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.