godchild.

Sucre, Bolivia

death road; or, how i almost fell off a cliff

La Paz began on a rocky note, but after I got over the fact that I was entirely without my winter wear, I decided that I was in heaven (ie. finally back in civilization) and spent the rest of the week sitting in a hot tub with hilarious Israelis, continuing the attempts to breathe normally at 3600 meters, and eating quinoa soup. Once I regained my emotional capacities after the vomit chorus on the way into town, I made the executive decision to mountain bike the most dangerous road in the world in the spirit of pretending to train for a triathlon. I find this quite impressive considering the only biking I've done since middle school was to and from yoga class this year (a straight shot on Latona, and sometimes I cheated and rode on the sidewalks even then).
Death Road takes you through waterfalls, through overflowing rivers, nearly careening off cliffs when you get too cocky and start going really fast, and descends 3000 meters from freezing, foggy La Paz into balmy, jungly Coroico. I had a couple of Aussie friends with me on the trip, and the rest of our group was either Brazilian or deaf, but almost dying together really brings people together and I left the mountain with a new arsenal of ASL signals and Portuguese phrases. Additionally, I somehow got the entire relationship history of a sweet guy from Rio who spoke English like I speak Hebrew and discovered a butterfly the size of my bike wheel.

The day ended with a buffet lunch and a pool overlooking the mountains, which I'm not sure is normal for triathlon training, but something I'd like to incorporate into my normal routine either way. Death Road conquered, check please.

mercado central, or; will i be murdered while buying cinnamon?

Here is the Mercado Central, the heartbeat of Sucre and a stark contrast to the prepackaged predictability of Safeway. No two visits are ever the same, and I can never decide whether to be thrilled or terrified when I walk in.

One afternoon we went to explore the spices, wide-eyed at the stacks of bright saffron and curry in sacks the size of 8 year olds. Entranced by the range of colors, I grabbed my camera to document the pointed towers of flavor and was rewarded promptly with a furious 70 year old woman, who shooed us away with a bitterness I assumed was reserved for the gringos alone. It wasn't the first time I'd heard about the strange fury that fruit vendors can possess. Vlad, a Romanian transplant from California, told us that as he examined avocadoes once in the vegetable aisle (paltas, which we were disappointed to discover taste like anise) he was furiously maligned by the old woman at the stand for stealing her products. She embarked on an extensive, detailed rant until the woman one stand over kindly guided him to her selection of paltas and allowed him to inspect them without suspicion. Lifting your own fruit becomes a crap shoot-- you run the risk of being given older, bruised produce if you don't choose your own, but could also become the victim of a screaming Quechua matron if you do.

I understand that the art of photography isn't always appreciated by the subjects, a lesson that was reinforced with my spice section ostracism. I am a slow learner, however, and assumed that if I avoided catching people's faces in photos I could avoid their wrath and still document the impressive piles of their wares. I was sadly mistaken, and almost suffered a concussion while trying to snap this shot of the potato sacks. Right after I took this picture, a furious woman rose up from behind one of the bags with a massive papa in her hand, which she wound up to throw at me while screaming, "POR QUE SACAS FOTOS?!?" I understand that one would be tired of tourists snapping shots of you as an example of the "natives in their natural habitat," but what these women don't understand is Western awe at the sheer amounts of everything in the market. It's something quite stunning when one is accustomed to small portions of plastic-wrapped food that get replaced daily in the supermarkets at home. We can't help but take pictures.

Later that day, however, we discovered that the anger of mercado merchants extends to their own, as well, as two women fought loudly in the meat section until one was disgraced enough to wander away like a defeated buck who had just tangled horns with a much-stronger peer. "We just wanted to buy some butter," we marveled to ourselves, since grocery shopping at home rarely holds the possibility of deep human emotion (unless you are at the Trader Joe's on Roosevelt and run into my favorite bald gay man JoeJoe, for whom running the sample table becomes a wild, loud affair involving everyone in a 30 foot radius and stories from Gay Pride parades a decade ago, while you drink six Dixie cups of coffee in succession and stand riveted to his one man show).

Getting back to the mercado and some things I would like to change about it: the dog issue. The health department would have an absolute coronary at the goings-on of Bolivian perros. They wander freely, peeing liberally underneath the meat stalls, mere inches from the whole pig heads, chicken feet, and heavy racks of cow backs dangling from wires. Our legs turned to jello when we were on the scene of a roaring dog fight, because apparently it's normal in Bolivia to allow your Rottweilers and other attack dogs to wander amongst humans. More than once we have mentally drafted a leash law amendment to add to Evo's new constitution.

Conversely, your market experience could be a delight that leaves you marveling at how wonderful the world can be. Marlo and I have been lucky to find a fruit woman who cuts us thick samples of peaches and plums and mangoes and apples while regaling us with scary stories of La Paz, and thanks us for being loyal to her by tossing extra limes into our bags. We found a potato woman who, instead of yelling at us, asks us about traditional American holiday meals and begged us to teach her how to make baked apples. We buy cunape every day at exactly 4:30, when the little balls of yucca and cheese come out of the oven like clockwork (and never a minute sooner, an unspoken rule), and the sweet couple in the bakery section always laughs when they see us coming, since our order never changes. We buy butter from a lovely woman who gives us advice on how to stay safe in Bolivia, and homemade pasta from another woman who thinks our relationship with the kids from the guarderia (two of whom often are present for mercado adventures) is "just really beautiful." The world's most wonderful people can be found at the mercado central, once you find out who to avoid. Grocery shopping is a potent mix of sights and smells and the absolute inability to guess what will happen that particular day. And I think, besides the amounts of dog urine and fly colonies one has to dodge to get to what you need, I will really miss how alive places like the market are.

that's mine, that's yours

At 13,420 feet, Potosi is the highest city in the world and, although we didn’t spend more than an hour there, it’s one of the most fascinating places we’ve been to so far. If you get a chance to read a little on about it, it’s worth your time. With a bloody, unjust history and boasting what used to be the biggest (and arguably most important) city in the New World with 200,000 inhabitants, Potosi was run ragged by the Spanish colonizers, who capitalized on the health, labor and natural wealth of the city to take back boatloads of silver and leave behind a trail of black lungs and poor campesinos.

Today, the average miner doesn’t live past 40. As we drove by one of the city’s biggest mines, I couldn’t decide whether to smirk or cry at the name: “Mina Cristo Redentor.” Christ the Redeemer Mine. Thanks, Spaniards! Drop off your strict Catholicism, get rich off the slave labor of your converts, and peace out once everyone who can afford it has bought titles of nobility. Awesome foreign policy; love what you’ve done with the place.

If you want to spend a few dollars, you can see the mines yourself. For a few bolivianos and gifts of coca for the miners, you too can crawl into someone’s hellish workplace to see what it’s like. There is a thriving tourist business (granted, “thriving” is relative. It’s not a beach or a resort town by any stretch of the imagination) in Potosi that allows you to don a hard hat and climb a rickety ladder into the earth.

Personally, the whole concept of mine tourism makes me feel queasy. I don’t think observing a place that is both employment and a death trap is something to be added to the list of “Must-Do in Bolivia,” and I was more than happy to skip straight through the town. Being fully aware that tourism provides jobs and also that exploitation happens in far more industries than just mining, I still feel totally uncomfortable with the idea that people come to Potosi and are “excited” to “do” the mines. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. I’m all for travel that is outside the norm, challenging, and that expands our awareness of the wide stratum of life stories being played out in the world, but this just seems like an eerie, voyeuristic extension of the original Spanish attitude.

Based on conversations with fellow travelers, my opinion is the minority. What do you think? Am I totally off-base with this one?

bolivian babies: now on your christmas shopping list

Check these adorable kiddos out! No, you can't buy the babies as gifts, but you can help them have enough to eat between now and February. They get food, you don't have to adopt them, everyone wins.

Here’s the deal: Ciruelitos Guarderia is a little nursery/daycare in the valley outside of central Sucre that is funded by the Bolivian government 10 months out of the year. Unfortunately, the government cuts off funding for December and January, but the kids have nowhere to go because their parents are mostly poor workers who get ZERO days off. The women who run this place are absolutely the most lovely people you will ever meet, and decided to keep working without salary in order to keep the kids in a safe place during the days. Fox Institute, the language school Marlo and I are working for, has raised enough to pay the women almost as much as they normally make, but there’s no money to feed the kiddos. Marlo and I are working on getting them set up for the next two months with at least enough food for the roughly 30 kids that spend their days there, but we can’t do it by ourselves.

Dear friends: what better time than the holidays to help people out who don’t have very much?
The upside of donating to Ciruelitos is that literally 100% of your hard-earned dough goes straight to the little ones. Seriously. Marlo and I go to the market with the girls who run the place, they haggle for every last boliviano, and literally work miracles in feeding so many kids with so little money. You have my personal guarantee that your cash will be spent on weird food that Bolivians like.

Examples of how far US dollars go:
--$10 will buy enough red meat to feed the kids for a week
--$7 will buy enough chicken for a week of soup
--$20 will buy enough vegetables and pasta for the week

In conclusion, don’t forget that God’s wrath knows no bounds and He is reading your mind right this second. That’s right, we would be so grateful if you'd just click “donate” to the right there and give us a day’s worth of latte money so everyone can have a Feliz Navidad.

Sincerely, your local nunnery

just deserts.

4 days in a Jeep in southwest Bolivian desert.
3 bloody noses from dust inhalation.
5 lagunas.
100s of flamingos.
12,000 square km of salt flats.
2 cases of severe altitude sickness.
1 llama that enjoyed eye contact.
This is how we spent our Thanksgiving: getting as far from the city lights as possible.


Salt mound ballet











Say hello to my leetle friend.












4:30 am wakeup call for a hike through thousand year old cactus? FINE, I'll get up.












Nope, it's not water. Just salt until the ends of the earth.











Sunrise! So that's what you look like! Our little group of two chatty American girls (whose politics were deemed liberal European), one good-natured Montevidean (our wee Urux), and the coolest Belgian couple outside of waffles and chocolate had a hard time splitting up.






Call me creepy, but ancient Aymara mummies with skin still on is called a jackpot of archaeology (they only found them nine years ago! Talk about great timing!). They all had EXPRESSIONS on their skulls, I'm not kidding! Ahhh, I love mummies, could someone send me that National Geographic with the Kennewick Man?







Dear flamingos: you are so rare and so magenta, I can't help but love you. Also, your legs bend backwards, and I have a lot of respect for that.










Standing on the tracks and waving at Chile on one side and Argentina on the other, but keeping it strictly Bolivia, thank you.









Arbol de Piedra, thanks for allowing me to realize my dream of walking around in a Dali painting.











Something about lava, geysers, and semi-active volcanoes makes me feel like I'm living in the Triassic Period. Don't tell my 8th grade science teacher I don't really know if that's the right period or not.









This was the highest we got, and could feel the air blowing in off the Pacific. When you haven't seen your favorite ocean in 6 weeks, that air feels GOOD.









Llamas are now good for the following things: cholesterol-free steak, prolonged eye contact, earring ideas, really soft sweaters, and sassy substitute best friends.












If you guys need me I'll be down here exploring this kick-ass canyon.

That little hut was home sweet home, where Marlo battled altitude sickness on a cement bed and an old Quechua lady made us the provincial version of elephant ears over an open fire.

Oh, hello, Wonder of Creation. Fancy meeting you here.

Long story short: I'm the luckiest girl in the world in the most beautiful country in South America. Mike Moe, you made me promise to come here, and I owe you big time.

evo it is.

Evo won by a landslide, and I have decided to continue believing in his democratic legitimacy, because sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Or something.

election weekend!

It's election weekend in Bolivia and tomorrow's vote will decide whether or not Evo gets to stay in office. We went to a rally for the opposition party in Sucre's town square the other night, and it's like Obama came to town: Manfred is the next big thing!

Fun fact: Bolivians aren't allowed to buy/have alcohol for the 40 hours leading up to voting! NO DRUNKIES IN THE VOTING BOOTHS, POR FAVOR.

As we spent long days in the desert last week, our driver Sergio and I passed the time in the freezing Altiplano talking about the government (strange thing about a second language: I can carry on a detailed Spanish conversation about politics but sometimes forget how to tell a simple joke. Oy vey). Our first night, as we huddled next to an open stove in an adobe hut, Sergio told me in his slow, round Bolivian drawl about how so many campesinos, including his mother, didn't have a national identity card until Evo mandated that they be free of charge. With that, she joined the masses of poor workers, previously disenfranchised, who put him into office four years ago.
Great deal, right? I always thought the story of Evo's election in 2006 sounded like what politics should be: a poor Aymara campesino makes good, and uses his trailblazing presidency to unite a country in a more equitable system and remind Bolivians that the Quechua and Aymara have significance as well. Oh wow. I'm so idealistic sometimes. As usual, politics are WAY more corrupt and human nature WAY shadier than I want to admit.

My Spanish tutor JuanJose just rolls his eyes when Evo's name comes up, and he is fairly indicative of the even divide between "city Bolivians" and "country Bolivians." Yes, as Sergio told me before, Evo did provide free carnet cards to the campesinos who didn't have them before, but he also did it illegally, since many of them were given double cards. He also traded the identity cards directly for votes. In the villages, elections were not a private affair, as campesinos had to hold up their vote for public review after casting it in the booth. If they didn't vote for Evo, they were punished; for example, public beatings with a belt. And with such measures, he naturally had a landslide victory with the previously disenfranchised villagers. "He has also succeeded in dividing those in the city and those in the campo," JuanJose said with disappointment. "He wants to change the constitution, and when city-dwellers protest (as they did in Sucre recently) they are beat down. Three people died here and many more were injured, but Evo never once acknowledged it or apologized for what happened. People in the city don't like him at all, for good reason."

Later, I chatted with Marisol about the same thing and she shook her head sadly at the unjust government that is just "otra cara de la misma moneda"-- another side of the same coin. She also mourned the lack of education outside of the cities that prevents the majority of Quechua and Aymara villagers from seeing beyond charisma, as well as the placation measures that give them the false sense of progress (for example, a new 50 boliviano monthly stipend for pregnant mothers. 50 bolivianos is about $6: "that's not help! That's an insult!" Marisol cries. But because it's 50 bolivianos more than they got before, they are deceived into thinking the government is progressing).

Voting is on Sunday, and emotions are running high in Sucre.

the worst dollar i ever spent.

After a night of adjusting to the altitude in La Quiaca, we joined hunched campesinos with colorful scarves securing massive crates and/or children to their backs to cross the bridge into Bolivia. Crossing our fingers that a fistful of money and buoyant smiles would suffice for entry instead of yellow fever certificates (currently lost in the Argentine postal system) and almost all of the 300 entry requirements Evo asks of poor Americans, we were happy to find the border guards in jovial moods. They deemed us worthy of 1. getting our passports photos mocked and 2. GETTING VISAS! Here we are with our shiny new Bolivian visas, so young and naive, with no idea of what lay ahead for us. With stomachs full of coca tea, we set off to the train, which by all accounts leaves every Tuesday.
Our first bad news of the day: PSYCH, no trains till Wednesday! Faced with the choice of staying in the god-forsaken border town of Villazon or taking the bus to Tupiza, we weighed our options. We had been warned about the bus to Tupiza. "It's really dangerous," people said. "Wait for the train, it's much safer." Our response? "How dangerous can a bus be, really?" So for 10 bolivianos, just over a dollar, we threw our packs in the belly of a rickety bus and climbed aboard. This was, perhaps, one of the worst decisions I have ever made regarding my personal safety.
We are used to busses smelling strongly of body odor and unidentified comestibles, and this was no different. However, only a quarter of the windows worked, so we sat three in a row in the baking sunshine as Urux kept an eye on the cargo to make sure no one made off with our backpacks. Marlo and I did the following things pre-departure: read Psalms regarding physical protection, kiss our necklaces of St. Christopher and St. Benedict, and hold hands. These were repeated throughout the voyage with increasing desperation and later were augmented by a few Our Fathers and, eventually, resignation to our fate.
The bus hit a pothole before we even left the city, tossing duffel bags out of the overhead compartments onto the heads of unsuspecting passengers and causing the bus to tilt so far to the left that I had visions of myself under a pile of the passengers next to me. And with this fortuitous beginning, we set out into the desert.
Oh, the desert. It really means business in southern Bolivia. Huge clouds of dust billowed into the bus with astonishing frequency, finding their way in great gusts through the few functioning windows and half-broken skylights, and surrounded the bus so completely that we wondered how the driver could see to drive. Not that it really mattered, though, because there WAS NO ROAD. Nope, just a "suggestion" path through a desert that, although appearing flat, pitched our poor bus around like a ragdoll. The rattling of seats made conversation impossible and I had images of the entire vehicle crumbling to pieces right there in the desert where Butch Cassidy died.
Then the mountains began, which is when I seriously began to consider standing up and saying a few words. Driving through cliff territory with no guard rail and only a couple inches of wiggle room? And all that business we heard about Bolivian bus drivers drinking on the job? TELL ME THAT'S JUST A RUMOR. I felt the bus slow down and peeked hopefully out the window. Rather than seeing our destination, I saw the trail ending in front of us. With a cliff to our right and a river to our left, we apparently had nowhere to go.
Silly American! If there's not a road, you can just DRIVE THROUGH THE RIVER. As Urux laughed "only in South America," our driver took a direct left and drove straight into the water to continue our journey.
This was an unfortunate time to look out the window again. Our route had not been kind to previous busses, and we gazed in terror at another bus exactly like ours, toppled on its side and resting on a gravel island in the river. On the verge of tears and strongly considering getting out and walking the rest of the way, we couldn't move from being paralyzed by terror and having peed our pants.
We finally made it to Tupiza after three hellish hours. We never want to see another bus for as long as we live. This story isn't even funny to me yet, and I need a drink.*

*This was written over a week ago, and we did end up getting some local moonshine to celebrate life. However, completely forgetting that we are in a 3rd World country and ice is a no-no, we got stomachaches from the fruit liquor and are sticking to wine from now on. Also, this story still isn't funny to me.

dear evo morales: you´re the best

I´m thrilled to pieces that there is a whole page in my passport now dedicated to Bolivia´s colorful and expensive visa! Life has changed a wee bit since Argentina, however.

Things I have: aching lungs from the altitude, a bloody nose from the dust, an increasing fascination with the clothes and politics and mentality of this country, a great duo of travel buddies, and my Bible which kept me company on the scariest bus ride of my life.

Things I won´t have for a while: ATMs, Wifi, toilet paper, fresh fruit, shaved legs, and stress.

Not too shabby.