20 Jan 05
La Paz, Bolivia

There is one aspect of this trip that I haven’t really touched on yet, and we’ll, maybe I shouldn’t, just in case Lou is read­ing (I don’t want him think­ing I’m French.) There are times, quite often, when this trip is god awful, kill me, please, now, bor­ing. Maybe I’m just more attuned to it since I’ve been sick, and can’t get out of my hotel room. When I get back to the states, if I never play another game of Soli­taire on my palm pilot it will be to soon. Again and again I’m thank­ful that I have my lap­top, oth­er­wise I may have ended my life by now.

The prob­lem is that there are lim­ited stim­uli.

TV — some, but often bor­ing (and sur­pris­ingly often, in Eng­lish), and in La Paz, sucks. Plus I never really watch TV with full atten­tion. Usu­ally it’s just back­ground noise, unless it involves rings, and lords, and hobbits.

Books — Ha!! I brought a book, which with dili­gent man­age­ment lasted me a cou­ple of weeks. Then I got another book at a book exchange — Terry Brooks, Run­ning with the Devil I think, which I got a cou­ple more weeks out of. It had two things going for it — I read one of his first books many years ago when I was into sci­ence fic­tion and loved it, and he’s from the Seat­tle Area. The rest of my choices sucked. I found another book exchange after much search­ing, and got a book called “The Con­fes­sions.” It is a bit­ing satire about a dys­func­tional fam­ily. So far I’ve read about five pages. It was a New York Times best seller, but hon­estly, I think that’s prob­a­bly because of book clubs all over the US, full of women who are glad it’s not their lives. Maybe it will be more inter­est­ing when I hit menopause (i.e. Never.) I long for a book­store full of Eng­lish lan­guage books.

Com­put­ing — Thanks GOD for my apple lap­top. But I am lim­ited to what I can do with­out the inter­net, or when I’m offline. After a full day of pic­ture tak­ing, I have my work­flow for the pho­tos to do. Most of that time is just spent wait­ing for the com­puter to either process or rename the files. It takes some time, but after about 6 weeks, it’s more of a chore than any­thing else. But at least I have more options with the com­puter. I can down­load pro­grams to try, or read web pages I’ve down­loaded at the inter­net cafe. Writ­ing these post up takes a lot of time, a cou­ple of hours per post, and I just hope I’m able to read it later, because that’s really what these post are for — so I can remem­ber these things years down the road.

Palm Pilot — This makes me sound like a sad, sad man. Since I’ve been gone, I’ve spent the sum of a cou­ple of days play­ing Soli­taire. If I’m wait­ing for some­one or some­thing, or eat­ing din­ner, or fly­ing some­where, it’s there for me. Once I won 8 games in a row, or dou­ble my pre­vi­ous record. I am very proud of that, but only because I think it’s almost sta­tis­ti­cally impossible.

Much time is spent in my room, look­ing at the walls. You can’t be out­side look­ing at stuff 24, or even 12 hours a day. Then there is break­fast, lunch and din­ner, all usu­ally eaten alone. Occa­sion­ally I hook up with some­one for a meal or two, but again, rare. Part of the prob­lem is demo­graphic — a lot of the trav­el­ers are either a lot younger (and trav­el­ing with friends) or a lot older and trav­el­ing with fam­ily or spouse. I can count on two hands the num­ber of trav­el­ers that are alone, if you remove the hik­ing trips I went on. When peo­ple are younger, they tend to stay in cheaper places, hos­tels and the like. If they are older, then they are trav­el­ing with other peo­ple. Granted some of the prob­lem is my own mak­ing, since I’m not very out­go­ing (well, until my new years res­o­lu­tion kicks in.) I’ll be mak­ing more of an effort once I get this cold under con­trol (and it almost is.)

There are only so many old Cathe­drals and Muse­ums you can see until they start look­ing alike. The same with inter­net cafes and cof­fee shops, where I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time lately writ­ing these post up. I never have that prob­lem with trees, moun­tains and other nat­ural wonders.