(15:15, 26 July, Immigration Office, Santa Cruz, Bolivia) I wasn’t the cut-off exactly, but it was the woman just 2 ahead of me who was the last to be served before Immigration closed for lunch. When I was in Sucre I went to the office there to check because my 30-day visa expires on the 28th of July. The Santa Cruz office, being in a big city, is much bigger and quite well organized (in fact I have written this entire blog post on the little slip of paper they gave me listing what I would require for an extension and how to go about getting one step-by-step), but there are obviously far more people available for making queues.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2010.
Tags: Culture, Food, Mistakes and Mishaps, South Africa
(22:35, 23 July, Bed in Room 1 next to the stairs of Hospedaje Paola, Samaipata, Bolivia) I wouldn’t say I was scared, but I still took the precaution of standing on the bed before I lifted my food packet to reveal that it was only the curly plastic that had come loose from the very book I am writing in, and not a mouse which had been my momentary imaginative suspicion. The thing is, there’s a bit of a scratchy rodenty noise in my ceiling which I can hear along with the chatter and cutlery clatter of downstairs, and between the spates of magnified flushings and drippings and gushings from the bathroom directly above me. The plumbing forms 2 diagonal pipe stripes hanging from the ceiling, in the corners of my room towards the barebulb light. I thought of asking for a different room but even upstairs in the shared kitchen every noise seems amplified. Only a little less than in my room, as I waited for the kettle to boil, I could hear the noisy conversation in the restaurant two floors down; the shuffling of chairs, the metal on metal sounds of the preparation of food, footsteps up and down, as though it was all happening right inside my own head. I’ve been reading quite contently with my fancy earphones transmitting silence to mute the commotion, but I took them out for a moment’s break, and I feel like the antisocial cousin locked in my room entertaining myself during a family gathering. The hostel isn’t particularly dirty, the bed’s ok and the staff seem friendly enough. It’s just that there are at least three generations of them and they are all down in the restaurant having a lively dinner while I’m cooped up in my single room, my door only a few stairs away.
Tags: Food, Friendly people
(12:15, 14 July, Cafe Mirrador looking out over Sucre, Bolivia) From here up the hill, Sucre is terracotta and white and spans out into the day in all directions until it meets some flat farm-topped hills with mountains behind them. I was up here some days ago with a friend and a glass of wine. We had to rush down to confirm that we would be trekking, in the very mountains the sun had been setting behind whilst we had been distracted discussing his past and my various possible futures. We left for the hike a day later instead, which meant we had to do the 2-day, skipping the last leg so Ollie, who is of Dutch parentage, would be back in Sucre for the final. Pushing it back a day also allowed me to recruit another couple to accompany myself, Ollie and Andreas, the guy who had initiated the trip.
Tags: Educational, Mistakes and Mishaps, Nature, soccer
(17:52, 2 July, Internet café in Uyuni, Bolivia) I considered sticking around in Tupiza for a while to ride a horse where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid met their maker but, having enquired at tour companies about tour groups with spaces for the Salar de Uyuni since we arrived that afternoon, I decided to write my name down with Rob, a guy I meet on the train, with the first very lovely woman we had spoken to. The fact that I could get to the reasonably sized town of Potosi to watch Argentina play on Saturday may have sweetened the deal. So we met, bags packed, for coffee on Tuesday morning and having introduced ourselves to the driver and cook we embarked on something my tired brain can only call indescribable.
(13:30, 3 July, Koala Cafe, Potosi, Bolivia) Honestly, I don’t know how to explain this tour to you all. We drove for 3 and a half days across the southwest of Bolivia, through some of the most incredible and surreal scenery and always up and up and up. We saw green lakes, red lakes, white lakes, multi-coloured mountains, black volcanoes, deep brown sand dunes, beige deserts. It was like the whole landscape had turned up the colour. The sky was a bluer blue, the grass more intensely golden, the weird plant that grows on the occasional rock was so dynamically green it was almost luminescent. It’s as if the normal world, where things exist at normal altitudes, is blurred and stunted by the extra layer of atmosphere it has to bear. On the antiplano, the sun is that bit nearer, the muffling insulation of air is thin, everything is crisper and sharper. Including the cold. The mornings and evenings were painfully cold! The freezing wind blows uninhibited and penetrates to your bones through the tiniest gap between scarf and hood or cuff and glove, and dare you wash your hands! Even at midday, water waits to be released by the sunshine, frozen in patches of shadow that won’t be moved until the seasons change.
And amongst the thermal pools and sulphuric geysers and the expanses of ice, are flamingos and strange rodents and llama and sheep. And people! An implausibly large number of people, growing their crops and tending their animals. There is something confused inside of me when I see a “village” of five families, a cluster of stone buildings, from which, every day, a team of men walk out to work on the tiny goldmine on their doorstep. Or when I see a woman in long socks and a traditional pleated skirt, knees bare, walking along a frozen riverbed in the frigid hours of the early morning. The tour in its entirety is one of those things that makes you wonder what it’s all for. And there’s nowhere better than sitting in the middle of a salt flat, in a dichotomy of extreme blue and extreme white, to feel like the answer must be simply insolvably simple.
Check out the enormous photoalbum on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=191761&id=504021698
Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher
What You’ve Been Saying