Botanzos y Sucre - April 28th

Hola Amigos.

Hey all, we´re in Sucre again, and have been for a the last week, taking grueling spanish lessons with our teacher Rita. It´s kind of like a two week fetal period in order to fully explore life in Bolivia when we´re done. Maybe three weeks.

Anyways, we spent a few days way off the beaten path on the way here in a town called either Botanzos or Bontanzos, depending on who you ask in the town. And what a town. The view from our hostal, covering the entire valley, was pretty proto-typical of what I expected of Bolivia. In parts, some of the tallest mountains in the world, but overall, simply a vast, sweeping horizon of peaks, few altogether commanding, but overall the sensation of actually standing on the cusp of the world.

Jess and I climbed a small mountain nearest to the town, Bartolemeo I think, and found a small hut on the top with quite possibly the happiest man I have ever seen in my life living there. And from the apex witnessed a vista and experience quite new to me. The entire horizon formed a single unbroken line of quiet ridges, mountain after mountain rolling into another, but at 4000 metres very few peaks like we know from the Canadian Rockies, instead, the tempered nature revealed, for the primary occasion in my life, the total ellipse of the planet´s shape. It was like standing on the curved edge of the earth. Twice I have felt the at once immense and yet comprendable occular nature of being on a rock in space, under the southern cross of Saint Kilda beach in Melbourne, and here atop the world. Anyways, not to make every thing that happens in Bolivia sound life changing, but this was still pretty novel.

To be frank, this photo is terrible, but I guess it was more of a temporal thing, than a 3x optical zoom thing.

Mucho amor,

Nick.


p.s. Heres to you, happy mounain man.

La Mantaña que come Hombres - April 19th, 2008

4000 up, and 100 down.

So it goes were in Potosi, the highest city in the world, the air so thin you get tired brushing your teeth and beer practically explodes from the bottle.

We´re here because we finally connected with out illustrious spanish teacher in Sucre, but she´s gone for a few days so we grabbed a quick bus to mysterious, tragic Potosi.

Potosi is dominated by Cerro Rico, a legendary mountain so filled with silver that it underwrought the Spanish Empire for hundreds of years. But not without cost, the mountain has killed between 4 and 8 million people. Million. The skyscape of Potosi is not a mountain but the largest grave ever placed on the soil, filled by greed. Tours operate daily to take tourists into the mines, now owned by several miner´s co-operatives, and show both the medieval conditions, and the morbid silence of the mountains´s soul. The exploitative nature of visiting people working towards their death is actually really balanced by the somewhat mandatory gifts of coca leaves, alcohol, and dynamite that visitors give the miners, their wives, and their children, all of whom can be found deep in the earth, and the darkness.

Jess and I grabbed a tour and donned the mandatory "my god tourists are stupid" overwear and headed into the mines.


Now, a big part of visiting the mountain has nothing to do with the social reality of Potosi and it´s miners, but with decending hundreds of metres in the earth. For those of you like me, the absolute most frightening, terrifying, and debilitating experience one could endure would be a complete enclosure in pitch black mining tunnels. The tunnels of Cerro Rico are not the same as North America, they are unventilated, unlit, unpowered and often under four feet round in diametre. I mean scurrying through this:


I cannot actually describe something I am more genetically frightened of.

Anyways, several parts of the tunnels were walkable, and even opened into small caverns, amidst the quiet work of Miners. As I said, there is no power in the mines, so all rock dislodged is puahed out in carts by men, adding to a growing understanding of the mountain, that what has happened in here has not changed for hundreds of years, and may never. To reinforce the point, the ghosts of Catholicism do not seem to penetrate the rock, and in a country with almost 100% christian religion, the only gods down here are the ancient ones...

This is Tio, or "Uncle". The statue is hundreds of years old, but the horns were added later as the Christian philosophy appropriated the god of the dark, hot caverns as El Diablo, a concept familiar and seemingly fitting. Tio is covered with coca leaves, cigarettes and alcohol offerings, every Friday the mineers come into this cavern, or sveral smaller subsidiary caverns across the mountain, to provide offerings and ask for wealth and safety. The photo is pretty wretched, but I have a great video that I will throw up if I ever get internet faster than a burro.

We emerged from the mountain hot and filthy, actually climbing hand and foot out from the tunnels. I had, somehow, lost a stick of dynamite inside, (I am not making this up), but it didn´t really seem to phase our guide much. I was comforted in that uncomfortable manner. It was an incredible experience, from the inky silence to the miners, a step closer to understanding the country, but for it all, there are still some sights you can´t wait for...

Pour Some Sucre On Me - April 14th, 2008

¡Hola Amigos!

Sorry for the long time waiting, I´ve been stewing over my fate and stomach pains while pontificating the future ownership of a camera, my immediate travel plans, and in general, having a miniature mental crisis over the state of my mind.

But now I am eating bubblegum! Sweet delicious, forgiving bubblegum. Oh how clarion it´s cry, how merciless it´s intestinal price.

Other than the petite perfection of tiny little gum balls, brewed somewhere with the help of all sorts of animal parts, I can´t say I have felt better than now in quite some time. I was starting to unravel pretty hard in La Paz, the physical proximity to all my dreams has thrown me for quite a loop, what I mean is, if you are unable to accomplish something when it is all around, for the taking, then it is a good moment to question what mettle you are comprised of, and what changes need to be made to ensure you can look yourself in the mirror. Not to get too ethereal, but I´m sure you can all understand.

(4 gum balls left...)

So, we were having a ton of trouble finding good spanish lessons, coupled with a ravaging tummy virus that turned all my future meals to pulp before I could even eat them, and absolutely not one solid night of sleep. The feeling I get from stress is exactly the feeling I have when I haven´t eaten. It´s a bit odd, but it means that many times in my life I spend a whole day pondering what unseen trauma could be disbalancing me, only to eat a cracker and find the world at peace. Speaking of which...

(3 gum balls left. Yum!)

So I was being woken up all sorts of times in the hostal by the doorbell, or vomiting Peruvians, or my lacerous insect bites (jungle mementos), only to be gripped by an unsavory taste of panic at the state of my life, a continuous worry that at all times may, or may not have been, entirely due to my complete lack of eating. I would then literally spin in my bed in tiny rotary circles until I fell asleep again, dutifully to repeat the process in any of the oncoming minutes. Literally, I have been a mess. It has not helped that on a very corporeal level, I have yet to make any significant headway into the goals I have for myself in this continent of personal possibility, nor have I led even one revolution. I tried to marshall the shoe-shine revolution, but to no avail, no one believes a man in canvass shoes...

(2 left! Deelicious.)

Okay then, so Jess and I fled the lovely but inhospitable-for-spanish-lessons La Paz and just recently arrived in the fabulously pretty and colonially middle class Sucre. It´s really nice on the eyes, even without the power of Illimani and the rest of the mountainous cohorts of the capital, but the buildings are all old and white and built on the blood of the poor, so it just kind of oooozes charm.

Taking lessons in the next few days, I feel fifty times better already, and oh look! I got a new, better, fancier camera for half the price back home. And you know what that means friends, medicore photography!

More tomorrow, when I describe Sucre in detail.

So good to be back, all my love, happy belated b-day to my dirtbag brother Steven,
Nick

The most beautiful place in the world - April 6th, 2008

Hola todo,

Well it looks the mountain came first after all. On Friday, amidst the depths of bacterial infection, we grabbed a lovely dodgy bus to Chulumani, the capital of the Yungas mountain range. I know I haven´t really described La Paz yet, or the terrain and life of Bolivia, but seeing as I didn´t even really understand it until this trip, it´s as fine a place as any to begin.

La Paz, as you may know, is the highest capital city in the world, somewhere around 3,640 m, or 11,942 ft. Edmonton is at 668 m, Vancouver and Melbourne at 2 m. So as you can guess, everywhere from here is down. The road to Chulumani-Coroico is more widely known as the death road, the most deadly stretch of asphalt and rock in the world. Since earning this dubious reputation a great deal of tourism has sprung up regarding over-anxious tourists mountain biking down select patches of the lethal road. A newer road was constructed several years ago that skirts the range completely, and most traffic now follows it, and for good reason, as it was estimated 200-300 people were being killed yearly. On Wednesday the papers carried a story of a tourist biker who added his name to the list.

Jess, myself, and our friend Shannon were all completely unaware that our desired route to Chulumani involved the Yungas roads in the slightest. It was with palapable tension that our rickety bus clambered out of La Paz.

As you know, I´m camera-less for the next little while, so I´ve jacked some photos off the web to attempt to fill in the gaps. But they do not even come close.

Bolivia is the corner where the sky meets the horizon, the lurching and ancient mountains still groaning their ascent. In places the peaks are merciless black basalt, with stark white snow facets that often do not dare to reach the summit. For the majority of the Yungas however, the mountains are the faces of my dreams...

Green, aching, dominating peaks, incolsed with mist, the sky invisible between them, and their peaks only hinted as the tropical fogs loll by. Their verdant sides pulse with jungle foliage, trees wrapped in trees, vines that stretch from canopy to ground. On the steepest cliffs, the trees barely give way to ancient greyed rock, cut sideways and strong by the forces that made them. And to make it complete, every single sliver of earth pulses with water, falling from heights unimagined, unbound by the seeming rules of reality outside of this place. There is not supposed to be this much beauty in one look, in between heartbeats so full the next comes lazily, panting. The terror of an expanding mind, eyes gouged with majesty, hoping that it will all just end so that I can come to terms with it. And the bus and the road clamber on, deeper and down, into the forest of the primeval, across rivers, through waterfalls, the black rock barely holding, the tires dangling over the edge.

I don´t exagerate, if you can believe me. I don´t actually have the words to paint the entire picture, I can´t say beauty any more times than I already have. But it is without question that I have witnessed the most incredible sight of my life. I am still shocked to be given warrant to say such a thing. This place is beyond experience.

The days we spent in town were quiet, hiking, the discoveries of jungle rivers and the lunches that must come with them, the still life moments of a small town bereft of major tourism, and the shallow pulse that lies underneath to be discovered and appreciated. We rode back this morning on the same road, the mists had lifted a bit and the mountain peaks were fully visible. There was perhaps less mystery but more majesty.

Back in town this afternoon we saw our first South American football match, I´ll describe the "excitement" tomorrow. Looking forward to finding an apartment this week, Spanish lessons continue, volunteering soon, maybe UN. Also, Morales is nearby on Friday, so I might make a pilgramage to see him.

Tomorrow I´ll let you all know what La Paz is like, and how to get by with pseudo-terminal bacteria warfare within.

Ciao,

Nick

oh, and since I´m without camera, here are some photos not of mine that give an idea.


A tiny village on the side of the road.


The road.

My new Latin friend - April 4th, 2008

Hello all,

I´d like to introduce you to my newest friend from Bolivia, I don´t know his name yet, but he lives in my stomach. From what I can deduce, his hobbies include causing pain, prohibiting my eating, halting the functions of my internal organs, and (probably) fondue parties.

It´s been about six days here in La Paz, and three days with my newest amigo. The rule of course, is not to let street food make up the majority of your diet. But the lure is always there, the beckoning call of cheap, cheap, cheap food. Speaking of cheap, a moment to explain.

A four course meal in La Paz routinely wraps up at around 8-10 bolivianos, which is about $1-$1.20. Sweet, terrible street food, whether it be breakfast, lunch, or dinner, is about 5 bolivianos, or 70 cents. Our hostel, which is fantastic, is 25 bs a night, and everything just scales around there.

I´ve got lots to tell of the past days in Bolivia, and what´s coming up, but my little friend is calling to me, and so I think I have to go lie down.
Or, we´re climbing a mountain in seven hours. I dunno...

Nick