Cochabamba is our new home

We are in Cochabamba, Bolivia, our new home for the next few months. Cochabamba is much warmer than La Paz, because its altitude is just over 8,000 feet, compared to La Paz at over 11,000 feet. It´s known as the city of eternal springtime, because the temperature is just about always in the 70s or 80s. Right now, we´re in the rainy season and so it usually rains at least some every day. There are tropical flowers and banana and palm trees in town, but on the hills above town there are cacti. The city of Cochabamba is the capital of the department of Cochabamba. You may have heard about the flooding in Cochabamba recently, displacing thousands of people and killing some. The flooding is in the lower more tropical regions, not in the capital city.

We will be here for the next few months, while I do some short-term work with an NGO that works with foreign volunteers, placing them with local organizations and host families, and offering them classes in Spanish and Quechua. I work thirty hours per week (with a 2-hour siesta every day from 12 to 2!) and Gary is taking intensive individual Spanish lessons three hours per day. He´s been in class for a week, and is learning a ton! He does homework every evening and has made flash cards for memorizing vocabulary.

We have a room in a really nice house above the NGO´s office. We have a huge window that we can keep open most of the time in this climate, overlooking the town and the mountains. And we have tons of closet space, probably enough for one shelf per item of clothing, considering that we only have what can fit into our backpacks! On the day we arrived, we sat on our bed and watched a rainbow appear over the mountains. We also have a nice balcony.

We share the house with three roommates, from Sweden, Scotland and Finland. One of our roommates is learning Quechua because she is a PhD anthropology student preparing to do field work with Quechua-speaking people. Another is an intern for the NGO. The third is married to the anthropology student.

We are in a pretty nice neighborhood, but the owner of the house across the street seems to have fallen upon hard times. Someone spray painted the words deudor moroso or “delinquent debtor” on his fence. Now it seems the family is trying to scrape up some funds to pay their debt, because there is a sign on the door saying habitación en anticretico. A habitación is a room. Anticretico is an unusual Bolivian system of getting a loan on your property without going through a bank. The owner of the room can convey the room to someone (I´ll call that someone the lessee for lack of a more accurate English translation) under anticretico. The lessee pays a sum of money to the owner, and the lessee gets to occupy the room for a certain period of time. When the period is over, the owner must pay the full amount of money back to the lessee. So basically the anticretico functions as a loan from the lessee to the owner, guaranteed by the right to occupy the property until it is paid back. You can put a room or an apartment or a house or whatever into anticretico. And all of these transactions are done in U.S. dollars.

Our house is two blocks from a pretty plaza, where dance groups practice for the upcoming carnaval, February 9. We can often hear the carnaval music from our room. Cochabamba is full of beautiful plazas, and the people really use them! During siesta time, people rest or take naps in the plazas. Kids play there with their parents or nannies. Boy scouts have meetings there. Couples make out there. Poor women wash their clothes in the public fountains, and then lay them out to dry in the grass. Now, in these weeks before carnaval, people (mostly young boys) run around certain plazas with water balloons, throwing them at anyone they can (mostly young girls). This is all in good fun and is a carnaval tradition. I´ve been hit twice. The first time, the balloon landed near me and just splattered me a bit. The second balloon hit me in the neck but not very hard, and it didn´t break. You do have to watch out, though, because some people freeze their water balloons!

Bolivia, like much of Latin America, thrives on penny capitalism, and around the plazas you can see people selling bags of water balloons, ready to be thrown. These vendors usually have a plastic tub, which they fill from the public fountain. They use a hand operated plastic pumping device to suck up the water from the tub and pump it into the water balloons. This way, people who don´t own a sink can still fill water balloons, and they can do it on the street.

It feels good to settle down in one place for a few months, after traveling every few days since the beginning of October. While we never wanted to have more belongings while traveling, it was funny to notice that as soon as we settled down we wanted to buy a few things for the house and for ourselves. Not much, just a pair of pants for me (I only had two pairs of pants, and you can wear out an item of clothing amazingly quickly when you wear it almost every day) and some tupperware for the kitchen. (In the U.S. there´s no need to buy tupperware since so many food items come in non-recyclable plastic containers, but that is not the case here. Yogurt and milk, for example, come in plastic bags). I bought my pants in La Cancha, the big market, and I bought men´s pants since the women here tend to be a lot shorter than I am! I later learned that I could have had a tailor make a pair of pants for me for under US$6. Next time!

One nice thing about settling down in a house is that we don´t have any more forced exposure to TV. While traveling, we were constantly subjected to movies on the buses, TVs in the shared spaces of our lodging and TVs in restaurants. Here in our house in Cochabamba, there is no TV and we are happy about that. Now we are just subjected to the hawking cries of street vendors who pass by our house every morning selling newspapers from a bicycle, fruit from a push cart, and other things we might need. The fruit guy is the most annoying, because he has some sort of a loud speaker that distorts what he says to the point of being unintelligible, but does make a lot of noise. And since he comes by every day, we know that he sells fruit and we don´t need to understand what he is saying. I´m glad that this type of advertising is not practiced in the U.S. (But as I´m writing this, I just heard the newspaper hawker outside, and I stepped out the door to buy one. She was riding her bike and had the newspapers in a plastic bag on account of the rain).

Going back to work was not as hard as I thought it would be. I´m helping the NGO gain 501(c)(3) non-profit status in the U.S., and that is interesting to me, and not very stressful. Plus, I know that it´s temporary and we still have quite a few months left to travel once I´m done. It gives us a nice opportunity to stay in one place, and for Gary to study Spanish. He gets to practice his Spanish while he does the grocery shopping and other errands.

Cochabamba has a strong market economy, with La Cancha, one of the largest markets in Bolivia. There are some supermarkets, but they are tiny and don´t have much selection. You can get everything you need at La Cancha, the street market. La Cancha sprawls over blocks and blocks and blocks. You just have to find your way to the section that sells what you´re looking for. For example, the other day Gary and I were looking for a potato peeler. We just asked a vendor where we could buy one, and she pointed us toward the kitchen item section, where we found rows of vendors selling all kinds of dishes and kitchen wares. The first few offered us cheese graters, but the third one we tried had the potato peeler we wanted. Unfortunately, on the way to the potato peeler section we had to walk through the meat section, with raw chunks of meat and parts of dead animals hanging and sitting all over the place. I tried not to breathe or look at anything but the floor where I was stepping. I did have to step over a few pools of blood, and Gary saw intestines.

I really don´t like shopping anywhere, including in the U.S. Doing it at La Cancha makes it more interesting, but it´s a pretty overwhelming experience, especially on Wednesday and Sunday, which are the busiest days. Fortunately for me, Gary does most of the shopping. Also, on Friday mornings there is a tiny open air market three blocks from our house. They close off a section of the street, and vendors put up booths. I went there with a list of things we needed, and found all of them, from laundry detergent to vegetable bullion to avocados to used clothing, with no problem. I did see a woman changing her baby´s diaper right in the display basket for the tomatoes she was selling. This is why you have to be so careful about following the “peel it, cook it or forget it” rule when it comes to fruits and vegetables.

I did have a case of turista during the first week we were here. It´s pretty much unavoidable when traveling in Bolivia. I think I got sick from an apple juice beverage that I drank at a restaurant, which may not have been made from boiled or purified water. My health travel guide says, “It sounds gross, but basically you get diarrhea by eating other people´s faeces, through contaminated food, water and eating utensils.” It´s not hard to imagine how this happens here, where the tap water is contaminated and few public restrooms have soap, and some do not even have hand washing water. (You flush the toilet by dipping a modified bleach jug into a 55-gallon drum of water, and then pouring it down the toilet. Many of the toilets don´t even have a toilet tank). My turista involved throwing up for eight hours (maybe you didn´t really want to know that). But the good thing is that it comes on quickly and is over quickly. One thing I´ve learned is that people will tell you to take stoppers like Immodium, but you really don´t want to do that. It´s best to let the contamination get out of your body as quickly as possible. Save your Immodium for when you have to take a long bus ride while you have turista, and consider it carefully even then. Taking stoppers can make you feel like you have diarrhea and constipation at the same time; not pleasant.

Here, we reduce the chance of getting sick because we prepare our own food and eat at home most of the time, so we can control the cleanliness of our food. But still, we like to eat at restaurants sometimes. Otherwise, we don´t get to try the local food, and Cochabamba is known for its cuisine. Yesterday we had a delicious sweet potato called camote. It´s purple inside, and very, very sweet; sweeter than the orange sweet potatoes we get in the U.S. Now that we´ve tried it in a restaurant, we know what it is and can make it at home. You can bake or boil it. The meals at Cochabamba restaurants are huge, kind of American style, and tend to contain a ton of meat, although there are three or four vegetarian restaurants here. Gary and I can split a meal and both be very full afterwards.

Cochabamba has a beautiful main plaza, surrounded by the state government buildings. It´s always full of people sitting and talking, selling things, and strolling around. Indigenous kids beg for money. But what impresses me is the political activity. There are always several board displays where people post leftist political messages. And the boards are always surrounded by a crowd of people reading the messages. There are also several vendors selling copies of the new proposed constitution and other legal materials, as well as documentaries about Che Guevara and Evo Morales and the plight of the coca growers in this region. (By the way, the coca grown in certain regions of Bolivia is the kind that is good for chewing and for tea. The coca grown in the Cochabamba region is good for … nobody will say what. But last week a house in Cochabamba burned down because someone was manufacturing cocaine there).

Also in the plaza there are always several people selling pirated DVDs. You can buy any movie you might want here, and also computer software, for just over US $1. The only exception is the few movies made in Bolivia. I´ve heard that the authorities here do care if you pirate Bolivian movies.

I´d like to take some pictures of La Cancha market and the other activities happening here, but people, especially indigenous people, don´t like to be photographed without permission. That´s why I take a lot of pictures from bus windows, a trick I learned from my friend Harald. Harald is also good at walking through a market shooting pictures literally from the hip, without looking through the view finder. I haven´t quite mastered that skill yet, but maybe I´ll try my hand at it later. Yesterday Gary and I took a tour in a double decker bus. We were on the top level, which was in the open air, and so I was able to take some pictures from there (while dodging water balloons) and I´ll upload them to the flickr site soon.

Harald´s run

Last week was Harald´s run! He ran more than 45 kilometers (28 miles), gaining 2,200 meters (7,260 feet) in altitude! He started at 5:30 a.m. in the plaza of Coroico, a town in the yungas of Bolivia, and he ran to the top of "the world´s most dangerous road."

The yungas are subtropical valleys of steep, forested slopes squeezed between the Cordillera and the Amazon lowlands. The village of Coroico is at 5,808 feet. Harald started by running 7 km downhill over wet cobblestones in the rain to Yolosa, the low point at 3,911 feet.

From there, he ran uphill on the old road from Coroico to La Paz. The road was built by Paraguayan prisoners of war, 50 years ago during the Chaco war. They built it by hand, with no dynamite, on steep mountain sides that plunge straight down many meters to the valley floor below.

The road is known as thw world´s most dangerous road, or the road of death. It is a dirt road, only one lane wide in many places. Noone knows how many buses and trucks and cars have plunged to the jungle floor below, because their remains are irretrievable in the terrain, and the fast-growing jungle plants quickly cover their path to destruction. But the many crosses lining the road give us some idea.

Harald hired, as support for his run, a man named Octavio who works for an adventure tour company. Octavio, in his 30s, has been driving the road of death since he was 18 years old. He started by driving a minibus full of passengers. Now he drives a Landrover as support for bicyclists who descend the road.

As far as anyone can tell us, nobody has ever tried to run up the road of death before, and Octavio was excited to act as Harald´s support in this endeavor. In fact, some of Octavio´s colleagues were jealous of his role.

As Harald ran, Octavio and Gary and I followed behind in the Landrover, refilling Harald´s water bottles and passing him bananas, grown fresh in the region.

As we rounded curve after narrow curve, looking down over the steep precipices, Octavio told us story after story of people who had died on the road. One of the deaths occurred while Octavio was driving a support vehicle for a group of cyclists going down the road. Two young Israeli men in the group were messing around, kicking and slapping each other as they sped down the road. One lost control and plunged over an edge. It took many hours to retrieve his body.

In another place, an Italian cyclist, startled by a truck honking its horn to warn oncoming traffic that it was rounding a curve only one lane wide, plunged to his death.

A bus driver, trying to make room for an oncoming truck, miscalculated and the bus, full of passengers, tumbled to the valley floor. Most of the bodies could not be retrieved. The spot is marked by one large cross and a group of smaller crosses.

In the 1950s a Bolivian dictator had five political prisoners thrown, alive, from a precipice along the road, called el balcón.

In another spot, a drunken truck driver lost control of his vehicle and plunged to his death, along with a load of lumber. Octavio tells me that all of the truck drivers keep coca leaves, cigarettes and alcohol on hand. The alcohol gives them a bit of energy for their long hours of driving, as long as they don´t drink too much. Octavio doesn´t seem to understand my shock upon hearing this.

Meanwhile, every day many groups of cyclists speed down the road, and apparently most of them make it to the bottom alive. I now appreciate the truth of their T-shirts, which say, "I survived the Carretera de la Muerte (death road)."

The Carretera de la Muerte has become a lot safer during the past year, as a new road to Coroico finally opened. Now, few vehicles use the old road, aside from the cyclists and their support vehicles. On our way up, we saw several people walking, two road maintenance crews, one large dual axel freight truck, one bus, three private vehicles that appeared to contain tourists, and four groups of cyclists with their support vehicles.

Harald was tired early on, maybe because of the muggy yunga climate at low altitude. Octavio served him some coca tea, which helped him with his energy. Harald ran, and crossed two rivers that flow over the road, and ran, and ran through a series of waterfalls, and ran, and reached the fog as he gained altitude, ran, and drank more coca tea. In one place he ran through the debris of an avalanche that had fallen over the road the night before. Earlier in the morning, truck drivers had cleared a path wide enough for a vehicle to pass. In all Harald ran until, after 7 hours and 21 minutes, he reached the end of the old road at a town (or series of stalls on the road) called Unduavi.

In total, Harald ran 28 miles and gained 7,260 feet in altitude. His high point, just before Unduavi, was at 3,600 meters, or 11,880 feet. Harald had wanted to reach La Cumbre pass, at 4,660 meters or 15,378 feet, surrounded by towering snowcapped peaks, but he will have to save that part of the run for another day.

Harald, who regularly trains anyway, trained for this run for six months, running up to 115 km every week, and during his visit to Bolivia he ran regularly at altitudes above 11,000 feet. He said that he had prepared well for the altitude but that he underestimated the difficulty of the changing climate during the run.

It was a wonderful experience to be a part of Harald´s run. Upon arriving back in La Paz, Harald was interviewed by a national Bolivian TV station and his story appeared on two news channels along with a picture of Harald and Gary and Octavio, and many of the other pictures that I took during the run.

Our friend Christian, another of our UWC classmates who is from Denmark but lives in Brazil with his wife Camila, also our classmate, also traveled to Coroico with us in order to support Harald on the run. However, Christian was experiencing his own run, a.k.a. tourist diarrhea, and wasn´t able to join us. Christian provided great support for Harald before the run in any case, as did Bertha.

Photos of Harald´s run are on our flickr site.

Before the run, we stayed at the Hotel Esmeralda in Coroico. We had a hotel suite that was the most beautiful we´ve ever seen! It had two floors. The bedroom upstairs had a whole wall of windows that open over a beautiful view of the valley and mountains and the town of Coroico. When we arrived, we could hear, through the open windows, a band practicing for carnaval.

The downstairs of our suite had a bathroom with a great, hot shower, a living room with a couch, and a beautiful balcony with a breakfast nook and hammock overlooking the same beautiful view. I think it would be wonderful to meet a group of family or friends at this hotel sometime (hint hint).

New Years with Bertha and Harald

We are in La Paz, Bolivia visiting two wonderful friends from the international high school, or United World College (UWC), that I attended in New Mexico.

Bertha is my dear friend from the UWC who is from Bolivia. I have wanted to visit her for years! Bertha lives in Switzerland with her husband Harald, who was also in my UWC class and who is from Germany. I saw Bertha at our ten year reunion, six years ago, but I had not seen Harald since we graduated in 1992! We lucked out that they are in Bolivia visiting Bertha´s family for the holidays. It is so wonderful to spend time with both of them, and also to meet Bertha´s family members, who are just as nice as Bertha is!

On a beautiful sunny day we visited the ruins of Tiwanaku, just outside of La Paz. The ruins are pre-Inca, from the Tiwanaku culture. Now, they are an important cultural site and Bertha attended a huge party there when Bolivia´s indigenous president, Evo Morales, was inaugurated.

We had a picnic outside the ruins, and took a minibus back to La Paz just as it started to rain. For the first few miles of our trip back, one passenger rode on the ladder on the back outside of the minibus. I think he did that because he couldn´t afford the fare. Yikes - we were glad when he got to his stop.

We had the most beautiful new years ever, on Lake Titicaca. The huge lake, at over 11,000 feet altitude, is one of the highest lakes in the world, and contains Isla del Sol, the legendary birthplace of the Incas. We joined a tour group for the first night, which was nice because everything was arranged and we spent New Years Eve with a really nice group of travelers from Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Quebec and Argentina.

Our boat took us to Isla del Sol, where burros carried our backpacks up the steep stone stairs to our hotel. Although we´re used to carrying backpacks, I don´t think any of us could have carried them up such a steep climb at that altitude. So thank goodness for the burros, which the locals use too, even for carrying all of their water from a spring at the base of the island up to the small villages above.

We had a New Years Eve party with the other people from our tour, with a buffet dinner of trout, potatoes and choclo (a Bolivian corn with huge kernels), and local folk musicians playing traditional Andean music. We had the whole New Years shindig with paper hats and horns, and dancing after midnight. We also observed a Bolivian custom of wearing new red underwear and eating 12 grapes, one for each month of the year. I think this was the first time I was awake for New Years Eve in years! It was a lot of fun.

The next day our guide, Vicente, took us by boat to Isla de la Luna where we visited a ruin and participated in an Aymara ceremony. It was similar to the ceremony that we did with Basilio, the shaman in Peru, except that we were present for the burning of the offering. Everyone felt peaceful and tranquil afterwards. We then had a traditional Aymara buffet, prepared by Vicente´s mother, on a cloth placed on the ground. (trout, potatoes, choclo ...) It was really nice.

We then departed from the tour to spend two more nights on the island, which were really relaxing and beautiful.

The people on Isla del Sol are Aymara, from the Tiwanaku culture. They are friendly to tourists, usually greeting us with a Good Morning, etc. The kids liked to ask us for candy, which we did not give them, but Bertha gave away her New Years horn which made two little boys really happy.

The island is agricultural, and the people farm small terraced plots of potatoes, corn, quinoa and fava beans. They rotate the crops each year, for a total of four years, and then let the land rest for four years.

There are no cars or vehicles on the island, and it is usually quiet except for the sound of donkeys, pigs and sheep. The llamas don´t seem to make any noise!

We stayed in a beautiful "hotel" which was really more like a house with four rooms for rent. From the balcony we had a beautiful view of Lake Titicaca and several islands, and mountains over 18,000 feet high on the far side of the lake. There were llamas and sheep, with babies, outside the rooms. Every adobe house in the town seemed to have a few farm animals associated with it. In front of our hotel there was a mother pig with several piglets living in an adobe pen. One of the piglets died while we were there, in a rainstorm, leaving two. The bigger piglet tried to prevent the smaller one from getting any of the mother´s milk.

We took a boat to the north end of the island, and visited a ruin guided by a 12-year-old Aymara boy named Robert. Then we began a 3-hour hike to the south end of the island on a "road" that is actually a very nice 4-foot wide path with stones lined along the edges. In many places the path was of stone, and in other places it was dirt. A horse-drawn cart could have passed along this road, but we did not see any carts or horses or cattle on this island. I think that donkeys are better suited to this steep terrain.

Aside from a eucalyptus grove, there were few trees on the island. The hillsides are either used for grazing animals or for agricutlrue.

We spent a total of three nights on the island. It was a beautiful place, extremely quiet and peaceful. And we shared the wonderful company of Bertha and Harald.