What´s in a name?

Half the fun of traveling is meeting people. Not just the locals - although that part is awesome - but also the other travelers. In the past few weeks I´ve hung out with (mot just ¨met,¨ but actually spent significant time with) people from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Australia, and pretty much every South American country. Oh yeah... and the US. Surprisingly few from the USA, though.

Over the past week or so I´ve been hanging out with the same group of people... a bunch of hooligans in our early 20´s. We did the Death Ride together... we rode the subsequent 15-hour bus to the jungle together... we did the pampas trip... we hung out in our hostel after the trip... we were on different buses for the 18-hour ride back to La Paz, but we still kept running into each other at meal stops, or when our buses got flat tires. We even hooked back up in La Paz for a day before we all headed off in different directions. It was actually kind of hard to say goodbye...

The fun part, though, is how well our names fit us. Our core group consisted of several boisterous, wise-cracking Germans with names like Yoern and Dirk and Yakob Boormeister; a laid-back Aussie gal named Isabella (or just ¨Bella¨); some British chaps named Max and Richard (not Rich or Rick... Richard); and, finally, a French-Canadian figure skater name Jolianne LaLié-Martou. I was the lone American. A Californian, no less. Dude!

Holy Wildlife, Batman!

Once again, I stumble back to civilization, dirty, smelly, bug-bitten, somewhat sunburned.... and with more amazing experiences to rant about.

• The goal: visit the Bolivian ¨pampas¨ (sort of a jungle swamp-land teeming with animals)
• The problem: between La Paz and the pampas is The World´s Most Dangerous Road. No joke. Somebody called the Inter-American Development Bank says so. It´s also known as the Death Road - There are an average of 100 fatalities each year.
• The solution: Ride a bike down the road instead of taking a bus. Good idea? I thought so.

We started at an altitude of 15,400 feet, in a snow-covered mountain pass...

and ended up at 3,600 feet, deep in the jungle.

That´s an altitude change of almost 12,000 feet in just 40 miles, which took us about 4 hours. Most of the ride is a bone-jarring one-lane dirt road chiseled into the cliffside. Thus the dangerousness.

The problem with a one-lane road chiseled into the cliffside? Try to get two buses past each other without sending one over the cliff. Easier said than done.

Check out this article if you want to read more about the death-defying ride (or see more photos).

Having survived the Death Road, I got signed up with a 3-day trip into the pampas. I was expecting a lot of wildlife, but I was still.... wow:

There were loads of alligators... Steve Irwin, eat your heart out.

Caimens as well... we went out one night spotlighting them, and managed to catch this guy.

We also went swimming with them... and the piranhas... and the pink dolphins. Yeah. Amazonian river dolphins. They exist. I couldn´t get a good picture of them, but they look like this.

We went traipsing around in the swamp looking for anacondas... it took several hours...

...but eventually we found one. A few, actually. This was the biggest.

There were rats the size of rottweilers (better known as capybaras, the world´s biggest rodents)...

...and my personal favorite... the piranha monkeys. Vicious carnivores. They stripped this guy to the bone in under 60 seconds. Luckily they weren´t still hungry, or I might have been next.

La ¨Paz¨... not exactly peaceful.

I´m now in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. After my last post, I rode a bus around Lake Titicaca to the Bolivian side of the lake. The trip included a very high-tech ferry system:

That´s my bus, with my pack visible on top. We passengers had to take the people-ferry (a little speedboat), while the bus got its own ride over. I was glad the barge didn´t capsize on the way across, as it seemed about to do several times.

On another note... I have to say, I´m disappointed in my Lonely Planet guidebook. Don´t get me wrong, it´s been doing pretty well. It´s slipped up once or twice, but hey. Nobody´s perfect. But this latest omission... wow. See, my guidebook mentioned a nice park with a fantastic 360 degree view of La Paz and the surrounding mountains. So I visited it. Figured out where it was, walked up the huge hill, paid the 50 cent entrance fee. And it was right... there was a very good view:

What the guide neglected to mention was that the ¨park¨ was really a huge playground, complete with thousands of screaming children:

Generally speaking, I´m liking Bolivia, though. Especially the prices -- they´re even cheaper than Peru, if that´s possible. Where else can you get a Coke in a glass bottle for 12 cents... and for 6 cents if you don´t mind drinking off-brands?

I´ve visited a couple museums in La Paz... not the boring kind, though. The first was a hands-on Bolivian musical instrument museum, loaded with little guitars, big flutes, and a surpising variety of drums. My favorite:

I also went to the very informative Coca Leaf museum. With the aid of an English booklet, I learned about the still-popular South American practice of chewing coca leaves (gives a buzz, much like having a cup of coffee), the chemical process of extracting cocaine from the coca leaves (complete with a very informative schematic of a do-it-yourself crack lab), and the history of cocaine in popular culture. Coca-Cola? Yup. Made with cocaine until 1912. And it´s still flavored with coca leaves.

As the caption says... no one (not even Mr. Castro) is free from Coca-Cola.

And it turns out that the common and popular ¨coca tea¨ Nic and I have been enjoying actually does contain miniscule quantities of cocaine. No wonder it helps with the altitude.

Later, I paid a visit to El Mercado Hechiceria... roughly translated, ¨Witch´s Market.¨ The one-stop place for all your magic-brew needs... mystic herbs, toad innards, lucky amulets....

...and baskets of shriveled llama fetuses. Nice.

Last, but not least, I checked out the ¨Valley of the Moon,¨ with its crazy wind-formed spires.

What better place than the Valley of the Moon to do... The Moonwalk?

Ok, ok. So it´s a pretty lousy Michael Jackson impersonation. You try taking a picture of yourself doing the Moonwalk on rough terrain.

And what South American city would be complete without parades? I heard a marching band outside my window one morning... no surprise there. As I headed out of the hostel a few minutes later, though, I noticed that TV in the lobby was playing the exact same parade. Televised from about 30 feet from my hostel.

This parade, it seemed, was for the anniversary of La Paz´s independence from Spain. Not Bolivia´s independence -- that´s on August 6th. Just La Paz. I tell you, they like their parades. I went about my business, paying little attention to the roadblocks that seemed to be springing up all over town. For the parades, I assumed. Little did I know....

Later that night I came across a major Bolivian block-party... sort of a combination of a Fourth of July celebration and a Times Square New Year´s Eve party.

That little square glowing thing on the left? That´s the stage. There were a lot of people packed into the square. Packed very closely. I´ve discovered that Bolivians have a lot less of a bubble than I do.

I hung around for several live bands, and was thinking about calling it quits when I figured out that they were frequently talking about how much time was left until midnight. Of course, I decided to hang around. Meanwhile, I sampled a variety of cheap (10-50 cent) street foods.

Street chefs in action. Price? Dirt cheap. Sanitation? Questionable.

My favorite was a shish-kabob of cherries that had been¨candied¨(like candy apples). My least favorite was a bowl of potatoes and strips of pork fat.

I headed back to the main square for midnight... they counted it down (just like we do on New Years), and the whole square sang what I assume was the national anthem. Then from right behind the stage they blasted off fireworks... the big kind, like we use one the 4th of July. And it definitely sounded like one or two exploded on the ground. Then another band got up, the party kept going, and I headed to bed. Yup. I´m one crazy party animal.

The Lake at the Top of the World

Wow. These last few days have been spectacularly phenomenal (phenomenally spectacular?), and I don´t think I´ll really be able to do it justice in a blog entry. I´ll try, though. If I had to sum up the trip in one photo, this would be it:

Nope, it´s not Christ ascending into heaven... it´s just me, enjoying the scenery.

I spent the last couple of days on a tour of Lake Titicaca (I can finally say its name without smirking). It´s big (the biggest in South America), it´s high (the highest ¨commercially navigable¨ lake in the world), and it´s pretty cool (both figuratively and literally).

The first stop on the tour was the Uros Islands. Well, actually, the first stop for me was to walk down to the tour office, after the van driver forgot to pick me up from my hostel in the morning. Eventually, though, I made it to the Uros Islands to hook up with my tour group.

Now, the Uros Islands aren´t any ordinary islands. They´re man-made islands. Yeah. Made of reeds. Seems that as the Incas were conquering their way across the Andes, they didn´t bother subduing most of the smaller islands dotting Lake Titicaca. Noticing this, a tribe of natives called the Uros moved their villages from the mainland (where they were under the Incan fist) to huge floating reed rafts (where they were largely ignored). The villages gradually rot away from the bottom, so fresh reeds are constantly added to the top. And boy, do these guys like reeds...

Their boats are made of reeds....

...their houses are made of reeds (with the occasional modern convenience)...

...their whole dang village is pretty much made of reeds. Apparently they have to be pretty careful with their cooking fires.

The inevitable ¨I´m here too¨ shot, just so you don´t forget what I look like.

Next was the island (the real island) of Amantani, where everyone in our tour group was split up into groups of 2-4 people and sent home to stay with familes native to the island. The wife (whose name I could never really pronounce, and have now completely forgotten) cooked us fantastic traditional meals, complete with herbal tea.

The dirt-floor kitchen (which was also the dining room) had no power or running water... just a cooking fire and a shelf of supplies. Kim (the only other American on the tour) and I got to hang out and watch her cook, but she wouldn´t let us help... she insisted that we just relax and play with Ponchito, her 5-day-old lamb.

And everywhere our hostess went, the lamb was sure to go... around the house, across the village, it didn´t matter. I´ll never think of the nursery rhyme again without thinking of Ponchito.

We hooked back up with our guide and tour group for a hike to the very top of the island, where we enjoyed one of the most spectacular sunsets I´ve ever seen...

The pictures really don´t do it justice, but at least you get a taste. Me and two Norwegian girls were the first ones to the top... they were taking pictures as enthusiastically as I was (I took dozens of the sunset), and eventually we got around to taking crazy pictures for each other. Including the one at the top of this post... I jumped and they shot. We headed back down, and about half an hour later enjoyed an equally spectacular moonrise...

...followed by another home-cooked meal. Next we were dressed in the native garb (in my case, a poncho and floppy cap), and after a quick photo with the family...

... we were sent off to an island fiesta, complete with traditional music (live band!) and dancing:

A few of the party-goers... me, David from Columbia, and Teine and Hege from Norway.

That night, I randomly woke up around 4:30. The moon was completely full, so it was like broad daylight outside. I couldn´t pass up the opportunity... I bundled up, hiked the hour back up to the top of the island, climbed this rock tower/monument thing (making me higher than anything around for dozens of miles), and waited for the sunrise. It was a pretty chilly wait -- keep in mind that the top of the island is about the same altitude as of the top of Mt. Shasta, and it´s winter down here in the Southern hemisphere. I´m glad I did it, though. The sunrise was amazing... and the setting was definitely memorable.

Later that day (after home-cooked breakfast) we boated over and explored the island of Taquile, whose natives are known for their knitting.

Me with the Great Big Wall-O-Hats

And the best part of all this? The two-day tour -- including transportation to and around the lake, meals, lodging, English-speaking tour guide, entertainment, etc -- cost roughly $13. Oh, how I love South American travel.

Wanderings

I´ve got to say -- things are significantly less awesome now that Nic´s gone. I´m not going to deny that there´s advantages of traveling on your own... you end up meeting and talking with a lot more people, for one thing. Plus you don´t have to share the window seat on the bus. But still... things are different. The quoting of Princess Bride and Monty Python has dropped to almost zero, for example. And most of my photos are starting to be of a few familiar styles...

The awkward ¨I´m here too¨ shot, which many will recognize from our college days.

The set-the-timer-and-run shot... usually requires several attempts to look right.

The random-passerby shot. Involves handing your camera to whoever´s nearby and hoping they don´t run off with it. The resulting photo is of varying quality. For example, above is the second photo the lady took... the first didn´t have our heads in it. That´s an authentic 600-year-old Incan wall, by the way. It´s in such good shape they built that other building right on top of it.

Anyway... my first few days on my own I did a lot of wandering aimlessly around the Peruvian countryside. The first village I stopped at was Mazuko, in the middle of the Amazonian jungle. (That´s the ¨I´m here too shot¨ up above.) I honestly love the jungle. I think I´m going to move to a jungle somewhere when I retire. I spent the whole day exploring jungle trails, following monkey families, almost burying myself in honest-to-goodness jungle quicksand, and chatting with locals panning for gold. I also took lots of photos, mostly of bizarre bugs and big lizards and a dead rotting something. I couldn´t decide which pictures to upload, so I compromised and didn´t upload any. Fair is fair.

The next day I moved on to Ccatcca, much higher in the mountains. I chatted with more locals that day than I had the rest of the trip combined... llama herders, little shepherd boys with bugles, grain threshers, families weaving, schoolteachers, schoolkids...

Pretty much everybody I came across gave me an odd look and asked me where exactly I was going. My response usually consited of ¨up there,¨or ¨over that way,¨ or eventually just ¨everywhere,¨ waving my hand at the whole valley:

1. The spot where I ditched my pack in some bushes, to keep from carrying it around all day.
2. The highest I got. That´s where I took the ¨timer¨photo, with the mountains in the background.
3. Where I took the ¨threshing women¨ photo.

Eventually I looped way around to the left of the picture, where the little town of Ccatcca actually is. I hung out for an hour or two with some kids playing marbles...

Nice kids... they liked their town, they liked their school, they even liked chemistry. Top-notch little buggers. Easy to understand, too. And they really loved getting their picture taken...

Oh yeah... I also got cornered in the middle of a field by three angry dogs. You might wonder how one gets ¨cornered¨ in the middle of a field. Oh, it´s easy. There´s three of them and one of you.

All alone...

Nic left me. Abandoned me to the mercies of banditos, pickpockets, and maniac bus drivers. If I want to have a conversation in English, I´m stuck whatever random gringos come along... which thus far have been a 23-year-old Swedish girl named Olsa, a lady from Iran who now lives in England (she had a very wierd accent), an Israeli guy who only talked about soccer and bars (neither of which I know much about), and a chemical engineer from San Francisco (we had a lot more in common). Usually, though, I´m surrounded by Spanish-only speakers... which, honestly, is the most fun. Especially since my Spanish is finally getting good enough to have something resembling a complete conversation in Spanish.

Nic, abandoning me. Look at that evil face. I forgot to rotate the photo before I uploaded it, so you´ll have to turn your head to fully appreciate the pure evilness.

We did have one last adventure before Nic left... a traditional Peruvian dish called ¨ceviche.¨ Take raw fish. Soak it overnight in lime juice with lots of chopped onions and chile peppers. The next morning, scoop it out and serve it with unpopped maize popcorn kernels. That´s ceviche. I´d like to point out that the fish is never actually cooked. It just sits overnight in lots of acid.

A traditional ceviche appetizer is a shot of ¨tiger´s milk.¨It´s a glass of the leftover fish marinade -- raw fish juices, onions chunks, concentrated lime juice, and all.

Keep in mind that Nic embarked on this culinary adventure about an hour before he set off on 60 straight hours of travel, including four countries, three bus stations, and seven airports. He´s a very brave man...

Jungle Madness

As Jack Handy once said: ¨If you find yourself in the underbrush, in your underwear, don´t start thinking about other words that start with ´under´.... that´s the first sign of jungle madness.¨

Yesterday, we returned to civilization after five days and four nights in the deepest, darkest jungle. We´ve got ten thousand bug bites, we´re dirty, we definitely stink, and worst of all, our camera batteries are nearly dead. But we´re alive. And we´re free from jungle madness. We hope. Only time will tell.

After Cusco, we took another 20-hour bus ride up and over another set of mountains, this time with a much more sedate bus driver (which, combined with a lack of syrupy doughballs, meant no gastrointestinal distress of any kind for Nic). The last half of the trip, though, was an entirely new experience. Picture another typical Greyhound bus. No special tires, suspension, or equipment of any kind. Imagine it bouncing down a one-lane, muddy jungle road, scraping jungle trees on both sides, splashing through jungle streams, creeping across tiny jungle bridges no wider than the bus, and generally going places no bus had gone before. Cool stuff.

We got to Puerto Maldonado, booked a cheap jungle tour (after much checking around and haggling) and set out the next morning for our four-day, three-night excursion with our boat-driver guide and three Peruvian adventurers about our age. After a full day of boating around, gawking at turtles, caimens (like crocodiles), crazy birds, and generally awesome scenery, we pulled in to shore for the night.

Forging into generally awesome jungle scenery.

While the guide was busy with guide-ish things at the back of the boat, we wandered 50 yards up a jungle trail to the thatched-roof shelter we were going to pitch our tents under. We waited there a couple minutes for the guide, swatting at the increasing numbers of mosquitos and flies interested in sucking our blood. Then we started to get larger flying things stuck in our hair and clothes. Angry-sounding flying things. Lots of them. Turns out there were not one, but two beehives in the eaves of the shelter. Needless to say, we cleared out of there darn fast, pausing a safe distance away to flick the remaining bees from our clothes and hair (which was particularly difficult in Nic´s flowing locks). We quickly switched to swatting at our feet and legs, though, as we discovered we had stopped on or near a trail of equally angry, tiny biting ants. We retreated the rest of the way to the relative safety of the boat, where we satisfied ourselves with swatting mere flies and mosquitos.

And our trusted native guide, source of wisdom and protection? He laughed at us, and assured us repeatedly that these bees weren´t stinging bees -- they were just interested in ¨burrowing¨ in our hair and clothes. Right. Anyway... he went up and lit a smoky fire, to keep them safely tucked away in their hives for the night. We were able to eat dinner and set up our tents in relative safety, until we noticed yet another jungle friend making his home in our lodge:

Oh yeah... and there were vampire bats flying around. Ah, the jungle.

So... What happens to untended fires overnight? They go out. What happens to bees in the wee hours of the morning? They wake up. Thus, Nic and I awoke to find fifteen or twenty bees crawling on the outside of our tent, with several dozens more zipping around in the air. We refused to move until the guide (who was merrily frying eggs, unphased by all the bees) agreed to make a smokier fire.

One of the bees on our tent, doing its best to bite through the mesh. Not the most pleasant thing to see mere inches from your face when you open your eyes in the morning.

The first stop for the day was fishing from a quaint bit of land in the middle of our lake. After a few minutes we dubbed it Wasp Island, for reasons that shall go unmentioned.

Piranha fishing from Wasp Island was a success....

...for some of us. Nic shows off his biggest catch.

Our guide, preparing my piranha for lunch. This isn´t the best picture to see it, but if you look closely you´ll notice that he is missing his ring finger on his left hand. Coincidence? I think not.

Here, the piranha was my lunch....

...and here, I´m about to be piranha lunch. That´s right. Later that day we went for a dip in the same lake we caught piranha in. Maybe we do have jungle madness...

We visited a native village... Nic entertained the kids while I bought the sweet lizard-tooth necklace you can see in some of the later pictures.

We visited the canopy, by way of a 150-foot high cable walkway. Amazing jungle views, sweet jungle sounds, lots of jungle insects interested in our bodily fluids.

We visited the jungle floor, checking out monkeys, crazy plants, and anthills the size of Volkswagons.

Have you ever been attacked by butterflies? It´s sort of like being beaten to death with feathers. A much more pleasant experience than being attacked by, say, bees, or biting ants. Believe us, we speak from experience.

At one of our stops, we encountered a very friendly, completely wild monkey. I guess checking my hair for bugs and pestering the caged birds and turtles was more fun than hanging out with his monkey friends.

Each night we tented somewhere different. Each night, the sun set around 6 PM. Each night around 6:01, every mosquito within a square mile honed in on our heat signatures. We´d put up with it for an hour or so (a bit more if our guide was telling jungle ghost stories). Then we´d retreat to the tent, to relative safety from the swarms of bloodsuckers. First, though, was our nightly ritual -- we had to spend ten or fifteen minutes with the flashlight, hunting down the handful of bugs that had snuck in with us during the few seconds we had the tent unzipped.

Some footprints we found near our tent one morning. We were convinced they were from some crazy lizard-beast, like a velociraptor or something. Our guide told us they were from a capybara, which is basically a big rat. An ROUS. I don´t know... I´m thinking it was a man-eating lizard, and he just doesn´t want to scare away business. There were also prints from birds, ocelots, jaguars, peccaries, and caimens.... hey, it´s a jungle out there.

At the end of our trip, we weren´t ready to go back into town yet, so we asked our guide if he could drop us off to camp somewhere within walking distance of Puerto Maldonado. He brought us to his dad´s place, a jungle farm complete with pigs, cows, a dog, chickens, chicks, and a rooster that started crowing at 5 AM.

Our only dinner and breakfast - authentic jungle oranges and coconuts.

Victims of jungle madness? You decide.