Argentina

We're finally in Argentina. Hard to believe, maybe because its only our third day and we are still pretty far north, in Cordoba . This country is huge, to give you an idea its a 36 hour bus ride from the border of Bolivia to Buenos Aires. For this reason we decided to break the trip up and spent our first night in Salta. A bustling, cosmopolitan city termed once again the ¨Valley of Eternal Spring.¨ We happened to run into Albin a kid from the Moonlight Lady Crew at the hostel we were staying at. We exchanged stories and caught up since we last saw each other 7 month ago. Its a small travel circuit when it comes down to it. At the hostel we are currently staying at we met a Finnish guy who had read about Sam and I from the travel blog that Megan, another Moonlight Lady traveler has written. At first glance Argentina is much more expensive then what we've been used to paying. We did come from the cheapest country in South America. We can't afford but to stay in dorm rooms and the bus rides cost upward of $30! (It was the best bus ride we have had.) It's also been a little bit of a culture shock crossing from Bolivia. Argentina is so much more developed and feels much more like a European country, Spain to be exact, rather than a South American country. The people look very European and you don't see the Indigenous as you did in the other countries we've passed through.

The language has been a problem as well. Argentinian accents are crazy and its close to impossible to understand what they are staying. And for some reason, much to our frustration, they have a hard time understanding us. They are also obsessed with their rock music which quite honestly sounds the same and is repetitive. The clubs in Cordoba only play Argentinian rock music or techno making it a very dull night out. Although night life doesn't start till 1 or 2 am and goes till 8 or 9 am. Talk about crazy!

As many of you are aware Argentina is famous for its beef, and justly so. We were in the country all of 20 minutes before we had our first taste when the "continental" breakfast we ordered came with steak and eggs. Later that night Sam went crazy and ordered a huge meat platter and a bottle of delicious wine. And last night we had a big Asado that an Argentinian staying at the hostel cooked up. Of course I had to try the beef since its world famous and even though I still can't go through a steak its the tastiest steak I have ever tried. Sam is in heaven and I keep kidding him that he's going to become a gordito during our time here.

We're going to chill out in the city of Cordoba with its thousands of students and jovenes for a few days and re-group before heading to Buenos Aires then to Patagonia!

Goin Postal II

Another adventure with the Bolivian postal system. We thought we had it down having sent several packages from Cochabamba. So we thought what the hey, these wool blankets are so awesome and sooo cheap its worth the 400 bolivian pesos to ship them home. Once again, the Bolivian postal system got the better of us. This time though it was more hilarious than frustrating.

We showed up at the post office around 3:30 pm about an hour after they got back from lunch break. They immediately informed us that the customs office was not - as it had been in Cochabamba - located in the same place, but in fact 15 minutes away by taxi. So we headed off to customs, managing to pick up the tape and brown paper required to wrap the package on the way. We got our customs stamps and headed back to the post office only to be greeted by a number of post office employees running around like they had no heads and all giving very confusing and contradictory information.

Eventually one kindhearted lady took charge and led us out of the building to a nearby street corner where she informed us we were waiting for transportation to the headquarters of the Special Task Force Against Narco Trafficking. Normally there is an officer from this organization present at the post office to do inspections but today being our lucky day he or she wasn't around and so, while Sepi rode up front with not one but two Bolivian postal workers I hopped in the cargo space of the Bolivian mail van and rode over to the headquarters.

Being escorted by the kind postal worker made all the difference as we were reluctantly admitted to an upstairs office and our wool blankets were given a perfunctory search for cocaine. With yet more of the necessary stamps we headed back to the post office where after another 45 min of paperwork and amazing background music like "if you want my booody and you think I'm sexy ..." we kissed our package goodbye, thanked the postal lady profusely and walked out of the office a mere two and half hours after we first entered.

Not bad really considering the free ride in the back of the van and complimentary tour of the Special Task Force Against Narco Trafficking.

Cerro Rico

This morning we took an infamous tour of the mines scattered throughout Cerro Rico (rich hill) in Potosí. The legend goes that if you took all the silver that the Spaniards mined from this mountain (Sumaj Orcko in Quechua meaning beautiful mountain) you could build a bridge to Spain and still have enough silver left to carry across. Although the Quechua and Ayamara peoples mined silver in the nearby towns it wasn't until the Spanish and their lust for precious metals arrived that the true exploitation of Cerro Rico began. The mountain with an elevation of 4800 meters has dropped 300 meters in the 400 plus years since then.

These past 40 years the mines have been run by cooperativos, a blessing or a curse depending on how one looks at the situation. During the era of government control all miners got free housing, water, electricity, and subsidised food. However, they received a lower price for their product. Now, with the cooperativos, the miners run the show, receive higher prices for their products but none of the benefits the government offered.

Our tour commenced at the miners market where we were geared up in rain gear, boots, headlamps, and helmets. We then proceeded to some stalls where coca leaves were sold along with dynamite, 96% alcohol (for consumption) and other articles pertaining to mining. We each bought bags stuffed with coca and some soft drinks to give as gifts to the miners we would meet. Then we proceeded to the entrance of the mine La Negra run by the cooperativo 26 de Septiembre.

We had to hurry along the narrow passageway as carts filled with rocks and minerals hurtled past, at which time we would cram into little holes dug out for this purpose. The entire time we were hunched double walking through puddles and breathing the stale air inside of the mountain. We walked for maybe half an hour stopping frequently so we could catch our breath. Remember we are nearly at 14,000 ft. Eventually we arrived at a hole that a miner was working at. Don Angel who has been working in the mines for 22 years was grateful for the bag of coca leaves and a bottle of soda. We had to crawl on our hands and knees to reach him and spend the entire time hunched over while talking. Later Sam got to try some of the manual labor of shoveling rocks into a wheel barrow, nothing like shoveling dirt, much much harder. All the more so because of the intense heat and humidity. The temperature fluctuated greatly throughout the mine.

During our tour we passed holes as deep as 300 ft which miners had cut in pursuit of veins of various minerals. We wrapped up our tour with a visit to El Tio, which is in fact a huge devil the miners have constructed out of clay. His origins date back to when the Indigenous were forced by the Spaniards to work in the mines under the mita system of forced labor. Under this system, adopted from the old Inca traditions but in a much harsher form, the miners were forced to work up too 15 hours at a time. Something that would be impossible without the stimulating effects of chewing coca leaves. Even today miners work up to 15 hours a day, 6 days a week with only one meal a day, usually breakfast, enduring with the help of coca leaves. All for a salary of $100 a month.

Back to El Tio. El Tio is worshipped because the devil rules the under world and the miners spend most of their lives underground. He is a synthesis of the Catholic devil whose form he takes and the ancient mother earth goddess Pachamama. As one of our guides Julio explained, El Tio has a beard because when the Spanish first arrived the Indigenous believed they were Gods with their white skin and hairy bodies. But later they turned out to be devils who brought evil and hardship.

Every Friday, after a hard days labor the miners burn cigarettes, give a small offering of the 96% alcohol, in the hopes that they will soon discover one of the 96% pure veins of silver that the mountain is famous for. This offering also insures good luck in health and preventing accidents, to which end they sometimes sacrifice llamas or leave llama fetuses. Hey even El Tio has to eat!

All in all the tour was amazing, sad and eye opening. We saw kids as young as 10 years old working. We got just a little taste of what kind of life miners have, enough to know we never want to be one.

Just a note, the tour agency we went with was GreenGo Tours. We highly recommend them. One tour guide was a miner and the other comes from a mining family.

La Higuera

This past week we traveled back into the highlands to the little village of La Higuera to visit the town where Ernesto "Che" Guevara was murdered on October 9, 1967. Going into the trip I was extremely excited, as Sam said I am the "Che-o-phile" and this was my passion we were following. But the whole experience left me empty and depressed. La Higuera is reachable by camiónes that carry agro-products such as pesticides and herbicides or micros or by taxi. We opted for the taxi since it cut the ride in half, there were no micros that day, and more importantly because I refused to ride in the back of an unstable truck with chemicals and fertilizers that could spell out on the long, bumpy, dusty ride to La Higuera.

La Higuera is in middle of no where, a village of only 27 families who make a profit from tourists (the majority non-American) who come through to see the school house where "Che" was murdered. The school house has been converted into a museum with pictures and explanations of his life and more specifically why "Che" decided to come to Bolivia to try and carry out the next revolution. A question Sam and I have repeatedly been asking ourselves. The board in the school house listed three reasons. The first being because it boarders Guevara's birth land, Argentina. The second, because Bolivia is bordered by five other South American countries making it an ideal place to spread the revolutionary idea. And third, because "Che" had connections to the communist party in Bolivia at the time. However, if anyone has ever been to Bolivia it is not a revolutionary country, it wasn't 40 years ago when "Che" was murdered and it sure as hell isn't today. The country is too divided between the upper class who is WHITE and the lower class who is Indigenious and too concerned with day to day survival to take up arms. There is no middle class to speak of, and the intellectuality that thrives in other South American countries is lacking in Bolivia. Intellectualism, is something which I see as being important in any revolutionary movement. Looking at most of the popular revolutionary figures, they came from well off families and were intellectuals.

Anyway back to La Higuera. After walking around the tiny school house and looking at the chair that "Che" was supposedly shot in we wondered outside to snap a few shots of the village. There was a little bust of "Che" in a fenced off courtyard in middle of the village where this Senora came out to show us pictures. It turned out the pictures where of "Che" after he was shot, which not only angered me but grossed me out. She was offering to sell us the pictures, to which I responded by storming away while Sam stayed and engaged her in a conversation about the village while smoking a big cuban cigar in memory of "Che". It turns out 40 years ago when "Che" had passed through La Higuera it was a village of 100 families and now it's shrunk to 27. The reason, because there is NOTHING there. Sam called it a one burro town. I don't even know how they manage to grow crops, the area is so dry and dusty (granted it is still the dry season, but its hard to imagine the place green during the rainy season).

I just felt so depressed, because La Higuera hadn't changed in these 40 years. If anything it had shrunk and now they where making profits off of a hero's murder, someone who is a legend in all of Latin America. What depressed me even more was that I couldn't blame them. I mean they have to make a living, but it seems so ironic that they are making profits off of "Che's" death, of all people. We passed up the offer to hike down to the stream where he was captured, because I just wanted to get back to ValleGrande the bigger town we where staying at. Its where "Che" was taken to after being shot and had his hands chopped off so he wouldn't be identifiable and where he was buried until 1997.

Next day we caught a bus to the town of Samaipata. A curious little place all set up for tourists, only we seemed be the only ones around. Anyway, the main attraction is these pre-inca ruins about 10 km outside of town. Apparently one of the main theories concerning their existence is that it was a landing site for UFO's. Can't say I was convinced but it was yet another beautiful site of an ancient civilization. For me the real highlight was coming across a possum on the "Ecological trail" curled up and fast asleep in one of the sites trash bins. Worth a visit but i think UNESCO may have been duped into funding the tourism project by the wealthy residents of the town.

We hurried back to smouldering Santa Cruz to find that during our absence our cd/vcd player and portable speakers where stolen from my backpack at the Hospedaje we had stored them. To top it off the cheaper Hospedaje we had moved to didn't have electricity, which meant no fan or shower so we left and found a nice place with AC, and running water. A little pricey, but what can you do, Santa Cruz is carrisimo. All in all, we are ready to leave Bolivia. Good timing really since our visa runs out the 28th. Its a beautiful country but depressing. Its so rich in resources, but classicism and racism rage uncontrolled. There is no infrastructure to speak of and all the wealth is concentrated in Santa Cruz where the cruseños want autonomy from the rest of Bolivia so they don't have to share it.

On the Road Again

Hello loyal readers, and there should not be too many of you since we have been pretty bad at updating this lately, but honestly our last few weeks were full of rather mundane tasks trying to wrap up our work with Environment Bolivia in Cochabamba and there wern´t too many yarns or funny tails to share. Of course being back on the road has quickly changed all that.

Taking our last experience of the so called "bus camas" here in Bolivia (literally bus-beds) we checked around before buying our tickets to Santa Cruz for a bus company that would likely have something approaching the level of service we saw in Peru. The recomendations and our own surveillance of the buses in the lot led us to the Bolivár bus company.

After tearful goodbyes to the Zemans family we hopped in our cab and arrived at the terminal with about 20 min to spare before our scheduled 8 p.m. departure. We checked our bags, crossing our fingers and trying our best to smile at the man whose responibility it would be to get them on the right bus and then proceeded outside to try and get ourselves on the right bus.

What a scene, the buses are all double parked and I consider it nothing short of miraculous that people are not crushed as the buses (called flotas) maneuver in and out of the "gates" while panicked Bolivians and tourists alike scramble aboard bus after bus in search of the one they are clutching a ticket for.

We picked a bus that looked promising and, lucky us, there was actually someone from the Bolivár company in the cargo hold who confirmed that yes this was the 8 p.m. "bus-cama" to Santa Cruz, a fact we dutifully reported to the elderly couple behind us who then passed it along to the couple behind them. The conversation went something like this.

"Is this the 8 p.m. to Santa Cruz"?
"Si"
"Is it the bus cama"?
"Si"
"Can we board yet"?
"No its closed".

This exchange was repeated again, and again, and again on down the line until at last a helpful employee decided to open the door and get all these poor confused passengers out of his face.

We found our seats and although we weren't too impressed with the "bus-cama" aspect of our ride at least our expectations were lower this time. And we also weren't the only ones to be disillusioned as we overheard other passengers complaining of the lack of leg room due to the false advertising of the whole "bus-cama scheme."

Just because we were now in our seats didn't mean the confusion was over, especially for poor Sepi who at one point awoke to the conductor announcing something that sounded like "La frontera! La frontera!" (the boarder! the boarder!). It turns out it was just some town whose name sounded a lot like "la frontera" but she still had her moment of panic thinking "where is my passport? and what boarder are we crossing again?" And then there was the midnight checkpoint where all the passengers disembarked so that drug sniffing dogs could be let on to do their thing. (Our route took us through the Chapare, Bolivia's main coca producing region and hence of some concern for the DEA). Oh and least I forget, at some point in the night, just after I had dozed off we stopped at a little roadside eatery and of course parked next to one of the apparently scarce REAL "bus-camas" of the type we had seen in Peru. Same bus line and all. Guess we got the short straw again.

There is something about a long journey via night bus that just leaves a body wretchedly confused the next morning, and this morning was no different. Of course after several months in the high and dry climates of Andean cities like Cochabamba and Arequipa, perhaps the shockingly hot and tropical climate here in Santa Cruz de la Sierra contributes to that.

Anyway we are happy to be here, checked in to a really nice place with a Toucan who hops around the garden, and ready for a good nights sleep stretched out on a real bed which lays no claim what so ever to having anything to so with a bus.