Diarrhea and Thank You Cory

In a recent chat with my dear friend Cory, the only criticism he gave me for my blog was that I never put anything in it that is bad. I told him its because life is good in South America and nothing all that bad has happened. Well either he jinxed me, or I jinxed myself. So, here you go Cory. I hope this makes you happy.



A group of seven set off for three days of trekking in the Yungas, six hours southwest of La Paz, a spectacular descent from close to 15,000 ft into a lush jungle basin, but only four got to trek. Lebn, his cousin Sadie, two French girls, an Israeli, a Colombiana, and I woke up with the sun on Thursday to board an old Blue Bird bus for the six-hour drive to the small town of Chunavi, the starting point of the Yunga-Cruz trek. The road was dirt for most of the journey, cut into the sides of the steep and rocky mountains. At one point the driver had to open the door to watch the tires skirting along the edge of the road, to keep us from falling off the cliff, into the valley below. The occasional creeks that we crossed, running through the middle of the road, made it easy to imagine how easily these roads get washed out.
But the scenery was spectacular and when we arrived at our destination, we were truly in the clouds. And its really hard to see in the clouds. It was recommended by the locals that we wait until morning before setting out, and we´ve discovered in our travels, that it is generally fairly wise to heed the advice of the locals. The visibility was nil, we were barely able to see 10 feet in front of us at times, but when the fog parted, the views were spectacular. But the locals recommended that we wait until the next day before setting off as the trail could be dangerous under such conditions. Luckily there was a place that could accommodate all of us for a more than reasonable price. So we hung out, played cards, and went to sleep. Most of us slept. I couldn´t quite get there, and in the morning, felt like a warmed over pile of hell poop.
After much debate - internal and with the group - it was decided that I should return to La Paz in the care of the two French girls, while the rest continued on the trek. I felt bad that they should miss the trek too, but they insisted that I shouldn´t go alone, and as one of them is a registered nurse, I couldn´t really argue now, could I?
So four went trekking (pictures to come) and three went back to La Paz. And the bad luck kept on coming. We were told the bus would arrive at 2 p.m., but at 8 p.m., we were still waiting, huddled in a blanket to protect us from the frigid mountain air, when some locals took pity on us and invited us into a room by the road where we could still hear the bus coming and gave us coffee. Not the best thing for my ailing stomach, but I was too cold to care. And just as we finished our coffee, and a lovely conversation, the bus arrived. And it was totally full. Not a single seat. In my country, this would have meant that we couldn´t get on the bus. But not in Bolivia. We rode the entire 6 hours back to La Paz on sacks of potatoes that had been stacked up in the middle of the aisle. I´ve had more comfortable bus rides.
But the bad luck ends there. We made it to La Paz late, but I was already starting to feel better, and we spent the next few days hanging out with some friends in their place in El Alto of La Paz for free, waiting for the others to return. It was relaxing and I started to feel better pretty quickly.
After Lebn returned, the French nurse and I headed for Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, and Lebn stayed behind in La Paz to have a mock Nils Pol hat made. The more fabric he cuts out of it, the more he seems to like it. Its a little light, but you can spin it on your finger. He met us and others there the next day, and Lebn, the two French girls and I spent four days on Isla del Sol. It was so refreshing. We found a place to stay with a guy named Alphonso and his family, who kept insisting that it wasn´t a hotel, but our house, and we should pay whatever we felt like when we left. We cooked over wood fires, and enjoyed a breathtaking view high over a tranquil bay. We saw a beautiful sunrise from the island that the Incas said the Sun was born on and beautiful sunsets every night. Lebn and I hiked to the northernmost part of the island for a sunset one night, and walked home by the light of the full moon, passing Incan ruins on the way. It was all pretty amazing.
And now we´re in Peru. We took four or five different modes of transportation to get us to a town called Arequipa. We´re here because the world´s two deepest canyons are nearby and we plan to get in them for a few days of hiking. I´ll write about them soon, Mom. No frantic emails about where I am, okay? I´m sorry this post was so long in the making. I´ve been distracted, and Internet has been more than I cared to pay. It won´t happen again.

Circo de la Calle

We´re still in La Paz. We found a pretty fun crew of artisans and jugglers to run around with and life is good. For example, we all went to a party on Saturday night and it didn´t end until yesterday afternoon. Lebn and I were coming out of our hotel room on Saturday night, and about 15-20 people were walking down our street, looking for us to take us to the rim of the valley that is La Paz for a fiesta. Pictures coming soon. We, being a great and mighty mob to be reckoned with, commandeered a bus that took us all the way to our destination. Ordinarily, we would have had to transfer to get there, but as we filled the entire bus, we talked the driver into taking us all the way.
Night number one of the party was fun. We stayed up late, drinking and drumming, and Lebn and I crashed on the hard wood floor. The next day the whole lot of us took to the streets to earn a little money. We were quite the spectacle, a band of hippies and artisans cruising the crowded markets. People stopped us to shake our hands and ask us where we were from before we even did a show. Our general answer became, ¨todo el mundo¨ as we had almost every South American country represented as well as Israel, France, Belgium and others that I´m forgetting. But once the shows began, we were like celebrities, mobs of people circling round us to find out what in the hell we were up to. The welcome that we received was so warm and enthusiastically friendly, that it alone would have made the whole day worth it. We must have done 7-8 shows by night fall, the last 3 or 4 were each supposed to be our last though we kept ending up doing one more, and made enough money for close to 20 people to eat all day and sponsor another party that night. I, personally, enjoyed receiving food from all of the vendors in the market more than the pocket change of the spectators. A bag full of delicious oranges, bananas, or peanuts were much more valuable commodities when working the streets all day, than a couple of Bolivianos and it felt more like it was genuinely coming from the heart. And now I can say that I´ve worked for peanuts and mean it.
The second night of party was much like the first, only Lebn and I managed to score pads to sleep on. We got a slow start the next day, and 4 of us decided to walk down the valley into the heart of La Paz for spectacular views and to experience a different part of the city. I wish we had pictures to post, but Lebn was without his camera.
However, another friend has posted some pictures of the weekends events at: http://picasaweb.google.com/igal.tar/BoliviaLaPaz
if you want to check them out.
And Lebn has posted a few new ones of older events. His picture page, once again, is:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lebnjay
Enjoy!
We love you all and deeply apologize to our wonderful Mothers for neglecting to make contact on Mother´s Day. We were working in the streets for peanuts. Aren´t you proud?

Who Needs Crappy Stuffed Animals Anyway?

Potosí was a lovely city, and as it is the highest city in the world, positively breathtaking. Literally. It´s mostly hills, so even a walk to the market to buy hot food on the street, is mildly exhausting. But its narrow, colonial streets were lovely, the surrounding desert spectacular, and the nights cold enough to properly appreciate the four heavy blankets that each of our beds had.
There were stoplights in Potosí, though none that were actually functional, but we did manage to cross paths with some Argentine jugglers doing their best with the anarchy that is traffic on the crowded city streets. We also went to see a movie for the first time since we´ve been travelling. It was well worth the wait, an old fashioned theater with a grainy picture, bad sound, and ticket price under a dollar, that made us feel like we´d travelled back in time. We went to see the movie 300, but when we entered the theater, the previous movie was still showing. It was soon over, and much to my delight, they cut it in the middle of the credits and immediately started showing the next feature. No previews. No commercials. The movie was average, so to feel like we were getting our money´s worth, we stuck around for the next one which, judging by the amount of people who did the same, is a totally acceptable thing. Unfortunately the second movie was Night at the Museum, a dreadful waste of energies that almost instigated us to ask for our six Bolivianos back.
After Potosí, we went to a small city called Oruro. We had no specific reason for going there other than it was on the way to other places we wanted to go, but it made for an interesting stop. The most interesting aspect of this city, is the abundance of street vendors, filling street after street with anything you could possibly imagine. There aren´t really store in the Bolivian cities we´ve visited so far. Banks, pharmacies, a few restaurants, and places to use the internet are the only places that are in proper buildings. Everything else is sold in stalls either on the street on in the large, warehouse-like markets. You can buy anything that you´d find in a supermarket, hardware store, clothing store, or pet store in the States, but you may have to visit a dozen stalls before you find exactly the right thing. Thankfully though, all like items are clumped together. There´s the shoe store street, the fruits and vegetables street, and the light bulb street. A street lined with fried food, or a street lined with hot soup and rice. We ate a complete and filling meal with rice, vegetables and meat for 3 Bolivianos. That´s less than 50 cents. And it was delicious. We almost bought Spider-Man 3 on DVD for 5 Bolivianos. I think it was available on streets in Bolivia the day it opened in the theaters.
All in all, it´s kind of like walking around at a State Fair, only there aren´t any games. There´s still lots of people shouting at you to spend your money on fried things and other stuff you don´t need or want, but if you really want a crappy stuffed animal, you can´t win one throwing a softball in a basket, but if you go to crappy stuffed animal street, I´m sure you´ll find one at a more than reasonable price.
And now we´re in La Paz, which is far more beautiful than I could have imagined and bursting with the kind of vitality that could convince me to explore the streets forever. The markets are the same as in Oruro only there are more of them, and as this city of 1.5 million was built withing a steep valley, every street offers a dramatic view of buildings hanging off the mountain side, or snow-capped peaks in the distance. We found a cheap room, an army of little old ladies selling sumptuous meals for pennies, and a conclave of travelling jugglers (we have yet to meet a juggler from Bolivia). We´ve started an impromptu juggling club that meets for a view hours everyday much to the delight of the many locals who frequent the plaza we play in. It´s a good thing its cold here or I´d never leave.
I have to go, but one more thing before I do. When I said ¨little old ladies¨before, that wasn´t to imply that they are in any way feeble or frail. I´ve seen more than I can count, climbing steep streets and hills all over this country with anything and everything strapped to their backs. Usually its whatever they take to town to sell, but I saw one woman walking home with a dresser strapped to her back! They are totally burly, unnaturally friendly, and feeding me very, very well. This is a wonderful country.

Bolivia!

Lebn was not consumed by a Puma and, after missing our first bus, we caught the next one to the border where we stayed the night and crossed the next morning into an entirely different world. If not the poorest, Bolivia is certainly at the top of that list, in this great big continent. Things were cheap in Chile and Argentina, but prices have been sliced in half (sometimes more) since we crossed the border to the point where we´re able to live quite comfortably on 2 or 3 dollars a day.
We didn´t stay long in the border town, buying train tickets to a town called Tupiza that afternoon. We met some Canadian kids who met Sam somewhere in Eastern Argentina, a strange and interesting coincidence, who have been travelling about as long as we have, and whose Spanish made us feel much better about our own. We sat in the cheap seats on the 5 hour train ride, though our new Canadian friends splurged on the fancy car, and got our first taste of Quechua, a native language spoken by a large percentage of the people here. A little old man came over to us and tried starting up a conversation and we couldn´t understand him at all. And just when we were feeling good about our Spanish. Luckily, another passenger clued us into the fact that it wasn´t, in fact, Spanish at all.
Once we got off the train, we were assaulted by dozens of children all wanting to take us to various hostels and residencias in town, but we decided to go it ourselves. But it wasn´t long before some pretty blondes ended up leading us to the same hostel that the kids were recommending. It´s not the first time I´ve been lead astray by a pretty face, and I´m sure it won´t be the last. There was a group of 4 (1 guy, 3 girls) who were looking for 2 more to accompany them the next day on a 4-day tour of the salt flats and various other destinations in Southwestern Bolivia. The cost was $115, entirely out of our normal price range, but pretty faces made us consider it for a minute. And as though that weren´t enough, one of them went to Western Washington University, and the others were all from Vancouver. But we resisted the sirens call and hooked them up with the other Canadians we´d met. They were perfect for each other really, and on an entirely different tour of South America than we are. The hostel we stayed at was a perfect example.
It was the first place we´ve stayed were everyone spoke English and everyone was just looking to party. It was a bit off putting and we really didn´t feel comfortable. A perfect example was the 2 Australians that we were sharing our room with coming in at 4a.m., drunk, and loud as hell, without the slightest care that there were other people there. And at 25 Bolivianos each (about 3 dollars) a night, it was out of our price range anyway. First thing the next morning, we started heading to another place that we´d heard was only 15 Bolivianos, when a fellow juggler named Manu noticed our juggling clubs and took us to where he was staying. We have our own room for 7 Bolivianos each. And with 3 or 4 course meals nearby costing about the same, this is far and away the cheapest we´ve been able to live so far.
And so we´re still in Tupiza, once again staying longer than we thought. We found some incredible canyons just outside of town for great hiking and have spent some time with Manu, an Argentine, his German girlfriend, and a French friend of theirs named Julian. We did a little show in the plaza and were introduced to San Pedro for an unspeakably incredible evening. People here don´t get to see jugglers as much as the other places we´ve been. Jugglers don´t come through here as often because they can´t make as much. But they respond to it much more enthusiastically, which makes juggling in the park that much more fun.
But, as wonderful as this stop has been, we bought bus tickets to Potosí for this evening. We´ve washed our clothes and ourselves and shed some unnecessary weight and the open road lays ahead. More to come.