A Fond Farewell

The first thing I did on Thursday when I got home was to go to the grocery store. Going to the grocery store was my ritual first stop in every new country I visited, so I guess it made sense. (Also, it was kind of necessary. I'm staying with my parents until the subletter moves out of my apartment, and the entire contents of their fridge was basically a jar of relish and five Parmesan rinds.) The prices were shocking - twenty pesos for a half-pint of blueberries; thirty-five bolivianos for Greek yogurt. I re-set the price scale in my head one last time, using the external cues (comparing similar products, seeing what was on sale) to figure out what was reasonable and filled the cart with the things I'd missed - sharp cheddar cheese, cheap sushi, Anchor Steam beer.

I got to the checkout and piled my purchases on the conveyor belt. The guy scanning my groceries was friendly in a distinctly American way, simultaneously casual and polite. Our conversation was unnervingly easy.  I didn't have anything to prove. He wasn't judging my Spanish or my foreignness, there were no fruits I had forgotten to weigh, no chance I had accidentally gotten into the line for pregnant women and the disabled elderly. I told him I had gotten off a plane from Argentina a couple of hours ago.

"So what did you miss most while you were traveling?" he said

I couldn't think of an answer. There isn't much someone can't live without for three months, and the things that I came up with were just too embarrassing to say out loud - my Frye boots; Glee; having a cell phone.  I finally gave him both the truest and the most boring answer there is: My friends and family. For them, if for no other reason, I'm glad to be back.

In a way, the trip felt too short. Three months seems like a lot to us Americans, but I only had a couple of weeks in each of the countries I visited, which doesn't even approach enough time to see everything I wanted to see. And mine was the shortest trip of any of the travelers I met on the road. For people from Australia, England, Scandinavia, Israel, three months is barely more than a vacation.

And yet it's long enough that I became a traveler, a strange in-between identity that's somewhere on the continuum between living life to the fullest and avoiding it like a champion, somewhere strongly to one side or the other but I'm not sure which. Some of what I learned is useless now that I'm back in the real world: that sleeping in a room with ten strangers isn't really that difficult, or even unpleasant, particularly if you can get a bed against the wall; that a fridge full of food that isn't yours is always kind of disgusting, even if it's clean and doesn't smell; that it's possible to hold an entire conversation in Anchorman quotes, English-language fluency optional. Some of what I learned is more useful than ever: that nice and friendly aren't necessarily synonyms, or even indicative of each other, pretty much at all; that how enjoyable a conversation is depends very little on what it's about and very much on who you're talking to; that meeting new people is sometimes as easy as walking up to strangers and introducing yourself.  Some of it's just new facts: that there are no McDonald's in the entire country of Bolivia; that the alkaloids from coca leaves are best released with a pinch of baking soda.

Anyway.  Now that I'm back in the U.S. this blog is going back into hibernation until the next great adventure.  Goodbye for now, dear readers.  It's been real.

Bones, Birds and Pots

I have become the good fairy of Argentine shopkeepers. Since arriving in Argentina, I'd picked back up the habit of hoarding monedas (coins), jealously refusing to part with them while shopping, lying when shopkeepers asked me, dutifully but without hope, if I had change. Pretty much all Argentines do this, because you need coins to ride the bus - the machines don't accept bills - and as a result, there's a pretty-much-permanent change shortage, which is partly organic and partly manufactured by the official bus company so they can sell change back to people on the black market at a markup. (Sounds like something out of a DFW-esque dystopia-parody, but that's the Argentina I know and love).

There's a genuine skill to collecting change, a quick calculation with every purchase of exactly what combination of bills and coins will net the desired peso in return. But I've been so effective at change-hoarding that I now have some 20 pesos in coins to get rid of by the time I leave tomorrow afternoon. All day, I've been paying for things in exact change, or sometimes volunteering the extra 50 centavos that will allow a shopkeeper to give me a two-peso bill instead of a handful of change. About half of them get this gleeful-furtive look on their face, not entirely unlike the one vendors wear when they quote a tourist a ridiculous price and the tourist agrees to pay. The other half thank me with a sincerity that's just a little bit more amusing than it is embarrassing. It's pretty much the easiest good deed I've ever done.
 

Recoleta: like this, but creepier.

In addition to my busy schedule distributing coins throughout the city, Nostalgia Tour 2011 continues. Yesterday I met up with some friends I met in Mendoza at the Recoleta cemetery, home to the remains of Eva Peron and various other members of the Argentine elite. The thing about Recoleta is that it's pretty obviously beautiful from pictures. Row after row of masoleums in black and white marble, doors and windows woven with elaborate cast iron bars, ancient locks netted with cobwebs, and sort of terrifyingly unfriendly but well-kempt cats. What I've never gotten a picture to convey is that it's also an incredibly eerie and romantic place, like an Edward Gorey drawing come to life. Some of the masoleums, left to fall into disrepair after the family to whom they belonged died out or ran out of money, are filled with broken glass and crumbling plaster and, occasionally, rotting coffins and hollow bones. Others are immaculate, with photographs and flowers carefully arranged on an embroidered white cloth and sealed behind a window that mirrors the face of anyone trying to peer into the grave.



My pot (corn, squash, cheese) at Pots. You can also see a little of my art.

After Recoleta, I managed to convince everyone to go to Pots, a restaurant a couple of blocks away that we used to frequent while I was studying abroad. (Most people, including the owners and management, call it Cumana. I had to send out an emergency e-mail to my study abroad friends to find out its real name before I could find it again.) It serves mostly cazuelas - little casseroles of meat and squash and corn and potatoes and cheese in various combinations - and every table has a little basket of crayons that you can use to draw on the paper tablemats.

 

What passes for a lobby at Konex.  When I was studying in BsAs, I also saw Rent in Spanish here, and a play for blind people that took place entirely in the dark.


That night, we went to a concert of the precussion group La Bomba del Tiempo. I used to go to their weekly Monday night show back when I was studying in BsAs. There were more foreigners there than I remembered last time - the scene appears to have shifted from mostly Argentines to mostly tourists, as cool things do when they're past their prime. (Cause and effect being, of course, a bit blurred.) But it was still fun.

El Caminito in La Boca.  For reasons I can´t explain, the whole neighborhood is filled with statues that look like the woman in the pink dress and the guy leaning out of the window.  They´re grotesque, and not in a particularly good way.  Other than them, though, it´s pretty sweet.

And today, I actually went to a place I'd never been before, El Caminito in the working-class neighborhood of La Boca. (I wasn't particularly encouraged by Molly, who did go and whose report basically consisted of, "A bird shat on my head and an old man asked me for a lottery number.") La Boca is a neighborhood guidebooks often call colorful, which is usually a euphemism for either artsy or filled with crazy people. In this case, though, it's quite literal; the houses lining El Caminito are painted in blocks of primary colors, so that the whole street looks a little like it was made out of Legos. We wandered from shop to shop and ate lunch - a parrillada complete with all the gross stuff, blood sausage and liver and horrible mealy-chewy intestines - in a sunny courtyard where an old man sang tango music and a bird shat on a friend's head.

Back in BsAs

Since I got here on Thursday, I've been on the hardcore nostalgia tour of Buenos Aires. My bus from Mendoza got in at 8 in the morning, and my hostel check-in wasn't until two, so instead of doing something reasonable like, I don't know, checking my e-mail or having a relaxed brunch, I walked the six miles from my hostel downtown to the Jumbo (a massive grocery store/Wal-Mart-type hybrid) in Belgrano and then part of the way back, taking a detour to go past my old apartment building and another to check out my old gym. It was surreal realizing how deeply the map of Buenos Aires is etched on my brain, walking into places I never thought I'd see again, passing buses whose numbers set off a flash of memory (that the 111 will take me to class is information I somehow know, but I can't remember anymore what class or even what building).

A hallway at Puan.  The big red banner says (I think - the picture's hard to read)
"We Go with the Leftist Front."

The following day I took the rickety wood-panelled Linea A subte train to Puan, the University of Buenos Aires's Filosofía y Letras campus where I took a Latin American Literature class. I'd had a complicated love-hate relationship with that class - I loved the brazenly intellectual, leftist atmosphere and the dreadlocked students in happy pants, hated the shit that we read. (Just read every single modernist manifesto ever written to approximate the experience). The front hall of the building is still plastered with posters announcing Socialist party rallies, students still share pot and mate in the main courtyard, and there's still a sort-of-inexplicable cluster of stalls selling bootleg DVDs on the first floor landing. From Puan, I tried to go to Parque Rivadavia, where you can buy a bootleg DVD of pretty much any movie ever (I was looking for Tropa de Elite), and instead walked like three miles in the wrong direction, out to the very outskirts of the city, at which point stores and people thinned out so dramatically that it became clear I had done something wrong. That was the one time so far my directional instincts have failed me.

Graffiti on a San Telmo street corner.

The less said about Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, which I spent struggling to get money, the better. Suffice it to say I spent enough time in Western Unions (yes, plural) to last about six lifetimes. Saturday I wandered into San Telmo, a neighborhood known for its antiques and street art. Finally solvent, I treated myself to lunch at El Desnivel, a parrilla where I ate my weight in buttery lomo beef with garlic sauce, fries, and chimichurri.

Today I took the 92 bus to the Feria de Mataderos, which is on the outer edge of the city - maybe about twenty minutes past the Garaje Olimpo, which was one of the main torture centers during the military dictatorship. I remember hearing a story from one of my UBA classmates about a man who lived across the street and boarded up his front porch so he wouldn't have to hear the screams of the victims. These days the building is covered with commemorative and political graffiti.

A stand at Mataderos selling humitas, tamales and empanadas.

The Feria de Mataderos was just as I remembered it. Booths selling jewelry, alpaca knitwear, leather alpargatas, handmade cheese. Traditional dancing in the square in the middle, dancers occasionally lost in
a cloud of smoke from one of the grills nearby. Foods typical of the north - locro, a corn-based stew, and humitas, a sweet corn tamale stuffed with cheese. Random men dressed in full-on gaucho gear: poncho, leather hat, knife in a detailed leather case.

And, most importantly, the same stand where, three years ago, I bought my Jesus sandals, so-called because they're basically a bunch of leather straps tied to my feet. I wore those sandals into tatters; they're now in a box under my bed, too gross to wear and too beloved to throw away. The fact that the sandals were there at Mataderos - the stall in the same place, even - and that they were available in my size is a small miracle.

Not that nothing in Buenos Aires has changed. I was here in 2008 when the first Starbucks in Argentina opened. Now there are Starbucks everywhere, some in near-Best-in-Show proximity to each other. And the inflation continues to blow my mind. The exchange rate since 2008 has changed to four pesos to the dollar from three, but even with my American money Buenos Aires is far from the budget paradise it was three years ago. The cheapest bottles of wine clock in at about eight pesos apiece, and an helado at one of the big chains (Volta, Freddo, Persicco) costs about twenty pesos - that's five U$D.

Obviously, I haven't been discouraged from eating ice cream. The cone I had today - chocolate amargo and dulce de leche dipped in chocolate - was harder to eat than a live eel (it melted all over everywhere and I ended up with chocolate all over my face) and also maybe literally the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. Like, actually.

It's weird to be here by myself. On the plus side, I can do strange nostalgic things like visiting Puan and going on razor-strike missions for sandals. But honestly, it's a little lonely - lonelier than it's been, because it's not like I'm looking for random traveler-friends, which are always easy to find. I'm looking for my study-abroad friends, who are also easy enough to find (I mean, one of them sleeps ten feet from me at home), but who aren't here. I miss you guys. Buenos Aires will always rock, but not as much as you.

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Riding Bikes in Maipu

The vineyard at Bodega La Rural, our first stop on the bike tour

After my week of abstinence in Jujuy, I headed to Mendoza, in the center of Argentina's wine country. The bus ride there took 21 hours, and there was one 15-minute stop for food. It was considerably less horrible than it sounds.

My first morning in the city of Mendoza I went to six different banks trying to find one that would give me a cash advance in the absence of a debit card. None of them would. That was exactly as horrible as it sounds. I finally ended up calling Nicky and getting him to wire me money through Western Union, which is supposed to come through tomorrow and had better fucking work,* because if if doesn't I have a bag of Frutigran cookies and some alfajores to live on for the next week.

Having spent the morning grappling with my money crisis, I needed wine. That afternoon, I went to Maipu, about two towns over from Mendoza. Maipu is the home of many of the region's wineries and most of its wine tourism, and is pronounced in such a way that I had several sort of embarrassing private giggle-fits regarding my mental list of the things I was doing in Maipu. We went to Bodegas Lopez, one of Argentina's biggest producers of wine, and Las Cavas de Don Arturo, a much smaller vineyard that sells its product only to the tourists who visit. That night, at the hostel, I had a parrillada with an English couple and a Dutch guy. We ate sausage and the famous Argentine beef, and drank more Malbec than I care to remember.

At Mr. Hugo's, drinking wine as he showed us the route

The next day, I went back to Maipu with another group of people I'd met at the hostel, to bike from vineyard to vineyard. We rented our bikes from Mr. Hugo, a backpacker legend who I started hearing about back in Bolivia. When we walked into the rental shop's little canopied courtyard it became clear pretty quickly why. It was 11:30 in the morning. Within minutes, he had sat all of us down with a brimming cupful of wine while he prepared our bikes. I left my empty cup at the table to go to the bathroom; when I got back, it had been refilled.

Absinthe, whiskey, liquers and fruit infusions

So we were already well-oiled when we hit the road. (The bikes, whose brakes squeaked like crazy and only sort of worked, not so much. But the latter doesn't seem like it matters as much when the former is true.) Next door to the first vineyard we visited was a store that sold chocolate, olive oils, jams and liquers. For fifteen pesos apiece, we were given samples of olive oil, olive spreads in four different flavors, six kinds of dulce de leche, zucchini, apple, and berry jam, dark and white chocolate, and liquers - I tried dulce de leche with banana and chocolate, and absinthe. The absinthe was prepared in the traditional way, which means a spoon of sugar was dipped into the alcohol, set on fire and then dropped back into the glass. Even with the sugar, it was still terrible.

After that I had to head back to catch my bus, which was sad but not tragic, for two reasons. The first reason was that the bus was heading to Buenos Aires, which hasn't changed much in the last three years and which still feels like home.

The second reason is that there was more wine on the bus.

*It didn't.  I lost several more hours of my life and 80 pesos making various phone calls to 800 numbers in the US, which aren't free from abroad.  I now have money.  Like, twelve times as much as I need to survive for the next four days.  Not taking any chances re: going through that again.

Bizarro Argentina

Aldea Luna and environs, as seen from the Violet Path

I just spent a week in a place that while geographically in Argentina, is nothing like the Argentina I know. The Argentina I know is a place where red meat and red wine are the two major food groups, where women go on soup-and-candy diets because giving up solid foods is one thing but eliminating refined sugar is unthinkable. Where dinner starts at 10 and ends whenever it's time to go out - so like two am, one at the earliest.

Aldea Luna, the guesthouse-cum-family farm where I've been volunteering for the last week, is Argentina turned upside-down. The menu, for one, is all vegetarian and milk-free. (We did have eggs from the farm's chickens.) And I was asleep every night by ten to wake up the next morning with the sunrise. We had dessert once, the first day I got there - crepes with orange and banana. In most of Argentina, that passes for a healthy breakfast.

Aldea Luna is remote. As in, an hour bus ride from San Salvador de Jujuy - in itself a pretty provincial city - in a rickety bus with aluminum sheeting covering some of the windows that in the US probably would have been retired about fifteen years ago. Everyone seemed to know everyone else (except, obviously, me, the lone gringa), and a few gave the bus driver cheeful messages to pass onto other riders. It ocurred to me that this was like rural-Argentina e-mail equivalent. From the bus stop, it's another hour hike in the woods to the farm, where's there's no internet, and mostly solar energy. To charge electronics, watch TV, etc, there's a generator that's turned on a couple of times a week. Shower days are Wednesday and Saturday, and the water is heated with a wood stove. I hate showers - I think they're boring - so I was totally into the enforced filth.

The dough, pre-rising

I woke up every morning to warm fresh bread, which by the end of the week I was making myself.  It's really filling, on account of the wheat germ, and perfectly textured - it has that dense doorstop-quality that I love, but is somehow simultaneously light and fluffy.  The recipe, which is super-easy, is as follows, with totally mixed-up measurement units in a reflection of my metric-system-addled brain.

Wheat Germ Bread

1.5 kilos white flour
2 cups of wheat germ
15 grams (1.5 grams) of dry yeast
3 tablespoons of vegetable oil
heaping spoonful of salt
water to texture (about 4 cups, probably)

Mix together all of the dry ingredients.  If you want to be on the safe side, activate the yeast with a little water and sugar before adding to make sure the salt doesn't mess things up.  Add water, slowly, until the bread has the consistency of dough.  (If you've never made bread before, this takes a little experimenting, but basically stop adding water as soon as the whole thing holds together.)  Separate into three separate balls and knead each until the gluten is activated.  Again, this is something that you sort of have to do by feel, but it's maybe about twenty times for each ball, and you can feel the dough become more elastic and resistant to further kneading.  Let rise for approximately three hours, under plastic or a wet cloth to preserve the moisture.  Bake at 350 degrees until done.  I have no idea how long this might be, since Elizabeth baked the bread in a Dutch oven on the stove, but you all know what baked bread looks like.

After breakfast I went to work. I was mostly responsible for tending to the garden - weeding, watering, mulching. I spent more hours than I care to remember hunched was the broccoli plants, pulling out weeds with a trowel and my bare hands, getting to know that the grasses always came attached in a long line by a root deep underground and the clovers tended to cluster together close to the stem of the broccoli plant. In exchange for four hours of work a day, I got free housing in a gloriously warm bed, up in the loft of a cabin I shared with two Brazilian WWOOFers. Food, which was probably about 70% harvested from the garden (everything but grains and tomatoes, really), cost an additional ten dollars a day for portions so big it makes my stomach hurt to think about. Tartas made with eggs from the chickens and greens from the garden, canelones with corn from the maizal, salads whose component parts (lettuce, beets, carrots) I pulled out of the dirt and then tossed together in a bowl.

My broccolis, ringed with ash to keep the worms away.

It was glorious to have so many fresh vegetables after the raw-food avoidance that marked Bolivia. But by the end of the week I was literally having dreams about sugar. A massive store filled with cupcakes topped with the kind of frosting so buttery that when it gets warm the butter melts and the sugar starts to separate out and get almost grainy. That was a really vivid dream. The next night it was ice cream.

The food was good and plentiful, the company - owners Elizabeth and Martin, their son Matias, all-around helper Gerardo, and the two WWOOFers - was great and gave my Spanish the workout it needed, and I managed to husband the battery in my phone such that I was able to get through several hundred pages of Infinite Jest, which I had impulsively downloaded onto my Kindle app the day before my internet fast started. But the best part of Aldea Luna was the dozens of kilometers of hiking trails that covered the back end of the property. Every afternoon, while the WWOFers and the family were working, I explored a different path, accompanied by one of the farm's five black labs. They went up the mountain and through streams and I got lost and then found and lost again, only to end up sloshing through one of the two rivers that borders the property in my borrowed runber boots until I found my way back.

As a side note, I decided to volunteer for a week to keep costs down, and it was definitely the right decision. Holy shit, has Argentina gotten expensive in the last three years. Still cheaper than the US, but things that I remember costing three pesos (as an example, Toro Viejo, a particularly horrendous cheap brand of wine) now cost more than twice that. Inflation continues to stampede along at about 30% per year, and the government continues to report it at 10%. I asked why, if even tourists know they're lying, they continue to erode their credibility. The answer, Martin told me, is that debt grows with inflation. With their false reporting, the government has to pay off its debt at 10% instead of 30%.

Crossing the Border

The line on the Argentine side, maybe about an hour into waiting.  Everyone looks pissed because they are.  The guy sitting on the fence was Argentine, and got so fed up he finally just walked in without an entry stamp.  The guy on the left was a Boca fan and really nice.  He claimed he could tell I studied literature by looking at me, and his Peruvian wife gave me a million recommendations for modern Peruvian literature I should read. 

I left Tupiza, Bolivia at 10 am yesterday for Jujuy, Argentina, and arrived at 10 pm last night. The twelve hours in between are a lesson in international politics, the lasting effects of colonialism, and what not to do while traveling.

I arrived in Tupiza on Thursday afternoon and set about trying to figure out how to get to the border with Argentina. Every company in the bus station advertised a bus to Villazon, the border town. And every bus company, when I asked, said they didn't have a bus there until midafternoon the next day. Since I needed to get to Jujuy by early evening to figure out how to get to the farm where I would be volunteering for the next week, that wasn't an option. Finally I found what I thought was the office for Bault, a reputable Argentine bus company. It would cost 250 bolivianos, a small fortune by any standard, but I would leave at 10 am the following day and get to Jujuy by early evening, the woman on duty told me.

It wasn't until I had paid that the woman told me I had to get my ticket to Jujuy at the border. She handed me a ticket for a minibus to Villazon, which I knew was worth about 20 bolivianos, max. I could ask for Jorge Lindu there, and he would help me.

Except I got to Villazon, and the office where he should have been was closed. At that point I realized that I hadn't bought a ticket from Balut at all. I had bought the vague promise of a ticket from Balut Tours, which shared only its name with the actual legitimate bus company. I finally managed to get someone from the company on the phone. He said he was at lunch, but if I went to Mikaela in La Quiaca, the town on the Argentine side of the border, she would get me a ticket.

With no other choice, I went to the border crossing. There was a short line on the Bolivian side. After ascertaining that I didn't need any more paperwork than my passport, I joined the queue and waited.

And waited. There weren't more than twenty people in front of me, but the line did not move. After maybe forty-five minutes, a German couple in frony of me paid off the border guards - twenty bolivianos, or just under $3 USD - and jumped the line. I kept waiting with another group of travelers that had clustered together in the way that travelers do in a situation they don't understand, an Irish couple and an English woman who was also travelling solo. Maybe 30 minutes after that, when there were only a dozen people in front of us, an immigration official approached our group.

"Are you travelling by bus?" It was a weird question. Everyone was travelling by bus. There was no other way to get anywhere on either side of the border, unless you had someone waiting for you. We nodded yes, and he led us to the front of the line, ignoring the protests of people who had been waiting for longer than we had. It became clear almost immediately that it was because we weren't Bolivian. The lines were for them. We were just caught in the crossfire.

With our Bolivian exit stamps in hand, we crossed to Argentina, where we were confronted with a longer line that moved just as slowly as the one on the Bolivian side. It took two hours to get to the front. The actual review of my passport took about a minute and ten seconds - ten seconds for the stamp, and a minute of good-natured grilling about my soccer partisanship. (River or Boca?) Once through we ran into another Irish guy.

"Did you guys have to wait in all that?" he asked. We all nodded grumpily.

"One of the Argentine border guys got me out of line and just led me to the front," he said. "He said the line is for the Bolivians. He said they don't like Bolivians here and they make it hard for them on purpose. Then he just stamped my passport and waved me through. I guess I just got lucky."

The five of us trudged up the hill to the La Quiaca bus station, where I set about trying to find Mikaela. After I had worked out my bus ticket, I figured I would change some money and call the family that runs the farm where I'd be staying to figure out transportation.

It turned out that finding Mikaela was easy.

"You're going to Jujuy?" she said.

"Yeah."

"Get on that bus," she said, pointing to a bus leaving the station. "RUN!"

So I did. It wasn't until I was about five minutes out of the terminal that I realized how dumb that had been. First of all, the bus wasn't the Balut semi-cama with food and wine, like I had been promised. It was a rickety Bolivian-style bus run by the company Arco Iris, with dirty floors and no bathroom and a stop every fifteen minutes to pick people up from the side of the road. The ride was worth probably about $15 USD, meaning I had paid $35 for a $17 journey. I had not a cent of Argentine money, and by the time I would arrive in Jujuy, it would be 9:30 pm at the earliest - way too late to go to a casa de cambio. And I hadn't called the farm, which I had promised in no uncertain terms to do. But it wasn't like I could get off now.

So I waited, praying there would be no delays. About an hour into the ride, the gods of travel spat in my face. Two soldiers got on the bus and began searching through people's bags with long plastic wands. After about ten minutes they left and another one boarded.

"We're going to have to check all of your luggage," he said. "We apologize for the inconvenience. Everyone please get off the bus and claim your bags. It will only take a minute."

Right. We piled off the bus and claimed our things. I only had my backpack, but most people had several sacks filled with cheap things from Bolivia, to give as presents or resell - blankets, boullion cubes, pots and pans, knockoff Barbie dolls. One woman had an entire side of beef that she had to take out of its wrappings and lay by the side of the dusty highway. Since it was the cheap bus, the passengers were mostly country people of indigenous descent - Bolivians and the Argentine equivalent of cholitas. The people in front of me had their bags torn apart as the gendarmes looked for cocaine; I saw one soldier squeeze out a tube of toothpaste and sniff its contents suspiciously. I showed my American passport and didn't even have to unzip my backpack.

The whole thing took about an hour. We re-boarded the bus and continued on our way. There was one more drug checkpoint, but blessedly, the gendarme just boarded, poked around for a couple of minutes, and left.

We finally arrived in Jujuy just past ten. There were no money-changing stations at the bus station. When I asked for one I was pointed to an ATM, which of course didn't help at all, me having lost my debit card. With the help of my bus driver, I eventually found some random guy who changed fifty dollars for me into pesos, promising me a horrendous rate of 3.8 pesos to the dollar and actually giving me only 160 pesos, which is closer to 3:1. I was too panicked and eager to find a phone to put up a convincing fight. It was not a day of good financial decisions. No one at the farm picked up the phone when I called, which is why I'm not there now (and why I still have internet access - I won't, at all, for the week that I'm there).

And now I'm safely at a hostel in Jujuy, having confirmed that I'll be heading to the farm tomorrow. I changed some more money, including my leftover bolivianos, at a great rate. Things are looking up. But Jesus Christ. Next time I'm taking a fucking plane.

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The Mines of Potosí

The entrance to the Candelaria mine

The mines of Potosí are a disturbing place.  For one thing, there's the claustrophobia of being several hundred meters below the earth, feeling the vibration of jackhammers and dynamite explosions in the walls around you and struggling to breathe the air thick with silica dust.  And then there's the knowledge that, while you'll leave in a couple of hours and very happily never go back, there are several hundred miners for whom this is their life.  Eight to 24-hour days six days a week, usually without food, breathing the poisoned air and hacking away at walls of solid rock to take home a weekly salary as little as 100 bolivianos - that's a bit less than $15 USD.  A week.

Potosí was once the richest city in South America.  The mine there was discovered about 10 years after the Spanish conquest and exploited - along with the indigenous population, who were used as miners - for the next several hundred years.  Production peaked around 1650, and at this point the deposit is nearly exhausted.  Modern-day miners are quite literally scraping at the dregs.  These days, the mines are run as a cooperative - miners give 15% of their profits to the coop in exchange for the right to mine where they please.  Maybe about 20 years ago, someone had the idea to open the mines to tragedy-porn-seeking tourists, and now mine tours must be almost as big a source of income as the metals extracted from the mine's walls.

After overcoming a few moral qualms and, more significantly, the fear I would discover I was claustrophobic  

Stalls at the miners market.  Those giant sacks are filled with coca leaves,
and the little blue-labeled bottles on the top shelf contain "miners alcohol."

under 500 meters of solid rock, I went on a tour of the mines Wednesday morning.  We started in the miner's market at about 10 am.  A few hours earlier, it would have been full of miners eating breakfast - up to four bowls of soup apiece; they don't eat in the mines, since the dust and minerals that get in the food would poison them even faster than does the dust and minerals in their lungs - and stocking up on supplies, including dynamite, coca leaves, juice and a kind of Bolivian ethanol that clocks in at 96% alcohol, and that the miners drink straight (but only on Mondays and Fridays).  The idea is that pure alcohol will somehow beget pure silver.  By the time we showed up, it was mostly tourists.  We purchased juice, coca leaves and dynamite to give to the miners we would meet, and made an offering of miners alcohol to Tío, the devil-god of the mines, pouring a few drops of a tiny shot on the ground and then taking the rest.  It was exactly how one would imagine drinking ethanol would taste. 

Next stop was the refinery, where the ore that the miners extract from the mountains is turned into silver.  I'm still not entirely clear on the process, except that it involves a lot of gnarly chemicals like arsenic that you don't want in your water and that probably end up there anyway.  The silver that results from the process is a fine wet dust, which our guide painted around our fingers like rings. 

Finally, we went further up the mountain and entered the mine itself.  The miners divide it into four levels, each hotter and deeper than the next.  The first level was for the most part walkable (although I had to crouch pretty much always - Bolivia wasn't built by people my size) and was several degrees colder than the outside.  The second level was, as far as I could tell, mostly just a passageway to the third - a narrow tunnel at a 45 degree angle, with the occasional rickety wooden ladder.  We all had to do parts of the climb with our backs parallel to the ground, crawling on our hands and feet like so many crabs.

The third level seemed to be where most of the work happened.  Miners cleared away large boulders in wheelbarrows, and every five or ten minutes someone gave a signal and we all hugged the rock wall as a mining cart shot by - literally tons of rocks and ore trundling along a set of metal rails, pulled by two shirtless men in front and pushed by two others in back.  It got hotter as we went further in, until we were all pouring sweat in our jumpsuits.  Our guide, an erstwhile miner himself, estimated that it was about 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) at the hottest.  The air was thick with dust and an endless variety of unidentifiable, probably poisonous mineral gases, each with its own sick earthy odor. The bandana I'd bought as a filter was of limited usefulness, since the air was so thin that when I put it over my mouth and nose it filtered out the oxygen along with the dust.

On the fourth and lowest level of the mine, we stopped to talk to Martín, a solo miner who had been working in the mines for several decades.  (Or, rather, our guide talked to him, and translated his monosyllabic responses into usable information.)  Every time we talked to someone over the age of about fifty, I felt a little ill, knowing as I did that most miners die by fifty-five of lung ailments.  Martín was hitting a metal spike with a hammer, drilling a small hole, maybe about an inch in diameter, into the solid rock.  Eventually it would be big enough to insert a stick of dynamite.   He works eight hours a day, seven days a week, except for Friday, when he pulls a triple shift and works for twenty-four hours straight.  He estimated that his daily profits were about fifteen bolivianos, or two dollars, a day, although of course that fluctuates depending on the productivity of a given deposit.  Most miners work in groups and share their profits, and make a steadier income of around 60 to 100 bolivianos a day - a small fortune in a country where the minimum wage just made the leap to 647 bolivianos a month. 

After three weeks in Bolivia, the poverty here is starting to wear at my consicence.  People are poor in a way I haven't ever experienced, poorer here than anywhere else I've ever been.  (Since most of my third-world experience is in South America, and Bolivia is the poorest country in the continent, that might just be a tautology.)  For a tourist, it mostly manifests itself in the prices, and for a while I felt gleefully like I was getting away with murder.  Eight dollars a night for a fully-furnished apartment!  Twenty-five cents for six mandarin oranges!  Then I realized that, geopolitically speaking, getting away with murder isn't so much a metaphor as a pretty apt description of what's going on.  Things aren't cheap because someone feels like giving me a cosmic gift, things are cheap because people can't afford anything more expensive.  So what do I do?  I pay 100 bolivianos - the same amount that some of the miners take home in a week, remember - to see just how shit things are.

The night after I visited the mines, a girl from my hostel invited me to the movie También La Lluvia (Even the Rain), which deals with a lot of these issues.  The plot concerned a group of Spanish filmmakers who came to Bolivia to shoot a movie about Bartolome de las Casas, a priest who agitated for indigenous rights.  At first they're just thrilled to hire extras for $2 a day, but as time passes they come to realize they're basically re-creating the Spanish oppression of the indigenous people, four centuries later.  Heavy-handed meta-symbolism aside, it hit pretty hard. 

The movie ended with the Spaniards leaving the country, and today, that's what I did, too.  I'm now in Argentina.  My epic journey from Bolivia was one final miserable lesson in cosmic and political unfairness, and merits a blog post in itself.  That next.