Bolivia: Highs, lows, and nothing in between

I´ve been in Bolivia for a week, and it seems that there are just 2 extremes here: amazing and awful.  Nothing here ever goes according to plan, and you just have to roll with it.  Nothing really makes too much sense, and mine and Clare´s response to many things here is just "Oh, Bolivia."  Half the surprises thrown at you turn out to be wonderful, the other half end up being shit.  but at the end of the day, all the surprises--good and bad--make the journey so much more exciting.

 

Peru-Bolivia Border

Last Monday:

High:  I met up with Clare!  it was so surreal to see her in La Paz!  We´re traveling together now until new years!
Low: Creepy man grabbed my ass while I was in the market.  I then proceeded to flip out and scream at him in english down the street...all the locals thought I was a crazy person.

 

The Witch Market in La Paz

Tuesday:
Low: I went on the Bolivian weight loss plan.  Aka I spent all monday night and the better part of Tuesday puking my guts out.  Lesson learned--don´t trust fish in a landlocked country.
High: Met some really cool Argentinians who were sharing our room who were very concerned for me and kept checking up.  Also, if you´re going to be sick, having an awesome friend like Clare there to take of you is definitely a plus.

Wednesday Clare and I took the bus to some ruins just outside La Paz.  They were pretty small and dinky, and a lot of them are recreations.  There were a few cool artifacts though.  And there were some adorable little german kids on our trip.  And we met another really nice Argentinian on the tour, and he´s going to show me around BA when I get there!

Thursday Clare and I biked down Death Road from La Paz to La cumbre.  This road was the deadliest in the world, as it´s super windy and narrow with no safety rails on the cliff side, so it was shut down to cars 5 years ago.  You can now rent mountain bikes and go down and it was so much fun!  The views were spectacular, and we met 2 sisters from Alberta who were really chill.  Lunch was included in the tour which was hilarious--the guy pulled out a loaf of wonderbread, a package of baloney, some cream cheese and packets of mayonnaise and ketchup and said ¨lunch is served´ It was so ridiculous.

 Clare and I decided to spend the night in Coroico, which is close to La Cumbre, and our journey to get there was hilarious as well.  Also, the drivers here are mad.  Every time I get in a taxi or bus I´m terrified we´re giong to go off the side of the mountain as they try to pass other trucks on blind corners on the narrowest roads known to mankind.

 

Clare in the main Plaza of Coroico.

When we first got to coroico, we went to the tourist information centre on the main plaza and booked a hike for the following day to a couple different communities, including one called Tocaña which is an Afrobolivian community!  We hiked up to our hostel above the town with a gorgeous view of the city and the mountains.  We met a really nice German couple at dinner who told me great tips about Rio, and were pretty much just loving life.

 

The following day we set out on our hike with the tour guide, who was also the guy who booked it, and he was so funny.  At one point we were walking down this path on the side of the mountain and it suddenly just turned into this 30 cm not even path with mountain face on one side and a cliff on the other, that was littered with uneven rocks and I was sure that I was going to fall to my death in the remote mountains in Bolivia.  We made it to the bottom though, and then our guide said we were going to rest by the water for a but before starting the hike up the next mountain, but then we said he needed to buy water and just disappeared, and Clare and I were convinced he wasn´t coming back.  Again, we were wrong, and he finally returned, only to change into his bathing suit and jump into the river.  So random!

The afrobolivian community was really cool, but by the time we got to Polo Polo where there are coca plantations, it was pouring rain, and we were drenched, and we couldn´t take any photos for fear of ruining our cameras.  The hike back down from there was miserable, as the one little path down the mountain had literally turned into a stream from all the rain, so we were walking down through a stream on the side of a mountain in the pouring rain.  When we got back to the hostel, Clare discovered she had bed bugs!  We complained to the staff, but they refused to admit it was bed bugs.  Luckily we didn´t have our big packs with us--they were still in La Paz, so we didn´t have to worry to much about our clothes getting infested.

We went into town that night for some shitty mexican food (it had been highly reccommended by our guide books and locals, but they were all wrong), and then met this guy working at a pizza place/bar and hung out with him for awhile.  When we wanted to go home though, just after midnight, there were no cabs!  And all the locals told us that the cab companies were shut down this late.  I don´t understand this weird country.  We couldn´t walk back up to our hostel as it was at least half an hour with no lights, so we had to stay at another one in town that night!  We were so unimpressed.

I decided to stay yet another day and the next day we switched hostels and hung out in the town.  It was so cute, there was a wedding in the church on the plaza, and afterwards the couple came out into the street for their first dance and the whole town gathered to watch and there was a mariachi band singing to them and it was so adorable!

That night, we went to Tocaña as the afrobolivian community was having their annual cultural festival!  It was so much fun, but we had to leave quite early, as we didn´t want a repeat of the previous night gettin stranded.  Although the festival was supposed to start at 8, it was bolivian time, so that really meant 9, and then a bunch of speeches had to open the festival, and some people we were with had hired a cab to take them back at 10, so we sadly had to leave.

 Yes, their sign says 23 de septiembre...I´m not too sure why.

Clare and I went back to La Paz Sunday morning, and then went up to El Alto from which you can overlook the entire city.

 We then went to Cholitas wrestling, which is probably the most bizarre thing I have seen while travelling.  I don´t understand many things here.

We took an overnight bus to Sucre, but were woken up at 4:20 in the morning because the bus had broken down.  I was half asleep and not down to deal with this shit in spanish, and we ended up having to wait for another bus to come and get us and take us the remaining few hours.  WTF BOLIVIA.

We´re in Sucre now though, and it seems like a cute place.  It´s super busy I think because everyone is doing their last minute christmas shopping, but all the whitewashed buildings look cool.

We´re going to go out for christmas dinner tonight, and might check out a midnight mass in the cemetary!