red roofed houses below, the rolling hills, the distant Peruvian mountains, and the huge sparkling lake all under the bright blue sky. At one point, the trail disappeared, but I kept on walking in whatever direction the rocks would allow, scrambling and climbing up huge boulders, wedging myself sideways and using rocks as holds. I kept looking around for a continuation of a trail and at one point found a dirt path with footprints, but that disappeared so I scrambled up rocks some more until I couldn’t anymore because they were too big for me to get over. I had no idea where the actual ruins were, which according to my guidebook, had a small admission fee, so this wasn’t it, but I used it as my lookout and sat up there on a rock for a while, not at the top of the mountain/hill, but way up there. Descending the rocks was harder than the climb up, because on the way down I had to jump and run rather than just pull myself up. The actual hiking bit, though, was nice and easy, both going downhill and decreasing in altitude. I kept looking along the way for any turnoff I might have missed, but I couldn’t find anything at all except a few trash cans, maybe they abandoned the Incan ruins? I wandered off trail a few times to see some really cool rugged rock formations and saw one that may have been some sort of gate, though most were natural and really nice with the lake backdrop. The entire time I was hiking, I didn’t see another tourist – there isn’t much else to do in town, I have no clue what they are doing, I don’t even see too many on the streets. There are a lot of people who come here, both to see the lake and en route to Peru. Right now, the border to Peru at Puno is closed for some reason so a lot of people are held up here, so I’m really surprised this tiny town isn’t swarming with tourists.
Back in town, I walked down to the lake and rented a kayak for half an hour. I was definitely out of practice and also spoiled but the nicer kayaks that I had used with Outback, especially as a guide, but it was doable and fun to paddle around as well as just float on the water. Passed some really odd looking boats, the same size as the passenger motor boats, but made out of reeds and with a head and tail in the shape of an animal, maybe a condor, with a really scary looking face. Bought my ticket to Isle del Sol for tomorrow and then went to get a small lunch. Ended up with bruscetta, everything else was so expensive and I wasn’t very hungry yet. I shared a bit of the bread with a dog who came to sit with me.
I wanted to go to the museum in town, but it didn’t open until 3, so I wandered around and sat by the lake. The town is so tiny that it’s entirely walkable, so I saw some cute houses, a ton of kids in their uniforms just finishing school, and stopped to watch a bit of the women’s soccer practice in the gym. There was quite an audience for even that, and a lot of women and children were sitting and playing in the central plaza, quite the laid back life. This is a very tourist based town and aside from the very residential areas a bit higher up, the streets are lined with bus companies, travel agencies, hostels, and restaurants. There are also lots of little stores with packaged drinks and snacks, each run by one or two teens or women who sit there most of the day sewing or chatting, very few customers coming through. At three, I walked over the museum, waited a bit, knocked on the door – nothing. Eventually gave up and walked back to my hostel, who knows if they are not open today or are just on Bolivia time. I had asked my hostel about the hot water this morning and they said they would fix it. I got back just as one of the guys was about to go into my room, so I went with him, he tried the water, and said that it worked. There is only one knob and apparently to get hot water you only turn it a tiny bit, anything beyond that will get you that. So I had a lovely hot shower and am just lazing around for a bit before I do another hike to see the sunset.
Accidentally slept in this morning, but it ended up being okay because this is a lazy tourist town with not much to do, though its absolutely beautiful here. Had a huge expensive breakfast (well, double the price of what it would be in La Paz, everything here is) of coffee, papaya juice, a fried egg with bread, and a small bowl of muesli with yogurt, papaya, and banana. To my surprise, I was joined at breakfast by a very friendly, well-groomed Siamese cat. I rarely see cats in South America, and definitely never see cats with well defined breeds. He talked to me for a bit and wanted some attention before he went back inside.
I then headed to the trailhead for Horca del Inca, ruins of an Incan astronomical lookout. There were signs through the town pointing to the trailhead, and then steps carved into the stone. The hike was really tiring because of the altitude so I had to take lots of breaks, but the view just got better and better as I got higher, with the red roofed houses below, the rolling hills, the distant Peruvian mountains, and the huge sparkling lake all under the bright blue sky. At one point, the trail disappeared, but I kept on walking in whatever direction the rocks would allow, scrambling and climbing up huge boulders, wedging myself sideways and using rocks as holds. I kept looking around for a continuation of a trail and at one point found a dirt path with footprints, but that disappeared so I scrambled up rocks some more until I couldn’t anymore because they were too big for me to get over. I had no idea where the actual ruins were, which according to my guidebook, had a small admission fee, so this wasn’t it, but I used it as my lookout and sat up there on a rock for a while, not at the top of the mountain/hill, but way up there. Descending the rocks was harder than the climb up, because on the way down I had to jump and run rather than just pull myself up. The actual hiking bit, though, was nice and easy, both going downhill and decreasing in altitude. I kept looking along the way for any turnoff I might have missed, but I couldn’t find anything at all except a few trash cans, maybe they abandoned the Incan ruins? I wandered off trail a few times to see some really cool rugged rock formations and saw one that may have been some sort of gate, though most were natural and really nice with the lake backdrop. The entire time I was hiking, I didn’t see another tourist – there isn’t much else to do in town, I have no clue what they are doing, I don’t even see too many on the streets. There are a lot of people who come here, both to see the lake and en route to Peru. Right now, the border to Peru at Puno is closed for some reason so a lot of people are held up here, so I’m really surprised this tiny town isn’t swarming with tourists.
Back in town, I walked down to the lake and rented a kayak for half an hour. I was definitely out of practice and also spoiled but the nicer kayaks that I had used with Outback, especially as a guide, but it was doable and fun to paddle around as well as just float on the water. Passed some really odd looking boats, the same size as the passenger motor boats, but made out of reeds and with a head and tail in the shape of an animal, maybe a condor, with a really scary looking face. Bought my ticket to Isle del Sol for tomorrow and then went to get a small lunch. Ended up with bruscetta, everything else was so expensive and I wasn’t very hungry yet. I shared a bit of the bread with a dog who came to sit with me.
I wanted to go to the museum in town, but it didn’t open until 3, so I wandered around and sat by the lake. The town is so tiny that it’s entirely walkable, so I saw some cute houses, a ton of kids in their uniforms just finishing school, and stopped to watch a bit of the women’s soccer practice in the gym. There was quite an audience for even that, and a lot of women and children were sitting and playing in the central plaza, quite the laid back life. This is a very tourist based town and aside from the very residential areas a bit higher up, the streets are lined with bus companies, travel agencies, hostels, and restaurants. There are also lots of little stores with packaged drinks and snacks, each run by one or two teens or women who sit there most of the day sewing or chatting, very few customers coming through. At three, I walked over the museum, waited a bit, knocked on the door – nothing. Eventually gave up and walked back to my hostel, who knows if they are not open today or are just on Bolivia time. I had asked my hostel about the hot water this morning and they said they would fix it. I got back just as one of the guys was about to go into my room, so I went with him, he tried the water, and said that it worked. There is only one knob and apparently to get hot water you only turn it a tiny bit, anything beyond that will get you that. So I had a lovely hot shower and am just lazing around for a bit before I do another hike to see the sunset.
Musical Instruments and Adorable Children
5-17 10:30p
Another long but exciting day. After breakfast, went to the bus terminal and bought a 2pm ticket for Copacabana. Packed up the huge mess I had made (it’s hard to live out of a backpack, have to dig through everything to find what you want!), checked out of the room, and left my big bag at the desk while I spent the morning around La Paz. I managed not to get lost, I finally knew which direction was which and was oriented to the city… just in time to leave!
Started out at a set of museums grouped into one on Calle Jaen in this old colonial house. The first was about Japanese migration to Bolivia and because it was mostly just long write ups in Spanish that would have taken tons of effort to interpret, I went through there pretty quickly. Next came the museum full of masks. Again, most everything was written in Spanish, though there were a few literal translations into English, done very literally so they were quite ridiculous to read. I read through some of the Spanish blurbs and looked around a bit, a lot of the masks were really scary and strange, all used for different festivals and celebrations. Their version of a clown is much, much worse than ours! The last museum was my favorite of the group – it had a room of gold pieces, and another area with silver and other metals. I was excited for the gold room because I had seen a gold exhibit in Peru that was amazing, but this didn’t really compare and there weren’t any descriptions on anything. The other metals section, though, had some pretty cool pieces, from masks that were found at the ruins I visited yesterday, to full body armor and tools and jewelry.
I walked down the hill a bit to the museum of musical instruments, which was by far my favorite of what I’ve seen so far in Bolivia. There were rooms upon rooms of collections of Bolivian instruments, as well as an international room. Took tons of pictures, which I hadn’t been allowed to do at other museums. Interestingly shaped guitars and percussion pieces, a dozen kinds of flutes, creative designs everywhere. There were also several interactive areas where it said ‘se puede tocar’ – you can touch – so I got to play with different percussion instruments. I’m blanking out now, there was so much to say, but pictures later will help bring it back. I can’t believe that was just this morning!!
I walked further downhill, deciding to spend the little time I had left going to a folklore museum, but it had just closed – most museums here tend to close for lunch from 12:30 till 3! So I went instead to the other vegetarian buffet in La Paz, which was just a few blocks further down the hill. They nicely put stairs as the sidewalk to make it nice and easy, though the altitude was definitely still getting to me. Lunch was delicious, the best big meal I’ve had here. I have no idea what kind of juice I had, some fruit I’d never heard of and couldn’t pinpoint to anything, but it was good. There was an interesting side made of onions (though a bit too strong on that end), purple olives, and cheese chunks, all fully coated in guacamole. I dipped bread in creamy green vegetable soup topped with cheese. Boiled yuccas, or something of the sort, and broccoli, yay veggies! For the second course, you got a choice between soy meatballs with rice and this cornbread looking thing, and I chose the cornbread. It was really, really good, and definitely had a corn base to it, but was kind of casserole-ish and very moist and filling. For dessert, there was a good sweet fried plantain and this chunk of raspberry moose. Hm, I guess I write a ton about food on here! It was really nice to be able to go to a fully vegetarian restaurant and be able to get anything at all and not worry about what was in it. This place won best restaurant in Bolivia several years back and it’s very popular and a decent price for the amount of good food you get, just under 4 dollars, which is a lot here but was worth it.
After lunch, retrieved my back and headed back to the bus station. The bus had seats jammed so closely together that when one person leaned their seat back, everyone had to to avoid being smashed, so we all had our seats fully back. They were hard to move back to their original position, so getting in and out and also reaching my backpack involved some contortionism. I’m glad I don’t have long legs! On the bus I was again surrounded by Israelis, several different groups this time, they are everywhere! After the army and before going to school, tons of them take really long travel breaks, though I don’t understand where they get the money since they make about $150 per month in the army! The ride to Copacabana was four hours of gorgeousness, with rolling hills, the Cordillera range in the distance, different views of the lake as we wound around and around. At one point, we all had to get off the bus and take little boats to cross the lake. They put about two dozen of us on a little covered motor boat and we rocked our way across the lake. Our bus went on its own mini ferry, which was barely bigger than it was and pretty scary to watch since it was so low to the water. Back on the bus for another hour and then we arrived. I checked into a hostel and then began to wander the town. My hostel was just a few minutes walk from the water and I found a rocky pier, so I shakily made my way to the end of that and watched the sun set over Lake Titicaca with the mountains of Southern Peru in the distance. Tomorrow night, I’ll climb up for about half an hour to a viewpoint that is supposed to have a really good sunset view.
I was going to go grab food and then go back to the hostel because that’s what I had done in La Paz, a huge city where it wasn’t safe to walk alone at night. But this was a tiny town with cobbled roads and very few cars, everyone walking around in the street, kids running and playing on their own. So I started walking around and was drawn to a building with loud cheering. Turned out it was a women’s soccer game, most of the women wearing jersey tops and traditional flowy skirts over tights – those definitely interfered with their game and caused a few stumbles. The gym was packed to the brim with what was probably most of the town. Many of the players were middle aged women and no one ran very quickly, so it was a fairly slow-paced game and no points were scored during the time I was there, but it was still fun to watch, not for the soccer but for the culture and atmosphere.
Outside, I stopped to watch some children play in the plaza, and was soon approached by several children and a little girl named Maya asked my name. Soon I had a huge group of kids around me, very excited to play with a gringa. The kids ranged from three or four to eleven or so and there were definitely a few, including Maya and another little one, who constantly needed to be hugging me or holding my hand. I spent about three hours with them, leaving for a bit in between to grab a quick dinner across the road. They of course were in love with my camera and had tons of fun taking pictures and videos of each other, squealing with laughter and delight. I have some pretty cute pictures on my camera, but the lighting isn’t great because it was dark outside. After my battery died, we moved on to playing games, some where I had no clue what we were doing but tried to follow along. There was one that was kind of like a version of freeze tag, where all the boys were the snow and the girls were the sun, and if we were tagged, we had to freeze until another sun tagged us. Almost immediately, we were all frozen except for one, who had quite the chase with the boys before she somehow managed to free us, and then all the kids collapsed in a big pile of laughter. Then came duck duck goose, similar to ours except they used a ball and when you were tagged as goose, the previous goose dropped the ball and you had to grab it and use it to tag the person in order to get them out – you could also throw the ball and hit them for the tag. After my dinner break, we got into a little bit of the kids asking about me, being amazed at how much my plane ticket cost, and wanting to learn random words in English. Kept being begged to stay, but eventually left with promises that I would come back tomorrow night at around the same time. Speaking Spanish with kids is definitely easier than with adults, and the older girls helped try to guess what I was meaning to say when I couldn’t think of it. I sometimes couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they were good about showing me or saying it another way, so it was definitely good Spanish practice.
Used the internet for a bit, though it was ridiculously slow and expensive, so I’m just typing this on my computer and I’ll move it over later. Then back to the hostel to take a nice hot shower, which I was very excited for – yesterday’s shower was icy cold and quite painful, so my hair didn’t get washed. I had chosen this hostel here partly because of promises of hot water 24/7. Eh, it was barely luke warm, so my hair remains gross. I need to be less of a wimp with the cold water, this is going to keep happening, but it’s kind of hard when my skin and is already purple and I’m trembling from the cold before even stepping into the shower! Okay this is ridiculously long and I should try to get some sleep, the altitude here is even worse than La Paz and the headache is not fun! Cookies if you actually sat through and read all of this! I think by the end of this trip I will have quite the long novel.
Another long but exciting day. After breakfast, went to the bus terminal and bought a 2pm ticket for Copacabana. Packed up the huge mess I had made (it’s hard to live out of a backpack, have to dig through everything to find what you want!), checked out of the room, and left my big bag at the desk while I spent the morning around La Paz. I managed not to get lost, I finally knew which direction was which and was oriented to the city… just in time to leave!
Started out at a set of museums grouped into one on Calle Jaen in this old colonial house. The first was about Japanese migration to Bolivia and because it was mostly just long write ups in Spanish that would have taken tons of effort to interpret, I went through there pretty quickly. Next came the museum full of masks. Again, most everything was written in Spanish, though there were a few literal translations into English, done very literally so they were quite ridiculous to read. I read through some of the Spanish blurbs and looked around a bit, a lot of the masks were really scary and strange, all used for different festivals and celebrations. Their version of a clown is much, much worse than ours! The last museum was my favorite of the group – it had a room of gold pieces, and another area with silver and other metals. I was excited for the gold room because I had seen a gold exhibit in Peru that was amazing, but this didn’t really compare and there weren’t any descriptions on anything. The other metals section, though, had some pretty cool pieces, from masks that were found at the ruins I visited yesterday, to full body armor and tools and jewelry.
I walked down the hill a bit to the museum of musical instruments, which was by far my favorite of what I’ve seen so far in Bolivia. There were rooms upon rooms of collections of Bolivian instruments, as well as an international room. Took tons of pictures, which I hadn’t been allowed to do at other museums. Interestingly shaped guitars and percussion pieces, a dozen kinds of flutes, creative designs everywhere. There were also several interactive areas where it said ‘se puede tocar’ – you can touch – so I got to play with different percussion instruments. I’m blanking out now, there was so much to say, but pictures later will help bring it back. I can’t believe that was just this morning!!
I walked further downhill, deciding to spend the little time I had left going to a folklore museum, but it had just closed – most museums here tend to close for lunch from 12:30 till 3! So I went instead to the other vegetarian buffet in La Paz, which was just a few blocks further down the hill. They nicely put stairs as the sidewalk to make it nice and easy, though the altitude was definitely still getting to me. Lunch was delicious, the best big meal I’ve had here. I have no idea what kind of juice I had, some fruit I’d never heard of and couldn’t pinpoint to anything, but it was good. There was an interesting side made of onions (though a bit too strong on that end), purple olives, and cheese chunks, all fully coated in guacamole. I dipped bread in creamy green vegetable soup topped with cheese. Boiled yuccas, or something of the sort, and broccoli, yay veggies! For the second course, you got a choice between soy meatballs with rice and this cornbread looking thing, and I chose the cornbread. It was really, really good, and definitely had a corn base to it, but was kind of casserole-ish and very moist and filling. For dessert, there was a good sweet fried plantain and this chunk of raspberry moose. Hm, I guess I write a ton about food on here! It was really nice to be able to go to a fully vegetarian restaurant and be able to get anything at all and not worry about what was in it. This place won best restaurant in Bolivia several years back and it’s very popular and a decent price for the amount of good food you get, just under 4 dollars, which is a lot here but was worth it.
After lunch, retrieved my back and headed back to the bus station. The bus had seats jammed so closely together that when one person leaned their seat back, everyone had to to avoid being smashed, so we all had our seats fully back. They were hard to move back to their original position, so getting in and out and also reaching my backpack involved some contortionism. I’m glad I don’t have long legs! On the bus I was again surrounded by Israelis, several different groups this time, they are everywhere! After the army and before going to school, tons of them take really long travel breaks, though I don’t understand where they get the money since they make about $150 per month in the army! The ride to Copacabana was four hours of gorgeousness, with rolling hills, the Cordillera range in the distance, different views of the lake as we wound around and around. At one point, we all had to get off the bus and take little boats to cross the lake. They put about two dozen of us on a little covered motor boat and we rocked our way across the lake. Our bus went on its own mini ferry, which was barely bigger than it was and pretty scary to watch since it was so low to the water. Back on the bus for another hour and then we arrived. I checked into a hostel and then began to wander the town. My hostel was just a few minutes walk from the water and I found a rocky pier, so I shakily made my way to the end of that and watched the sun set over Lake Titicaca with the mountains of Southern Peru in the distance. Tomorrow night, I’ll climb up for about half an hour to a viewpoint that is supposed to have a really good sunset view.
I was going to go grab food and then go back to the hostel because that’s what I had done in La Paz, a huge city where it wasn’t safe to walk alone at night. But this was a tiny town with cobbled roads and very few cars, everyone walking around in the street, kids running and playing on their own. So I started walking around and was drawn to a building with loud cheering. Turned out it was a women’s soccer game, most of the women wearing jersey tops and traditional flowy skirts over tights – those definitely interfered with their game and caused a few stumbles. The gym was packed to the brim with what was probably most of the town. Many of the players were middle aged women and no one ran very quickly, so it was a fairly slow-paced game and no points were scored during the time I was there, but it was still fun to watch, not for the soccer but for the culture and atmosphere.
Outside, I stopped to watch some children play in the plaza, and was soon approached by several children and a little girl named Maya asked my name. Soon I had a huge group of kids around me, very excited to play with a gringa. The kids ranged from three or four to eleven or so and there were definitely a few, including Maya and another little one, who constantly needed to be hugging me or holding my hand. I spent about three hours with them, leaving for a bit in between to grab a quick dinner across the road. They of course were in love with my camera and had tons of fun taking pictures and videos of each other, squealing with laughter and delight. I have some pretty cute pictures on my camera, but the lighting isn’t great because it was dark outside. After my battery died, we moved on to playing games, some where I had no clue what we were doing but tried to follow along. There was one that was kind of like a version of freeze tag, where all the boys were the snow and the girls were the sun, and if we were tagged, we had to freeze until another sun tagged us. Almost immediately, we were all frozen except for one, who had quite the chase with the boys before she somehow managed to free us, and then all the kids collapsed in a big pile of laughter. Then came duck duck goose, similar to ours except they used a ball and when you were tagged as goose, the previous goose dropped the ball and you had to grab it and use it to tag the person in order to get them out – you could also throw the ball and hit them for the tag. After my dinner break, we got into a little bit of the kids asking about me, being amazed at how much my plane ticket cost, and wanting to learn random words in English. Kept being begged to stay, but eventually left with promises that I would come back tomorrow night at around the same time. Speaking Spanish with kids is definitely easier than with adults, and the older girls helped try to guess what I was meaning to say when I couldn’t think of it. I sometimes couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they were good about showing me or saying it another way, so it was definitely good Spanish practice.
Used the internet for a bit, though it was ridiculously slow and expensive, so I’m just typing this on my computer and I’ll move it over later. Then back to the hostel to take a nice hot shower, which I was very excited for – yesterday’s shower was icy cold and quite painful, so my hair didn’t get washed. I had chosen this hostel here partly because of promises of hot water 24/7. Eh, it was barely luke warm, so my hair remains gross. I need to be less of a wimp with the cold water, this is going to keep happening, but it’s kind of hard when my skin and is already purple and I’m trembling from the cold before even stepping into the shower! Okay this is ridiculously long and I should try to get some sleep, the altitude here is even worse than La Paz and the headache is not fun! Cookies if you actually sat through and read all of this! I think by the end of this trip I will have quite the long novel.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Tiwanaku
Today was a long but fun and interesting day. Started out getting a call from the airport at 7:30 saying my luggage would be there within the hour. It came at 9. I was supposed to get picked up by the tour group 8:45 - 9, and I got picked up at 9:15. That´s Bolivia time, la hora Boliviana, for me, I better get used to it!
It was a 1.5 hour ride to Tiwanaku. Everyone spoke English, which was really nice because I could actually have a full conversation for the first time in several days. Four from Israel, one from England, and four from Pennsylvannia. Part way there, we stopped to take pictures from a viewpoint (the whole drive there was gorgeous). A group of really friendly dogs came up to say hi. One little terrier guy had a huge engorged tick on his head, and of course I couldn´t help but remove it and he was actually really good about it and licked me afterwards.
At Tiwanaku, we started in the museum and got a really good detailed tour from our guide. Way too much to remember, but I´ll try to get down the basics.
The tour started with some maps of Bolivia and how it is arranged - highlands, valley, and jungle, and each of those areas into 3 or 4 major areas, more than half of which I will be going to. She then went into the history of the Tiwanaku. The era lasted for almost 3000 years and they aren´t quite sure why it stopped existing, but it was probably because there was a 90 year drought.
We then went into a pretty huge artifacts area of the museum - couldn´t take any pictures there. A huge part of their culture was around animals. The culture that they kind of stemmed from used llama heads as their primary symbolism, and during the Tiwanaku age, they used a motif of a 3 step staircase. This number came from the three levels of their universe - the gods, the layer of the people, and mother earth on the bottom. Another significant number was 7 - they had seven layers on their pyramids, and seven twists of the snake on the big statues of priests and gods. The animals that they used constantly in all of their pieces because they considered them sacred were the puma, condor, fish, and snake. Llamas were also very important in the culture but were not considered sacred. They were used for transportation, wool, meat, and fuel (candles were burned using llama fat surrounded by wool). Their bones were used for music instruments such as flutes and also combined with copper to make flexible arrows. There was also a mummy, with the skull showing and the rest of the body in a fetal position wrapped tightly in rope. It was a priest, which they could tell in that the head was deformed, apparently all priests had a deformed shape to their heads... they must have smushed their heads when they were babies?
After the artifacts (many more than those, but as much as I tried to remember everything, I´m drawing a blank), we went to the portion of ruins that had been moved inside. The most significant was a huge sculpture/statue of a priest. You can tell whether it is a priest or god because the priest holds one scepters and one glass, and the god holds two scepters. Animals are integrated everywhere and the designs are really intricate and perfectly symmetrical. The statue in this room was 7 meters tall! The theory is that the designs are so symmetrical because the artists wove the designs to the exact size and then were able to put them against the stone and use them as a template.
Then on to the ruins we went. After we climbed up a big hill (not fun with altitude higher than La Paz!), we reached the back side of the seven layer pyramid. Only three layers have been excavated so far, the whole site is in progress, as they only began extensive excavation 5 or 10 years ago after being granted UNESCO status. Our guide kept telling us to come back in 5 or 10 years and we would be able to see so much more. Without a guide, it would have just looked like plain old ruins that I´ve seen many times before, but she was amazing about telling us the stories behind everything. At one point, there are these magnetic rocks that confuse a compass. People used to make pilgrammages to that point because they felt a sacred energy coming from the area, which she tried to let us feel by having us rub our hands together and then hold them near the rock with our eyes closed. Didn´t work for me, but interesting nonetheless. There was also this really cool rock several places.
At first, it just looked like a rock with a hole in it. But it actually works really well as a sort of megaphone. There is a bigger hole on one end than the other, and the inside is curved in a way to almost mimic the cochlea and the setup of the ear. 
Another really interesting area was the 175 heads. It was a patio sort of area, and all four walls were covered in faces carved in stone, each one individual. The faces on the east side were most well defined, and those to the west were pretty worn away - from what we could get out of the guide, it was due to age. Next came another intricate statue of a priest.
Apparently, when the Spanish came, they saw it and thought that it was the devil so tried to decapitate it, but the stone was too strong - thus the chipped left shoulder. Instead, they resorted to exorcised it and carved crosses on the statue. Lovely. Also, from the whole site, they stole all of the gold and diamonds that were previously plastered on many of the stones.
Last but not least was the sungod gate, which was cool because it reminded me of the sun god statue at UCSD. There were all these different ideas behind what the different things on it represented (30 men = 30 days, 24 rays coming out of the sungod´s head = 24 hrs/day, etc), but because the calendar year was different, people think that archeologists were just overanalyzing it. After that, we had a decent lunch where they actually had a vegetarian option of quinoa soup and a cheese and veggie omelette with yellow rice and fries and then fruit with yogurt for dessert. Pricier than at a restaurant on the street, but not bad for 4 dollars. :D Had fun speaking in English to everyone at lunch and finding out about other people´s trips. The ride back was fun as well, though a bit bumpy since the driver took a different route than on the way there, and the scenery was amazinggg. It is the beginning of the dry season, so there is still some greenery, but by August, it will all be pretty drab, so we get the best of both worlds, green and no rain. And actually not as cold today as I expected given the altitude, I brought along warmer clothes once I finally got my luggage, but didn´t need them.
Got dropped off down in El Prado with the rest of the group, so decided to wander again. I wandered a bit too much and ended up kind of lost and unable to find the place where the microbuses leave, so ended up taking a taxi up the hill because I had no clue where I was and it was dark. It was again near impossible to find dinner and I got laughed at quite a few times for asking for vegetarian food. Eventually walked down to the bus terminal and found a stall there where I got a fried egg sandwich and a banana milkshake for a dollar. I am going to have to survive off eggs and carbs and fruit juice! Now I will go and crash in my hostel and finally shower (my towel didn´t arrive early enough this morning, boo!) Though I don´t know if there is even hot water, so this will be interesting. My bed is nice and warm, though, so Ill probably burrow under my blankets afterwards and watch CSI or something in Spanish. Okay, time to go and end my saga. Tomorrow will be museum day, and then I´m off on the next leg of my adventure to Copacabana and Lake Titicaca.
It was a 1.5 hour ride to Tiwanaku. Everyone spoke English, which was really nice because I could actually have a full conversation for the first time in several days. Four from Israel, one from England, and four from Pennsylvannia. Part way there, we stopped to take pictures from a viewpoint (the whole drive there was gorgeous). A group of really friendly dogs came up to say hi. One little terrier guy had a huge engorged tick on his head, and of course I couldn´t help but remove it and he was actually really good about it and licked me afterwards.
At Tiwanaku, we started in the museum and got a really good detailed tour from our guide. Way too much to remember, but I´ll try to get down the basics.
The tour started with some maps of Bolivia and how it is arranged - highlands, valley, and jungle, and each of those areas into 3 or 4 major areas, more than half of which I will be going to. She then went into the history of the Tiwanaku. The era lasted for almost 3000 years and they aren´t quite sure why it stopped existing, but it was probably because there was a 90 year drought. We then went into a pretty huge artifacts area of the museum - couldn´t take any pictures there. A huge part of their culture was around animals. The culture that they kind of stemmed from used llama heads as their primary symbolism, and during the Tiwanaku age, they used a motif of a 3 step staircase. This number came from the three levels of their universe - the gods, the layer of the people, and mother earth on the bottom. Another significant number was 7 - they had seven layers on their pyramids, and seven twists of the snake on the big statues of priests and gods. The animals that they used constantly in all of their pieces because they considered them sacred were the puma, condor, fish, and snake. Llamas were also very important in the culture but were not considered sacred. They were used for transportation, wool, meat, and fuel (candles were burned using llama fat surrounded by wool). Their bones were used for music instruments such as flutes and also combined with copper to make flexible arrows. There was also a mummy, with the skull showing and the rest of the body in a fetal position wrapped tightly in rope. It was a priest, which they could tell in that the head was deformed, apparently all priests had a deformed shape to their heads... they must have smushed their heads when they were babies?
After the artifacts (many more than those, but as much as I tried to remember everything, I´m drawing a blank), we went to the portion of ruins that had been moved inside. The most significant was a huge sculpture/statue of a priest. You can tell whether it is a priest or god because the priest holds one scepters and one glass, and the god holds two scepters. Animals are integrated everywhere and the designs are really intricate and perfectly symmetrical. The statue in this room was 7 meters tall! The theory is that the designs are so symmetrical because the artists wove the designs to the exact size and then were able to put them against the stone and use them as a template.
Then on to the ruins we went. After we climbed up a big hill (not fun with altitude higher than La Paz!), we reached the back side of the seven layer pyramid. Only three layers have been excavated so far, the whole site is in progress, as they only began extensive excavation 5 or 10 years ago after being granted UNESCO status. Our guide kept telling us to come back in 5 or 10 years and we would be able to see so much more. Without a guide, it would have just looked like plain old ruins that I´ve seen many times before, but she was amazing about telling us the stories behind everything. At one point, there are these magnetic rocks that confuse a compass. People used to make pilgrammages to that point because they felt a sacred energy coming from the area, which she tried to let us feel by having us rub our hands together and then hold them near the rock with our eyes closed. Didn´t work for me, but interesting nonetheless. There was also this really cool rock several places.
At first, it just looked like a rock with a hole in it. But it actually works really well as a sort of megaphone. There is a bigger hole on one end than the other, and the inside is curved in a way to almost mimic the cochlea and the setup of the ear. 
Another really interesting area was the 175 heads. It was a patio sort of area, and all four walls were covered in faces carved in stone, each one individual. The faces on the east side were most well defined, and those to the west were pretty worn away - from what we could get out of the guide, it was due to age. Next came another intricate statue of a priest.
Apparently, when the Spanish came, they saw it and thought that it was the devil so tried to decapitate it, but the stone was too strong - thus the chipped left shoulder. Instead, they resorted to exorcised it and carved crosses on the statue. Lovely. Also, from the whole site, they stole all of the gold and diamonds that were previously plastered on many of the stones. Last but not least was the sungod gate, which was cool because it reminded me of the sun god statue at UCSD. There were all these different ideas behind what the different things on it represented (30 men = 30 days, 24 rays coming out of the sungod´s head = 24 hrs/day, etc), but because the calendar year was different, people think that archeologists were just overanalyzing it. After that, we had a decent lunch where they actually had a vegetarian option of quinoa soup and a cheese and veggie omelette with yellow rice and fries and then fruit with yogurt for dessert. Pricier than at a restaurant on the street, but not bad for 4 dollars. :D Had fun speaking in English to everyone at lunch and finding out about other people´s trips. The ride back was fun as well, though a bit bumpy since the driver took a different route than on the way there, and the scenery was amazinggg. It is the beginning of the dry season, so there is still some greenery, but by August, it will all be pretty drab, so we get the best of both worlds, green and no rain. And actually not as cold today as I expected given the altitude, I brought along warmer clothes once I finally got my luggage, but didn´t need them.
Got dropped off down in El Prado with the rest of the group, so decided to wander again. I wandered a bit too much and ended up kind of lost and unable to find the place where the microbuses leave, so ended up taking a taxi up the hill because I had no clue where I was and it was dark. It was again near impossible to find dinner and I got laughed at quite a few times for asking for vegetarian food. Eventually walked down to the bus terminal and found a stall there where I got a fried egg sandwich and a banana milkshake for a dollar. I am going to have to survive off eggs and carbs and fruit juice! Now I will go and crash in my hostel and finally shower (my towel didn´t arrive early enough this morning, boo!) Though I don´t know if there is even hot water, so this will be interesting. My bed is nice and warm, though, so Ill probably burrow under my blankets afterwards and watch CSI or something in Spanish. Okay, time to go and end my saga. Tomorrow will be museum day, and then I´m off on the next leg of my adventure to Copacabana and Lake Titicaca.
First Day Around La Paz
5/15/11pm
Didn’t get to see as much today as I would have liked because most shops and museums were closed for Sunday. I mostly wandered the city and people watched. La Paz is a very sloped city with El Alto and the airport at the top around 14,000 feet. As you descend lower and lower into the valley, it gets much easier to walk and breath. Unlike many areas where the wealthier live in the higher up areas, the rich areas are at the lowest points of La Paz. I’m staying somewhere in between, right near the bus terminal, so had to ride about 15 minutes downhill to get to El Prado where the central cultural areas of the city area.
I was surprised, though, in that it was so much less centralized than Lima or Cuzco – there, I was able to walk around a central plaza near the big church and there were museums and shops everywhere, really easy to navigate and find things to do. From my map and my experience, it was the opposite here – there are a bunch of museums I want to go to, but they are all clustered in different parts of La Paz. Tuesday, my museum day, will involve lots of bussing around! It doesn’t help that today was Sunday or that to get anywhere involves winding (and slippery, eek) cobbled roads with very steep slopes. I was trying to find El Museo de Coca because it is supposed to be a really interesting place about coca as both an illegal drug and in sodas, etc. I finally found it after tons of wandering, but it was closed – the sign on the door said they would be back at 4, but asking local shopkeepers, I eventually found out it was closed for the day. Not sure if I’m going to have time to go there while I’m here.
The street the museum was on was a good find, though, with booths and booths of artisans with colorful woven goods. I’m going to wait and buy things till later in my trip so I don’t have to lug everything around, but it was fun to just look around at everything. Also amusing were the blocks where every single store sold the same thing – there were two blocks in a row where the only stores were barber shops/hair salons, each with their own sign, and every one of them had at least one customer inside. Maybe Sunday is hair day? It just seems so crazy to have it all centralized like that in one place. I later wandered to the big market area with several floors of booths. Most were closed, but it was a really interesting setup looking at the signs, things were categorized in the same way. Each row of booths was labeled as calle (street) # something, and each calle had either all flower shops or all meat booths or all book stores, etc. How do they make any money that way? I guess it makes it easy to find stuff with there directory of what is where!
During my wanderings, ran into one of the few vegetarian restaurants in the area and got the lunch buffet. It wasn’t very flavored and I somehow had almost no appetite, so I couldn’t even finish my plate, very unusual! But it was nice to be able to try a bit of everything. Fried soya was decent, though very fried, and the soup was good – one of the few times I’ll actually be able to eat soup here.
Another random point today was seeing all the dogs around. There were tons of street dogs, which was to be expected, but they weren’t starving to death and weren’t scared at all of people, but didn’t beg either. I was surprised, though, to see a good number of dogs being walked on leashes by their owners, many of them wearing coats – I haven’t seen that anywhere else that I’ve traveled, they usually look pretty scraggly and wander the streets on their own even if they do belong to someone. I also passed by a woman walking a sheep on a leash, it seemed very well trained…
I had taken a taxi down to El Prado because I was completely unfamiliar with the area, but decided to take a micro back up the hill (similar to the mini bus-ish things that stop anywhere that I’ve seen in a bunch of other countries, but not like anything in the US). Back near the train station, I heard festive music and followed it until I found a group of musicians and dancers. The women were in traditional clothing with very flowy skirts and sang as they spun in circles, I don’t know how they didn’t get dizzy, I got a bit dizzy just watching them. Most of the men played the trumpet or tuba or drums, and two of the men joined in the dancing – one was dressed in a suit and seemed to be the one in charge, and the other held up a sign as he spun around that translated to ‘Jesus Loves You.’ I don’t know what the occasion was, but there are celebrations in Bolivia constantly. Earlier today, I kept hearing loud noises and asked one of the shopkeepers – she said that they were fireworks being set off, but she didn’t even know which celebration it was for because there’s almost always something. Anyway, I sat and watched the celebration for a bit and then walked around to search for dinner. There were many less restaurants in this area than lower down in El Prado, so everything had only meat on the menu. I eventually asked at one of the restaurants and got them to make me a dish with two fried eggs, rice, tomatoes, and these really yummy fries. They also put a couple pieces of cheese on top, which were really nice for flavor – the cheese here is so good because it’s all really fresh and natural. I only spent 4 dollars on food all day – breakfast was included with the hostel (with deliciousss fresh papaya juice) and lunch and dinner were 2 each for tons of food.
Then back to the hostel I went – it was getting dark and I shouldn’t wander around alone at night here, so I’m holed up in my room instead. Started planning the details out for the next couple days and of course writing this long ramble. Tomorrow, I should hopefully get my backpack delivered in the early morning and can finally take a shower – it’s a bit hard to do when it’s freezing and I don’t have a towel. I’ll be picked up from my hostel a bit later to go on a guided day trip to Tiwanaku, a ruins site that is about an hour and a half away. I was told today that the guide would be bilingual, so hopefully other people in the group with speak English and we can get an English tour.
Didn’t get to see as much today as I would have liked because most shops and museums were closed for Sunday. I mostly wandered the city and people watched. La Paz is a very sloped city with El Alto and the airport at the top around 14,000 feet. As you descend lower and lower into the valley, it gets much easier to walk and breath. Unlike many areas where the wealthier live in the higher up areas, the rich areas are at the lowest points of La Paz. I’m staying somewhere in between, right near the bus terminal, so had to ride about 15 minutes downhill to get to El Prado where the central cultural areas of the city area.
I was surprised, though, in that it was so much less centralized than Lima or Cuzco – there, I was able to walk around a central plaza near the big church and there were museums and shops everywhere, really easy to navigate and find things to do. From my map and my experience, it was the opposite here – there are a bunch of museums I want to go to, but they are all clustered in different parts of La Paz. Tuesday, my museum day, will involve lots of bussing around! It doesn’t help that today was Sunday or that to get anywhere involves winding (and slippery, eek) cobbled roads with very steep slopes. I was trying to find El Museo de Coca because it is supposed to be a really interesting place about coca as both an illegal drug and in sodas, etc. I finally found it after tons of wandering, but it was closed – the sign on the door said they would be back at 4, but asking local shopkeepers, I eventually found out it was closed for the day. Not sure if I’m going to have time to go there while I’m here.
The street the museum was on was a good find, though, with booths and booths of artisans with colorful woven goods. I’m going to wait and buy things till later in my trip so I don’t have to lug everything around, but it was fun to just look around at everything. Also amusing were the blocks where every single store sold the same thing – there were two blocks in a row where the only stores were barber shops/hair salons, each with their own sign, and every one of them had at least one customer inside. Maybe Sunday is hair day? It just seems so crazy to have it all centralized like that in one place. I later wandered to the big market area with several floors of booths. Most were closed, but it was a really interesting setup looking at the signs, things were categorized in the same way. Each row of booths was labeled as calle (street) # something, and each calle had either all flower shops or all meat booths or all book stores, etc. How do they make any money that way? I guess it makes it easy to find stuff with there directory of what is where!
During my wanderings, ran into one of the few vegetarian restaurants in the area and got the lunch buffet. It wasn’t very flavored and I somehow had almost no appetite, so I couldn’t even finish my plate, very unusual! But it was nice to be able to try a bit of everything. Fried soya was decent, though very fried, and the soup was good – one of the few times I’ll actually be able to eat soup here.
Another random point today was seeing all the dogs around. There were tons of street dogs, which was to be expected, but they weren’t starving to death and weren’t scared at all of people, but didn’t beg either. I was surprised, though, to see a good number of dogs being walked on leashes by their owners, many of them wearing coats – I haven’t seen that anywhere else that I’ve traveled, they usually look pretty scraggly and wander the streets on their own even if they do belong to someone. I also passed by a woman walking a sheep on a leash, it seemed very well trained…
I had taken a taxi down to El Prado because I was completely unfamiliar with the area, but decided to take a micro back up the hill (similar to the mini bus-ish things that stop anywhere that I’ve seen in a bunch of other countries, but not like anything in the US). Back near the train station, I heard festive music and followed it until I found a group of musicians and dancers. The women were in traditional clothing with very flowy skirts and sang as they spun in circles, I don’t know how they didn’t get dizzy, I got a bit dizzy just watching them. Most of the men played the trumpet or tuba or drums, and two of the men joined in the dancing – one was dressed in a suit and seemed to be the one in charge, and the other held up a sign as he spun around that translated to ‘Jesus Loves You.’ I don’t know what the occasion was, but there are celebrations in Bolivia constantly. Earlier today, I kept hearing loud noises and asked one of the shopkeepers – she said that they were fireworks being set off, but she didn’t even know which celebration it was for because there’s almost always something. Anyway, I sat and watched the celebration for a bit and then walked around to search for dinner. There were many less restaurants in this area than lower down in El Prado, so everything had only meat on the menu. I eventually asked at one of the restaurants and got them to make me a dish with two fried eggs, rice, tomatoes, and these really yummy fries. They also put a couple pieces of cheese on top, which were really nice for flavor – the cheese here is so good because it’s all really fresh and natural. I only spent 4 dollars on food all day – breakfast was included with the hostel (with deliciousss fresh papaya juice) and lunch and dinner were 2 each for tons of food.
Then back to the hostel I went – it was getting dark and I shouldn’t wander around alone at night here, so I’m holed up in my room instead. Started planning the details out for the next couple days and of course writing this long ramble. Tomorrow, I should hopefully get my backpack delivered in the early morning and can finally take a shower – it’s a bit hard to do when it’s freezing and I don’t have a towel. I’ll be picked up from my hostel a bit later to go on a guided day trip to Tiwanaku, a ruins site that is about an hour and a half away. I was told today that the guide would be bilingual, so hopefully other people in the group with speak English and we can get an English tour.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Still Not Having The Best of Luck
Well, Im here, but it hasnt been the smoothest ride. The plane rides themselves were fine aside from not really being able to sleep much all night, so Im going back to the hostel in a bit to sleep. Well, dinner on the plane wasnt great, they come by and ask if I wanted chicken or beef. I asked if there were any veggie options and Im told chicken. And that was in the US, Ill have lots of fun with that here! So eventually got to Bolivia, went thru immigration no problem (but minus the cost of the expensive visa), and then went to wait for my bag. There was a backpack sitting there that looked exactly like mine, same shiny blue coloring, same model. But it wasnt mine. I was worried that the person had taken my bag and left hers. I waited till all the bags through, and then went to deal with lost baggage with a couple other people. Turns out the girl whose bag this was wasnt even on the flight, so she clearly didnt take it. But a few of the other people with lost baggage had done the same thing I had with taking Delta and then transferring to American, apparently our baggage didnt make the switch with us. Wonderful. After about an hour of waiting and filling out a form with airport staff who were thankfully very nice, I took a taxi into the city. It was just starting to get light so it was a really pretty ride. The airport is in El Alto, which is way above most of La Paz, so you drive down this huge hill and the sloping and houses are gorgeous. Ill see it all in the full light in a bit. Checked into a hostel, where the staff were again really, really nice and helpful. They made me breakfast and I talked to the guy who was working there while I ate and that was really interesting, he is in his 20s and studying to become a mechanic. Super helpful and eager to answer any questions. My Spanish is quite shaky, but it will get there. The grammar, not so much, but as long as I can understand things and get my point across, I should be good. After breakfast, I went out to change money, call the airport, and find internet. Got hold of the same guy at the airport who had been helping me and gave him the address of my hostel- he will call the hostel in the early morning to let me know the bag is here (it will travel out of miami late tonight), and then the bag will be delivered to me. That part is really nice, i was worried i would have to go back to the airport in the morning, which would have cost quite a bit for roundtrip taxi and just been a pain. so fingers crossed that my bag actually makes the journey this time and hopefully I will get it tomorrow. Luckily I have all my valuables with me as well as a change of clothes. But Im freezing, its really really cold here and I have a warm jacket but no layers or gloves or anything. Ick. Ill probably take it easy today and just go to a few museums and wander the city after a nap. And my luck with this trip better get better after this, things just keep on going wrong, all related to stupid airlines! Okay my fingers are frozen from typing since the door to this cafe is open, but Ill write later when I have actual fun adventures rather than just travel hassles.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Not the most wonderful way to start my trip...
This is my first of what I’ll probably be doing all the time – writing while I’m traveling, and posting a bunch sometime later. So today has been lots of fun. We left Nashville in the morning to make the 4+ hour drive to Atlanta. Two hours into the ride, I got a voicemail from American Airlines – my flight from Miami to Atlanta was cancelled, and they had kindly rescheduled my route – tomorrow morning, I would fly from Atlanta to New York, then New York to Miami, then Miami to La Paz. Right. So I called American and the guy wouldn’t/couldn’t switch me to a different flight to Miami today, but at least made it so that tomorrow I would go Atlanta to Miami without a New York detour. But that was still a huge pain because I would have to spend the night in Atlanta and deal with food, hotel, etc, so we went to bug them at the desk at the airport. Ideally wanted to somehow find a flight to Miami tonight, but my alternative was for them to get me set up in a hotel with food vouchers and maybe even upgrade my ticket for the huge hassle they caused. Got really, really lucky at the airport after quite a long wait in line and got put on a flight to Miami tonight so that I’ll still be in time to catch my redeye to Bolivia. And Kat and Igor were awesome and waited at the airport with me while we got the mess sorted out. So it all worked out and I’ll get there as planned, just have a bit of time in Atlanta now before my flight, but that was really not the ideal to start my trip. Hopefully it will all go up from here.
Had lots of adventures in Nashville with Kat over the last week. Of course there was tons of good food, including the best popsicles ever at Las Paletas – last time I had such good popsicles was at a stand four years ago in Baja, and I’d been craving them ever since. Spent a day at the lake going tubing, attempting to water ski, going on the jet ski, and wading around. Another morning, we drove out a bit into the beautiful country for a two-hour horseback ride. We were the only ones there, so got a private trail ride with tons of trotting and galloping along the way. Also visited with a huge pen of Pomeranians who were used for breeding. They had a fairly big, nice area, but I’m not even going to go into my whole debate after that. Anyway, I discovered later that night that the ticks in the area had taken quite a liking to me – not a nice surprise, especially for a California girl who was not expecting them! The weather was all over the place, hot, warm, stormy, rainy, it would change constantly and messed with our plans a bit. But saw an awesome thunderstorm from Kat’s 8th floor balcony, I wish we got more of those in CA! It dried up yesterday afternoon long enough for us to rollerblade around the lake in Centennial Park and see lots of adorable goslings waddling around the grass. We looked a little bit ridiculous on rollerblades, but it was fun to skate around, though I wasn’t nearly as nimble on them as I used to be.
We had plenty of other adventures too, as well as some lazing around the house, but it’s hard to write about everything when it already feels like it was so long ago. I’ll be better about keeping up with writing while I’m in Bolivia. I always regret that I didn’t write enough in Ecuador or especially Tanzania because I can’t go back and remember all my stories like they just happened. So that’s what this blog is mainly for, and of course to entertain those of you who feel like keeping up with or checking in on my adventures. Please leave me comments or messages along the way, I’ll be gone for a long time and miss everyone back home! I still have two hours before my flight leaves, but I’m so ready to go right now!
Had lots of adventures in Nashville with Kat over the last week. Of course there was tons of good food, including the best popsicles ever at Las Paletas – last time I had such good popsicles was at a stand four years ago in Baja, and I’d been craving them ever since. Spent a day at the lake going tubing, attempting to water ski, going on the jet ski, and wading around. Another morning, we drove out a bit into the beautiful country for a two-hour horseback ride. We were the only ones there, so got a private trail ride with tons of trotting and galloping along the way. Also visited with a huge pen of Pomeranians who were used for breeding. They had a fairly big, nice area, but I’m not even going to go into my whole debate after that. Anyway, I discovered later that night that the ticks in the area had taken quite a liking to me – not a nice surprise, especially for a California girl who was not expecting them! The weather was all over the place, hot, warm, stormy, rainy, it would change constantly and messed with our plans a bit. But saw an awesome thunderstorm from Kat’s 8th floor balcony, I wish we got more of those in CA! It dried up yesterday afternoon long enough for us to rollerblade around the lake in Centennial Park and see lots of adorable goslings waddling around the grass. We looked a little bit ridiculous on rollerblades, but it was fun to skate around, though I wasn’t nearly as nimble on them as I used to be.
We had plenty of other adventures too, as well as some lazing around the house, but it’s hard to write about everything when it already feels like it was so long ago. I’ll be better about keeping up with writing while I’m in Bolivia. I always regret that I didn’t write enough in Ecuador or especially Tanzania because I can’t go back and remember all my stories like they just happened. So that’s what this blog is mainly for, and of course to entertain those of you who feel like keeping up with or checking in on my adventures. Please leave me comments or messages along the way, I’ll be gone for a long time and miss everyone back home! I still have two hours before my flight leaves, but I’m so ready to go right now!
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tentative Itinerary
Things will probably change, but this is what my next couple months look like so far. Excited!! I'll be posting lots of stories and pictures on this blog while I'm gone.
Visit Kat in TN, then fly to Bolivia
5/15a Land in La Paz
5/17p or 5/18a Bus to Copabanca
5/19 Day trip to Isla del Sol, bus back to La Paz, overnight bus to Cochabamba
5/21p Bus to Torotoro
5/23a Bus to Cochabamba, overnight bus to Sucre
(or 5/24 truck to Potosi + day there, then Sucre)
5/24 (or 25) – 6/14 volunteer in nursery in Sucre
6/15 Bus to Potosi – visit mines, 6:30p bus to Uyuni
6/16 – 6/19 Salar de Uyuni tour, pm in Tupiza
6/20 Horseback riding, then bus Tupiza to Tarija (pm departure 8 hrs
6/21 Fly Tarija to Santa Cruz, pm around Santa Cruz
6/22 Bus Santa Cruz to Ambue Ari
6/22 – 7/21 Volunteer with wildlife
7/21 Bus to Santa Cruz
7/24 Bus to Samaipata
7/26p Bus to Santa Cruz
7/27a Fly to SFO
View Full Size Travel Map at Travellerspoint
Visit Kat in TN, then fly to Bolivia
5/15a Land in La Paz
5/17p or 5/18a Bus to Copabanca
5/19 Day trip to Isla del Sol, bus back to La Paz, overnight bus to Cochabamba
5/21p Bus to Torotoro
5/23a Bus to Cochabamba, overnight bus to Sucre
(or 5/24 truck to Potosi + day there, then Sucre)
5/24 (or 25) – 6/14 volunteer in nursery in Sucre
6/15 Bus to Potosi – visit mines, 6:30p bus to Uyuni
6/16 – 6/19 Salar de Uyuni tour, pm in Tupiza
6/20 Horseback riding, then bus Tupiza to Tarija (pm departure 8 hrs
6/21 Fly Tarija to Santa Cruz, pm around Santa Cruz
6/22 Bus Santa Cruz to Ambue Ari
6/22 – 7/21 Volunteer with wildlife
7/21 Bus to Santa Cruz
7/24 Bus to Samaipata
7/26p Bus to Santa Cruz
7/27a Fly to SFO
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