Fin de Viaje!

Yes, the trip is over. Where does the time go to?

A few thoughts overall.

First, it was incredible. I met the best people, visited the most amazing places, and experienced new and exciting foods (I'm craving lomo de pobre right now).

Second, I'm glad to be home. I was wondering if I'd experience reverse-culture-shock or general disgust with America, but I can honestly say: No, I love America. Yeah, we have a lot of problems, but you know what? Everywhere has lots of problems. That doesn't mean I wouldn't want to try living anywhere else, but it does mean that I'm glad to be home.

Third, my deep thought for the trip. I realized day by day in the countries I visited (especially Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador) that 'cultural diversity' there is far different than cultural diversity in North America. Yes, you have people from the mountains, people from the coast, people from the farms, people from the cities. Yes, they have their own cuisines and micro cultures. But at the end of my trip I could count on two hands the number of black people I saw. The first thing I noticed when I got to New York was how blessedly diverse the crowd was. All of a sudden I realized why the Chinese food and the Indian food I ate in South America was so bad. The lack of food options is one of many indicators that in South America, the diversity and knowledge of non-South American cultures is poor at best. (I'm realize I'm generalizing here. First, I only went to Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Second, the cities were much more diverse and had strong European influences. But even in BsAs there were only three Indian places in the city, and they weren't that great.) The long and short of it is that though we pay a lot of lip service to cultural diversity in America, it really is important to who we are. The next time you get aggravated that someone can't speak English very well or that someone doesn't understand your local customs, try to reason that they're improving this country in other ways. We all could probably learn something from them.

Ok, enough preaching. I'm back in Cambridge now, enjoying burritos at Anna's, Italian cuisine in the North End, and riding the T around with people from all over the world. I'm also taking a Spanish language class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

America del sur hace una lugar especiale en mi corazon, pero soy contento estoy a mi casa.

Chao chicos!

disney picchu

We spent the past few days in Cuzco fighting off massage, hostel, and restaurant touts, buying things (and paying through the nose to send them home), visiting three Incan ruin sites in the Sacred Valley, and finally, the Holy Grail, Machu Picchu. I'll focus on Machu Picchu.

First of all, Machu Picchu gets more hype than probably anything in South America. Unlike any of the other activities I´ve undertaken on this trip, it´s a place that people specifically come from all over the world to see. To be honest, I´ve never really understood the draw to it, but it was something I wanted to do because I was in the neighborhood. Maybe that´s why I wasn´t running around singing out in happiness like one of the girls we saw coming down the path.

The truth is, I was slightly bitter that I had forgotten my student ID card which would have reduced my entrance fee by 50%. No, I´m not a student anymore, and no, I´m not in favor of cheating the system when I don´t deserve something, but...

The admission fee was $49! That didn´t include the additional $12 charge for the bus to get to the ruin itself. And they didn´t even give us a fucking map or put signs with factual information anywhere. Nothing. I´m sure it´s because the millions of guides running around ($15 for two hours) would have had a fit.

My question is as follows: What are they spending all our money on? A day at Disney Land costs roughly the same, except Disney has some serious operating expenses. Electricity, personnel, and insurance, just to name a few biggies. Yeah, there were a few people scraping lichens off the rocks, but do you think they make as much money as the teenager strapping people onto Space Mountain? And Machu Picchu had llamas and alpacas wandering around to manicure the grass.

For a few hours, I was a shareholder, and I want to see the expenditures.

Ok, I´m really not all that bitter. I had a really nice day at Machu Picchu. It really was a beautiful place, and as usual, Mark and I took the road less traveled and hiked up Hauyna Picchu, the giant mountain in the backround of all the famous MP pictures. Pretty difficult for me given my fear of heights, but I made it up and back without a panic attack. They don´t believe in railings and safety down here...

Is Machu Picchu worth the hype? You have to see for yourself.

since we last spoke

So, I{m a little disappointed that 1) I{ve fallen way behind in uploading pictures and 2) that I can{t find the damned apostrophe on this keyboard!

It{s been something like 10 days since I{ve last written, but I{ve been busy. I spent

5 days on an an ecolodge in the Amazon,
1 day mountain-biking down The World{s Most Dangerous Road,
1 day being very ill in La Paz (don{t eat the ice cubes),
2 days on Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca (birthplace of the Incan people), and
1 day traveling into Peru and visiting people who live on floating islands made out of reeds.

All in a weeks work, right?

Something else I{ll mention before I go is that after Isla del Sol, I have a whole new view bathrooms. A bathroom is luxurious if

1) you don{t have to supply your own toilet paper
2) there is soap
3) there is a lid on the toilet seat
4) there isn{t a bucket in which you have to throw your used toilet paper
5) there is a flush mechanism, meaning you don{t have to pour a bucket of water into the bowl
6) if you have to pour your own bucket, there is water available to pour
7) if a bucket is to be poured, you (and not the inn-keeper) are the one responsible for pouring it it

Ok, on my way to Cuzco. Should have good internet access for the next few days.

administrative bizniz

Today was an internet and scheduling day. Unfortunately about once a week or so we need to really stop and figure out our rough schedule. This one is pretty interesting.

Tomorrow, Sunday, we're going to the famous Tarabuco market. I'm sure I'll end up with several new items to weigh the pack down.

Tomorrow night we're taking a night bus, cama ejecutivo [read: luxury], to La Paz, a 12 hour ride arriving at 7 am Monday morning.

At 11 am Monday morning we fly to Rurrenabaque to begin an ecotour in the Amazon Basin in Parque Nacional Madidi. We booked tour for this with Chalalán Ecolodge, Bolivia's leading community-based ecotourism project. Here is the itinerary:

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Day 1: La Paz – Rurrenabaque
Fly La Paz - Rurrenabaque (50 minutes). Our staff transfer you from Rurenabaque airport to the Chalalán office by bus where you fill in the forms necessary to enter Madidi National Park and receive information about your trip to the Ecolodge. This night. You stay in a nice hotel in the centre and have the rest of the day to relax in Rurrenabaque.

Day 2: Rurrenabaque – Chalalán Ecolodge – Madidi National Park
After breakfast at the hotel, you take a boat up the River Beni and on to Chalalan. It takes 5½ hours up the rivers Beni and Tuíchi. Our boats are equipped with: roof, comfy seats, life jackets, raincoats and a first-aid kit. Snack en route.
After lunch at the lodge, there is time to rest or swim in the lagoon before you hike in the rainforest. There is a walk along the Paraba path to the viewing point where you can see the beautiful landscape across the lagoon, mountains and the Madidi rainforest. We return by canoe along the rivers leading to the Chalalán lagoon, watching birds and monkeys on the way. Dinner at the lodge followed by a night hike to see insects, tarantulas, amphibians, mice, and nocturnal birds and monkeys.

Day 3: Chalalán Ecolodge – Madidi National Park
After breakfast, you walk through the jungle, learning about the forest and the wildlife. There are themed walks to choose from: natural interpretation of the forest, natural history, ecological processes, medicinal plants and hardwood trees, animal behaviour and bird watching.
Return to the lodge for lunch and then spend the afternoon taking a short walk in the Amazon. Late afternoon features a choice of activity: handicrafts, canoe on the lagoon or watching videos about the community and the national park.
In the evening, there is a canoe trip on Chalalán Lagoon spotting amphibians, nocturnal birds and alligators - easily seen because of their glowing eyes.

Day 4: Chalalán Ecolodge – Madidi National Park
You spend the day out and about. You walk along the rivers Rayamayo and Eslabón where you can fish and watch spider monkeys, tapirs, deer, wild boar and maybe match a glimpse of a jaguar.
Following a packed lunch on the banks of the River Eslabón, you wander back to the lodge, spotting birds, mammals and insects and catching fish if you wish. This evening there is a traditional “dunucuabi” dinner of catfish wrapped in leaves or fish á la “tacuara”. This is followed by a traditional Quechua – Tacana night with music and dances from the San José de Uchupiamonas community. (Traditional dinner and dance depend logistic at Chalalán)

Day 5: Chalalán Ecolodge – Rurrenabaque – La Paz
After breakfast, it’s a short walk to the river Tuíchi to take the boat back to Rurrenabaque (3 hours). At 11.30 you are at Rurrenbaque ready for your flight back to La Paz.

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OK, this sounds a little hokey, very cushy, and perhaps over-planned. We could have just gotten guides in Rurre and roughed it a little more... But, this is the only lodge inside the park, and will be far away from the gringo-ville that is Rurrenabaque. Also, to add a dash of realism to the flowery itinerary provided to us by the lodge, I've read traveler reports of the really nice accomodations also accomodating huge spiders, wall-climbing frogs, and bats. That's right, in the rooms.

So mom, I'll be AWOL until at least Friday :)

the miner's life

(pictures coming soon)

I am rich Potosi,
The treasure of the world...
And the envy of kings.

So says Lonely Planet of Potosi, once one of the richest cities in the world due to huge deposits of silver (plata) in Cerro Rico, the mountain that overlooks the colonial city.

I was immediately struck by Potosi's narrow streets, yellow buildings, and steeply graded streets. My chest was struck by a difficulty breathing - the city is at roughly 4070 meters, which turns the simplest chores, like climbing a flight of stairs, into endurance sporting activities. Tancredi, an Italian guy we traveled with for a few days, had a heart problem and wore a heartrate monitor to warn him when his heart approached 180 bpm. That thing was going off every two seconds, which meant we had to take it easy. I wasn't complaining.

THE thing to do in Potosi is tour the silver mines here. Although the mines have largely dried up compared to what they once where, they are still very much active. Over 40 cooperatives employ 16,000 miners to work in appalling conditions to extract zinc, silver, and lead, while being exposed to arsenic, silicon, and asbestos. Miners usually acquire some sort of poisoning after only 7 to 10 years.

The tour included visiting the miners' market (they each have to buy their own mining supplies, including dynamite). We bought gifts of coca leaves, cigarettes, and soda for the miners. Then we suited up in outfits becoming of miners, complete with hardhat (which yes, was very necessary) and headlamps. We headed into the mine.

Our guide, Wily, a former miner, showed us the statue of the devil inside, to which the miners gave daily offerings of coca leaves, cigarettes, and alcohol, and asked for permission to mine and protection from the dangers within the mine. Only a few days ago two miners were killed in a cave in. Of course, we were in one of the safe ones ;)

At distances of up to 2 kms inside the mine, we got to speak with miners, learn about mining techniques (it's all done by hand), identify strands of both minerals and poisonous substances, climb up and down ropes and ladders between various levels, and peer down 60 m holes. Back outside we got to set off some dynamite. Gringo-tastic!

Wily gave us some really interesting perspectives on the life of miners. They love their jobs for the most part. The mines become their lives, and even when [those that survive] retire, they hang out outside the mines with the miners and smoke cigarillos. As Erin and I learned in Nicaragua, the world view of poor people may be very different than that of those more educated. The miners had little interest of the future. As many of us may see our lives in a linear fashion, hopefully trending upward as we age, these guys take each day for what it is and have little thought for what life for their families will be after they die of silicosis in 15 or 20 years. The most unfortunate part is that there really isn't a lot else to do here, and there are always others willing to take the jobs of those who die or quit. There are no benefits, no health insurance, and no official life insurance, though many of the mine owners pay families for their silence when their fathers or brothers die.

As somber and sad as all this is, the tour was incredible and enlightening. I coudn't imagine going back the next day for another tour, let alone day after day of work. As Wily said, that is the miner's life.

Uyuni

After getting shaken down by Bolivian immigration for an additional 50Bs (I love that the abbreviation for the Boliviano is 'Bs') beyond the 100 USD we already paid for our visas (which only Americans and Australians have to get, thanks to the Bush administration's delicate foreign policies), we made plans to leave Uyuni. Uyuni is really only a jumping-off point for gringos to see the salt flats.

Down here, everyone who's remotely white and not from SA is a gringo - this is not necessarily derogatory, BTW. Americans are called 'Yankees', which was a lot funnier in BsAs because it was prounced 'Shankees'. I digress.

Anyway, we wanted to get on to our next stop, the mountain mining town of Potosi. The only option that day was to take a night bus leaving at 7pm and arriving sometime between 1 and 2am. We signed up the French/Italian couple from the salt flats, Celia and Tancredi, to join us on the trip, and we arranged a hotel in Potosi so that we'd have somewhere to get in when we arrived.

We had the rest of the afternoon to bum around, and though there wasn't much to Uyuni, it was a neat afternoon for several reasons. First, for the first time on my trip in SA, I was confronted with a truly different place. Many Americans (I assume many because I was one of them, and I'm so incredibly worldy) don't know that Chile and Argentina are actually very developed - Santiago and Buenos Aires might as well have been European cities, and the rest of their respective countries actually had paved roads and electricity that worked around the clock. And many of the people in Chile and Argentina might as well have been from America or Italy or France, etc, etc. You couldn't tell just by looking at someone where they were from, and people often made the huge mistake of trying to talk to me in rapid castellano.

Not so in Bolivia. I stick out like a sore thumb here. The majority of the population in towns like Uyuni (and later Potosi and Sucre) seem to be of indiginous decent, and many people continue to wear traditional clothing.

Mark and I visited several of the markets, the most interesting of which, by far, was the food market. The highlight was seeing a woman taking off the top of a skinned cow head with a hacksaw. We asked to take her picture but she declined. I did get another picture of a skinned cow head though.

We had dinner at a fairly nice place. When I went in the bathroom I thought to myself that my entire idea of luxury had changed. Opulence is having toilet paper waiting for you, rather than you having to bring your own. Later that night I tried to use a public bathroom, and my entire idea of disgustingness was brought to a new level. Oh yeah, and the drunk guy in front of me waiting for this pristine porcelian convenience couldn't wait to go, so he just went while he was standing there in line.

While I'm telling you all these seemingly bad parts about Bolivia, I'll also add that the busride to Potosi was one of the worst rides yet. It was a smaller bus with no bathrooms and filled with people under wool blankets. It was cold, smelly, and there was a drunk guy hanging over Mark, offering me Puro, an almost 100% alcohol imbibe. He kept saying "Me gusta tu escribe" or something like that, which I translated to mean, "I like that you´re writing". I was writing in my journal. The night sky was beautiful though, more Milky Way, and amazing cliffs that luckily I couldn't see. I started apprciating riding in the dark so that I couldn´t see potentially terrifying road hazards until I realized that the bus driver had a harder time seeing them too...

All these bad things about Bolivia, but I don´t really think they´re bad. They´re new, and interesting, and make me a little uncomfortable. But why else do we go to new places?

Bolivia´s Southwest Circuit

This past week we left Chile, embarking on a tour of Bolivia´s Southwest Circuit. What is the SW Circuit, you may be asking?

The southern border crossing with Chile, near San Pedro de Atacama, is at roughly 4800 meters. That´s 15,700 feet folks! We were all having a hard time breathing and had to walk at half-speed everywhere to fend off exhaustion, respiration troubles, and headaches. All us gringo tourists were divided into groups of six and packed on to Landcruisers, all our packs wrapped in a tarp strapped to the roof. We proceded to drive into some of the harshest, most barren landscape I´ve ever experienced: a high desert, with very few plants, extremely windy, and very cold and dry.

We did see several amazing salt lagoons, complete with flamingos (they're not just for front yards in Florida) and llamas feeding on the banks.

Unfortunately, headaches abounded on the first day and the cumbia blasted over the 4wd´s sound system by our driver, Jonah, didn´t help much. That night we were treated to one of the worst spaghetti dinners ever to be eaten (how do you mess that up?), and slept in a dark and dingy refugio without hot water, electricity for only a few hours, no shower, and lots of wool blankets. I will say we were a good group of people. Despite the conditions, everyone took it really well. Everyone on the trip was from somewhere different in Europe, although someone joked they were happy about the absence of Germans. Apparently they get a bad rap. There were reps from France, Belgium, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain. We played a card game called Shithead which was fun to try to explain, translating from language to language until everyone got it.

The next morning didn't start off much better. It was cold, breakfast was horrible, and several of us (including me) were still feeling ill from the altitude. Luckily we were at the highest point of the journey. It was all downhill from there, and as the altitude dropped, our spirits rose (maybe it was the ABBA CD).

We passed several more langoons, interesting rock formations innexplicably in the middle of nowhere (erratic rocks, perhaps?), and scenery that increasingly resembled New Mexico and Utah.

We (including Jonah) stopped for a beer in the small village of San Juan, which existed only to farm quinoa, one of Bolivia´s most important crops, along with potatoes and coca. Next we moved on to a small salt flat, just a small taste (so to speak) of what was to come.

A much larger taste was the salt ecolodge we stayed in that night. This was a refugio made almost entirely of salt!! Salt blocks comprised the walls, the chairs, the tables, and even a small bar. The best part was the salt crystals that made up the floor. It was like walking in the bottom of an aquarium (without the water). Every morning the care-takers raked the salt to remove the footprints and get ready for the next group. And this place had hot water and a passable dinner. All right!

After a great night's sleep and a breakfast made much better by the introduction of Mark's and my peanut butter, we set off into the salt flats. I'm hardly going to try to explain what this was like, but I'll say it was very, very white. Very big, and very white. It was almost like being in the ocean. Landmarks that we drove to (there were several islands of regular soil, rocks, and plants in the salt) never seemed to get nearer, even as we drove 60 miles an hour towards them on no road whatsoever. Well, there were a few tire tracks to follow.

I got to drive the Landcruiser. Yes, that's right, I GOT TO DRIVE THE LANDCRUISER. I was totally joking when I asked Jonah the day before if I could drive, and when we got to the salt flats, he offered to let me drive. In fact, he let each of us take a turn. At first he sat in the front seat, but later he sat in the back seat and was talking to us and inspecting my LP Bolivia book while Mark tried to figure out where the hell he was going. Can you imagine this behavior in the US? Are you kidding me? Yeah, like everything else down here, there were no waivers of responsibility or anything.

Needless to say, we stopped several times and got some astounding pictures.

As the day went on we made our way to the east side of the flats to a village called Colchani. This is where the really nice, expensive salt hotels are, and where very poor souls harvest the salt, 10 Bolivianos (less than 2 USD) for every 1000 kg they harvest. To put that in perspective, my backpack weighs about 15 kg, 67 times less. We ate lunch and finished the trip in Uyuni at the Cemetario de Trenes, a strangely intriguing place where old locomotives and train cars are left to rust.

Welcome to Bolivia!