Since I last wrote we have returned from a four day tour of ¨the middle of nowhere at extremely high altitudes¨in Bolivia. All done with four other people plus a driver and cook and a 4X4 Toyata truck...but I¨m going to let Tyler tell that story later!
For now a brief update till we left four our desert adventure. Isla Del Sol. I told you that it was raining and cloudy but we left anyway cause it was ¨the thing to do¨in the lonely planet. Those things are seriously like bibles to some people! Anyway, we get the island and climb the million steps to the top. Rain stopped so we set out to explore the island. It was about 6 km long and maybe 1 km wide? A guess...but not too big. Some people get dropped off at the north tip and walk to the south to get picked up in the afternoon. We were tipped off that it wasn´t worth the trek so got dropped off and picked up from the South. The island was very barren...a sparse patch of trees and a whole lot of terraced fields for growing stuff. Tyler and I hiked up to a peak and were approached by a million year old man/farmer who was scanning the area to check his crops. I tried to initiate a conversation in my very broken spanish and ended up just saying ¨si¨ and nodding my head a lot. I have NO clue what he was saying and in what language. It was wierd. They just keep on talking. Even though, we CLEARLY stand out as NOT speaking the language...they just dont get it. We´ve experienced a lot of that in South America. The highlight of this excursion was when we were walking back down to catch our boat...we came upon a yard with two big black pigs in it. We had a blast feeding them our apple and watching them smack thier cute little snouts together as they chewed. They had to push the apple around in the dirt a lot before attempting to eat it...it was too clean. Amazing what will capture your attention for what seemed like hours! The pigs were lucky that the horse and llama were just too dumb to eat it from us. It was a nice adventure and turned out to be a beautiful day too. On the way back, our old German friends, and the one who is a retired dentist, gave Tyler some more drugs and antibiotics which he started taking at once.
We took a bus to La Paz the next day. This city is crazy. It´s weird at first cause it is SO high up. Right in the middle of some mountains in a bit of a valley. A pretty big city with LOTS of hills to walk! We spoiled ourselves the first night with a 3 star hotel that had HOT water and free internet! We arranged our Bolivian tour of the salt lake for two days later. Our first night, we decided to take advantage of the hotel and the tv so set out to find something to ¨take out.¨ We ended up with some pretty good fried chicken and french fries that we toted back to our hotel room with a huge bottle of orange Fanta. All for just under $4. We were definitely loving the cheap prices. It sounds like all we´ve eaten is fried chicken, but we have also tried other things.
Next day, Sunday, we toured around the area set out to make some great shopping finds as we had been holding off until now as we were told the prices were cheapest. Do you think we could find a single alpaca wool hat??? NOTHING. It was SO wierd. There were millions of stalls all over the place, a road closed down for a market type thing and people walking around selling cotton candy and kids playing, but we the only white people for miles?! I couldn´t understand it. Where are all the tourist like stalls that hound you and ask you to buy everything they are selling? In Cusco, Puno and Copacabana they were EVERYWHERE...and now that it comes time to actually WANTING someone to throw a scarf in my face, they were nowhere to be found. I was starting to get nervous. Shopping is one of my most favourite things and I was being deprived...I had been waiting SO long for this very day?! After a few hours of shuffling through stalls selling CDs, necklaces, toys, dog clothes!! and modern clothes that the locals were buying up like hotcakes, we sat down at a VERY local restaurant to eat. Everyone had their eyes on us. It is a very funny/wierd feeling. We tried, once again, in our broken spanish to order ONE set lunch meal that we were going to share. Comes with Soup, salad, maincourse and desert for about $2. We saw one guys plate on the way in with noodles and some other stuff so just said ¨noodles¨ in spanish and he acted like he understood. Well, then we waited. And we waited and waited and waited. We watched about three other people who came in after us get served and started on salad and even soup! I generally dont like raising a fuss while away cause there really is no point but Tyler had enough. He walked up to the waiter and in his most polite and cute Canadian way asked about our soup...the waiter pretty much just nodded and kept on walking leaving Tyler in his dust. Kinda funny to watch this from my seat. Tyler is sure that he got through though. And, sure enough, a while later out comes the salad. It was just pretty funny to be treated so differently in this restaurant full of locals. The rest of our meal came and was pretty good. The dessert consisted of a tiny chunk of pineapple siting in a tiny steal bowl with lukewarm ¨pineapple¨ flavoured water/juice. I think they call it pineapple pudding?? Wierd. On the food note, the one BIG difference I¨ve noticed here is in the desserts. You cant find donuts or cakes. Not the good MOIST kind we have in Canada. They have a lot of DRY cakes and stuff filled with Dulce de Leche which is like caramel but thats it. We have found the odd good bakery to get myself a fix, but the locals dont each much sweets. I´ve also been kept alive with packages upon packages of oreos. They are SO cheap I just cant resist. It´s my little bit of North America that I can have WHEREVER I go. Now that we¨ve gotten to chile, I¨ve told myself that the oreo binge has to end. It was great while it lasted but I can no longer afford to keep it up :(
Oh ya. Shopping. So...we set out after our lunch (sans pineapple dessert in my belly) in search of Oreos. Well, oreos and shopping. Just as we were about to give up, we stumble upon a few shops on this one street that sold some of the classic ¨touristy¨gifts that I was dying to find. There is a god! We shop till my hearts content and bargain our way (a bit of bargaining that is...I find Im not as excited to bargain as I thought...when it comes down to one dollar I just cant be bothered. Tyler really hates it...he would pay what they ask every time if it were left up to him. The woman always have HUGE smiles on thier faces when Tyler shops though, which almost makes it worth it!) Anyway, we get a bunch of stuff...presents to send home and memorabilia for us to send home as well. We pass a few more shops on the way back to the hotel and I´m feeling much better. The afternoon is spent taking a city ¨sauna¨tour of the city. We search around and after a few taxi rides, make it to the place where the double decker city tour bus is to make its afternoon stop. It begins to rain slightly so when the bus arrives, we are the first in line and immediately go to the top to the very front with the BEST view on the bus!! This part was also covered over with clear platic which also made it perfect to hide from the rain. We got head sets and listened to the tour in english as the bus drove all over the city. We came SO close to hitting power lines. Some times we did hit them. They had SO many power lines leading up to one little pole it was scary! We took so many pictures and found this to be the highlight of the morning tour! I¨m talking about 50 separate power lines coming to one single pole like stand then going on from there. It was chaos! We thought of you, Pete and took pictures so you would appreciate the ¨organization¨that Saskatoon has to offer! I mean, half the city must be out of power every time one wire goes down! So the rain eventually stops and our ¨perfect¨ seats become the SAUNA seats. We go down to the Zona Sud which is the lower part of the valley and also the higher class and ritzy buildings which is also 10 degrees warmer! It was so neat to see the cultural difference in the same city. The whole city is based on this principle with the poorest people being at the highest altitude and coldest temperatures and the richest at the bottom of the valley with milder temps. We started to see people dressed entirely in north american clothes, no more classic Bolivian dresses and women with shawls carrying babies. Now they had jogging strollers and spandex! Kinda neat. We got out at one point to enjoy the view and we then thankfully switched to a seat in the lower part of the bus shielded by the sun. A pretty cool city all in all.
Next day we decide to try to send a package home. Not as easy as it sounds. We get to the post office and are sent in a million different directions. We finally find customs and the place where they search your parcels for drugs and pack them up. There is a line and we get out of one woman that they are closing for lunch cause they are so busy. Wierd. We take our package accross the street to a FedEx type place called DHL. They tell us it will be $120 US to send it home!!!??? After all of that bargaining that we did to get all of this stuff, I almost had a heart attack. Back to the post office. Now the door to customs is closed but there are some people getting stuff packaged up by a lone woman. We find a place like ¨express¨ post who is much cheaper than DHL and will track our package for us which regular mail will not. They also claim it will get there in 10 days...keep your fingers crossed! We are told we need passports, then I ask why and she says okay, we dont. Packs up our stuff, charges $1, and we take it up to the express spot. The woman weighs it and its a few grams over 5 kgs. This means we have to pay $20 more?! We go through trying to decide what to leave out and eventually get it below 5 kgs. Sorry Tres, you dont get a gift...hehe kidding. The long and short of it is that we never really did get it checked by the drug people and couldn¨t understand what the woman was saying to know if they were going to go through it later...it was SO wierd and confusing and unorganized. And the whole tracking thing is kinda pointless when the ticket is in spanish and the whole website is in spanish too. Not much help. Again, keep your fingers crossed...and Dad, keep your eyes open for a package!
Oh ya...as we walk down to the post office that morning there are tourist shops ALL over the place. Lining all the streets and throwing scarfs in your face at every opportunity! Apparently, Sunday is not a good day to shop in La Paz.
We decide to tackle the whole dentist situation now that we are going to be in the middle of nowhere for the next few days. His tooth was getting better, but still painful when he wasn´t taking the drugs. Tyler phoned to a dentist (who was recommended by the lonely planet) the day before and made an appointment with Dr. Jorge (my favourite spanish name...pronounded horhe meaning George) We take a taxi back down to Zona Sur where he is located. A BEAUTIFUL modern building with lots of dentist gadgets and english speaking staff and Jorge himself spoke excellent english. He took a look and then took an xray to be sure. The cool thing was instead of film xrays, it was all done on the computer which was so neat. They took digital pics inside his mouth and then shoved this huge prong thingy down his throat that he gagged out a couple times before getting it right. I must tell you that Tyler has unbelieveably healthy teeth. He has had one cavity his entire life and is somewhat petrified of dentists and the thought of having a tooth pulled. I soothe him with my horror stories of wisdom teeth being pulled and my root canal and crown incident and assure him that it could be no worse than that. Fortuately, for him, I am right. It turns out that the tooth is completely healthy and that there is just a bit of his gums half covering the tooth that must have got something under it and gotten infected and inflamed. Tyler has the world lifted from his shoulders. The tooth can stay. Only after he undergoes a complete cleaning of the infected area that causes quite a bit of pain. Alas, we leave horhe, and $50 US, and return to the great north with cold nights and alpaca pushers. Tyler sleeps well for the first time in many nights. As the days go on, the pain eventually subsides and finally, today, we can say he is pain free! Thank you Dr. Jorge!!
I will try to pull Tyler away from the tapes and tapes of rugby games that our host, Gus, an old rugby coach and good friend, has stashed here at his home where we are staying for a few days in Vina del Mar, Chile, to write a brief note about our Bolivian salt lake, middle of nowhere experience!
Be well,
Julia
