16 — 21 Jan 2005

As far as I can tell there are three dif­fer­ent types of hotels in South Amer­ica. You’ve got basic — i.e. back­packer hotels. When I see the word back­packer, that should be a clue that some­thing is wrong and I should move one. Then you’ve got the very nice, top end hotels. I don’t even stay in these if I can help it, unless I do what I did in Puno. Then there are mid range hotels. These have gen­er­ally been very good, and rel­a­tively cheap. Oddly, the cheap­est place I’ve stayed in — La Paz — had the most expen­sive mid range hotel ($20/US.) Are­quipa was $18, Cusco was $16.

The hotel we stum­bled upon in La Paz is pretty basic, and frankly I don’t like it. It’s at best OK, but I feel the need to spend more money, and so I go look­ing for hotels. Down the street from my Mon­day morn­ing hotel was a very nice, west­ern­ized cof­fee shop. I stop in and have a very nice capuc­cino and an Amer­i­can Break­fast (which means three eggs, cooked very well.) Ser­vice is a lit­tle slow, which is OK with me — I’m read­ing up on La Paz, and play­ing Soli­taire. Always with the Soli­taire. Out­side the win­dow of the cof­fee shop, I see a whole bunch of cops dressed in riot gear. Even­tu­ally I find out why — while I’m eat­ing I see that some sort of protest is going on. I see it going by out­side, so I fig­ure it is prob­a­bly best to get far away from there. I pay as quick as I can, but when I leave I find that I’m right in the mid­dle of it. Granted, as protest go, it’s not that bad — it seems to be mainly natively dressed older women (much bet­ter than say, soc­cer hooli­gans), but just the same I want to be far away. So, I high tail it out of there, towards where my next hotel is sup­posed to be. I can’t find my sec­ond choice, so I go with my third — — Hostal Naira and it was fine, if a lit­tle expen­sive. It had all the things that I wanted — cen­tral loca­tion, lots’ of hot water, com­fort­able bed and seem­ingly secure (how can you ever tell that though?)

I’m feel­ing pretty bad, so I don’t do much today, but I did have one goal in mind for the day, and for La Paz. What I need to do is get a Brazil­ian Visa, and that means find­ing the Brazil­ian Con­sulate. There is a main street that seems to be the heart of La Paz, and I take it the entire way down. The street is kind of inter­est­ing in that changes names about four times in about three miles. On my way towards the Con­sulate, the road splits, with each direc­tion being a dif­fer­ent street. I don’t catch that the first time, but after a cou­ple of kilo­me­ters I do, and drop down to the other street. I don’t know it at the time, but I miss the Con­sulate by about two blocks. Once I find the cor­rect street, I see a lot of con­sulates and embassies, includ­ing a huge US embassy. Think­ing I’m on the right street I keep going until it’s clearly not Embassy Row any more, and turn around. On the way back, I find the Brazil­ian Ambas­sadors res­i­dence, and the guards out front point me the cor­rect loca­tion (it’s near the Radis­son hotel.) Com­ing back that way, I get there to find it’s closed. Of course, there isn’t any infor­ma­tion about hours or any­thing else, so I find another entrance to the office build­ing and ask the secu­rity guard. Appar­ently it’s closed for Siesta. I’m in the depths of my sick­ness, so I fig­ure its time for my Siesta too. I make my way back to my hotel (and pass yet another protest, this one block­ing one way of the main street — its divided) and sleep for a while, and awake feel­ing some­what bet­ter, but I don’t go back to the Embassy. The rest of the day I find an inter­net cafe, cruise the web for a while and even­tu­ally grab some food and go to sleep too late. While watch­ing TV again, I notice that yet another road is blocked. The road south — AKA, the most dan­ger­ous road in the world is blocked. on Fri­day the road into the city from the North, the one I was on, was blocked. Appar­ently there are also some sorts of protest or riots in Santa Cruz, the “offi­cial” cap­i­tal (in real­ity, every­thing is in La Paz except for the supreme court, which is in Santa Cruz.)

The next morn­ing, Tues­day, I head down­stairs and grab a cof­fee at the cafe on the first floor. This is prob­a­bly the worst day of my being sick, and I feel hor­ri­ble. As Barry White sings, at 9 a.m. “I’m gonna love you a long time, girl”, next to me sit a Wis­con­sin woman and her hus­band who ini­tially annoy me. She com­ments on remarks made by another amer­i­can tourist about the war being waged for the wrong rea­sons (which peo­ple with the fact agree. Some­thing like 60 per­cent of peo­ple who voted for he who will not be named thought there were ties between Al Queda and Hussien, and thought we’d already found weapons of mass destruc­tion. Both are false, yet pre­sented as rea­sons for the war by you know who.) I already don’t like her, feel like hell, but then she comes over and says “you read eng­lish — do you speak eng­lish too? Ini­tially I was kind of annoyed by her, but then I real­ized that she is buzzing on Coca tea. She just got in, and isn’t feel­ing well, so she starts in on the Coca, and kept at it. And she’s buzzing about 90 miles an hour. She’s ask­ing me where to find leaves you can trust, and how you chew it, etc. Even­tu­ally she starts ask­ing me if it’s OK to bring coca tea into the US. The lit­tle devil on my right shoul­der wanted to tell her “Sure, bring all you can carry. They don’t care.” The devil on the other shoul­der wanted to tell her she could but she’d have to carry it where the sun don’t shine. I don’t know why she thinks I’m an expert on US Coca impor­ta­tion. Her hus­band has suc­cess­fully tuner her out. I’m hop­ing my hack­ing and cough­ing will stop her, but it doesn’t — even­tu­ally her hus­band takes her away as they start their sure to be inter­est­ing day.

I have the same goals at hand, plus I want to book a tour to some ruins nearby. I find a travel agent rec­om­mended by my Rough Guide and book my tour for the fol­low­ing day — Wednes­day. It’s about $15/US, which like most of Bolivia, is cheap. I jet on down to Con­sulate, and talk to some­one and find out what I need. It’s a pain for me, but I guess the US is a pain for most of the world. Brazil, how­ever, is alone in doing to Amer­i­cans what Amer­i­can does to the rest of the world. I think I may even­tu­ally get fin­ger­printed if news reports are right (just like we do to every­body else.) The worst part is that I have to pay $100/US to apply for a visa — eas­ily the most expen­sive coun­try for a Brazil­ian Visa. $100 isn’t a lot of money for me, but for some­one from Brazil, it’s a lot of money, and a much more oner­ous restric­tion. I’m some­what thank­ful it isn’t higher. In addi­tion to the money I also have to fill out another form that I imag­ine is taken directly from the US Visa appli­ca­tion form. This is a sep­a­rate form that is only for Amer­i­cans, and it ask a whole bunch of silly ques­tions that I know we ask, includ­ing the clas­sic ” Do I intend to par­take in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties while in the US.” Too bad we didn’t have that before 9/11. It sure would have stopped those terrorist.

I need to get some pic­tures taken for the visa, get a few pho­to­copies and deposit my $100 into Banco de Brazil. I leave, and head towards the bank. Every­thing goes smoothly, if some­what slowly — most notably it takes me about 20 min­utes to get my pic­tures. I rush back to the con­sulate, and end up miss­ing it by eight min­utes. Damnit!! It takes two days to get the visa, and I can’t come back until Thurs­day (Wednes­day I’m on a tour), which means I can’t pick up my Visa until the fol­low­ing Mon­day, and am prob­a­bly stuck in this bor­ing town until at least then. I don’t have much of a choice, so I head back down­town and grab a bite to eat. I go back to my hotel for a short while, until I’m feel­ing a lit­tle bet­ter. There are a lot of peo­ple sell­ing stuff on the streets here, and a ton of shops and mar­kets to explore. Specif­i­cally I’d like to see a mar­ket that is sup­posed to have a a bunch of local herbs and witch­ing supplies.

While walk­ing along, I did come across one really inter­est­ing site. It was off the main drag, but still near the heart of town. It was a store sell­ing huge stacks of money, includ­ing stack after stack of three inch thick bun­dles of $100 bills. There were equally large stacks of other money I didn’t rec­og­nize. There was a pretty strong temp­ta­tion to see just how much that stack of money cost, but I resisted. I couldn’t imag­ine any good com­ing from it, and I’m too pretty for prison. Next door to the money store was an Adult The­ater, which was the first one I’d seen in Latin Amer­ica. There was a great sign out front, but I didn’t want to flash an expen­sive cam­era (or even my cheap one) in this appar­ently seedy part of town. A lit­tle later, and the tar­get of my walk today, was a prison in La Paz. Appar­ently they took an entire city block and turned it into a prison. I guess inside there, you can live as well as you can on the out­side if you have money. My tour book is mixed on if you can take a tour or not, and well, I’m too pretty even to tour a prison.

Even­tu­ally I found an inter­net cafe where I could plug my lap­top in, and life was good. After some time online, I found a really cheap place to eat. It was right around the cor­ner from my hotel, and it was essen­tially a chicken breast and wing and some fries — the total was about $1.50. La Paz is a pretty cheap place. Back to my hotel, I watched some more TV, and found out a cou­ple of things about LP. First — they don’t have any prob­lem show­ing women in thong biki­nis on TV (includ­ing one woman who flashed what part of her back­side you couldn’t see.) On two sep­a­rate shows, they had these quite pretty girls going down a run­way. I never fig­ured out if there was a con­test going on, or if it is part of a series. Each girl came out, the crowd hoots and then the next girl comes out. One of the two run­ways was shown on two sep­a­rate news pro­grams. Sec­ond — there isn’t a lot of TV in Bolivia. It appears that there are a lot of pub­lic access TV shows, and a lot of news shows. There are a cou­ple of TV series shot in, and set in Mex­ico. But most of the stuff looked like it could have been shot with han­dled video cam­eras. Oh — and the road south is still blocked. And there are still protest in Santa Cruz.

The next day is Wednes­day, and I’m off to see the Ruins at Tiahua­naco (unless the road is blocked.) I don’t have a lot of time, so I just grab a quick cup of cof­fee, and run into my coca fiend friend again. She starts ask­ing me more about coca, and about bring­ing it into the US. Again I tell her it’s a bad idea, we’ve got a zero tol­er­ance pol­icy, etc. Then she ask me “how do you know so much about coca.” I just say — “I’ve been famil­iar with it for long time.” hop­ing to be mys­te­ri­ous enough to get her to leave me alone. A day later she ask me if I work for the gov­ern­ment. I laugh and say “that’s not how I know about it.”

The ruins at Tiahua­naco were pretty cool. It was founded about three thou­sand years ago, lasted almost a thou­sand years and at it’s peak had 50,000 peo­ple liv­ing there. The ruins them­selves were pretty basic, but you could see the poten­tial. When it comes to ruins, Mex­ico has done by far the best job of restor­ing them. But then again, they are also the rich­est coun­try I’ve been in ( I imag­ine Brazil is richer, mainly because it’s 170 mil­lion peo­ple vs 100 for Mex­ico, but I don’t know about the stan­dard of liv­ing or income.) About the time we get there, it starts rain­ing, and rain­ing hard. Our first two stops on the tour are muse­ums, which are pretty inter­est­ing, and a good place to be in the rain. By the time we’ve seen the two muse­ums, the clay ground out­side is very wet and slip­pery. It’s still rain­ing, and quite cold. I’m wear­ing my down jacket under­neath my rain jacket and my hat, and I’m still very cold. I’m think­ing this is the very last place I should be right now. The rain is keep­ing me from get­ting very many pic­tures, but I do man­age to get a few (and get my cam­era wet in the process. Even­tu­ally, because I’m try­ing to blow the rain drops off the lens, the cam­era stops work­ing. I have my fear that my cam­era is ruined, so I stop tak­ing pic­tures for a long while. Even­tu­ally it starts work­ing again. After lunch, it stopped rain­ing, and we vis­ited one more ruin and got some decent pic­ture, but mainly of flowers.

While we are walk­ing around in the museum, and out­side, this ger­man guy pulls a Canon 20D with a 75–300/IS lens out of his cam­era bag. Once I stop drool­ing, I start talk­ing to him, and he’s a very nice guy. We talk cam­eras for a while, then come to find out he rides a BMW 1200GS (the new improved ver­sion of my bike.) He’s been hik­ing around Argentina and Bolivia for a cou­ple of weeks, and has some sto­ries about Patag­o­nia. We ended up hang­ing out for the rest of the trip, which was pretty nice. I still wasn’t feel­ing good, so con­ver­sa­tion didn’t come eas­ily, but I had a really good time talk­ing to him. We exchanged e-mails, and I hope to be able to keep in touch with him, or at least see his pic­tures. He had some very, very good pic­tures on his cam­era, and was a very inter­est­ing guy.

On the trip there, the woman giv­ing the tour gave some very inter­est­ing tid­bits to our tour. La Paz was orig­i­nally founded north of where it is now, then moved to it’s cur­rent loca­tion. That town is quite small, but up on a plateau and quite a few miles from where the city is now. Bolivia has 8 mil­lion peo­ple. Of those 8 mil­lion, 1 mil­lion live in La Paz, and another 1 mil­lion live in a city on the Plateau just out­side of La Paz. It’s called El Alto. Another 1 mil­lion live in Santa Cruz, and most of the rest live in a few other cities. The coun­try­side of Bolivia is pretty sparse, and very mountainous.

Being in the rain and mud as long as I was made for some filthy clothes and shoes, and for a very cold Greg. Back at the hotel, I took a very long, very hot shower and changed into my clean pair of pants. I went down­stairs to the Cof­fee shop on the first floor of the hotel and had a cou­ple of grande espres­sos and a slice of pie, and tried to catch up on e-mail and my post (this post, when com­plete, will bring me com­pletely up to date. Oh what Joy it will be.) Then to the inter­net cafe until time to eat. Notice a pat­tern? yup, a pat­tern of boredom.

Thurs­day is the big day. I have copies copied, my pic­tures taken, and my money paid. I get there shortly after they open and turn every­thing in. The only flaw is that they need to keep my pass­port until I get my Visa (on Mon­day.) My orig­i­nal idea was to take a plane to Potosi and see the mine nearby. But, can I fly with­out a pass­port? I don’t know. So plan B would be to fly to San­ti­ago and get the Visa there, but I’d have to pay another $100 and deal with this has­sle again. So what do I do — some­thing dif­fer­ent, of course. I decide to skip Chile, since I want to go to Brazil , and frankly, my time is run­ning out.

This was a pretty big real­iza­tion for me. My flight out of Buenos Aires is the 24th of Feb­ru­ary. I hadn’t planned on going to Brazil, but since Simone is there, I guess I’m hav­ing to change my plans. The week of Car­ni­val, in Sao Paulo, is the first week of Feb­ru­ary. The week before she doesn’t have class at Uni­ver­sity, so she’ll have time to pick me up at the air­port, which makes me happy, and we’ll be able to do some things together. To fit this in means I’m going to have to get rid of Chile from my plans. I’m OK with that. If you can’t be flex­i­ble, then trav­el­ing isn’t for you. Now that I’m see­ing the end, I’m both happy and sad. It will be good to get my life back on track, and see if I can make the things hap­pen that I want and need to hap­pen. I haven’t thought too much about such things lately, but now I guess I need to start fac­ing them.

On my way back from the embassy, with­out pass­port, I decide to see if I can fly to Potosi. The travel agent I used last time told me there were only flights on Tues­day and Fri­day. So, Fri­day it is. BUT, the flight on Fri­day is can­celled, but I can fly to Sucre, and take a three hour bus ride to Potosi. I book the flight, make a few phone calls, and head back to my hotel. I’m not really inter­ested in doing much more in La Paz. Frankly, once you get away from all the protest, there isn’t a lot to see or do. At least it’s cheap. So I book my ticket, and decide to head to Sucre — the flight is at a decent hour for once.

That night I head to a steak place listed in my Rough Guide. There must be a lot of places that exist solely because of these travel guides. For not the first time, I walk into a restau­rant, and I’m the only one there. Even­tu­ally other trav­el­ers enter, but for the bal­ance of the night it’s just these two table. Ser­vice is good, but it’s eas­ily the most expen­sive place I’ve eaten in La Paz by far. My steak, which was very good, and Argen­tinean, and the half bot­tle of wine I got (Argen­tinean again) came to, with tip, to 130 Boli­vars, or $16.25. It’s too much money when I ate an entire din­ner for less than two dol­lars before. It was good — very, very good but I won’t do it again. As I’m leav­ing the waiter, who was some­what odd, tells me some­thing from across the room. I don’t know exactly what he was say­ing, but I caught the word “bonita”, which means beau­ti­ful. I don’t know what he’s talk­ing about, but there wasn’t any­thing beau­ti­ful there — just me. It made me ner­vous, so I gulped my wine and left quickly. Back to the hotel, with the door securely locked, and more protest on TV. This would be rel­e­vant later.

The next morn­ing, Fri­day, I get up and head to the air­port. I’m feel­ing bet­ter than I had in a while, even though I’ve still got some con­ges­tion. I for­got that wine has sul­fites in it, which some­times causes prob­lems with aller­gies. I get to the air­port a lit­tle later than I thought I should, but it ended up being OK. At 9:30 a.m. I check in and am told that the flight won’t be at 10:30, as orig­i­nally planned, but instead at 3:10 p.m. My first reac­tion is to get upset, but then I real­ized there wasn’t any­thing I could do about it, so I might as well use that time to catch up on my La Paz entry. I won­der what step that is on a 12 step pro­gram. I hope it’s 9 or 10.

So that’s what I do. When I sit down, I notice my elderly coca friend, who I’ve kind of taken a shin­ning to now. She lives in Wis­con­sin, but taught school for many years, then moved to Coun­sel­ing. Since I’m finally feel­ing human again, I’m enjoy­ing her com­pany, but it only last about 10 min­utes before she and her hus­band catch their flight. As I’m sit­ting there typ­ing away, I notice that there are more and more peo­ple, for more and more flight, con­gre­gat­ing. I don’s speak any span­ish, but I even­tu­ally fig­ure out that there are a lot of strikes in Santa Cruz, includ­ing one at the air­port. Have you noticed a theme? Appar­ently a lot of peo­ple are upset about the Pres­i­dent, and are try­ing to get him to step down. This is how they got rid of the last pres­i­dent. There are strikes almost every day, includ­ing a few that have turned vio­lent, and a few oth­ers that were tear gassed. The strike at the air­port is sup­posed to be over before too long, so I wait. And wait. Even­tu­ally I decide that I don’t want to fly to Sucre any­more. My worst case sce­nario would be get­ting stuck in Sucre and hav­ing to take a bus back, or some­how not get­ting back until Wednes­day or Thurs­day. So I decide to go back to La Paz, and try to fly to Sao Paulo on Monday.

This plan works out pretty well. I’m able to get my money back, and I get a flight to Sao Paulo on Tues­day, on Var­tig. It’s a brazil­ian car­rier, and shouldn’t depend on other Boli­vian air­ports. There wasn’t enough time between the con­sulate open­ing and my flight on Mon­day, but that’s OK. I’m cur­rently back at my hotel, same room, nurs­ing some bruises and hav­ing an espresso grande, wait­ing for the skies to clear.