Bolivia to Peru

I’m not sure how to begin writing…I’ve been in South America for a month and a half, but it feels longer. It feels like far too much to summarize here, but I’ll try.

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I arrived in the beginning of January, in La Paz, Bolivia. I spent my first day there, in the biggest city in the country, 12,000 ft. up in the mountains. I walked up and down the steep streets overcrowded with people and honking vehicles, looking at the brick box houses that cover every part of the deep valley, and felt intimidated and overwhelmed by so many new people, sights, and sounds. I didn’t spend much time here, though. The first night I took a 25 minute flight to the city of Cochabamba. Looking back, it seems silly to have paid fifty whole dollars for that flight. To travel between La Paz and Cochabamba would have taken 8 hours on a bus and would have cost no more than six or seven dollars, but at that time, I was inexperienced with buses (and with everything in Bolivia) and it seemed like a safe idea to fly. Although I learned later that most Bolivians would tell you never to fly on TAM, the airline we took. Lots of people said that is more dangerous and unreliable than the other big Bolivian airline, but I’m not sure I believe this after some friends were stuck for three days trying to fly on the “better” AeroSur.

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In Cochabamba, I met up with 19 people from a class I took last semester at school in Berkeley. Our class, called “Design Bolivia,” was mainly architecture students, but also included a mix of others. Throughout the semester we studied Bolivian culture, politics, life, etc. and worked with a San Francisco based volunteer organization (FSD ) and a Bolivian non-profit helping children with disabilities in the city of Cochabamba. We worked with these organizations to come up with a design project at one of the facilities used by the non-profit. They needed paths built to make their farm more accessible to the children living there. So, once we got to Cochabamba, that’s what we did. We all lived with host families and worked most days on the paths at the farm. It is a bit outside the city, so we went everyday in a big, yellow, tourismo bus. The countryside is really interesting. There are lots of cows and sheep wandering around and kids playing along the side of the road in front of small brick houses with rusty tin roofs. Most buildings have mud brick walls around them with some kind of spikes on the top for security. Everyone grows corn, and probably a lot of other vegetables, but most obviously, lots of corn. Since we were in Cochabamba during the rainy season (although it only rained a few times) there was green everywhere. The clouds in Cochabamba are huge and puffy and there are tall, bright green mountains close to where we were working. We usually spent all day on the farm, laying a level rock path, then building wooden framework around that, and finally mixing concrete to fill the framework, covering up our carefully fitted rocks. We thought all this would be much quicker and easier, but the hot and tiring work turned out to be quite a process and we finished just in time, late in the afternoon on our last day.

We didn’t work all the time though. There was time to tour the city and some nearby towns. We had dinner at a peña where we ate Bolivian food (guinea pig, cow stomach, etc.), heard a few different Bolivian bands play, and danced late into the night. Other nights we spent with our host families, walking around the many plazas in the city, or going out dancing. Finally, the end of our two week program came and 18 of the 20 people in the class left. Myself and a friend, Sanya, stayed, with plans to travel in Bolivia for a couple of weeks and then to head to Peru in the beginning of February.

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Our first adventure, we decided, would be to Santa Cruz. A city to the east, much lower and near the jungle. So, we took our first overnight bus, with only a moment of panic when we realized we were on the wrong bus, headed to a very different city, in the opposite direction. Luckily, we were able to quickly get ourselves where we needed to be and arrived successfully in Santa Cruz 11 hours later. There isn’t a lot to do in the city. Other than the zoo, we didn’t find many exciting attractions. Santa Cruz turned out to be an interesting city, culturally. There is obviously more wealth in there. Nicer cars, people dress more formally (and much less traditionally), and the restaurants feel and look very European. At night, we sat on the second story of a restaurant overlooking the main plaza watching people arrive at a fashionable restaurant opening with TV cameras, a small red carpet, and fireworks. We also watched as big groups of people drove down the street, honking, yelling, and blaring music campaigning for the constitutional referendum that happened a few days later. In Cochabamba and La Paz, graffiti reading “Evo, Sí” and “Sí en la constitucion nueva” told us that people were in favor of the current president, Evo Morales’, constitutional referendum. In Santa Cruz, most cars had bumper stickers saying “vota NO” and banners saying the same thing were in all the plazas and along the streets. There was even a song that played continuously…”vota no, defiende tus derechos…”

Since there wasn’t much more to do in the city, Sanya and I headed to a town a couple hours to the west called Samaipata. We had heard that this was a fun place to visit, with ruins, waterfalls, rivers to swim in. Although we never made it to the rivers and waterfalls, it was great. The town is very small. It doesn’t take long to walk from one edge to the other and we went out in search of lunch an hour too late and as hard as we tried, we could only find one restaurant that was open. From our hostel we had a view of the whole town and the surrounding hills. It’s very lush and the flowers and tile roofs of the old buildings are beautiful with the green surroundings. The next day, we woke up early to walk to El Fuerte, the ruins that are on the top of a hill about 10 km from the center of town. It was a beautiful hike up through the hill with always changing views of the mountains, fields, valleys, and various rock formations. Once at the top, the ruins were impressive, but to me a little bit less so than the scenery. There are a number of low walls made of adobe bricks and a huge flat rock covering the hilltop, carved with various patterns, things that look like doorways (where I think mummies were put), seats, and stairs for walking onto the rock. As soon as we finished our long hike back into town, it was time to go. We had to get back to Santa Cruz so as not to be stuck there on the day of the voting for the constitution when everything was closed. We were advised to walk down to the highway to catch a bus or taxi or something. After a short time worrying that perhaps we wouldn’t find a way back to Santa Cruz, we got a taxi. We piled in with a bunch of locals and spent a hot, squished couple of hours in the car back to the city. From there, we eventually caught a bus and made it back to Cochabamba to stay with a friend (from FSD) during the weekend of voting when everything was closed and no one was supposed to be too far from their own houses.

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It was great to be back in Cochabamba for a few days. We stayed with our friend at her apartment, so we were able to spread out a little bit, cook our own food, and relax. Cochabamba felt a bit like home after traveling. We went grocery shopping, got a cell phone number (to call the few friends we had…), and made plans to go to El Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. A couple of other people we knew from FSD in Cochabamba decided to come with us, so a few days later, four of us set out for Uyuni.

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We left Cochabamba, more or less for good this time, on a bus to Oruru where we hoped to catch a train, but when we got there, it turned out to be the wrong day or the wrong hour for buying tickets, or something. So, we had a day to spend in Oruro, which is not the nicest city in Bolivia. It’s dirty and brown, has very little vegetation since it’s at such a high elevation, and felt sad and dusty. I liked the city even less when, in an effort to explore the city a little bit, my camera was stolen. Luckily, it was quickly recovered with the help of some kids armed with water balloons. But this encounter left me a bit uneasy and ready to get out of Oruro. I’m not sure whether the next portion of our journey was more or less pleasant than the day spent in Oruro. It was just as someone had warned us…like an earthquake all night. This was the bus to the town of Uyuni. It was overfull, with children on every lap and people sleeping in the aisle. For almost the whole eight hours the, the bus drove on bumpy, rocky dirt roads and everything on the bus shook and rattled with quite impressive volume. It was good that the movement and noise kept me awake all night, because otherwise I think all my belongings would have vibrated away to opposite corners of the bus. We arrived safely in the deserted town of Uyuni at 4 am and found somewhere to sleep. Felling a little tired and dirty (since the water at the hotel never did end up getting turned on) we ventured out to find ourselves a tour and were quickly able to do so, to eat some breakfast, and get into our “Jeep” (really a Toyota Land Cruiser) to head out for three days on the Salar and beyond.

We saw so much in those days. The first day was on the Salar itself. It is amazing!! White for as far as you can see, with mountains that look like floating islands in the distance. I expected it to be fluffy like snow, but when you walk on the salt, it’s hard, a bit sharp to the touch, and fairly wet. It has to be collected in piles to dry before it can be taken away in trucks to sell. And in some places there are small ridges that outline a pattern of hexagons on the ground. Somewhere out in the middle, there is an island covered in cactus, huge cactus, and rocks that look they were once coral in the ocean. It’s a strange, highly populated little place in the middle of such nowhere. But it’s a beautiful contrast, the pure white with the greens and browns and blacks of the cactus and rock. The next couple days were spent off of the Salar, but were nonetheless amazing. Beautiful mountains in every direction. Lakes like mirrors filled with graceful flamingoes. Sitting in a hot spring pool next to a steaming lake at sunrise. Valles de Rocas where llamas graze next to a stream in a picturesque green valley enclosed by tall boulders and rock formations. From the top, you can see that these rocks go on for miles in every direction. I think I would be happy there for weeks just climbing up on the rocks and into the valleys. How beautiful.

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And with that, we finished our tour of Uyuni and I, my time in Bolivia. A couple days later, I was in Peru. First in Puno (on Lake Titicaca) for a couple of days, to Los Uros, the floating reed islands. Then through pretty little farming towns, next to tall mountains and rivers to the city of Cusco. Here I will be for a few months.