Dance-off, Bolivian style

Sometimes the best experiences come from following random leads. I found an obscure flyer for a cultural dance show while in an internet cafe a few nights ago and ended up meeting one of the dancers a little later; he was passing by and spotted me clutching the flyer and emplored me to come. Never one to resist a personal invite, we hopped in a cab WAY uptown last night to see what Boris and his companions had for us in the promised evening of Malamba and Chaqueño.

Naively, we turned up a little earlier than the stated start time, sweetly forgetting that we were in fact in Boliva which runs entirely on its own schedule. Still, after a few hours of waiting and sipping the strong local brew, the small but nice cultural center we had arrived at burst into life, buzzing entirely with locals. Boris seemed dutifully amazed that we had actually come and we realized that we were in for a gem of an evening, Bolivian style.

We lost ourselves in the evening as group after group of dancers and musicians, clad in beautiful and varied costume, amazed us with their skills. I´m told the Chaqueño dances were a Argentinian-Bolivian fusion and almost all of them were centered around the theme of wooing and attraction. Conceived from the idea of a rooster courting a hen, the dances included the men displaying machismo through stamping and very fancy and expressive footwork while the women were more demure and coy about the advances of their suitors. The audience were pretty vocal about their preferred groups and took to the floor for their own dancing during the breaks.

It was so much fun being so very submerged in this beautiful culture for an evening , with only our white faces glowing back at each other :) The waitress was horrified at the thought of us gringos going out and finding our own cab at 1 am so she got the doorman to find us a ´real´one. Definitely one of my favourite evenings on the trip so far.

Lost in Translation 2

Indeed, what would be a chicken´s fantasy?

Jungle Pictures

Piranas, trees, rivers, and sore feet!!

La Paz take 2

Well we made it back to La Paz early this morning on what ended up being a 19-hour, bumpy, slightly perilous bus journey that rose a full 3,500 m from start to finish. Needless to say we were a teensy bit chilly when we arrived...

Having left the humid jungle behind us we are back at our crash pad, the ever-bustling Cactus Hostel, to see some more of La Paz. Though the offical capital is still Sucre, La Paz very much is the de facto capital of Bolivia and definitely behaves as such. Its like New York with much less structure. Few discernable road rules, throngs of markets, museums, etc. Gear shift from the jungle life!

We are staying in the witches market area (above). Its not so much cauldrons as every imaginable herb, tea, talisman and even dried up baby llama fetuses (spot them?) - all to bring you some sort of luck or health. Fortune tellers read coca tea leaves or tarot cards on the streets to passers by. We are also right in the middle of the main artesan area; no doubt I won´t escape without some knitted somethingorother by the end of the weekend!

Today I discovered the heavenly properties of Bolivian salteñas, small empanadas sold in stalls on the street filled with meaty/chickeny/vegetably goodness. I´m hooked, while Andy laments my fate for eating food from the street :)

Jungle Extravaganza

Here we are in warm and sleepy little Rurrenabaque, a little town in the Amazon basin. We survived our three day jungle trip to get here which included boating along the rivers, hiking parts of the jungle and sleeping on the riverbed each night under millions of stars.

As ever on such trips, it was somewhat of a motley crew but with a few momorable characters and our very enthusiastic guides, Miguel and Ivon. Once I saw the boat I felt incredibly stupid for having asked after a bathroom, seeing as it really was more of a raft! (Each morning I saw the driver surrepticiously bailing water out of the boat...)

Turns out that the company we booked with is the only one of its kind that does this trip so it really felt like a unique experience. On the way we picked up Pedro, a local who lives in a small community along the river. Pedro was our guide for the jungle hikes and showed us the medicinal and poisonous flora and fauna in the jungle. We even had the priviledge of hiking through Madidi National Park, one of the most protected and biodiverse areas of jungle in the Amazon basin.

No jungle extravaganza is complete without getting up close and personal with nature! As well as seeing monkeys, stalking wild boar and of course receiving a plethora of mosquito bites, we had a few other memorable encounters...one one hike we stopped at a swamp to fish for piranas and yours truly caught the first one! Then on our last day as we boated toward Rurrenabaque, we stopped at a beautiful natural swimming hole with waterfall. Of course, I jumped in headfirst along with a few others before realising that there was some badass fish living in there with nasty stingers. OUCH! Three of us received several nasty swollen stings that left us in quite real amounts of pain for about 5 or 6 hours. Yikes. Not to be left out, Andy managed to pick up a couple of hardcore tick-like insects that well and truly attached themselves to him. Nice.

(I would also like to take this moment to share my personal pride and joy moment: needless to say, changing clothes was not something that really happened - at all - for most of us during the trip. So when I did get changed into my swimsuit to dive into the aforementioned pool, what did I find curled up in belly button but a little dead bug! Nice. )

We´re taking a day or two here in Rurre to soak up the sun and sample the numerous hammocks in town. Then back to La Paz for some more altitude and to continue our Bolivian adventures. Jungle pics to follow...

La Paz and beyond...

As our bus wound its way into La Paz from Lake Titicaca Millay worked out that when she did her parachute jump in New Zealand a few years ago it was from a LOWER altitude than the one at which we currently stand. We´re currently 3,800m (that´s 12,500ft) above sea level and trekking around this steep hilly city is a constantly breathless experience.

As it turns out though this time we´re just passing through, we´ve managed to find a jungle trip that is going to take us tomorrow by boat deep into the Amazon Basin. We signed up eager for the adventure that will take 3 days and involve camping in the jungle for 2 nights. It was only after we´d handed over our money that the reality began to sink in and we started to wonder what we had gotten ourselves in for. In this part of the world ´boat´ could mean anything from a pre-war rust bucket to a raft; my Spanish wasn't good enough to enquire about the existence of a motor. The one thing Millay did discover was that it definitely doesn't have a toilet, I don´t think we've ever prayed so hard for ´good health´ if you know what I mean.

Still if we survive the trip down there the town we´ll stay in for a couple of days, Rurrenabaque, should be gorgeous and chilled. The other slight adventure is that is that the only way back to La Paz USED to be (our mothers - notice the USED) via what was officially recognised as the "world´s most dangerous road". Apparently drunk driving, a 3.2m wide mountain road and 600m drops wasn't conducive to a happy driving experience. Luckily, thanks to a huge international development grant, a new road has now been built that is apparently a lot safer and the old road is now restricted solely to hiking and mountain bike tours that are advertised everywhere as ´ride the road of death´. Don´t worry Donna, I've got Millay on a short leash on this one!

Copacabana

We spent a few nights in cute little Copacabana, on the shore of the huge Lake Titicaca, which at 3,820 m is the world´s highest navigable lake. On it are several islands, including some made entirely of reeds on which the Aymara tribe still live. The Aymara and Quechua peoples of Peru and Bolivia accept as their creation story that their sun-god, Viracocha and the first Incan appeared on the Isla del Sol (island of the sun) under direct orders from the sun. The lake is beautiful and serene, and its hard to remember you´re so high up, until you try to walk anywhere that is!

Of course day 2, I got itchy feet and decided to prop Andy up in a bar with the Liverpool v Chelsea match on while I ventured off on a rented bike along the lake. SO tiring! At almost 4,000 metres (what´s that, like 13,000 feet?) my lungs were the size of a peanut!

Still, I managed to bike to the Bolivian version of the floating islands (Islas Flotante) and along the way befriended a local boy, also on bike, who happened to live there. He very kindly gave me a tour in his fishing boat of the small but very well made reed islands and he even caught a trout for his dinner on the way home!

For some reason I thought it would be a GREAT idea to get back to Copacabana and right away climb the steep hill that overlooks the bay and the lake, Cerro Calvario, to watch the sunset. By this point my lungs were the size of a pea and it was all I could do to stumble down and pour myself into a restaurant to sample some of the lake´s famous trout. I have never slept so well. Tomorrow, off to the big smoke of La Paz.

Bolivian Border Blues

There have been many occasions I have lamented the colour of my passport - blue, for American - and on no occasion more so than the day spent leading up to and including crossing from Peru into Bolivia. Lets just run through the differences between my checklist and Andy´s checklist for getting into Bolivia:

Millay:

1. Get up early. Go to Bolivian embassy in Puno, Peru. Get told I need a form which he can´t possibly give me himself, but I have to find online. Get appropriate website addresses.

2. Find that none of the web addresses work. Of course.

3. Nevertheless, go ahead with collecting all the things I need for the crossing, including:

4. Passport

5. Photocopy of passport

6. Yellow fever vaccination card (Karaoke Eddie very kindly took us to a clean clinic in Cusco to get our shots, don´t worry mum!)

7. Photocopy of yellow fever vaccination card

8. Credit card

9. Photocopy of credit card

10. 4x passport photos

11. Letter proving hostel reservations in Bolivia...and last but most certainly not least,

12. $100 US dollars in cold hard ca$h. !!!!

Andy

1. Get the bus to the border.

2. Show passport. Get it stamped.

3. Walk onto Bolivian soil.

Where is fairness in that!!! *sigh*. At least all went well and I´m not in a Bolivian jail cell. We arrived at nightfall to the chilled little town of Copacabana (yes that´s right, the original) where we intend to plant ourselves, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, for a few nights before hitting the big smoke of La Paz.