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.

Someone Else's Disaster

Up until now, due mostly to the various vacationers I've been traveling with, I've been taking a combination of airplanes, cars, and long-distance buses to get from place to place.  From here on in, though, it's all bus, all the time.  Bolivia, notorious for terrible roads and deadly public-transporation wrecks,  is probably a weird place to switch from an airplane-bus-car patchwork to a bus-only transportation regime.  But at this point I have much more time than I do cash, so buses it is.

I took my first solo long-distance Bolivian bus on Saturday night.  I had done a lot of research online before booking, and found that there were two top-class bus companies that go overnight from La Paz to Sucre.  (Top-class = $19 USD for a ticket, which is a small fortune in bolivianos.)  One of them, El Dorado, is notorious for a particularly gnarly series of fatal crashes, and was shut down for a month last year while the government investigated its safety record.  The other, TransCopacabana MEM, almost shares its name with two other, less-reliable bus companies, Flota Copacabana and TransCopacabana.  Completely unable to tell the difference between the three Copacabana-themed companies and worried about ending up on a pile of sticks on wheels, I bought a ticket on El Dorado.  I figured, a little glibly, that post-El Dorado's brush with the authorities it was probably the safest choice anyway.

The other thing that my research told me was to be careful with my luggage.  All buses into and out of La Paz, the internet said, stop in the suburb of El Alto to pick up additional passengers and supplies, at which point a small army of beggars and hawkers also boards, trying to get money out of the bus´s passengers however possible - including stealing any unattended or poorly attended bags.  (Note that El Alto is a suburb in Latin American-style, meaning that it's home to people too poor to live in the city center, a strange inverse of the United States urban model).  Sure enough, the bus had barely left the La Paz station before a teenage boy began striding up and down the aisle, telling anyone who would listen about a medical condition that left him prone to unpredictable fainting fits, and asking us for money so he could get his medication before the pharmacies closed.  He left and was replaced by a man hawking necklaces of what he called "alpaca silver."  For fifteen bolivianos apiece, we could be the proud owners of a piece of jewelry that would never rust, never stain and never tarnish!  He finished with a mysterious demonstration that involved rubbing one of the chains repeatedly with a metal spoon.

All that was before we even got to El Alto.  In El Alto, another wave of people boarded, selling mates and flashlights, begging money for their gout or blindness or bad leg.  I refused all offers and kept my purse held tightly in my lap.  About fifteen minutes later, the bus started again.

And went about a block.  Ten more minutes of waiting, and a half-block more.   The other passengers started getting impatient, leaning out the windows to yell, "Let's GO!" or going downstairs (it was a two-story bus) to harangue the bus driver.  It took a while for the rumors regarding the delay to float back to me.  There was an extranjero who had gotten all of his stuff stolen.  He had gotten off the bus and was refusing to get back on.  As the story spread through the top floor of the bus, someone turned to me.

"¿Hablas inglés?" she asked.  I hadn't spoken anything but some basic Spanish since boarding the bus, but there's really no way to hide my tall pale foreignness in Bolivia.  "El chico necessita un traductor."

I ran downstairs, holding my purse in one hand and my backpack in the other (I wasn't taking any chances).  A blond kid in a t-shirt advertising La Paz's big party hostel was standing on the curb, alternately gesticulating wildly and leaning down with his head in his hands. The bus's drivers and the few passengers who had gotten off to try to talk to him were utterly stymied by the force of his panic and the language barrier - he spoke no Spanish, and no one, it seemed, spoke English. 

"Where are you from?" I said, adding unnecessarily, "I speak English."

"England," he said, and then with more urgency:  "They stole my backpack!  It was right under my feet.  I was touching it!  Someone leaned over me and asked me to open the window so he could speak with someone outside, and then it was gone.  Everything was in there.  My money, my computer, my passport.  I just bought a new camera.  It's all gone."

"I'm so, so sorry."  Unsure of what else to say, I slipped into emergency mode.  "You need to find a place to stay tonight and then tomorrow morning, you need to get to your embassy.  They should be able to help you there, I think."  I consulted with someone behind me.  "There's no embassy in Sucre.  You'll need to stay in La Paz."

"I don't even have enough money to get a back to the city," he said.  "I don't have anything."

"That's one thing you don't have to worry about," I said.  "I'll give you some.  How much do you think you'll need?"

That point, however, turned out to be moot.  With me as an interpreter, the news of the Brit's dire situation spread fast.  Within minutes, most of the bus was out on the sidewalk, everyone simultaneously sympathetic, embarrassed, and eager to hurry on to their destination.  They were all yelling advice at me, which I filtered and then passed on to the Brit, who was barely listening - "Go to the police!  Go to the embassy!  You're never going to find your bag now, it's gone, let's get going!"  Someone pushed their way through the crowd and handed me a wad of bills - a hundred boliviano note, a handful of twenties, a fifty.  I don't know why they didn't give it directly to him, except that as the interpreter I had someone become the go-between connecting this lone lost foreigner and an entire busload of anxious Bolivians.

Eventually, the chaos subsided.  The Brit, with two hundred-something bolivianos from the impromptu collection, retrieved his clothes from under the bus and prepared to head back to La Paz with a man who had left his wife and children on the bus to help get him safely into the city.  As the passengers were re-boarding, an old man came up to the Brit, who was still crying a little, and with the utmost sincerity said, "Dear boy, you're alive.  You're still alive.  God bless you.  Now get out of this godforsaken country."  I translated, and the Brit almost cracked a smile.  I very much hope he's on his way home now.  I never even got his name.

The rest of the bus ride, needless to say, was relatively uneventful.  I watched enough of R.E.D. to decide it wasn't worth trying to hear the Spanish above the rumble of the bus, and listened to my iPod, occasionally sleeping the kind of sleep that you think is wakefulness until you look back and realize you remember having dreams.  Sucre is beautiful and peaceful and I somehow stumbled into renting a fully-furnished apartment, complete with living room and kitchen, for the equivalent of $9 USD per night.  I take my next bus tomorrow.  I will be holding tightly to my luggage the whole way.

Accidental Adventures

There are times while traveling when it just seems like the worst idea in the world, to be alone in a foreign country, literally thousands of miles away from anyone who even knows your name.  Jenni left on Wednesday morning, and my month on my own began with my realizing I had lost my debit card.  It wasn't stolen, as there haven't been any weird charges.  I just left it somewhere.  I know that makes me an idiot. 

Thus began an adventure that involved several calls to Bank of America on the shoddiest international connection ever, in a little internet cafe where the sympathetic owner complimented my Spanish and gave me a piece of candy with my change, possibly because I looked like I was going to cry.  It was easy enough to freeze my debit account.  Figuring out how on earth I would get money was more complicated.  It takes a week an a half to send a new bank card abroad; I don't even know, at this point, where I'll be the day after tomorrow. The B of A representative told me I shouldn't have a problem getting a cash advance on my credit card, but banks 1-4 that I visited didn't agree so much.  They all sent me to the main bank branch, on Camacho, "in that direction."  Since there are at least two Calle Camachos, and "in that direction" was a polite-ish way of saying "stop bothering me," it took me forever to find the right bank.  When I finally got there, the teller almost sent me away because the signature on my passport didn't look enough like the signature on one of the many receipts she made me sign.  I tried to explain that one's signature changes quite a bit between the ages of sixteen - my passport is from 2003 - and twenty-four.  (In fact, although I didn't tell her this, my current signature comes from hours of doodling in high school math classes, trying to develop a signature that looked more "grown-up" - if only I had anticipated the consequences!)  Either she bought the explaination or wanted me to stop crying (again - not a big crier, but these were dire circumstances), because two tellers and another hour later and I finally had my cash.

That ordeal (temporarily) over, I set out for the town of Coroico, about three hours outside of La Paz on the outskirts of the jungle.  I hadn't stayed in the same place for more than a single night since April 1, and I wanted some time to relax.  I got into a cab and told the driver to take me to "the Villa Fatima bus station," as my Lonely Planet indicated all buses to the yungas (the jungle region of Bolivia) leave from the neighborhood of Villa Fatima.  He clearly had no idea what I was taking about.  I thought he was an idiot.  Turns out, once again, it was me.

The buses to the yungas do leave from the working-class neighborhood of Villa Fatima, but there is no bus station.  Instead, different street corners are dedicated to different destinations, so you have to figure out where your particular bus leaves from.  The kindly cab driver, in between astounding questions about what the United States was like - "What language do they speak there?" "Do people from the U.S. eat corn?" - asked around and got me safely to the right place.

Finally there, I walked up to one of the companies and asked for a ticket to Coroico.

"Fifteen bolivianos," the attendant said.  Note that that's right around two dollars.

"Great, thanks," I said.  "And what time does the bus leave?"

She gave me a withering look.  "Sometime after it gets here."

A sort of crap picture of a cholita
stolen from someone else's blog. 
It's considered rude (obviously, I guess)
to take pictures of them, so I don't have
my own.  Note the precarious hat
and many-layered skirts.

Awesome.  I waited for about 45 minutes in the uncharacteristically hot afternoon, among the street vendors selling fruit and cigarettes and soda and the cholitas - indigenous women who still wear their traditional garb - waiting to go back to the countryside with bags full of bread and yogurt and potatoes bought from markets in La Paz.  The bus finally came at around 2:30 (which, when I finally looked at my ticket, was exactly when it said it was going to come) and the cholitas piled their purchases on the roof with a strength that puts my skinny pale arms to absolute shame. Fifteen of us piled into a van little bigger than a Ford Windstar, and after a quick round of complaining about how hot it was, which an Afro-Bolivian man solved by prying a window open with his keys, we were on our way.

The bus ride was its own little adventure.  I was the only gringa on the bus, and was treated in much the way someone would treat a fart - everyone noticed me, pretty obviously, but they all pretended not to.  That was okay, as it gave me the opportunity to watch them, chatting, swapping coca leaves and clusters if grapes and homemade sandwiches, and to look out the window.  The World's Most Dangerous Road used to be the only way to get from La Paz to Coroico, and while a new highway opened up to replace it in 2007, there's still a little bit of overlap, and it's still a treacherous an winding road set high up on the cliffs.  I counted 38 roadside crosses before we even hit the new road, which is not, frankly, a road game I would recommend.  But after a while I began to trust the driver, who obviously knew the road well and was neither drunk nor falling asleep (both big causes of bus accidents in Bolivia). 

We got into Coroico a little before 6 pm, and I spent the next couple of days in a little cabin in a gorgeous resort in the jungle, alternately wandering, writing, and hanging out with a group of Americans I ran into there who had been on my WMDR ride. It was just what I needed after so many accidental adventures.

The World's Most Dangerous Road

An early vista from the altiplano.  What you can't see from this picture is the carcass of a minibus whose driver fell asleep, sending the vehicle and its passengers shooting over a 400-some meter cliff.

On Monday, Jenni and I mountain biked down the World's Most Dangerous Road (also known as the WMDR or the Death Road), classified as such due to the average of 26 vehicles yearly that flew over the its cliffs until a new replacement road was built in 2007.  It's a 64 km ride that makes you 3,600 meters down, from a starting height of 4,700 meters above sea level to an ending height of 1,200 meters, from the high mountains around La Paz to the middle of the jungle.  I won't be able to walk properly for days, but it was incredible. 

Looking hot in our vests.

We started at what's known as The Cumbre (the summit), next to a lake surrounded by snow-capped peaks.  In the bus all of my layers - shorts, sweatpants, wind pants, two shirts, a fleece, a windproof jacket, a bright orange vest and biking gloves - had seemed totally unnecessary, but as soon as we started down the road (which was paved for the first 20-some kilometers), the wind found the cracks in my armor, and it was bitterly cold.

It was also gorgeous, and, frankly, terrifying.  The paved road wasn't so bad, other than a dew potholes and the 500-meter drop to the left.  But the second we left the pavement, things got gnarly.

Our guide pointed at a tunnel right in front of us.

"We're not going through there," he said.  "A couple of years ago a French girl wrecked herself in it.  She reached up to adjust her glasses, hit a wall and was in a coma for three weeks."

Instead, we took a loose gravel path around the tunnel.  I managed it fine by keeping up my speed over the rocks, but missed the ramp back up on the other end.  I braked in panic before I hit the curb, spun out, and ate shit, landing on my knee, which is now an unlovely brownish color.  Embarrassingly or blessedly, it was our group's only wipeout of the day.

The actual Death Road.  As you can see, it's extremely narrow, with a pretty unforgiving cliff off to the right.  You can't so much see what terrible condition the road is in, but trust me.

The WMDR itself was actually easier, thanks in no small part to my having learned the limits of my braking ability on pebbly gravel.  It was also incredibly beautiful.  Almost as soon as we hit the dirt, it started getting warmer, and the layers came off one by one, until we were riding through air thick with dust and jungle humidity.  Somewhere along the halfway mark, a small white butterfly started keeping pace with me, resting briefly on my handlebars.

A capuchin monkey tipping over his water bowl.

We ended up at an animal reserve called La Senda Verde in the jungle outside a town called Yolosa.  The reserve takes in animals rescued from the black market, including dozens of birds, hundreds of turtles, a caiman, a spectacled bear, and upwards of 40 monkeys that climb all over you and try to pick your pockets.  It was a great place to unwind after the tour.  Jenni and I stayed overnight in a little cabin and spent hours the next day letting the monkeys pretend we were trees.

A rescued coati.

My knee is turning funny colors, and I'm absolutely covered with sand-fly bites (according to the Wikipedia page: "Sand-fly bites are frequently several times as itchy as mosquito bites, and tend to last longer as well.")  But it was totally worth it.  Armed this time with lots of DEET (which you can't wear around the animals at the reserve, since it poisons them) I'm going back to the jungle today.

Walking on Water

Montecitos in the salares, with salt miners in the background.

The Salar de Uyuni is a mindfuck. One moment your eyes see a massive frozen pond strewn with piles of snow. The next minute the world shifts and you're sliding across a sheet of glass, bisecting huge diamantine sugar cubes. Then you're standing on a mirror that blends together the land and the sky until there really isn't a horizon anymore, just blue.

The Salar (salt flat) was Jenni's and my first stop on a three-day tour of the Uyuni desert in Southwestern Bolivia. Because the rainy season has gone late this year (it usually ends in March) the salar was flooded. As a result, we weren't able to drive more than a couple of kilometers in, slowly, so that the salt water wouldn't splash too far and damage our engine. But the reflective surface of the flats was eerie amd beautiful, and we were able to see workers harvesting the wet salt for consumption - raking it into montecitos (little mountains), letting the water drain out for a week or so, and then loading it into dump trucks to take into town for processing. The salt forms in these strange three-dimensional squares with another hollow square in the center. I ate a lot of it, and Jenni judged me.

Rows of quinoa ready for harvest.  All of the pictures I took from the car are weird and off-kilter because the roads were so bumpy.

The following day we drove across the altiplano and into the desert, ending up at an elevation of some 16,000 feet. (La Paz is at a comparatively weaksauce 12,000). On our way we passed through fields of quinoa in colors like a New England fall or a paint catalog- light butter yellow, firetruck red, twilight purple. It's harvest season, so there were hundreds upon hundreds of bunches drying in the sun by the side of the road. The stems are covered in tiny flowers that crumble in the sun, leaving behind the hard, edible little seeds.

The geysers.  What you can't see is the mud bubbling up from the cauldrons, or the force with which some of the geyers shoot out steam.

The last day we woke up at 5:20 and were on the road by 6. It was brutally, insanely cold - somewhere in the 20s, our driver Franz estimated, and definitely way below freezing. The frost persisted until well after sunrise. As the day warmed, we drove across the most stunning scenery yet - plant-like rock formations cut by the wind, a patch of geysers shooting steam from bubbling mud, and a series of lakes, including one called the Laguna Verde and one called the Laguna Blanca. Neither of them were actually their promised color because there wasn't enough wind to stir up the minerals that provided their respective colors. (Borax for the white lake, a combination of iron, arsenic and lead for the green lake.) But by the time we made it to our last stop, the wind had picked up, and the Laguna Colorada was swirled with red, which you can only sort of tell from the picture, and filled with flamingoes, which again, you can only sort of tell from the pictures.  We had our lunch there, a picnic out of the back of Franz's 4WD, and then rode the five hours back to Uyuni.  A very bumpy bus ride later, Jenni and I are back in La Paz. 

The Laguna Colorada.  The blurry bits around the edges of the lake are flamingoes.

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The High Life



At Zig Zag.  At first I thought the waitress was making fun of us for being gringoes by making us wear the bibs, but they turned out to be necessary because of the splattering juices from the sizzling meat.

There are a lot of great things about traveling on a budget. In a way, actually, you're much closer to the daily lives of the people in the country you're visiting - you shop at their grocery stores, take their buses, buy cheap used books from the same hole-in-the wall stores.

Ceviche.  Note that these pictures
are all kind of crap because I took them
 before I realized my phone
camera had a flash. 

That said, there are definite benefits to the other kind of travel. During my last week in Colombia, driven by a fit of money panic, I ate little more than rice, eggs, bread and vegetables in various permutations. (There aren't many.) Peru was pretty much the opposite of that, food-wise, thanks to my dad, who's been traveling with me for the last week.

On his first day in Lima, Dad and I went to the Huaca Pucllana, an old pre-Incan ruin with a well-known outdor restaurant overlooking the archaeological site. I got the ceviche, seafood "cooked" in lime juice. It came, as is pretty standard, with plantain chips, two kinds of corn - boiled and fried - and yucca, a root almost but not quite too starchy to be edible. The fish and scallops were buttery-smooth, although I was less enamored of the pulpo - octopus - which in addition to having gross little suction cups still attached to its tentacles was also kind of rubbery.



Granita, creme brulee, suspiro and lucuma custard.

 The best part of this meal, though, was the dessert. Dad and I got the dessert sampler, which came with little cups of creme brulee layered with tomatillo jam and a sweet graham-cracker-like crust; a custard made of lucuma, an Andean fruit that tastes a little like a smoky sweet potato; a pisco sour granita; and suspiro a la limena, (literally, "sigh, Lima-style), a dulce de leche custard with dense meringue on top.

The following day we went to La Rosa Nautica, a restaurant in a series of gingerbread Victorian cupolas on a pier in the Pacific. We got the special of the day, a mixed seafood grill for two.


You can just barely see how weird and alien the octopus looks.



The platter, when it came, looked like it had been eaten by an entire octopus. The suction-cup-studded purple tentacles that had grossed me out the night before were in full display. At first I ate around it. Scallops, white fish, calamari. Finally, I tried the octopus.

It was incredible. By far the best part of the dinner, and one of the best things I've eaten in Peru. Smooth, just slightly chewy, and incredibly flavorful. Turns out octopus is actually pretty delicious.

The other surprise came in Arequipa, a city surprising in itself for the quality of its restaurants (and for its crushing altitude, and for its beautiful white colonial streets...) We went to a restaurant called Zig Zag, famous for its 'stone-grilled' meats. Not quite sure what that meant, Dad and I both ordered the beef-pork-alpaca sampler with creamed quinoa on the side. Our meals came literally on a stone, still sizzling, surrounded by little dishes of anchovy butter, herb mayonnaise, and aji garlic sauce. The meat was on the rare side, but I cooked the pork a little more right on the stone. Against all odds, the alpaca - a famously tricky meat, easy to cook into gamy cardboard, was the most delicious of the three meats, smooth and tender and, when covered in anchovy butter, pretty much perfect.

Dad leaves tomorrow, so it's back to rice and eggs and three-dollar fried fish lunches. Not that I could keep this up for that long - I've been eating a ton. But it was good while it lasted.

Breathless in Arequipa

The airplane we took from Lima to Arequipa let us out directly onto the tarmac. Straight in front of us was the Arequipa International Airport, a little building with a single luggage belt and a shabby collection of kiosks touting local hotels and tours of nearby Colca Canyon. It's provincial and, particularly given that Arequipa is Peru's second-largest city, singularly unimpressive.

That is, until you turn around and see the hulking snow-capped mountains - including El Misti, an active volcano - right behind the plane, imposing and majestic and completely out-of-sync with the airport's dreary functionality. Cognitive dissonance, as it turns out, is kind of Arequipa's signature. Bach's Toccata and Fugue weaves through the streets of the colonial old town - the same three bars, over and over. It wasn't until the third time or so that we heard it that we realized it was blasting from the garbage trucks.

Dad and I were met outside the airport by a driver sent by our hotel, who led us to a rickety Daewoo with a sticker across the front windshield that said THE UNDERTAKER. Fortunately, it didn't prove prophetic, as the most exciting thing that happened on our drive was passing several flocks of sheep, attended by people in traditional Andean garb, along the median of the highway that led into town.

When we got to our hotel - La Casa de Melgar, a converted bishop's residence with courtyard after courtyard, all built from the city's legendary white stone and filled with gorgeous flowers - Dad and I dropped our stuff. We then wandered around the white-stone city for an hour or two before I retreated back to our room to rest. The elevation has totally wiped me out, although at some 2,500 meters, this is the closest to sea level I'll be for the next month, so I'd best be getting used to it.

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Bogota, Round Two

A tiny corner of the dance floor at Andres Carne de Res

On Molly and Doyle's last night in Colombia, we went to Andres Carne de Res, a club in a suburb of Bogota advertised as Colombia's best.  It's about an hour's drive from the city center, which we did in a 'party bus' - really, a reappropriated school van pumping a bizarre mix of dance tunes and Hoobastank, filled about 10 people past capacity with travelers living up to their respective cultural stereotypes. (Boisterously drunk Irish, belligerently drunk Australians, sloppily drunk Americans.)

Half steakhouse, half dance club, Andres Carne de Res is in a sprawling building packed with crazy floor-to-ceiling decorations out of one of Dali's gnarlier acid trips. Headless mannequins covered in mosaics of mirrored tiles, a life-sized stuffed tiger jumping through a lighted hoop, signs that say things like Ojos Asi en los Ray Ban ("Keep your eyes on my Ray Bans") and Aqui Rumbean los Astronautas ("This is where the astronauts party").  It basically looks like the house of the hoarder with some artist friends and a great sense of humor.

A random photo of the decor

We made friends on the sardine-tin crowded central dance floor with a guy named Alfred, whose assurances that he wasn't drunk became less convincing every time he repeated them.  He was there that night to celebrate his younger sister's 23rd birthday, and carried a bottle of tequila with him that he passed around freely.  We each took a shot, chased with slices of orange and lime that were provided in little coconut-shell bowls lying around the bar, presumably for that purpose, and danced for hours to an eclectic mix of salsa, reggaeton, and the unescapable Black Eyed Peas.  At one point, we took a break out back, sitting for a minute on the curb of a blocked-off street that was filled for the evening with makeshift drink booths and carts selling choripan.  As we watched drunk girls stumble outside for some fresh air, a brass band appeared out of nowhere, complete with dancers costumed as various vaguely religious figures tossing confetti into the crowd.

It's easy to forget amidst so much joyful debauchery that Colombia's civil war isn't over, but rather just pushed to the remotest fringes of the countryside. But a couple of days after Molly and Doyle left, I was wandering around the city with a friend I made at the hostel, and we stumbled into "Las Colores de la Montana," a movie centered around a little boy named Manuel, who watches as his friends' families and then his own are accused of being guerrillas and then killed or made to flee the town where they all live.  It was sweet and sad and chilling, as I really hadn't thought before seeing it about the cost of the relative peace that's made Colombia into a trendy tourist destination.  

That said, I really loved Colombia.  I'm starting to realize how little time I have to travel - I'm barely getting to scratch the surface of the countries I'm visiting.  I'm already planning my trip back.