Thursday, March 27, 2008
Going into the Jungle!
Hey everyone! This is gonna be a quick one cause I am just about to get on a boat and cross the river away from civilization for the next two weeks. I am in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia, in the tropical north part and I am on my way to Esperanza de Libertad, where I guess I will be helping them build stuff and hanging out with monkeys, or something like that! Vamos a ver. Anyway, I just wanted to say that if you don´t hear from me for a while, don´t panic, I´m probably okay, i just won´t have much access to the internet until I get back from Esperanza. I hope you guys are doing great. I wanted to put up a post about going to the Salar de Uyuni, which I did almost a week ago now, but I haven´t really gotten it together to write it. So if you´re curious, just google it and you can see what i´m talking about. It´s a really famous and beautiful place, so there should be plenty of photos and stories and stuff like that. Okay, big hugs to all! xo, Pike
Monday, March 24, 2008
Sorry to Whine, I am totally okay and all that.
Hey, so sorry if my last post was a bit melodramatic... Just for the record, that happened over a week ago and I am totally fine now. I didn't lose my main bag, just the stuff I had brought for the overnight, so even though it really sucked to lose stuff like my air mattress, my favorite skirt and shirt, glasses, sunglasses, and lots of little things that generally make my life more comfortable, I want to make it clear how grateful I am for the stuff I DIDN'T lose: my passport, my spare debit card, my computer, my camera, etc. And that I never even saw who took it. I think it would be way more traumatizing to get robbed to my face than behind my back. Even though it is far more cowardly to steal from someone who doesn't even know you're doing it. Whatever.
So yeah, don't worry about me, I'm fine, I'm in La Paz now, desperately trying to catch up on my blog updates cause I have actually been doing tons of stuff that is really interesting, which means I haven't had time to write about it! Which is kind of a good thing, right? Right.
Okay, thanks, that's all....
lots of love to you all!
xoxo p.
So yeah, don't worry about me, I'm fine, I'm in La Paz now, desperately trying to catch up on my blog updates cause I have actually been doing tons of stuff that is really interesting, which means I haven't had time to write about it! Which is kind of a good thing, right? Right.
Okay, thanks, that's all....
lots of love to you all!
xoxo p.
Trouble in Tarabuco
Sucre:
I was staying on the floor of some very nice, if sort of hippie-ish, guys I met on Couchsurfing in the lovely town of Sucre, Bolivia. Another girl, Celeste, who I had also met on Couchsurfing, told me that a friend of hers was organizing a trip to Tarabuco for the annual indigenous celebration that happens there, and if I wanted to go it would be really fun. So I said sure, why not? Sounds like a good time. At 4 the next day, we met up in town and waited for the bus to come and get us. When it eventually did come to pick us up, we realized that this was not going to be the normal 2-5 people trip that her friend, the local boyfriend of another gringa who lives in Sucre, had taken her on before. This time around the bus was packed with dozens of screaming, rambunctious teenagers, and as Celeste and I were the only gringos and also, I am certain, by far the oldest ones there, I hoped I wouldn't feel too out of place for the next few days.
As soon as the bus started its engine, the teenagers all at once lit up cigarettes and began puffing away with wild abandon, as if to assert their independence by choking us all to death with their putrid fumes. I pulled down my school-bus window and tried my best to stay in the current, despite the fact that it wasn't very warm, and shot school-marmly death looks at every underager with a cigarette in their hands. It didn't work.
Anyway, after a little less than two hours our journey was already over, and somehow I had survived, so I was happy when we all clambored off the bus and into the chilly air of Tarabuco. After a few minutes of confusion, we picked up our things and allowed ourselves to be herded down and through several winding cobblestone streets until we arrived at a rundown, nondescript building on the corner of two equally non-descript streets. Stepping through a low doorway, we were in a tiny courtyard of sorts, with doorways into other rooms to our left and in front of us, a large pile of rubble and a crumbling doorway hung with a sheet and marked "bano" to the right, and a set of steep stairs leading to another room above it all just ahead and to the left.
I was already exhausted from a poor night's sleep the night before, so I hadn't counted on staying away long when we mounted the steps and set up our things, all of us in one room, blankets and sleeping bags directly on the hardwood floor. I was looking forward to taking a stroll around the town, maybe getting a bit to eat and then heading to sleep, hopefully even finding somewhere to fill up my hot water bottle along the way so my feet wouldn't freeze in the frigid night air of the uninsulated room. Celeste and I had seen a cafe that looked promising, so after chatting for a while with some friendly boys who had offered to show us around the town, we decided to go check it out and then meet up with them later in the square.
The cafe, it turns out, did in fact have a few vegetarian items, which is something of a miracle in a Bolivian town of such a small size (only around 1,000 people live there), so we ate avocado sandwiches and drank hot tea before heading out to the main square, where all the festivities were to take place the next day.
When we arrived, the first thing Celeste showed me was the massive, impressive statue of an indigenous warrior standing over the body of a slain Spanish conquistador, his chest a gaping hole, with the warrior holding the man's heart in one hand and his mouth dripping with blood, as though he had just taken a bite. It was then that Celeste explained to me that the celebration we were there for is actually an important holiday in the local indigenous cultures because it is the commemoration of a battle in which the indigenous tribes managed to defeat the Spanish (and lead by a woman, no less!!!), and is a reminder that the people here were not willingly defeated, but fought to the death to protect their homeland and traditions.
This sounded pretty great to me, except that being a gringa, I felt a bit of awkwardness too since my very presence there was, in some ways, part of a different method of colonization, and I really didn't know how welcome we would be. In any event, we gawked at the statue a little bit longer and then decided to go get my hot water bottle so we could ask the cafe if they would fill it up for me, since we were both ready to turn in for the night. But when we arrived back at the house, we found that the door was padlocked and there was no one around to let us in. Annoyed, we looked around for the guy in charge, but he was nowhere to be found. Someone else mentioned that the door would be open again by midnight, so we would just have to hang out until then. Okay, so I wasn't happy but it wasn't the end of the world.
We went back to the square and ran into Ricky, the friendly other tour guide we had been chatting with earlier, and he took us to go buy coca leaves and showed us the traditional way to chew them; removing the spines, and carefully placing first 5 or so leaves in your mouth, then taking a tiny, tiny bite of a piece quinoa charcoal/ corn substance that, when rubbed against the leaves, releases the juice more efficiently. The thing with coca leaves is that the effect is really nothing like the highly concentrated extract that we know as cocaine- rather than a super stimulant, it has been traditionally used for thousands of years to help people deal with altitude sickness, as an analgesic (it did actually feel like a bit of novocaine had been rubbed on my gums), and as a way to physically cope with the incomprehensibly hard labor forced on the indigenous people by the Spanish conquistadors and in the mines. I tried a little for about an hour or so, but the numbness kind of just made my cavities more sensitive to the cold, and I wasn't very into the feeling of having a big wad of leaves shoved in my mouth like tobacco. But it's an experience, so I'm glad I tried it!
After hanging a while in the park, we went to the dance that everyone else was at, just around the corner from the house, and actually had a lot of fun dancing to an extremely weird mix of reggaeton, terrible latin pop, fantasy metal, and traditional Bolivian music. The scene was actually so bizarre it was funny: at first, we were just hanging out and kind of group dancing with Ricky and a couple of the boys who had been friendly to us before (they all used to work with our intrepid "leader" as tour guides for a different company). Then this extremely wasted, obnoxious American girl, "Heather", decided to come and besiege us with how excited she was to meet another American, and started aggressively provoking our new friend Ricky into... I don't know what.... saying, "oh, you know, Ricky, he is SUCH a SLUT!!!" and we were just like, "whatever dude, whatever your going for here is none of my business" but still, it took her ages to finally go away, and by that time Celeste and I had just started dancing with each other and this apparently made our new friends feel unwelcome, so they went with Heather, which was fine too. It was then, after we had tired of dancing and realized it was about midnight and decided to leave, that the 15-year-olds struck.
Innocuous enough at first, I said, "why not?" thinking it can be fun to have an innocent dance with a kid young enough to be my child, more or less.
Things are different here.
I don't know if it's just because we are gringas and maybe are generally all thought to be totally up for whatever, whenever, or if they actually expect to make out with every girl they ever dance with, but I have to say it took me the better part of an hour to actually convince this kid (this was after dancing- very, very badly on my part- for quite a long time without unsavory incident) that no, there really is no way on earth that I'm going to kiss him, and not just because I'm waaaaay older than him.
Celeste was having a similar issue with her 15-year-old, so eventually we finagled our way out of there, though not before having to physically confront a completely different guy, this one a part of our tour group, who was drunkenly trying to prevent us from leaving. It's a good thing I'm not scared to use force if I have to, though thankfully it hasn't really ever come to that. I think that as soon as someone sees that you are more than willing to put up a fight that usually is enough to make them decide that it's really not worth the effort. I grabbed his arm and shoved it out of the way, ushering the both of us out of there and back into the cold night air.
Anyway, by this time I really was tired and grouchy, and seriously not in the mood for anymore dancing, dealing with drunken strangers, or anything else but sleep. But of course, despite the fact that by now it was 2am, the door to the sleeping space remained padlocked when we arrived and no one seemed to know where our guide was at. We spent the better part of the next hour scouring every plaza, still-open bar and party-sounding place in the tiny town, without ever encountering Celeste's friend, until finally we returned to the house and found somebody who knew somebody else who had the keys. And thus, we were finally let in the house, only to realize that there were lots of people there already, they had apparently just been locked in, as we now were as well.
Even though it was freezing, I had my really fancy little air mattress and my halfway decent sleeping bag, so that combined with how exhausted I was helped me fall asleep fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I wouldn't get to enjoy it for long, since sometime 1 to 2 hours after we finally made it in, so did all the others, many of whom were still up for partying. This included the obnoxious guy who tried to block us from leaving the party, and it took a lot of restraint for me to not just totally lose it and start screaming at him, since he was flipping the lights off and on and running around the room like a demented puppy on steroids. The others were complaining as well and eventually he settled down, but by this time it was something like 5am and we didn't have long until the light came in again, waking him and all the others. Soon I was trying hard to ignore the inevitable sounds of waking that were happening all around me, determined to cling to every potential minute of sleep I could possibly muster. It was sort of working for a while until, out of nowhere, I suddenly had the sleeping bag ripped away from where I was holding it over my eyes, and the demented face of that same guy (!) started shouting at me that we had to get up! we had to get up!!! now!!! and I totally lost it.
Anyway, after repeatedly warning him to get the fuck out of my face (to the best of my ability in Spanish), the douchebag finally listened and left the room, and by that time i was so over it all that I just decided to get up anyway and try to make the best of it by getting some breakfast and tea and hopefully just getting through the day. Celeste agreed, and so we packed up our things, arranged ourselves the best we could, and then realized that there was just this big room with everyones's stuff in it, which seemed a little sketchy. Just then, though, Celeste's friend the "tour guide" finally made an appearance, still totally drunk from the night before, and assured us that after we left, they would be locking the whole place and then we could all come back and get our things at 3, when we started re-gathering to head back to Sucre.
This sounded slightly dubious but we really didn't have any other option, being, as we were, in a tiny town where we knew no one on the biggest celebration day of their year, so we shoved our things into the corner and tried to make them appear as innocuous as possible, and left.
The day itself actually went okay from that point, starting with our breakfast of hot tea, fruit smoothies, bread and jam and a traditional drink called Api, which is like an extremely sweet sort of mash of purple corn, cloves, cinnamon and who knows what else, served thick and hot in the morning. After eating, we headed for the main square, which was quickly filling up with people from all over the region, indigenous and non-indigenous alike. The sounds of drums and pipe music was in the air, and the excitement in the air was tangible.
Although the early morning air had been cold and crisp, by 10 am we were peeling off the multiple layers of clothing we were both wearing, applying lots of sunscreen to help shield us from the steadily strengthening sun. We shielded our eyes as we strained to get a better view of the dancers in the parades that were now underway, the women in their incredible sequined shawls and traditional dresses, the men in elaborate hot pink costumes as well with capes, dome-shaped form-fitting hats, knitted legwarmers and jangly spurs on the wooden sandals that were strapped to their feet, which sounded like tambourines as their feet all hit the pavement in unison.
After watching the dancers for a while and snapping some photos of the incredible statue, we wandered around the mercado, just browsing at all the different things that were on offer, everything from little old-fashioned tins of lip balm to yarn to food of all kinds to llama fetuses to bury under the foundation of your house, a tradition that is thought to bring luck by appeasing the appetite of Pachamama, the earth mother goddess, from whom the native people believe they are directly descended. For her as well it is customary to tip 3 drops of any alcoholic drink to the soil before taking a drink, to prove that in everything you have remembered from whence your sustenance comes, something I learned from our mine guide at Potosi. But I digress.
After the markets, we ran into a friend of Celeste's who informed us that our other friends from Sucre (the ones I'd been staying with) were all going to meet up in an hour or so on the main field, which normally is used for football games but today had been transformed into a massive dance-off arena with a huge pole in the middle adorned with brilliantly colored ribbons and flowers and laden with all kinds of food and drinks- we surmised that this was to be the prize for the best group of dancers, since Celeste had seen a similar custom at Carnival. We didn't find our friends, but we did eventually find some shade and hid out there, eating soggy, greasy french fries until we were feeling cold again and ventured back out into the sun. Eventually we did locate our crew, and we all went to a little place with a patio and sat around, enjoying the beer (shared, the brazilian way, from a large bottle amongst many people, served in small glasses) and having a lovely time just chatting and hanging out, something of a refuge from the chaos all around us outside.
By this time it was nearly two, and Celeste and I wanted to try to get one more little bite to eat from the friendly cafe before it was time to recollect our things. So we said our goodbyes, since the others would not be coming back on the bus with us, and went to eat and chill before the journey back, and it was as I was getting ready to pay the bill that I realized that, somehow in all the chaos (and most certainly in the crush of the crowded streets), my little billfold with my cash, driver's license, credit and debit card had disappeared.
I was in a bit of disbelief at first, not understanding how this could have happened, but really, it is obvious enough: I was wearing my little "punk pouch", sort of a fanny pack that Ju in Rio had given me, and since it is not directly attached to my body and since the main compartment is located on one side of my butt, it is not brain surgery to figure out that actually I had made myself an easy target by storing my wallet there while walking through pressing crowds of people.
So although I was upset, I wasn't going to freak out about it. I lost about 50 bolivianos, which is equal to something like $7, and my cards were both replaceable. So, finally accepting my fate, we turned and went back to the house to get our things and get out of there. I was ready to leave.
When we showed up at the doorway it was open, so we walked into the courtyard, up the stairs, and into the room, giving it a second for our eyes to adjust to the darkness before we could accept what was before us there: that being, exactly, nothing. No people, no stuff, just a blank room with another door leading into another room, from which we could hear voices. I opened the door, and there, to my left, were three people, fully dressed, just hanging out on a bed and looking annoyed at my intrusion. I asked about the stuff, and all they said was, "the guys came and took it all". "What guys?". "I don't know. Just a bunch of people were here and they came and got everything." Celeste and I exchanged looks and asked a few more questions about whether they had seen our things specifically, etc, but those people were really not helpful; they suggested we find our friend since it was probably him that had come and grabbed our things.
So once again, we set out in search of this "tour guide", and once again who we found instead was Ricky, who quickly explained the situation to his other friends, and attempted to reassure us that it was likely that Celeste's friend had grabbed our things and was hanging onto them somewhere.
So we waited, putting out the word that we were on the lookout for flaky space-case tour guide boy. Less than 10 minutes later, there he was, trotting over to us with- wait! Is that our stuff?! For a moment I felt a rush of relief, until I noticed that while he did have both of our sleeping bags and Celeste's bag, my brown one was still absent. So I uneasily enquired about it, and he looked back at me blankly, as if I were testing him and he wasn't sure what to say. I asked again- "y mi bolsa? De tela, y color cafe? No tienes?" He shifted uncomfortably and admitted that he hadn't seen it, let alone grabbed it, and was I sure it was there with the other stuff? At this I began to lose my patience, since being robbed once in a day is typically more than enough for most people. So I wearily traipsed back to the house with him, having to actually remind him where it was since he was STILL far too hammered to even walk straight, let alone give me much confidence that he was going to track down my stuff. Obviously, nothing had changed in the 25 minutes since I had last visited the house, so we returned to the square, me angry and dejected and him beginning to fret and feel awkward and guilty. He left me in the center with Celeste and a bunch of others while he and a friend supposedly went to double check wherever they had left our things before and the waiting bus, which kind of gave me a shred of hope for a minute, but eventually came back with the same news: no sign of my bag. At this point I was so tired and overwhelmed that everything felt a little surreal, from the people playing guitar and singing all around me to Celeste and some random kid giving me a neck and head massage to help me "chill out", to the obnoxious, evil hippie who had tried to rope me into buying some stupid feather earring he had made for me despite my already having told him I was just robbed and had no money. When I repeated this to him at the end of his little schtick, he became angry and said I didn't have to lie, at which point I actually sort of yelled at him, which isn't something I really do much in real life, despite how often I want to! But he was such a creep, I seriously could not believe his audacity and really had no qualms about asserting myself there, either.
Anyway, after an hour or so of the "tour guide" dude coming and going, fretting and fawning and not really knowing what to do, we really had to go cause the bus driver was, understandably, getting impatient, and I just wanted it all to be over with.
The final blow came when I got on the bus and asked the girl who was sitting there whether she had seen anything. I described the bag, and she calmly replied, "si, claro, esta arriba" (yes, of course, it's on top of the bus). "Estas seguro?!" I asked excitedly, (are you sure?!), and clambored up the ladder to the top of the bus, only to find a massive completely different backpack from the relatively small bag I was searching for, which turned out to belong to our fearless leader, Wasted Tour Guide Dude (WTGD). I was so unhappy it was unbelievable.
As everyone was getting back on the bus, WTGD proclaimed that he, nobly, would not be returning with us, but instead would be staying in the town with me (!) to continue the search for the missing bag. I explained that if it wasn't in all the places he looked before, and if he really had genuinely searched for it, then the bag was stolen, not misplaced, meaning that it was on its way to another town in another vehicle at that moment and there is no way we were going to find it anyway, which is true. He seemed relieved that I didn't want to stay and keep wandering around looking for it, and once we were on the bus (which was too crowded for everyone to have a seat), he promptly lay down at an incredibly awkward angle and passed out in the steps of the bus until he had to be literally slapped awake by his sister and girlfriend and dragged off the bus upon our arrival back in Sucre. So much for getting my money back. I hope to God this guy doesn't actually go through with his plans to become a tour guide for real (I learned from Celeste that his brilliant name for this future business is to be "Fucking Tours", a name from which it is apparently difficult to dissuade him from. I rest my case).
Anyway, by the time we were back in Sucre I didn't have it in me to deal with the card cancellation drama, and being as it was a Sunday night in a relatively small place I figured it probably didn't matter anyway, since there wasn't really anywhere to use them. So instead I went back to the empty house, took a long, hot shower, and fell asleep, grateful that at the very least, I still had my ipod and computer so I could listen to some soothing music until I fell asleep.
I was staying on the floor of some very nice, if sort of hippie-ish, guys I met on Couchsurfing in the lovely town of Sucre, Bolivia. Another girl, Celeste, who I had also met on Couchsurfing, told me that a friend of hers was organizing a trip to Tarabuco for the annual indigenous celebration that happens there, and if I wanted to go it would be really fun. So I said sure, why not? Sounds like a good time. At 4 the next day, we met up in town and waited for the bus to come and get us. When it eventually did come to pick us up, we realized that this was not going to be the normal 2-5 people trip that her friend, the local boyfriend of another gringa who lives in Sucre, had taken her on before. This time around the bus was packed with dozens of screaming, rambunctious teenagers, and as Celeste and I were the only gringos and also, I am certain, by far the oldest ones there, I hoped I wouldn't feel too out of place for the next few days.
As soon as the bus started its engine, the teenagers all at once lit up cigarettes and began puffing away with wild abandon, as if to assert their independence by choking us all to death with their putrid fumes. I pulled down my school-bus window and tried my best to stay in the current, despite the fact that it wasn't very warm, and shot school-marmly death looks at every underager with a cigarette in their hands. It didn't work.
Anyway, after a little less than two hours our journey was already over, and somehow I had survived, so I was happy when we all clambored off the bus and into the chilly air of Tarabuco. After a few minutes of confusion, we picked up our things and allowed ourselves to be herded down and through several winding cobblestone streets until we arrived at a rundown, nondescript building on the corner of two equally non-descript streets. Stepping through a low doorway, we were in a tiny courtyard of sorts, with doorways into other rooms to our left and in front of us, a large pile of rubble and a crumbling doorway hung with a sheet and marked "bano" to the right, and a set of steep stairs leading to another room above it all just ahead and to the left.
I was already exhausted from a poor night's sleep the night before, so I hadn't counted on staying away long when we mounted the steps and set up our things, all of us in one room, blankets and sleeping bags directly on the hardwood floor. I was looking forward to taking a stroll around the town, maybe getting a bit to eat and then heading to sleep, hopefully even finding somewhere to fill up my hot water bottle along the way so my feet wouldn't freeze in the frigid night air of the uninsulated room. Celeste and I had seen a cafe that looked promising, so after chatting for a while with some friendly boys who had offered to show us around the town, we decided to go check it out and then meet up with them later in the square.
The cafe, it turns out, did in fact have a few vegetarian items, which is something of a miracle in a Bolivian town of such a small size (only around 1,000 people live there), so we ate avocado sandwiches and drank hot tea before heading out to the main square, where all the festivities were to take place the next day.
When we arrived, the first thing Celeste showed me was the massive, impressive statue of an indigenous warrior standing over the body of a slain Spanish conquistador, his chest a gaping hole, with the warrior holding the man's heart in one hand and his mouth dripping with blood, as though he had just taken a bite. It was then that Celeste explained to me that the celebration we were there for is actually an important holiday in the local indigenous cultures because it is the commemoration of a battle in which the indigenous tribes managed to defeat the Spanish (and lead by a woman, no less!!!), and is a reminder that the people here were not willingly defeated, but fought to the death to protect their homeland and traditions.
This sounded pretty great to me, except that being a gringa, I felt a bit of awkwardness too since my very presence there was, in some ways, part of a different method of colonization, and I really didn't know how welcome we would be. In any event, we gawked at the statue a little bit longer and then decided to go get my hot water bottle so we could ask the cafe if they would fill it up for me, since we were both ready to turn in for the night. But when we arrived back at the house, we found that the door was padlocked and there was no one around to let us in. Annoyed, we looked around for the guy in charge, but he was nowhere to be found. Someone else mentioned that the door would be open again by midnight, so we would just have to hang out until then. Okay, so I wasn't happy but it wasn't the end of the world.
We went back to the square and ran into Ricky, the friendly other tour guide we had been chatting with earlier, and he took us to go buy coca leaves and showed us the traditional way to chew them; removing the spines, and carefully placing first 5 or so leaves in your mouth, then taking a tiny, tiny bite of a piece quinoa charcoal/ corn substance that, when rubbed against the leaves, releases the juice more efficiently. The thing with coca leaves is that the effect is really nothing like the highly concentrated extract that we know as cocaine- rather than a super stimulant, it has been traditionally used for thousands of years to help people deal with altitude sickness, as an analgesic (it did actually feel like a bit of novocaine had been rubbed on my gums), and as a way to physically cope with the incomprehensibly hard labor forced on the indigenous people by the Spanish conquistadors and in the mines. I tried a little for about an hour or so, but the numbness kind of just made my cavities more sensitive to the cold, and I wasn't very into the feeling of having a big wad of leaves shoved in my mouth like tobacco. But it's an experience, so I'm glad I tried it!
After hanging a while in the park, we went to the dance that everyone else was at, just around the corner from the house, and actually had a lot of fun dancing to an extremely weird mix of reggaeton, terrible latin pop, fantasy metal, and traditional Bolivian music. The scene was actually so bizarre it was funny: at first, we were just hanging out and kind of group dancing with Ricky and a couple of the boys who had been friendly to us before (they all used to work with our intrepid "leader" as tour guides for a different company). Then this extremely wasted, obnoxious American girl, "Heather", decided to come and besiege us with how excited she was to meet another American, and started aggressively provoking our new friend Ricky into... I don't know what.... saying, "oh, you know, Ricky, he is SUCH a SLUT!!!" and we were just like, "whatever dude, whatever your going for here is none of my business" but still, it took her ages to finally go away, and by that time Celeste and I had just started dancing with each other and this apparently made our new friends feel unwelcome, so they went with Heather, which was fine too. It was then, after we had tired of dancing and realized it was about midnight and decided to leave, that the 15-year-olds struck.
Innocuous enough at first, I said, "why not?" thinking it can be fun to have an innocent dance with a kid young enough to be my child, more or less.
Things are different here.
I don't know if it's just because we are gringas and maybe are generally all thought to be totally up for whatever, whenever, or if they actually expect to make out with every girl they ever dance with, but I have to say it took me the better part of an hour to actually convince this kid (this was after dancing- very, very badly on my part- for quite a long time without unsavory incident) that no, there really is no way on earth that I'm going to kiss him, and not just because I'm waaaaay older than him.
Celeste was having a similar issue with her 15-year-old, so eventually we finagled our way out of there, though not before having to physically confront a completely different guy, this one a part of our tour group, who was drunkenly trying to prevent us from leaving. It's a good thing I'm not scared to use force if I have to, though thankfully it hasn't really ever come to that. I think that as soon as someone sees that you are more than willing to put up a fight that usually is enough to make them decide that it's really not worth the effort. I grabbed his arm and shoved it out of the way, ushering the both of us out of there and back into the cold night air.
Anyway, by this time I really was tired and grouchy, and seriously not in the mood for anymore dancing, dealing with drunken strangers, or anything else but sleep. But of course, despite the fact that by now it was 2am, the door to the sleeping space remained padlocked when we arrived and no one seemed to know where our guide was at. We spent the better part of the next hour scouring every plaza, still-open bar and party-sounding place in the tiny town, without ever encountering Celeste's friend, until finally we returned to the house and found somebody who knew somebody else who had the keys. And thus, we were finally let in the house, only to realize that there were lots of people there already, they had apparently just been locked in, as we now were as well.
Even though it was freezing, I had my really fancy little air mattress and my halfway decent sleeping bag, so that combined with how exhausted I was helped me fall asleep fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I wouldn't get to enjoy it for long, since sometime 1 to 2 hours after we finally made it in, so did all the others, many of whom were still up for partying. This included the obnoxious guy who tried to block us from leaving the party, and it took a lot of restraint for me to not just totally lose it and start screaming at him, since he was flipping the lights off and on and running around the room like a demented puppy on steroids. The others were complaining as well and eventually he settled down, but by this time it was something like 5am and we didn't have long until the light came in again, waking him and all the others. Soon I was trying hard to ignore the inevitable sounds of waking that were happening all around me, determined to cling to every potential minute of sleep I could possibly muster. It was sort of working for a while until, out of nowhere, I suddenly had the sleeping bag ripped away from where I was holding it over my eyes, and the demented face of that same guy (!) started shouting at me that we had to get up! we had to get up!!! now!!! and I totally lost it.
Anyway, after repeatedly warning him to get the fuck out of my face (to the best of my ability in Spanish), the douchebag finally listened and left the room, and by that time i was so over it all that I just decided to get up anyway and try to make the best of it by getting some breakfast and tea and hopefully just getting through the day. Celeste agreed, and so we packed up our things, arranged ourselves the best we could, and then realized that there was just this big room with everyones's stuff in it, which seemed a little sketchy. Just then, though, Celeste's friend the "tour guide" finally made an appearance, still totally drunk from the night before, and assured us that after we left, they would be locking the whole place and then we could all come back and get our things at 3, when we started re-gathering to head back to Sucre.
This sounded slightly dubious but we really didn't have any other option, being, as we were, in a tiny town where we knew no one on the biggest celebration day of their year, so we shoved our things into the corner and tried to make them appear as innocuous as possible, and left.
The day itself actually went okay from that point, starting with our breakfast of hot tea, fruit smoothies, bread and jam and a traditional drink called Api, which is like an extremely sweet sort of mash of purple corn, cloves, cinnamon and who knows what else, served thick and hot in the morning. After eating, we headed for the main square, which was quickly filling up with people from all over the region, indigenous and non-indigenous alike. The sounds of drums and pipe music was in the air, and the excitement in the air was tangible.
Although the early morning air had been cold and crisp, by 10 am we were peeling off the multiple layers of clothing we were both wearing, applying lots of sunscreen to help shield us from the steadily strengthening sun. We shielded our eyes as we strained to get a better view of the dancers in the parades that were now underway, the women in their incredible sequined shawls and traditional dresses, the men in elaborate hot pink costumes as well with capes, dome-shaped form-fitting hats, knitted legwarmers and jangly spurs on the wooden sandals that were strapped to their feet, which sounded like tambourines as their feet all hit the pavement in unison.
After watching the dancers for a while and snapping some photos of the incredible statue, we wandered around the mercado, just browsing at all the different things that were on offer, everything from little old-fashioned tins of lip balm to yarn to food of all kinds to llama fetuses to bury under the foundation of your house, a tradition that is thought to bring luck by appeasing the appetite of Pachamama, the earth mother goddess, from whom the native people believe they are directly descended. For her as well it is customary to tip 3 drops of any alcoholic drink to the soil before taking a drink, to prove that in everything you have remembered from whence your sustenance comes, something I learned from our mine guide at Potosi. But I digress.
After the markets, we ran into a friend of Celeste's who informed us that our other friends from Sucre (the ones I'd been staying with) were all going to meet up in an hour or so on the main field, which normally is used for football games but today had been transformed into a massive dance-off arena with a huge pole in the middle adorned with brilliantly colored ribbons and flowers and laden with all kinds of food and drinks- we surmised that this was to be the prize for the best group of dancers, since Celeste had seen a similar custom at Carnival. We didn't find our friends, but we did eventually find some shade and hid out there, eating soggy, greasy french fries until we were feeling cold again and ventured back out into the sun. Eventually we did locate our crew, and we all went to a little place with a patio and sat around, enjoying the beer (shared, the brazilian way, from a large bottle amongst many people, served in small glasses) and having a lovely time just chatting and hanging out, something of a refuge from the chaos all around us outside.
By this time it was nearly two, and Celeste and I wanted to try to get one more little bite to eat from the friendly cafe before it was time to recollect our things. So we said our goodbyes, since the others would not be coming back on the bus with us, and went to eat and chill before the journey back, and it was as I was getting ready to pay the bill that I realized that, somehow in all the chaos (and most certainly in the crush of the crowded streets), my little billfold with my cash, driver's license, credit and debit card had disappeared.
I was in a bit of disbelief at first, not understanding how this could have happened, but really, it is obvious enough: I was wearing my little "punk pouch", sort of a fanny pack that Ju in Rio had given me, and since it is not directly attached to my body and since the main compartment is located on one side of my butt, it is not brain surgery to figure out that actually I had made myself an easy target by storing my wallet there while walking through pressing crowds of people.
So although I was upset, I wasn't going to freak out about it. I lost about 50 bolivianos, which is equal to something like $7, and my cards were both replaceable. So, finally accepting my fate, we turned and went back to the house to get our things and get out of there. I was ready to leave.
When we showed up at the doorway it was open, so we walked into the courtyard, up the stairs, and into the room, giving it a second for our eyes to adjust to the darkness before we could accept what was before us there: that being, exactly, nothing. No people, no stuff, just a blank room with another door leading into another room, from which we could hear voices. I opened the door, and there, to my left, were three people, fully dressed, just hanging out on a bed and looking annoyed at my intrusion. I asked about the stuff, and all they said was, "the guys came and took it all". "What guys?". "I don't know. Just a bunch of people were here and they came and got everything." Celeste and I exchanged looks and asked a few more questions about whether they had seen our things specifically, etc, but those people were really not helpful; they suggested we find our friend since it was probably him that had come and grabbed our things.
So once again, we set out in search of this "tour guide", and once again who we found instead was Ricky, who quickly explained the situation to his other friends, and attempted to reassure us that it was likely that Celeste's friend had grabbed our things and was hanging onto them somewhere.
So we waited, putting out the word that we were on the lookout for flaky space-case tour guide boy. Less than 10 minutes later, there he was, trotting over to us with- wait! Is that our stuff?! For a moment I felt a rush of relief, until I noticed that while he did have both of our sleeping bags and Celeste's bag, my brown one was still absent. So I uneasily enquired about it, and he looked back at me blankly, as if I were testing him and he wasn't sure what to say. I asked again- "y mi bolsa? De tela, y color cafe? No tienes?" He shifted uncomfortably and admitted that he hadn't seen it, let alone grabbed it, and was I sure it was there with the other stuff? At this I began to lose my patience, since being robbed once in a day is typically more than enough for most people. So I wearily traipsed back to the house with him, having to actually remind him where it was since he was STILL far too hammered to even walk straight, let alone give me much confidence that he was going to track down my stuff. Obviously, nothing had changed in the 25 minutes since I had last visited the house, so we returned to the square, me angry and dejected and him beginning to fret and feel awkward and guilty. He left me in the center with Celeste and a bunch of others while he and a friend supposedly went to double check wherever they had left our things before and the waiting bus, which kind of gave me a shred of hope for a minute, but eventually came back with the same news: no sign of my bag. At this point I was so tired and overwhelmed that everything felt a little surreal, from the people playing guitar and singing all around me to Celeste and some random kid giving me a neck and head massage to help me "chill out", to the obnoxious, evil hippie who had tried to rope me into buying some stupid feather earring he had made for me despite my already having told him I was just robbed and had no money. When I repeated this to him at the end of his little schtick, he became angry and said I didn't have to lie, at which point I actually sort of yelled at him, which isn't something I really do much in real life, despite how often I want to! But he was such a creep, I seriously could not believe his audacity and really had no qualms about asserting myself there, either.
Anyway, after an hour or so of the "tour guide" dude coming and going, fretting and fawning and not really knowing what to do, we really had to go cause the bus driver was, understandably, getting impatient, and I just wanted it all to be over with.
The final blow came when I got on the bus and asked the girl who was sitting there whether she had seen anything. I described the bag, and she calmly replied, "si, claro, esta arriba" (yes, of course, it's on top of the bus). "Estas seguro?!" I asked excitedly, (are you sure?!), and clambored up the ladder to the top of the bus, only to find a massive completely different backpack from the relatively small bag I was searching for, which turned out to belong to our fearless leader, Wasted Tour Guide Dude (WTGD). I was so unhappy it was unbelievable.
As everyone was getting back on the bus, WTGD proclaimed that he, nobly, would not be returning with us, but instead would be staying in the town with me (!) to continue the search for the missing bag. I explained that if it wasn't in all the places he looked before, and if he really had genuinely searched for it, then the bag was stolen, not misplaced, meaning that it was on its way to another town in another vehicle at that moment and there is no way we were going to find it anyway, which is true. He seemed relieved that I didn't want to stay and keep wandering around looking for it, and once we were on the bus (which was too crowded for everyone to have a seat), he promptly lay down at an incredibly awkward angle and passed out in the steps of the bus until he had to be literally slapped awake by his sister and girlfriend and dragged off the bus upon our arrival back in Sucre. So much for getting my money back. I hope to God this guy doesn't actually go through with his plans to become a tour guide for real (I learned from Celeste that his brilliant name for this future business is to be "Fucking Tours", a name from which it is apparently difficult to dissuade him from. I rest my case).
Anyway, by the time we were back in Sucre I didn't have it in me to deal with the card cancellation drama, and being as it was a Sunday night in a relatively small place I figured it probably didn't matter anyway, since there wasn't really anywhere to use them. So instead I went back to the empty house, took a long, hot shower, and fell asleep, grateful that at the very least, I still had my ipod and computer so I could listen to some soothing music until I fell asleep.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Mines of Potosi, Bolivia
History is a strange and brutal thing, as anyone who knows anything about life here on earth can attest. After reading several books related to the Spanish conquest of Latin America, I was already well aware of the fact that without the enslavement and forced labor of millions of indigenous Latin Americans from the 1400's on, the history of the world as we know it would have been completely different. This is because if it were not for the millions of tons of gold and silver, along with other metals, that were extracted by the Natives and then shipped to Europe, the entire European economy of the last 500+ years would never have been possible. In fact, if even a small percentage of the precious metals pulled from these lands had been extracted but only in the hands of local people, I dare to speculate that South America, not Europe, could easily have become the world superpower that is now Europe (and the U.S).
That said, I was also aware that the vast majority of the wealth of the Spanish empire was taken from Potosi, here in Bolivia, so there was no way I was going to not go and see this place when I had the chance. It is so crazy to think about it, how important it is, but even more, how tragic the fallout has been for the estimated eight million people who have lost their lives working in these mines.
Anyway, there are loads of tour operators in the town of Potosi, and I couldn't really tell the difference between any of them, so I just picked the one that gave me a deal with my bus ticket out. Luckily for me, the guide was really great. I have never particularly relished the idea of challenging my claustrophobia and good sense by climbing into an extremely dark, cramped, and toxic mine, but I felt like if millions of others have done it then I should at the very least understand what that experience is like. I went with a group of about 12 other people, but we were split into 2 groups when we got to the mines, after suiting up in waterproof galoshes & rain gear, along with hardhats equipped with industrial headlamps.
Only about 10 minutes after pulling away from the town, we arrived at the mouth of the mine, one of thousands riddling the mountains all around the region. Following our leader, an ex-miner himself, we trudged through muddy water into the blackness, where our headlamps illuminated what I recalled to be asbestos crystallized all over the damp walls of the cave, according to the Canadians I had had breakfast with that morning. I tried not to think about it. For awhile I put my scarf over my face to serve as a sort of filter, but you know how when you try to do something and end up doing the opposite? Well, in this case, I kept trying to breathe as slowly as possible but the suffocating atmosphere and fumes made me breathe all the more deeply, inhaling what I've read are dozens of different toxic materials far into my poor, already put-upon lungs (the exhaust fumes down here are sure to have already taken a few years off my life, not to mention the second-hand smoke).
Anyways, almost immediately after we entered, we were quickly advised to get off the main track and all flattened ourselves against the side of the cave walls as two men pushing a trolley full of broken rocks came barreling down the track. Our guide explained that although the cart alone weighs 500 kilos and the rock load 1000, these guys have the "easier" job here in the mines and therefore make less, though still considerably more than the average for Bolivia. For the record, those guys earn somewhere between 2-3000 bolivianos (about $275 US) per month for about 6 hours of work per day; compared to the average minimum wage of 550 bolivianos ($60 US), these guys have it good here. Of course, there's a massive trade off: the average life expectancy for a miner is around 45, and every year between 45 and 60 miners die in accidents- somewhere around 1 per week. The "dangerous" jobs, on the other hand, pay really well:between 5-6,000 bolivianos per month for just 2 to 3 hours per day of work. But these are the guys who are lifting 1500 kg drills and making holes in the cave walls, which will then be stuffed full of dynamite and lit by hand, in order to obtain the chunks of rock that will then be hauled out of the cave and isolated into lead, silver, tin, and zinc. We got to see all of these processes in action, including one stint where we climbed up eight consecutive ladders, all made of ancient, mud-caked wood, many with rungs broken, until we were 50 meters above where we had started, to watch the men put dynamite in the holes. Less than 5 minutes after we had made it back down, we felt the entire mountain shaking with the blasts of the dynamite they had just set off, and I couldn't help envisioning the entire roof caving in on top of us and becoming a tragic statistic in the course of a few minutes. It's not hard to see why they don't really offer "mine tours" in the U.S. Ha ha.
Anyway, we were in there for a total of around 2 1/2 hours, and during that time our guide introduced us to many of the men who worked there, as he handed out the "gifts" we had collectively purchased for them ahead of time: coca leaves, bottles of 96% pure grain alcohol (the label claims it's "comestible")and cheap soda to mix it with, work gloves (which many of the men didn't have an accepted gratefully) and unfiltered cigarettes, not just for the miners but also for The Tio ("Uncle"), or the Devil statue who is believed to be the protector of the miners. We went and visited this bizarre statue, which was still decorated from Carnival with bright paper streamers. All over and around him were strewn cigarettes, coca leaves, confetti and notes of scribbled names and words- a perfect example of how the indigenous people here have, much like the folks in Mexico and Guatemala, integrated their native spiritual beliefs in a seemingly incompatible juxtaposition with the intense Catholicism that is all-pervasive here. Shortly after our visit with the Tio, it was time to go, and I had a long chat with a man who was waiting for his ride as we were waiting for the other group to emerge. This man told me he has worked in the mines for 10 years, and that although he doesn't like it, he has 8 children and this is essentially the only work he could possibly find in this region that would allow him to support a family of that size. I had no idea what to say to him. What could I say? So I asked him about his kids, and learned that the oldest, who is 17, is preparing to go to college and that, at the very least, seemed to make his father feel like maybe his struggles were worth it. This man has literally traded in his life to improve those of his children, as I'm sure he is well aware that he will not live long having been doing this work for such a long time. It was intense. After an awkward goodbye, we were off, us French- Japanese- American- British lucky bastards, piling into the van, each of us undoubtedly feeling humbled and grateful that we would never have to live like that. But sad, too.
The thing that is weird to me is that even though the mines are now cooperatively owned by the miners themselves, there are still very few health or safety precautions in place, and it's not because they don't know the risks. They know all too well what they are doing to their bodies, what they are trading in for that money. I don't know. I hope that someday their work will be less dangerous, that they can find a way to make it a little less deadly to try to make a living. In the meantime, I will continue to try to figure out how I can possibly make this world a more just place, so perhaps in the future, being born in this part of Bolivia doesn't mean your choices are either dire poverty or an early death.
That said, I was also aware that the vast majority of the wealth of the Spanish empire was taken from Potosi, here in Bolivia, so there was no way I was going to not go and see this place when I had the chance. It is so crazy to think about it, how important it is, but even more, how tragic the fallout has been for the estimated eight million people who have lost their lives working in these mines.
Anyway, there are loads of tour operators in the town of Potosi, and I couldn't really tell the difference between any of them, so I just picked the one that gave me a deal with my bus ticket out. Luckily for me, the guide was really great. I have never particularly relished the idea of challenging my claustrophobia and good sense by climbing into an extremely dark, cramped, and toxic mine, but I felt like if millions of others have done it then I should at the very least understand what that experience is like. I went with a group of about 12 other people, but we were split into 2 groups when we got to the mines, after suiting up in waterproof galoshes & rain gear, along with hardhats equipped with industrial headlamps.
Only about 10 minutes after pulling away from the town, we arrived at the mouth of the mine, one of thousands riddling the mountains all around the region. Following our leader, an ex-miner himself, we trudged through muddy water into the blackness, where our headlamps illuminated what I recalled to be asbestos crystallized all over the damp walls of the cave, according to the Canadians I had had breakfast with that morning. I tried not to think about it. For awhile I put my scarf over my face to serve as a sort of filter, but you know how when you try to do something and end up doing the opposite? Well, in this case, I kept trying to breathe as slowly as possible but the suffocating atmosphere and fumes made me breathe all the more deeply, inhaling what I've read are dozens of different toxic materials far into my poor, already put-upon lungs (the exhaust fumes down here are sure to have already taken a few years off my life, not to mention the second-hand smoke).
Anyways, almost immediately after we entered, we were quickly advised to get off the main track and all flattened ourselves against the side of the cave walls as two men pushing a trolley full of broken rocks came barreling down the track. Our guide explained that although the cart alone weighs 500 kilos and the rock load 1000, these guys have the "easier" job here in the mines and therefore make less, though still considerably more than the average for Bolivia. For the record, those guys earn somewhere between 2-3000 bolivianos (about $275 US) per month for about 6 hours of work per day; compared to the average minimum wage of 550 bolivianos ($60 US), these guys have it good here. Of course, there's a massive trade off: the average life expectancy for a miner is around 45, and every year between 45 and 60 miners die in accidents- somewhere around 1 per week. The "dangerous" jobs, on the other hand, pay really well:between 5-6,000 bolivianos per month for just 2 to 3 hours per day of work. But these are the guys who are lifting 1500 kg drills and making holes in the cave walls, which will then be stuffed full of dynamite and lit by hand, in order to obtain the chunks of rock that will then be hauled out of the cave and isolated into lead, silver, tin, and zinc. We got to see all of these processes in action, including one stint where we climbed up eight consecutive ladders, all made of ancient, mud-caked wood, many with rungs broken, until we were 50 meters above where we had started, to watch the men put dynamite in the holes. Less than 5 minutes after we had made it back down, we felt the entire mountain shaking with the blasts of the dynamite they had just set off, and I couldn't help envisioning the entire roof caving in on top of us and becoming a tragic statistic in the course of a few minutes. It's not hard to see why they don't really offer "mine tours" in the U.S. Ha ha.
Anyway, we were in there for a total of around 2 1/2 hours, and during that time our guide introduced us to many of the men who worked there, as he handed out the "gifts" we had collectively purchased for them ahead of time: coca leaves, bottles of 96% pure grain alcohol (the label claims it's "comestible")and cheap soda to mix it with, work gloves (which many of the men didn't have an accepted gratefully) and unfiltered cigarettes, not just for the miners but also for The Tio ("Uncle"), or the Devil statue who is believed to be the protector of the miners. We went and visited this bizarre statue, which was still decorated from Carnival with bright paper streamers. All over and around him were strewn cigarettes, coca leaves, confetti and notes of scribbled names and words- a perfect example of how the indigenous people here have, much like the folks in Mexico and Guatemala, integrated their native spiritual beliefs in a seemingly incompatible juxtaposition with the intense Catholicism that is all-pervasive here. Shortly after our visit with the Tio, it was time to go, and I had a long chat with a man who was waiting for his ride as we were waiting for the other group to emerge. This man told me he has worked in the mines for 10 years, and that although he doesn't like it, he has 8 children and this is essentially the only work he could possibly find in this region that would allow him to support a family of that size. I had no idea what to say to him. What could I say? So I asked him about his kids, and learned that the oldest, who is 17, is preparing to go to college and that, at the very least, seemed to make his father feel like maybe his struggles were worth it. This man has literally traded in his life to improve those of his children, as I'm sure he is well aware that he will not live long having been doing this work for such a long time. It was intense. After an awkward goodbye, we were off, us French- Japanese- American- British lucky bastards, piling into the van, each of us undoubtedly feeling humbled and grateful that we would never have to live like that. But sad, too.
The thing that is weird to me is that even though the mines are now cooperatively owned by the miners themselves, there are still very few health or safety precautions in place, and it's not because they don't know the risks. They know all too well what they are doing to their bodies, what they are trading in for that money. I don't know. I hope that someday their work will be less dangerous, that they can find a way to make it a little less deadly to try to make a living. In the meantime, I will continue to try to figure out how I can possibly make this world a more just place, so perhaps in the future, being born in this part of Bolivia doesn't mean your choices are either dire poverty or an early death.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Week In Review: A Challenge, por lo menos
What I've been doing for the last week:
Thursday: I was hanging out in Florianopolis with Laura and Guto, who treated me very well. We basically just went to the beach and walked around the tiny tourist town where their rented apartment is, because for most of the day it was too hot to do anything else. Oh, and I ate acai. I love acai!!!
Good: the beautiful, clean beaches with perfect, foamy water that wasn't too strong to play in. Having a few days do do basically nothing. Watching Maria Full of Grace and Life Is Beautiful, both really good and really sad but neither of them as devastating as I had expected them to be. Finding the health food store and buying bulk organic food that saved me for the next week! The granola-looking hippie lady that ran it was totally classic!
Bad: Getting bitten all night, every night by some kind of insane, tiny flying biting ants that were really excited about the fact that I was sleeping on the kitchen floor. That totally, totally sucked, actually. Mmmm, but I think that that was the only bad thing. Everything else was pretty effing great.
Friday: (3/7): Said my goodbyes and thank-yous to Laura and Guto and got on the bus to Foz do Iguacu, arriving early Saturday morning- I wrote a whole entry just about this, so see "Foz Do Iguacu" below.
Saturday: That night I got on another bus, this time headed for Asuncion, Paraguay, and after dealing with some total crap at the border where they charged me $30 for not having a visa (since when did you need a visa to go through Paraguay?! Since December, according to them), I eventually made it there around 11:30 pm. SInce I hadn't heard back from any of my couchsurfing attempts, I just walked across the street from the bus station and booked myself into the first cheap, sleazy hotel I saw. $8 US got me a tiny room and a hot shower with a shared bathroom, and I realized happily that dingy though it may be, it was the first actual bed I'd slept in since leaving Sao Paulo, so I was happy- though really, totally ready to leave Paraguay.
Sunday: I checked back out of my little room at 9:30am and put my things in the storage room at the bus terminal, after buying my ticket to Bolivia. I then spent the rest of the morning looking everywhere for an open internet cafe, since I actually had no concept of where in the city I was, where anything else was, or what I might actually do with myself for the day, since my bus wasn't due to leave until 7pm. Eventually I asked one of the guys working in a telephone call center and he told me to catch a certain bus to a certain market, and that they would probably have something there. Well, that bus never came, so eventually I just got on a different bus with the same market listed in the hand-written sign on the front, and after about 10 minutes we passed an open internet cafe on that road so I just got out there and spent a little time re-connecting with the outside world. Sometimes it is just really, really grounding to be able to sit at a computer and feel reassured that the world you know really is still there, you just aren't in it right now!
Paraguay in general was really intense, even though I was only there for one day. I couldn't understand what most people were saying to me, even though they were speaking Spanish, because they were speaking with this really slurred accent that basically leaves out distinct syllables and entire endings of most words. Even when I asked someone to repeat it but more slowly I couldn't really make it out, so that sucked. When I can't understand what someone is saying to me it makes me feel so anxious, like I'm sure they think I'm really slow or something, which in turn makes me paranoid that everyone dislikes me and/ or wants to rip me off for being an ignorant gringo that can't even speak spanish. I'm trying, I swear!!!
Another thing about Paraguay is the really obvious, crushing poverty that subsumes it. When we crossed the border from Brazil the difference was crystal clear. I know that Brazil has intense problems with homelessness and poverty too, but at least in the cities, Brazil tries to cordon those people and communities off, to hide them from frightened tourist eyes. But in Paraguay there is no such deception. There are families living in dirt lots with innumerable grubby kids running around, crying, with distended bellies and enormous, tragic eyes. There are children grasping fences and huffing from plastic bags while gesturing wildly at something invisible in front of them, and vendors hopping off and on buses, all night every night, desperately hawking biscuits and hot orange juice for the equivalent of about 10 cents, going back and forth, back and forth all night until they've earned enough to buy food for their families for the next day. For me, the middle class American, it is much easier to travel somewhere without the consequences of my own privilege staring at me, begging for change, making me uncomfortable. Maybe this is why so few tourists go to Paraguay.
That night I got on the bus for Bolivia, and as we pulled out of the station, an hour late, rain started to fall. I put in my headphones, reclined the seat of the ancient bus, and fell asleep.
Monday: The first thing that happened Monday was leaving Paraguay. Sometime around midnight, we pulled onto a long dirt road, made muddy by the rain, and stepped out into the humid night air to be allowed to leave Paraguay. We walked down a path and up to a rough wooden shack in the middle of a vast pasture, and waited in a line while chickens and dogs ran to and fro in the front yard. When it was finally my turn, the man behind the wooden table took my passport without a word, gave me a cursory glance, stamped the exit page and handed it back without ceremony. Eventually we got back on the bus and kept going.
Some hours later, we hit a similarly muddy and similarly remote area, wherein a small cluster of buildings signalled that we were now at the Bolivian immigration office. Again I stood in line, only this time there were money changers and a "cafe" on either side of me. This time, though, the men behind the desk were not silent. When it was my turn, they flipped through my passport, looking, vainly for- what? Once, twice, then, "no hay visa?". My heart sank. Fuck! I had even asked people if I needed a visa and everyone told me no! I said, "no, no necesito un visa, verdad?". The men rolled their eyes and exchanged irritated glances before telling me, "si, necesitas una visa o no puedes entrar. Es cien dolares." Ummm... excuse me?! One hundred dollars?! What did they think, that I'm completely stupid? Besides, I actually didn't HAVE a hundred dollars with me. What do they think, I just carry around that kind of money like an idiot rich tourist? I was mad. But then they pointed to the sign on the wall, and there, to my even greater annoyance and disbelief, was the proof: All U.S. Citizens have to pay $100 US to enter Bolivia, along with a whole other list of needed documents, including a credit card, yellow fever vaccination card (luckily I had done that before Brazil), ticket in and out, and some other stuff too. I was sooo annoyed! Not only was it 3am and I was totally out of it, but I didn't actually have the money they wanted and they were threatening that they weren't going to let me in at all. Then when they asked me why I even wanted to come to Bolivia and I told them I was here to volunteer on an animal sanctuary, they tried to give me even more crap saying that well, then, I was lying by saying I only needed a tourist visa since really I was trying to work here, which of course is completely ridiculous. Great. Eventually the bus driver stepped in and spoke with the guys, who were very blatantly enjoying my misery, and agreed to front me the cash until we got to Santa Cruz, using my passport and all my documents as collatoral, just to make sure. 16 hours later we were there, and he got his money and I got my passport, and I was all too happy to get off of that bus.
Once I arrived I called Carla, my couchsurfing host, and she eventually came to get me and rescue me from the attentions of every single "hippie /traveller/ freak/ weirdo" in the station. There aren't many people in South America who look "different", so anyone who does is kind of automatically part of this secret club, and sometimes I welcome the immediate solidarity. But other times it just stresses me out to have to talk to people, to explain where I'm from, and what I'm doing here, and talk about my tattoo and where I want to go next and what I'm doing for money etc etc. Especially having just disembarked from a 23-hour-long bus trip from hell.
Tuesday: I woke up in the office of Carla's house, and learned that Carla has gone out to run various errands, but would be back soon. So I put on some clothes & arranged my stuff as neatly as possible, and went downstairs to eat the rest of the bread and olive oil I had brought as some sort of breakfast. Sure enough, shortly thereafter Carla reappeared and said I could go into town with her and her friend if I wanted, so I jumped in the car and away we went. Carla had a bunch of other errands to run, so she suggested slew of parks and museums I could go check out and dropped me at the vegetarian restaurant , which was only a few blocks away from the central plaza in town. I ate a decent, though not terribly exciting, lunch of salad, soup, & some kind of rice thing with tvp, and then headed for the square. But I was still feeling really tired and low-energy, despite having gotten nearly 12 hours of sleep and having slept the majority of my time on the bus the day before. So I just sat on a bench next to a shoe shine man for a long while, watching the people around me, taking in the plaza (24th de Septiembre) and all it's attendant activity.
Eventually I decided to check my email, so I killed almost two hours doing that, and then I went for a walk to see some parks, and came across a japanese market that had really cheap tofu and miso and soy meat, so I bought a few things there too and continued on my way. I stopped in at a bakery and inquired about whether they had any sweets that were without dairy or eggs, and the woman motioned to a pile of adorable little donuts with white coconut icing. After verifying that they really were totally vegan, I bought two and went happily on my way, feeling like maybe things were okay after all. By then it was time to meet Carla, but when I called her she was busy so we agreed to meet two hours later in front of the cathedral. I killed a few more hours searching in vain for the art museum and drinking a frozen iced tea (delicious) in a cute cafe next to the cathedral, and went out to wait but she never showed. By now I was getting a little anxious and irritated cause I had a headache, so I called her and realized that we had misunderstood each other because she was at home helping her mom and wouldn't be able to come and get me anymore. So I asked her to email me directions by bus and once again embarked on an internet odyssey, this time feeling pretty out of it and over Santa Cruz in general... If you got an email from me that day, I apologize! I have never been good at hiding my feelings!
Anyway, eventually I got a cab home and it all worked out in the end. I took an ibuprofen and went to bed, and once again slept for a very long time.
Wednesday: Today Carla was really excited to actually take me out and show me around, cause she didn't have a million things she had to do. So we went and bought my ticket for Sucre, and asked around at various travel agencies for quotes on a ticket for her to go to Germany later this summer, since she's been offered a job as an au pair. Another element to the inequity of the world economy is the fact that folks here in South America, despite earning far less than those of us in North America, have to pay far more in real dollars to travel. For example, the absolute lowest price she has found on a round-trip ticket to Germany is somewhere around $1800 US. Now I know that it is a long way to go from here to there, but I can pretty much guarantee that if the ticket was round-trip ORIGINATING in Germany, it would be less. Less people here can afford to fly, so there is less service, and therefore less competition, and therefore- everything is actually MORE expensive than for those of us who already have the money to spend! The irony is astounding, and the cyclical nature of this system is disheartening, to say the least.
Anyway, we also went and hung out for a bit with Carla's friend Fatima who make us a lovely lunch, including a special batch of veggies without eggs just for me, and then the three of us took a long walk to the muddy, overflowing river nearby. After this Carla and I said goodbye to Fatima and went to the biggest open market in town, where Carla's mom works selling the sportswear that is made in the workshop attached to their house. We hung out there, wandering in and out of stalls, and Carla bought some clothes while I settled for a chocle (an ear of traditional corn, very different from the corn we have at home) and some papas fritas. Eventually we helped her mom carry stuff back to the car and close up the stall, and headed home. Later that night we went back out with some of Carla's girlfriends and sang along loudly to the guy with the guitar doing a pretty good job of covering just about every "alternative" hit from the nineties, the pinnacle of which was "Creep" by Radiohead, which he even played a second time for us. Much, much later, we found our way into a cab and eventually arrived in her neighborhood, by which time both of us had fallen asleep. I woke up easily but getting Carla awake again was a whole other challenge, but eventually I was able to jostle her into consciousness enough to prop her up while we picked our way back to her house through the muddy, rutted dirt roads.
Thursday: After going to bed sometime around 5:30, I was awakened by Rosio, the girl who does the cooking and cleaning at Carla's house, asking me if I'd seen Carla's cell phone. Unfortunately, I didn't have it, and apparently neither did she, which is a shame. I eventually crawled out of bed and managed to shower and get packed, since I had a 4 o'clock flight to Sucre. I know, I know- I really, really didn't want to fly anymore, but after so many days on the bus and with the roads being mostly impassable due to either flooding or blockades by striking workers, I really couldn't say no when I realized that a plane ticket was $50 and would save me 16- 24 hours of bus time. I promise, I will do something valuable to make up for the size of my environmental footprint this year- really!
Anyway, I got another cab to the airport and had a complete painless trip here to Sucre, where I arrived at 4:30 in the afternoon. I headed into town and realized that my Couchsurfing contact hadn't gotten my emails yet, so I waited a while, went and ate at the vegetarian restaurant (the best meal I've had in weeks- tofu asada with veggies and rice in some kind of traditional sauce), and eventually met up with the other girl I'd been planning to hang out with (also from CS), who conveniently enough, turns out to sort of be dating the guy that I was supposed to stay with! So she walked me to the house and we all ate some cabbage and potatoes and they went out while I, once again, went to bed. Hmmm, I'm detecting a theme here.
Today- Friday: Woke up late, feeling on the verge of getting sick, and am still a bit low energy wise, though my mood is 100% better than it was a few days ago. I guess this is what happens when I don't have access to a kitchen to cook for myself- I become totally malnourished. I haven't even been able to find beans here that don't already have meat in them, so I've been surviving on bread and oil and white rice and fried things for about a week now, along with some fruit here and there, and I am totally feeling it. Thank god now I have a kitchen though! I made a really exciting salad with mint-tahini dressing for lunch, and am going to eat some form of protein for dinner tonight, no matter what!!! I had a really nice time snooping around the main market this morning- I just really love the way markets are in Latin America. There are just so many colors and smells and sights and sounds and the vegetables are all so beautiful, and there are huge sacks of different grains and seeds and pastas, and it is cheaper than the grocery store, especially if you're good at bargaining (which I am not, but who cares. I'd rather pay a little more to buy from an indigenous farmer than buy some mass-produced agri-food from the local subdivision of Wal-Mart). So that was fun. Now I'm going to go try to find a new set of headphones, since the ones I have now only work in one ear and the sound in that ear is pretty crap.
If you're still reading this- thanks for caring, though maybe you have too much time on your hands! If not, don't worry- I understand. I'm writing this blog as much to not forget my experiences as to keep everyone up-to-date, since my memory is so very regrettably bad. As always, I hope you are all doing great and that this finds you healthy and happy! Big hugs, Me.
Thursday: I was hanging out in Florianopolis with Laura and Guto, who treated me very well. We basically just went to the beach and walked around the tiny tourist town where their rented apartment is, because for most of the day it was too hot to do anything else. Oh, and I ate acai. I love acai!!!
Good: the beautiful, clean beaches with perfect, foamy water that wasn't too strong to play in. Having a few days do do basically nothing. Watching Maria Full of Grace and Life Is Beautiful, both really good and really sad but neither of them as devastating as I had expected them to be. Finding the health food store and buying bulk organic food that saved me for the next week! The granola-looking hippie lady that ran it was totally classic!
Bad: Getting bitten all night, every night by some kind of insane, tiny flying biting ants that were really excited about the fact that I was sleeping on the kitchen floor. That totally, totally sucked, actually. Mmmm, but I think that that was the only bad thing. Everything else was pretty effing great.
Friday: (3/7): Said my goodbyes and thank-yous to Laura and Guto and got on the bus to Foz do Iguacu, arriving early Saturday morning- I wrote a whole entry just about this, so see "Foz Do Iguacu" below.
Saturday: That night I got on another bus, this time headed for Asuncion, Paraguay, and after dealing with some total crap at the border where they charged me $30 for not having a visa (since when did you need a visa to go through Paraguay?! Since December, according to them), I eventually made it there around 11:30 pm. SInce I hadn't heard back from any of my couchsurfing attempts, I just walked across the street from the bus station and booked myself into the first cheap, sleazy hotel I saw. $8 US got me a tiny room and a hot shower with a shared bathroom, and I realized happily that dingy though it may be, it was the first actual bed I'd slept in since leaving Sao Paulo, so I was happy- though really, totally ready to leave Paraguay.
Sunday: I checked back out of my little room at 9:30am and put my things in the storage room at the bus terminal, after buying my ticket to Bolivia. I then spent the rest of the morning looking everywhere for an open internet cafe, since I actually had no concept of where in the city I was, where anything else was, or what I might actually do with myself for the day, since my bus wasn't due to leave until 7pm. Eventually I asked one of the guys working in a telephone call center and he told me to catch a certain bus to a certain market, and that they would probably have something there. Well, that bus never came, so eventually I just got on a different bus with the same market listed in the hand-written sign on the front, and after about 10 minutes we passed an open internet cafe on that road so I just got out there and spent a little time re-connecting with the outside world. Sometimes it is just really, really grounding to be able to sit at a computer and feel reassured that the world you know really is still there, you just aren't in it right now!
Paraguay in general was really intense, even though I was only there for one day. I couldn't understand what most people were saying to me, even though they were speaking Spanish, because they were speaking with this really slurred accent that basically leaves out distinct syllables and entire endings of most words. Even when I asked someone to repeat it but more slowly I couldn't really make it out, so that sucked. When I can't understand what someone is saying to me it makes me feel so anxious, like I'm sure they think I'm really slow or something, which in turn makes me paranoid that everyone dislikes me and/ or wants to rip me off for being an ignorant gringo that can't even speak spanish. I'm trying, I swear!!!
Another thing about Paraguay is the really obvious, crushing poverty that subsumes it. When we crossed the border from Brazil the difference was crystal clear. I know that Brazil has intense problems with homelessness and poverty too, but at least in the cities, Brazil tries to cordon those people and communities off, to hide them from frightened tourist eyes. But in Paraguay there is no such deception. There are families living in dirt lots with innumerable grubby kids running around, crying, with distended bellies and enormous, tragic eyes. There are children grasping fences and huffing from plastic bags while gesturing wildly at something invisible in front of them, and vendors hopping off and on buses, all night every night, desperately hawking biscuits and hot orange juice for the equivalent of about 10 cents, going back and forth, back and forth all night until they've earned enough to buy food for their families for the next day. For me, the middle class American, it is much easier to travel somewhere without the consequences of my own privilege staring at me, begging for change, making me uncomfortable. Maybe this is why so few tourists go to Paraguay.
That night I got on the bus for Bolivia, and as we pulled out of the station, an hour late, rain started to fall. I put in my headphones, reclined the seat of the ancient bus, and fell asleep.
Monday: The first thing that happened Monday was leaving Paraguay. Sometime around midnight, we pulled onto a long dirt road, made muddy by the rain, and stepped out into the humid night air to be allowed to leave Paraguay. We walked down a path and up to a rough wooden shack in the middle of a vast pasture, and waited in a line while chickens and dogs ran to and fro in the front yard. When it was finally my turn, the man behind the wooden table took my passport without a word, gave me a cursory glance, stamped the exit page and handed it back without ceremony. Eventually we got back on the bus and kept going.
Some hours later, we hit a similarly muddy and similarly remote area, wherein a small cluster of buildings signalled that we were now at the Bolivian immigration office. Again I stood in line, only this time there were money changers and a "cafe" on either side of me. This time, though, the men behind the desk were not silent. When it was my turn, they flipped through my passport, looking, vainly for- what? Once, twice, then, "no hay visa?". My heart sank. Fuck! I had even asked people if I needed a visa and everyone told me no! I said, "no, no necesito un visa, verdad?". The men rolled their eyes and exchanged irritated glances before telling me, "si, necesitas una visa o no puedes entrar. Es cien dolares." Ummm... excuse me?! One hundred dollars?! What did they think, that I'm completely stupid? Besides, I actually didn't HAVE a hundred dollars with me. What do they think, I just carry around that kind of money like an idiot rich tourist? I was mad. But then they pointed to the sign on the wall, and there, to my even greater annoyance and disbelief, was the proof: All U.S. Citizens have to pay $100 US to enter Bolivia, along with a whole other list of needed documents, including a credit card, yellow fever vaccination card (luckily I had done that before Brazil), ticket in and out, and some other stuff too. I was sooo annoyed! Not only was it 3am and I was totally out of it, but I didn't actually have the money they wanted and they were threatening that they weren't going to let me in at all. Then when they asked me why I even wanted to come to Bolivia and I told them I was here to volunteer on an animal sanctuary, they tried to give me even more crap saying that well, then, I was lying by saying I only needed a tourist visa since really I was trying to work here, which of course is completely ridiculous. Great. Eventually the bus driver stepped in and spoke with the guys, who were very blatantly enjoying my misery, and agreed to front me the cash until we got to Santa Cruz, using my passport and all my documents as collatoral, just to make sure. 16 hours later we were there, and he got his money and I got my passport, and I was all too happy to get off of that bus.
Once I arrived I called Carla, my couchsurfing host, and she eventually came to get me and rescue me from the attentions of every single "hippie /traveller/ freak/ weirdo" in the station. There aren't many people in South America who look "different", so anyone who does is kind of automatically part of this secret club, and sometimes I welcome the immediate solidarity. But other times it just stresses me out to have to talk to people, to explain where I'm from, and what I'm doing here, and talk about my tattoo and where I want to go next and what I'm doing for money etc etc. Especially having just disembarked from a 23-hour-long bus trip from hell.
Tuesday: I woke up in the office of Carla's house, and learned that Carla has gone out to run various errands, but would be back soon. So I put on some clothes & arranged my stuff as neatly as possible, and went downstairs to eat the rest of the bread and olive oil I had brought as some sort of breakfast. Sure enough, shortly thereafter Carla reappeared and said I could go into town with her and her friend if I wanted, so I jumped in the car and away we went. Carla had a bunch of other errands to run, so she suggested slew of parks and museums I could go check out and dropped me at the vegetarian restaurant , which was only a few blocks away from the central plaza in town. I ate a decent, though not terribly exciting, lunch of salad, soup, & some kind of rice thing with tvp, and then headed for the square. But I was still feeling really tired and low-energy, despite having gotten nearly 12 hours of sleep and having slept the majority of my time on the bus the day before. So I just sat on a bench next to a shoe shine man for a long while, watching the people around me, taking in the plaza (24th de Septiembre) and all it's attendant activity.
Eventually I decided to check my email, so I killed almost two hours doing that, and then I went for a walk to see some parks, and came across a japanese market that had really cheap tofu and miso and soy meat, so I bought a few things there too and continued on my way. I stopped in at a bakery and inquired about whether they had any sweets that were without dairy or eggs, and the woman motioned to a pile of adorable little donuts with white coconut icing. After verifying that they really were totally vegan, I bought two and went happily on my way, feeling like maybe things were okay after all. By then it was time to meet Carla, but when I called her she was busy so we agreed to meet two hours later in front of the cathedral. I killed a few more hours searching in vain for the art museum and drinking a frozen iced tea (delicious) in a cute cafe next to the cathedral, and went out to wait but she never showed. By now I was getting a little anxious and irritated cause I had a headache, so I called her and realized that we had misunderstood each other because she was at home helping her mom and wouldn't be able to come and get me anymore. So I asked her to email me directions by bus and once again embarked on an internet odyssey, this time feeling pretty out of it and over Santa Cruz in general... If you got an email from me that day, I apologize! I have never been good at hiding my feelings!
Anyway, eventually I got a cab home and it all worked out in the end. I took an ibuprofen and went to bed, and once again slept for a very long time.
Wednesday: Today Carla was really excited to actually take me out and show me around, cause she didn't have a million things she had to do. So we went and bought my ticket for Sucre, and asked around at various travel agencies for quotes on a ticket for her to go to Germany later this summer, since she's been offered a job as an au pair. Another element to the inequity of the world economy is the fact that folks here in South America, despite earning far less than those of us in North America, have to pay far more in real dollars to travel. For example, the absolute lowest price she has found on a round-trip ticket to Germany is somewhere around $1800 US. Now I know that it is a long way to go from here to there, but I can pretty much guarantee that if the ticket was round-trip ORIGINATING in Germany, it would be less. Less people here can afford to fly, so there is less service, and therefore less competition, and therefore- everything is actually MORE expensive than for those of us who already have the money to spend! The irony is astounding, and the cyclical nature of this system is disheartening, to say the least.
Anyway, we also went and hung out for a bit with Carla's friend Fatima who make us a lovely lunch, including a special batch of veggies without eggs just for me, and then the three of us took a long walk to the muddy, overflowing river nearby. After this Carla and I said goodbye to Fatima and went to the biggest open market in town, where Carla's mom works selling the sportswear that is made in the workshop attached to their house. We hung out there, wandering in and out of stalls, and Carla bought some clothes while I settled for a chocle (an ear of traditional corn, very different from the corn we have at home) and some papas fritas. Eventually we helped her mom carry stuff back to the car and close up the stall, and headed home. Later that night we went back out with some of Carla's girlfriends and sang along loudly to the guy with the guitar doing a pretty good job of covering just about every "alternative" hit from the nineties, the pinnacle of which was "Creep" by Radiohead, which he even played a second time for us. Much, much later, we found our way into a cab and eventually arrived in her neighborhood, by which time both of us had fallen asleep. I woke up easily but getting Carla awake again was a whole other challenge, but eventually I was able to jostle her into consciousness enough to prop her up while we picked our way back to her house through the muddy, rutted dirt roads.
Thursday: After going to bed sometime around 5:30, I was awakened by Rosio, the girl who does the cooking and cleaning at Carla's house, asking me if I'd seen Carla's cell phone. Unfortunately, I didn't have it, and apparently neither did she, which is a shame. I eventually crawled out of bed and managed to shower and get packed, since I had a 4 o'clock flight to Sucre. I know, I know- I really, really didn't want to fly anymore, but after so many days on the bus and with the roads being mostly impassable due to either flooding or blockades by striking workers, I really couldn't say no when I realized that a plane ticket was $50 and would save me 16- 24 hours of bus time. I promise, I will do something valuable to make up for the size of my environmental footprint this year- really!
Anyway, I got another cab to the airport and had a complete painless trip here to Sucre, where I arrived at 4:30 in the afternoon. I headed into town and realized that my Couchsurfing contact hadn't gotten my emails yet, so I waited a while, went and ate at the vegetarian restaurant (the best meal I've had in weeks- tofu asada with veggies and rice in some kind of traditional sauce), and eventually met up with the other girl I'd been planning to hang out with (also from CS), who conveniently enough, turns out to sort of be dating the guy that I was supposed to stay with! So she walked me to the house and we all ate some cabbage and potatoes and they went out while I, once again, went to bed. Hmmm, I'm detecting a theme here.
Today- Friday: Woke up late, feeling on the verge of getting sick, and am still a bit low energy wise, though my mood is 100% better than it was a few days ago. I guess this is what happens when I don't have access to a kitchen to cook for myself- I become totally malnourished. I haven't even been able to find beans here that don't already have meat in them, so I've been surviving on bread and oil and white rice and fried things for about a week now, along with some fruit here and there, and I am totally feeling it. Thank god now I have a kitchen though! I made a really exciting salad with mint-tahini dressing for lunch, and am going to eat some form of protein for dinner tonight, no matter what!!! I had a really nice time snooping around the main market this morning- I just really love the way markets are in Latin America. There are just so many colors and smells and sights and sounds and the vegetables are all so beautiful, and there are huge sacks of different grains and seeds and pastas, and it is cheaper than the grocery store, especially if you're good at bargaining (which I am not, but who cares. I'd rather pay a little more to buy from an indigenous farmer than buy some mass-produced agri-food from the local subdivision of Wal-Mart). So that was fun. Now I'm going to go try to find a new set of headphones, since the ones I have now only work in one ear and the sound in that ear is pretty crap.
If you're still reading this- thanks for caring, though maybe you have too much time on your hands! If not, don't worry- I understand. I'm writing this blog as much to not forget my experiences as to keep everyone up-to-date, since my memory is so very regrettably bad. As always, I hope you are all doing great and that this finds you healthy and happy! Big hugs, Me.
Paraguay
Holy Shit, Paraguay. I'm on the bus and I've been here all of five minutes and already it's so intense- totally different than Brazil- at least the Brazil that the gringos are allowed to see. This place, the poverty is fully in your face. We just pulled into the bus terminal right across the border and next door is an empty lot with at least a dozen or so families living in various refrigerator-box type dwellings, with millions of filthy little kids running around with huge stomachs and even huger eyes. To top it off, there, perching on the fence that is the border of this lot, is a boy who can't be more than 10, screaming and gesturing wildly at someone visible only to him with one hand, as he clutches and huffs from a plastic bag with his other. His eyes are crazy, rolling back in his head and just looking at him makes me want to cry. Why is the world like this? How can this be real?
Foz Do Iguacu, Brazil: A Review
Foz do Iguacu is a magical place of beautiful waterfalls on the 3-way border between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. According to everyone I met here in Brazil and abroad who has been this way, it is a sight not to be missed. So I figured that since it was on my way from Brazil to Bolivia anyway (since I'm going through Assuncion, Paraguay) I had better stop and check it out. I left Florianopolis at 2:35 yesterday afternoon, on a fairly comfortable, if crowded, bus. I spent the next 19 hours alternatively trying to converse in Portinol with my neighbor, listening to my iPod, watching Mission: Impossible (terrible), and, eventually, sleeping fitfully in a vicodin haze, waking every time we stopped (which was often) and when I was extremely cold due to the crazy refrigerator-like air conditioning these buses invariably use. But finally, at 8:25 this morning, we arrived. I was really confused at first because I looked at my little alarm clock thing and it said we were two hours later than I thought we were supposed to be, but the women in the next seat over assured me that no, I hadn't slept through the Foz and wound up in Paraguay (as I feared), we were just late. This was actually a bit of a relief for me, because I had been worried that 5 hours of sleep wouldn't be enough, but by the time we rolled in I had gotten close to 7, which is a much more healthy and reasonable amount to get, I think. So even though I was groggy, I figured with a little bit of caffeine I'd be all set to hike lots of beautiful jungle trails and spend a nice day totally by myself in nature, for a change.
So I checked my luggage at the bus station after confirming that there are, in fact, evening buses I could take to Paraguay tonight, and got myself on the bus to the falls.
I guess I knew I was in trouble when I first saw the theme park- like entrance to the Falls. I scanned the various price lists, noting the tiered system: Brasilieros pay one price, citizens of neighboring countries another, and the rest of us a third, and highest price to get in. This is fair enough, I suppose, since really I don't think Brasilieros should have to pay at all, since it is after all a National Park, in Brazil. Nonetheless, even the cheaper rate of R$13 for them was pretty steep, I though, and the R$ 20.50 I had to pay was really over the top. But I had come all this way and I wasn't going to turn back now on account of being a total cheapskate. No, I told myself: even if it sucks, the only way I won't regret it is if I go in and see for myself. After all, I had come all this way.
So I paid the money, and was even cheerful about it, since I was sure that it would be worth it once I was in the jungle, hiking around and looking at all the waterfalls. I was hoping it would be like one of the amazing national parks I visited earlier this year in Australia- the one I'm thinking of was particularly gorgeous, with fast-flowing streams and natural pools that, if you dared, you could get into and out of again before being sucked down one of the many rapids. Monica, Jak and I spent hours in that jungle, climbing and swinging in trees, exploring all the different paths shooting off from the main one, wading in the calmer waters and climbing the bridges over the fiercer ones. I was hoping for something like this.
My second warning sign was when I discovered that you can't actually just "go for a hike" to the falls- you have to get on a bus (the cost of which makes up R$ 5.50 of your entrance fee) and be driven there. Still, though, looking at the map and seeing 2 other trails in addition to the main one to the waterfalls, I had hope. I went with everyones else to see the falls first. They let us off the bus and we scrambled out, and I quickly made my way onto the wide, very well-maintained concrete path, which was also equipped with handrails, making it great for folks with mobility issues, but bad for someone who really wants to get a good workout (which I really, really did). The first thing I saw was a cute, raccoon-like creature snuffling around in the brush before he or she noticed that I was trying to take a picture and started ambling away. I thought that was pretty neat, but as I continued down the path I soon realized that these little guys were EVERYWHERE, and many were not nearly as shy as that first one. So of course, being me, I had my camera out and was desperately snapping away for like 20 minutes as I inched my way down the path, trying to get some good shots. It was sort of ridiculous. Anyway, eventually I left the poor creatures alone and continued along, and soon came to the first part of the falls, which were, in fact, really beautiful. There were rapids, and huge cliffs, and even numerous parts where you could see rainbows. Out came the camera again, and after another hour or so of relentless photographing, I was ready to really hit the other trails and do some hiking.
The problem was, when I got off the bus at the first of the other 2 trailheads and started walking, I was promptly stopped by an employee of the "safari tour" company and informed that I wasn't allowed to go on the trail unless it was as part of the paid safari, which was NOT included in the entry fee. I was just like, "are you kidding me? This is a National Park! Why is a private company allowed to monopolize an entire huge section of what is supposed to be a public place?" He seemed vaguely sympathetic, but was firm, adding that it could be "dangerous" if I went in alone, so finally I gave up and ended up just walking for about an hour in the broiling sun along the side of the paved tar road until I got to the next bus stop. The other trail was the same deal, so by that point I was hungry, dejected and ready to go.
So I guess in the end, I'm glad I went because I know that if I didn't I would feel like I had missed something incredible. But really, if I had to do it all over again (knowing what I know now), I would probably skip it. I know it sounds bratty, but as much as I love nature I've seen a lot of places that are equally as beautiful but without the overwhelmingly capitalist slant that was the entire experience. Everything from the food to entry to the postcards was way expensive, and for that I expected more in terms of actual interactive things to do. Instead it's just another place that, sadly, has managed to turn experiencing nature into just another spectator event.
So I checked my luggage at the bus station after confirming that there are, in fact, evening buses I could take to Paraguay tonight, and got myself on the bus to the falls.
I guess I knew I was in trouble when I first saw the theme park- like entrance to the Falls. I scanned the various price lists, noting the tiered system: Brasilieros pay one price, citizens of neighboring countries another, and the rest of us a third, and highest price to get in. This is fair enough, I suppose, since really I don't think Brasilieros should have to pay at all, since it is after all a National Park, in Brazil. Nonetheless, even the cheaper rate of R$13 for them was pretty steep, I though, and the R$ 20.50 I had to pay was really over the top. But I had come all this way and I wasn't going to turn back now on account of being a total cheapskate. No, I told myself: even if it sucks, the only way I won't regret it is if I go in and see for myself. After all, I had come all this way.
So I paid the money, and was even cheerful about it, since I was sure that it would be worth it once I was in the jungle, hiking around and looking at all the waterfalls. I was hoping it would be like one of the amazing national parks I visited earlier this year in Australia- the one I'm thinking of was particularly gorgeous, with fast-flowing streams and natural pools that, if you dared, you could get into and out of again before being sucked down one of the many rapids. Monica, Jak and I spent hours in that jungle, climbing and swinging in trees, exploring all the different paths shooting off from the main one, wading in the calmer waters and climbing the bridges over the fiercer ones. I was hoping for something like this.
My second warning sign was when I discovered that you can't actually just "go for a hike" to the falls- you have to get on a bus (the cost of which makes up R$ 5.50 of your entrance fee) and be driven there. Still, though, looking at the map and seeing 2 other trails in addition to the main one to the waterfalls, I had hope. I went with everyones else to see the falls first. They let us off the bus and we scrambled out, and I quickly made my way onto the wide, very well-maintained concrete path, which was also equipped with handrails, making it great for folks with mobility issues, but bad for someone who really wants to get a good workout (which I really, really did). The first thing I saw was a cute, raccoon-like creature snuffling around in the brush before he or she noticed that I was trying to take a picture and started ambling away. I thought that was pretty neat, but as I continued down the path I soon realized that these little guys were EVERYWHERE, and many were not nearly as shy as that first one. So of course, being me, I had my camera out and was desperately snapping away for like 20 minutes as I inched my way down the path, trying to get some good shots. It was sort of ridiculous. Anyway, eventually I left the poor creatures alone and continued along, and soon came to the first part of the falls, which were, in fact, really beautiful. There were rapids, and huge cliffs, and even numerous parts where you could see rainbows. Out came the camera again, and after another hour or so of relentless photographing, I was ready to really hit the other trails and do some hiking.
The problem was, when I got off the bus at the first of the other 2 trailheads and started walking, I was promptly stopped by an employee of the "safari tour" company and informed that I wasn't allowed to go on the trail unless it was as part of the paid safari, which was NOT included in the entry fee. I was just like, "are you kidding me? This is a National Park! Why is a private company allowed to monopolize an entire huge section of what is supposed to be a public place?" He seemed vaguely sympathetic, but was firm, adding that it could be "dangerous" if I went in alone, so finally I gave up and ended up just walking for about an hour in the broiling sun along the side of the paved tar road until I got to the next bus stop. The other trail was the same deal, so by that point I was hungry, dejected and ready to go.
So I guess in the end, I'm glad I went because I know that if I didn't I would feel like I had missed something incredible. But really, if I had to do it all over again (knowing what I know now), I would probably skip it. I know it sounds bratty, but as much as I love nature I've seen a lot of places that are equally as beautiful but without the overwhelmingly capitalist slant that was the entire experience. Everything from the food to entry to the postcards was way expensive, and for that I expected more in terms of actual interactive things to do. Instead it's just another place that, sadly, has managed to turn experiencing nature into just another spectator event.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Curitiba, Brasil
Wow, I´ve been in Brazil a long time now I think! Has it really been a month? I can´t believe it, but I think it actually has. Time flies when you´re having fun, and, despite a few snags along the way, I really am loving it here. Like loving it to the point where I´m planning out how to learn Portuguese, get a motorcycle and live in this beautiful old neighborhood in Rio called Santa Tereza.
Anyway, after I left Sao Paolo I headed back to Rio, where I spent 10 days partying like I haven´t in a long time, care of my fabulous tour guide Juliana, who I met at Carnaval Reveluçao. Never mind the fact that I am consistently the way oldest person I find myself hanging out with here in Brazil (when the kids learn my age, their eyes get big and they look at me harder, like they are suddenly going to see the wrinkles materialize or something. It´s funny. Kind of.)- I still know how to have a good time! Already in Brazil my internal clock is set to go to bed around 6am, and as it turns out, everyone in Rio´s is too, so it actually worked out perfectly.
The only major downer was, of course, Jay and I´s failed attempt at meeting up to travel together again as friends. Without going into too much detail, I will just say that it is really apparent that we are so incredibly different now that there is not even a foreseeable way for us to be friends anymore, which really makes me sad since he has been my most reliable support for the past 3+ years. But old patterns die hard, and unfortunately our worst ones had already surfaced by his second day in Rio so we went our separate ways and now our plans are to travel separately. I think it is definitely for the best, but to be sure I would have liked it if we could still have been friends and gone through some of South America together. In the cities it can be really fun to be on your own, cause you meet tons of people that way, but my city time is about to be over as I prepare to head into Bolivia and Peru for the next few months, and I would really love it if I had someone to share the experience with. Anyone really sick of working?! Come on down and hang out with me!!!
Yeah, soooo...
Right now I am in the city of Curitiba, which is about 6 1/2 hours by bus southwest of Sao Paolo. Compared to SP, this is a small city, but still, it has 2 million people and it´s own little rad queer scene, so it´s kind of a nice change of pace. Okay, wait though, I´m totally getting everything out of order here though, so I will put things in a line first (I´m tired so I apologize for my whacked-out writing style right now)... Okay, so after Carnaval Revoluçao I hung out another week or so in Sao Paolo. Then I went to Rio for about 10 days, which felt more like a month, and did just about everything a local would do and basically nothing a tourist would do (well, okay, I did finally go to the beach on my last two days there). We wanted to go see the Jesus but it cost like 36 reals (something like $24 or so?) just to get the train up there, which you have to take, so I figured I could see him well enough from where I was and we skipped it. After much fun and fabulous street food in Rio, I got back on the bus and spent another 4 days or so in Sao Paolo, doing nothing much other than eating vegan ice cream. On my last day there I went walking all around the bougie part of town looking at galleries and fancy cool-people expensive toy stores and stuff with my adorable friend Andrei, who is the boyfriend of Juliana, my fabulous tour guide in Rio. Then there was a dub night happening at Espaço Impropio, where I was staying, so we all stayed up for that since Gui was working the bar. We were all surprised when the main crowd that showed up for the event was a bunch of Brazilian oi kids, which are kind of like skinheads only less racist and militant, but still into the fashion and quite nationalistic. This obviously made the folks who live at Impropio very wary and suspicious, since the neo-Nazi/ fascist/ skinhead movement is really big here in Brazil (who would´ve thought? Not me!) and skinheads regularly target anarchists, queers, punks and other "weirdos" to beat up at random. But nobody acted up and eventually we went and danced around a bit when we ascertained that these were probably just misguided youth and not actually friends of neo-nazis. My real mission that evening had been to locate and play pool in one of the mythical "lesbian snooker halls" that, according to my friend Helena in Rio, abound on the Rua Augusta, which is the main street leading to where I was staying. From what Helena had told me, it is kind of like this total phenomenon where a bunch of dykes kind of monopolize these pool halls, and often will break up into teams consisting of "butch", "femme", and "other"... (I forget exactly what the "other" is...) I just HAD to see it for myself, it sounded like such a bizarre and yet beautiful thing. So I cajoled Helena´s best friend Marina, who was in town visiting her parents, into taking me on a little tour of these mythical places, but when we finally hit the streets around midnight, it turned out that the main one she knew of was inexplicably closed (the night in Sao Paolo is just getting started around midnight), and the other two, smaller pool halls (called "sinuka" here, which is actually what we call "snooker") were already packed full of random, seemingly heterosexual young people smoking way too many cigarettes, so we turned back in confusion and just a little disappointment, though not after I did at least witness several lesbian couples using one table at the last place we checked. Hmph.
Anyway, as with my last night in Rio, I figured that rather than try to get a couple hours´sleep and then get up totally early to catch a 7am bus it was easier just to ride it out and sleep en route. So even though I was fading by 5:00am, I stuck it out and soon enough it was time to collect all my things and say goodbye, just as Impropio was finally closing and my friends were trying to convince me to come out with them to the bar. Everyone was so lovely, and I had so many nice goodbyes that by the time I was finally on my way to the subway I had to really hustle to make it in time, but make it I did, and at 7:10am I got on the bus, took a vicodin, and passed out for the 6 1/2 hour journey to Curitiba.
And now, here I am
After a bit of a drama where I thought I was going to have to stay in this insanely expensive hostel becuase the friend I came to visit lives in a weird boarding house and can´t have guests, I managed, through the magic of the international radical queer network, to find some really cool queer folks who, on 20 minutes notice, hooked me up with a place to stay AND even came and got me at the hostel. Then Tiago, the boy whose house I am at right this second, took me to go eat these insane vegan hot dogs with like 8 different toppings on them and it was sooo awesome. The guy who served us these hot dogs was none other than Ma-ma, an enormous, sort of Henry Rollins-looking character with massive tattoos covering his legs that say QUEER PUNK; he is something of a legend here in Curitiba, as he has fronted a number of well-respected hardcore bands, the most famous of which was Gay-O-Hazard, which never actually put out a record but did put out some amazing t-shirts (several of my friends in S.P. had them and they rule). Anyway, today a bunch of us hung out in front of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, which is shaped like a giant eye, and watched as literally dozens and dozens of rich people with various purebred dogs congregated to let the "dogs" play with one another. It was sooo weird- there was not a single mixed-breed dog there that I could tell and everyone was dressed to the nines, like they are all Paris Hilton or something. Brazil is kind of like that in some ways. I have to say I have noticed more fancy-schmancy designer dogs here than anywhere else I´ve ever been, noting, of course, that I haven´t ever spent much time in L.A. But still- come on.
Anyway, then we all went to eat Açai, which is The Best Thing Ever, though far more expensive and harder to find here in Curitiba than it was in Rio. It´s like this frozen berry from the Amazon that supposedly has all these amazing health properties (though I suspect that the freezing process probably eliminates most of those) and they blend it up with Guaraná, another fabulous product from the Amazon, to make a bright purple sorbet with this really weird, delicious flavor. I like mine with ammendoim (peanuts) and bananas on top. It rules.
Other than that, Curitiba is waaaay mellow (read: kind of boring) so even though I really love the kids I´m hanging out with, come Tuesday morning I think I´ll shove off to go see my friend Laura (who I met in Spanish school in Guatemala) in Florianopolis, which is another 4 1/2 hours or so south of here and is said to be gorgeous. Apparently it´s an island with 26 different beaches around its perimeter. Sounds good to me.
Yeah, so that´s the plan for now. I´ll be en route to Bolivia and Esperanza de Libertad by next week if all goes according to plan, so wish me luck! Huge hugs and all that stuff! xoxo Pike
Anyway. S
Anyway, after I left Sao Paolo I headed back to Rio, where I spent 10 days partying like I haven´t in a long time, care of my fabulous tour guide Juliana, who I met at Carnaval Reveluçao. Never mind the fact that I am consistently the way oldest person I find myself hanging out with here in Brazil (when the kids learn my age, their eyes get big and they look at me harder, like they are suddenly going to see the wrinkles materialize or something. It´s funny. Kind of.)- I still know how to have a good time! Already in Brazil my internal clock is set to go to bed around 6am, and as it turns out, everyone in Rio´s is too, so it actually worked out perfectly.
The only major downer was, of course, Jay and I´s failed attempt at meeting up to travel together again as friends. Without going into too much detail, I will just say that it is really apparent that we are so incredibly different now that there is not even a foreseeable way for us to be friends anymore, which really makes me sad since he has been my most reliable support for the past 3+ years. But old patterns die hard, and unfortunately our worst ones had already surfaced by his second day in Rio so we went our separate ways and now our plans are to travel separately. I think it is definitely for the best, but to be sure I would have liked it if we could still have been friends and gone through some of South America together. In the cities it can be really fun to be on your own, cause you meet tons of people that way, but my city time is about to be over as I prepare to head into Bolivia and Peru for the next few months, and I would really love it if I had someone to share the experience with. Anyone really sick of working?! Come on down and hang out with me!!!
Yeah, soooo...
Right now I am in the city of Curitiba, which is about 6 1/2 hours by bus southwest of Sao Paolo. Compared to SP, this is a small city, but still, it has 2 million people and it´s own little rad queer scene, so it´s kind of a nice change of pace. Okay, wait though, I´m totally getting everything out of order here though, so I will put things in a line first (I´m tired so I apologize for my whacked-out writing style right now)... Okay, so after Carnaval Revoluçao I hung out another week or so in Sao Paolo. Then I went to Rio for about 10 days, which felt more like a month, and did just about everything a local would do and basically nothing a tourist would do (well, okay, I did finally go to the beach on my last two days there). We wanted to go see the Jesus but it cost like 36 reals (something like $24 or so?) just to get the train up there, which you have to take, so I figured I could see him well enough from where I was and we skipped it. After much fun and fabulous street food in Rio, I got back on the bus and spent another 4 days or so in Sao Paolo, doing nothing much other than eating vegan ice cream. On my last day there I went walking all around the bougie part of town looking at galleries and fancy cool-people expensive toy stores and stuff with my adorable friend Andrei, who is the boyfriend of Juliana, my fabulous tour guide in Rio. Then there was a dub night happening at Espaço Impropio, where I was staying, so we all stayed up for that since Gui was working the bar. We were all surprised when the main crowd that showed up for the event was a bunch of Brazilian oi kids, which are kind of like skinheads only less racist and militant, but still into the fashion and quite nationalistic. This obviously made the folks who live at Impropio very wary and suspicious, since the neo-Nazi/ fascist/ skinhead movement is really big here in Brazil (who would´ve thought? Not me!) and skinheads regularly target anarchists, queers, punks and other "weirdos" to beat up at random. But nobody acted up and eventually we went and danced around a bit when we ascertained that these were probably just misguided youth and not actually friends of neo-nazis. My real mission that evening had been to locate and play pool in one of the mythical "lesbian snooker halls" that, according to my friend Helena in Rio, abound on the Rua Augusta, which is the main street leading to where I was staying. From what Helena had told me, it is kind of like this total phenomenon where a bunch of dykes kind of monopolize these pool halls, and often will break up into teams consisting of "butch", "femme", and "other"... (I forget exactly what the "other" is...) I just HAD to see it for myself, it sounded like such a bizarre and yet beautiful thing. So I cajoled Helena´s best friend Marina, who was in town visiting her parents, into taking me on a little tour of these mythical places, but when we finally hit the streets around midnight, it turned out that the main one she knew of was inexplicably closed (the night in Sao Paolo is just getting started around midnight), and the other two, smaller pool halls (called "sinuka" here, which is actually what we call "snooker") were already packed full of random, seemingly heterosexual young people smoking way too many cigarettes, so we turned back in confusion and just a little disappointment, though not after I did at least witness several lesbian couples using one table at the last place we checked. Hmph.
Anyway, as with my last night in Rio, I figured that rather than try to get a couple hours´sleep and then get up totally early to catch a 7am bus it was easier just to ride it out and sleep en route. So even though I was fading by 5:00am, I stuck it out and soon enough it was time to collect all my things and say goodbye, just as Impropio was finally closing and my friends were trying to convince me to come out with them to the bar. Everyone was so lovely, and I had so many nice goodbyes that by the time I was finally on my way to the subway I had to really hustle to make it in time, but make it I did, and at 7:10am I got on the bus, took a vicodin, and passed out for the 6 1/2 hour journey to Curitiba.
And now, here I am
After a bit of a drama where I thought I was going to have to stay in this insanely expensive hostel becuase the friend I came to visit lives in a weird boarding house and can´t have guests, I managed, through the magic of the international radical queer network, to find some really cool queer folks who, on 20 minutes notice, hooked me up with a place to stay AND even came and got me at the hostel. Then Tiago, the boy whose house I am at right this second, took me to go eat these insane vegan hot dogs with like 8 different toppings on them and it was sooo awesome. The guy who served us these hot dogs was none other than Ma-ma, an enormous, sort of Henry Rollins-looking character with massive tattoos covering his legs that say QUEER PUNK; he is something of a legend here in Curitiba, as he has fronted a number of well-respected hardcore bands, the most famous of which was Gay-O-Hazard, which never actually put out a record but did put out some amazing t-shirts (several of my friends in S.P. had them and they rule). Anyway, today a bunch of us hung out in front of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, which is shaped like a giant eye, and watched as literally dozens and dozens of rich people with various purebred dogs congregated to let the "dogs" play with one another. It was sooo weird- there was not a single mixed-breed dog there that I could tell and everyone was dressed to the nines, like they are all Paris Hilton or something. Brazil is kind of like that in some ways. I have to say I have noticed more fancy-schmancy designer dogs here than anywhere else I´ve ever been, noting, of course, that I haven´t ever spent much time in L.A. But still- come on.
Anyway, then we all went to eat Açai, which is The Best Thing Ever, though far more expensive and harder to find here in Curitiba than it was in Rio. It´s like this frozen berry from the Amazon that supposedly has all these amazing health properties (though I suspect that the freezing process probably eliminates most of those) and they blend it up with Guaraná, another fabulous product from the Amazon, to make a bright purple sorbet with this really weird, delicious flavor. I like mine with ammendoim (peanuts) and bananas on top. It rules.
Other than that, Curitiba is waaaay mellow (read: kind of boring) so even though I really love the kids I´m hanging out with, come Tuesday morning I think I´ll shove off to go see my friend Laura (who I met in Spanish school in Guatemala) in Florianopolis, which is another 4 1/2 hours or so south of here and is said to be gorgeous. Apparently it´s an island with 26 different beaches around its perimeter. Sounds good to me.
Yeah, so that´s the plan for now. I´ll be en route to Bolivia and Esperanza de Libertad by next week if all goes according to plan, so wish me luck! Huge hugs and all that stuff! xoxo Pike
Anyway. S
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
