Everyone Loves A Parade

I put together video of the Jersey City Bolivian parade so that everyone can enjoy it.

Bolivian Parade, JC

I got a little carried away with taking photos yesterday.

You can view them all here.

Duh

I do hope you will all forgive me for assuming someone was moving in today and had hired a moving van company with a rather odd name.

Every Day's A Party

The Andean music echoing through the streets should have been a tip-off, but I just learned that the festival happening on the streets of JC today is a parade for Bolivia! I didn't even know we had a Bolivian population here.

I'm grabbing my camera and will report back.

The End of the Bolivia Section of Our Show

Finally! I'm done going through the Bolivia video footage from my hundred-dollar flash camcorder.

This last one is of something that is standard operating procedure for tourists to Potosi. First, you tour the silver mines and reward your mining hosts with gifts of cookies and dynamite.

Then you go explode your own dynamite. Like so.

Getting Close to the End Now

Will I ever finish posting about the short trip I took to Bolivia and Peru in January?

Yes. But first I have to finish the videos. Only two more after this one...

A Day at the Silver Mines

Here's a little footage of our January 2 trip down into the Potosi silver mines.

Please pardon the shakiness. I have a hundred dollar palm camera. That might have to change whenever I undertake a more serious expedition.

Local Remedy

"I feel GREAT today!" J, a young woman on the Bolivia trip, had been bouncing off the walls one morning as our group got into three taxis.

"Caffeine," I stated.

"Oh." She looked deflated.

J and I had both gotten pills for altitude sickness from the farmacia the day before. She'd taken hers in preparation for going to altitude, but I'd decided to tough it out and hope for the best.

I'd looked up the Spanish for "altitude sickness" and we'd gone to the pharmacy.

"Take this," said the pharmacist, handing us "Sorojchi" pills. We'd both dutifully purchased some. But a little Internet research turned up info that they were just aspirin and caffeine. So I'd skipped it.

And when we got to Potosi, I was glad I skipped it. I'd felt pretty good at altitude this time. Seems taking the bus instead of the plane did the job.

Souvenir Show

In Bolivia, you can buy knitted finger puppets by the ton.

And then you can put on a puppet show, even if your Spanish sucks as much as mine does. I made one that goes like this:

L: "¿Cómo se llama?"

S: "Mi llamo es El Hombre Araña. ¿Cómo se llama?"

L: "Mi llamo es Llama!"

Llama Crossing

The roads of Bolivia are fraught with peril.

Traditional Songs on Lake Titicaca

If you have a computer that can handle watching QuickTime movies, click here for a .mov look at these women singing, er, traditional songs on Lake Titicaca, Peru.

Revenge of the Purple Candy

I made it to my hotel in Puno before my body gave up and quit fighting off Montezuma's Revenge. I sucked on two purple hard candies that I'd found in the room.

Those didn't stay down either. Ewwww.

I lay on the bed and groaned for a while, then weakly pried open my laptop and looked up what medication I needed. I dragged my sorry ass down to the nearest pharmacy for 10 400 mg doses of Noroflaxacin. I had a day-and-a-half in Puno. There wasn't time for this shit.

Literally.

Ahem. Anyway, a few hours later I booked a boat trip for the morning and went to sleep.

In the morning, I went out on a boat with a guide and some other tourists to see the Floating Islands of the Uros people. These islands are actually manmade, of dirt and totora reeds. Small communities live on each island in reed huts.

These days, their livelihood is tourism. The tourists and guides pay a per-head fee to the islanders, who show how they dress and live and then sometimes, the tourists pay for boat rides on reed boats. In my case, another tourist that I was sitting with in a hut bought a tapestry and a mini-reed-boat. She got great souvenirs and the sellers then left me alone to take photos.

We rode on the reed boat, motored on over to Taquile Island (a 7-square-kilometer real island, made of rocks and stuff), and took a hike. Up, up, up to the village at the top, where the men wear floppy nightcaps, like a Catalan caganer shepherd.

Then down, down, down. 500 steps.

500 very steep steps.

And when we got back to Puno, I went to find Hey-There. "If I walk the main street," I thought, "I'll find someone I know."

It took only pacing back and forth twice to stumble over Julia from the GAP trip. She sent me off to Hey-There's hotel, where we said our goodbyes. Hey-There had been asleep when I'd left La Paz.

"So I'll see you tomorrow?"

I told Hey-There she wouldn't. I was heading to Cuzco in the morning.

Leaving La Paz

But I like these people. I don't want to leave them.

I was standing on a landing in Hotel Rosario in La Paz, having just left the group of 8 others that I'd spent the last few weeks with. Three were off on their own plans for the jungle in the morning, two separately bound for Chile, and three continuing on with a different GAP leader bound for Peru.

Strange, no? I am not usually so keen on strangers, mistrusting them for ages before I decide that they are all right.

But I had a bus ticket for Peru for eight the next morning. Hey-There grunted when I tried to wake her. Never mind. I'd find her tomorrow night in Puno when she caught up to me.

The bus goes to Copabacana, where I was to transfer to a bus that would take me across the border to Peru.

Two items of interest occurred on the bus trip: 1) I felt tummy grumblings and realized I had Montezuma's Revenge. It took all my self-control not to vomit on the bus journey. 2) The bus crossed Lake Titicaca on a rickety ferry. Really! Take a look at the video below. Scary stuff. Wonder what Captain Sully would make of this.

Losing It

Hey-There, my 62-year-old roommate, had lost it. She was chattering away, narrating the Dolph Lundgren movie on the railway station TV with her own script. Meanwhile, AF—a biologist from the mines outside Perth—dove under the table and napped on his coat. I played pool with our merchant marines and kept my distance from our group, which had lost its collective mind a few hours prior.

The train, which had already been leaving in the middle of the night, was running late. After three days in the desert, we'd all showered in Hotel Samay Wasi back in Uyuni, gorged ourselves on Tonito pizza, and headed to the overnight train-bus to La Paz.

And so we waited.

And waited some more.

The slight air of respectability our group had acquired post-showers started to wear thin. We slobbered and jabbered.

I'm exaggerating. But only about the slobber.

The train finally rolled in so late that I no longer recall the time. We piled into the reclining seats and Hey-There continuing to chatter until a stranger shushed her.

We were on our way back to La Paz.

Day Three: Southwest Circuit

Delirium had set in last night over dinner, with certain group members giggling far too much (um, me, maybe) over jokes that probably weren't really that funny.

That's what happens when you pack nine people into two Land Cruisers and drive them out into the desert for three days.

I woke up early and was initially startled by the pyramid of empty beer cans in the common area of the salt hotel. I smiled. Our boys had been up late, then.

Today was salt flat day. We'd get to the reason we'd come to southwestern Bolivia.

Lonely Planet Bolivia said it well, so let's just borrow from them:

"One of the world's most evocative and eerie sights, this, the world's largest salt flat (12,106 sq km) sits at 3653m... When the surface is dry, the salar is a blinding white expanse of the greatest nothing imaginable."

They pull the salt of the earth out of the ground here and sell it for human and livestock consumption. It's funny that Bolivia is such a poor country when it has so many natural resources, including silver, salt, gas, and uh, sweaters.

We cruised the plains of salt, stopping for perspective photos, some of which worked and some of which didn't. We pulled into Uyuni in late afternoon, salivating over the thought of pizza and showers.




More photos here.

Day Two: Southwest Circuit

I couldn't hack it. I was weak.

At 4:30 a.m., I dressed in the dark since Hey-There, Paul, and I were in a dual-gender room in the crappy hostel by the Laguna Colorado. "Can I turn the light on now," said Paul after a while.

I went into the two-stall bathroom and undid my belt, but I almost vomited from the smell. There were probably about 25 people staying in the hostel, and 25 people make a helluva dreadful smell when they are all tossing their used toilet paper into a wastebasket in the dark. I fled. I hadn't been drinking much as I was consciously trying to avoid the rank stalls.

We were all wearing multiple layers of clothes as we piled into the two Land Cruisers in the dark and headed to the Sol de Mañana Geyser Basin.

The crowds at the geysers confused me. We were in the middle of nowhere, Bolivia, at the crack of dawn. What was with all the people?

Quietly, Paul explained it. The cold of the morning made the steam more dramatic. In the afternoon, all the geysers looked like bubbling mud. So all the tour operators arrived at the same time.

Tourists were leaping across steam vents and peering over the edges, ignoring the "Danger" sign. One of our women nearly slipped into one, giggled, and was then surprised to hear it could be dangerous.

'It's boiling water," muttered someone. It might have been me.

We headed to some thermal springs for clean pit toilets and breakfast. Again with the crowds. We'd all been interested in the springs until we saw the dozens of people crowded into the pool. James the engineer made a joke about "short and curlies" at the bottom of the pool and my thoughts about it being a petri dish of shared illnesses sealed the deal. I wasn't going near the thermal bath, no matter how dirty I felt.

We drove past lovely, rugged panoramas, a volcano, and colorful mountains. In the evening, we stopped at a new hotel, the Hostal Solar Botana in San Juan. The building was made of salt blocks, clean, relatively modern, and best of all, had a hot shower and towels available for 10 bolivianos a go.

Day One: Southwest Circuit

Most tourists to Bolivia end up on the Southwest Circuit sooner or later.

It's a 3-day 4WD trip through a national park and the massive salt flats near Uyuni.

We left Uyuni and did the trip in reverse, beginning with a long drive to the red lagoon and finishing at the salt flats on Day Three. A cook and two drivers took us out into the rugged landscape, towards the Chilean border.

We'd stop at small roadhouses for lunch, and along the way, we'd pull over and investigate interesting sights. The first night, we stayed in a crowded, dirty hostel with foul-smelling toilets. There's not a lot of choice out in the boonies. Hey-There and I shared a triple with the boss, trip leader Paul.

Our day's drive went kind of like this:


We stopped to see rocks.



And for funny rabbity things.



And finally for the Laguna Colorado.



More photos here.

The Way to a Woman's Heart

About 7 years ago, I was walking south on Manhattan's Orchard Street. An older man passed me, walking north. He eyeballed me.

"You still got it."

Aghast, I'd thought I wasn't aware I'd lost it. Talk about a backhanded compliment. At 35, I wasn't exactly sagging around the edges.

Today, seven years later, his comment might be appropriate. In the 9-person group I was in Bolivia with, I felt more an outsider than an active participant. I'd been on a half-dozen small group expeditions in the past, but on the other trips, I'd been of the median age. Now I was the only one in my age group.

The two younger women primped and vamped and made themselves up at night for dinner (our men were oblivious). I watched them with a little envy but mostly with relief. Let them put on the show. I wasn't here to flirt. I didn't feel any pressure to perform or even to shower. But I like to stay clean so I showered when I could, like on the last morning in Uyuni before we were to go into the salt flats for three days.

Hair still sopping wet, I got into one of the two Land Cruisers. After we left Uyuni and stopped by the train cemetery, we headed towards the Eduardo Avaroa National Reserve, home of salt flats, lagoons, and pink flamingos.

An hour or so's drive into the trip, we stopped off in the small town of San Cristobal for a potty break. The other women and I trotted into the mercado and lined up outside the public toilet, near an unusually tall, handsome Bolivian man who was chatting with his friends.

A small boy attendant held out some toilet paper to me and said "Uno Boliviano." The fee for the toilet was one coin.

I reached into my jeans pocket.

Nada.

I checked my other pockets. I had nothing but large bills. No one ever has change in the unindustrialized world. I blanched... I didn't have the money to enter the ladies room.

The handsome Bolivian man then stepped in. He gallantly forked over one of his own coins, smiled, and waved me into the ladies room.

I reddened and walked in, as my group and a few Bolivians tittered behind me. Better than a drink, a man had bought me a pee.

I still got it.

El Tren Muerto

Rusting, abandoned machinery is disquieting, but that awareness did not prepare me for our morning visit to the Cementerio de Trenes.

Three kilometers away from Uyuni there is a train graveyard, full of once-functional machinery that has been left to the desert. A bit further on are even more locomotives, including an ore train once robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as Bolivia's first steam engine. Bolivia is now the poorest country in South America, but it once buzzed with the profits from silver mining.

I quietly kept an eye on the engineer in our group. He loves machines; what would he make of this desolate setting?

The same thing the rest of us made of it as it turned out.

"That's really sad."

Going Local

We caught a local bus from Potosi to Uyuni, a 7-hour slog across winding dirt switchbacks. I sat with Hey-There in the front, next to two very tall, very scrunched-up men from our group of nine.

We drove.

And drove.

And drove.

Once, we were allowed off the bus to pee in the dirt behind a pig sty next to a restaurant. Though "restaurant" may be too broad a term to use for the concrete block alongside the road. We stopped other times to pick up passengers or let them off, and once for the bus crew to pick plants, but no other potty stops occurred. I'd been careful about my liquid intake being used to this sort of trip, but the plant-picking bit was as new to me as it was to the others in our small group.

Finally, we pulled into the dusty town of Uyuni, its frontier-feel obscuring the friendliness we'd encounter later when all of us went out for the best pizza in Bolivia, when I went to the market for a fresh juice, or when four of us went out in search of tough, plastic zippered bags. We were leaving all we could at the hotel during our 3-day excursion into the salt flats, and would substitute tough plastic for our regular luggage.

Photos of the bus journey are here.

And here is a little video for you.