Living the High Life

Here we are in La Paz, huffing and puffing our way around at about 13,000 feet.  Actually, today we are both feeling much better than we have in a while.  We spent a couple of rough days in Potosi, the highest city in the world, at an altitude of 14,000 feet.  Our bus arrived at 3 in the morning, so that didn´t help either.  For some reason all of the overnight buses in Bolivia seem to arrive at 3 or 4 in the morning, which is not so fun for the passenger.  Potosi was such a sad, beautiful, and fascinating city.  Anyone who is interested in getting a feel for where we are right now must watch the documentary titled El Minero del Diablo, or The Devil´s Miner.  It is one of the most heartbreaking things you will ever watch, and it paints a very clear picture of a city with a very complicated past and present.  Potosi was once the richest city in the world due to it´s silver mines, and most tourists go there today to tour the mines, which are still in operation, although most of the silver supply has been exhausted.  The mines are incredibly dangerous, and almost all of the miners who work in them, including children as young as ten years old, die by 35 or so.  We did not tour the mines because we did not feel comfortable taking a tour of a place that continues to kill so many people, but the city itself was still quite fascinating to see.  I cannot recommend this documentary enough.  Please watch it.
We spent the last several weeks in the city of Tarija and its surrounding areas, working for about ten days for a strange man in the city with a garden of sorts and some very sad animals, but we had a free place to stay in a truly wonderful city.  You can hop a micro bus (which sometimes is actually the back of a pick up truck) and be in mountains or by rivers or in cute little towns in thirty minutes as well from Tarija, and we took full advantage of that because we only worked half days in Tarija.  Creepy Mauricio, the man we worked for, hooked us up with another cool gig in a town called Valle de Concepcion, which is a wine producing town about thirty minutes outside the city.  All of the wine in Bolivia is produced around Tarija.  Most of it is pretty bad, but it was still cool to be in the region.  There we spent a week picking leaves on a vineyard.  The work was excruciatingly boring, but the place was stunningly beautiful, and we met some great characters there.  In the first five minutes of us being there, Jesus, the owner of the vineyard, sliced his hand open on a bottle of wine that exploded, and he just continued to smear the blood that was oozing out of his finger on the wall of the wine cellar for about ten minutes as it bled and bled.  It was sort of like that, if that makes any sense.
We celebrated what we thought was Luke´s 30th birthday there, and it was a total bust.  We took the day off of work and walked about 2 hours to a town that we were told was beautiful, but turned out not to be, and it was 100 degrees.  We tried to go out for a special dinner and everything in the town was closed.  Everyone at the vineyard said we would drink wine and celebrate when we got back from dinner, and when we did everyone was nowhere to be found.  Nothing went right.  BUT then we woke up in the morning and realized that we had the date wrong (we are sort of living in the twilight zone here), and that what we thought had been Luke´s birthday was actually the day before, and we were given a second chance!  We did it right on his real birthday, going back to Tarija, spluring on a place with our own bathroom, going and swimming in a waterfall, and eating Chinese food!  The whole situation was pretty hysterical.
And now, La Paz.  This is a beautiful city that is incredibly intense and overwhelming.  It makes walking around the streets of NYC feel like being in the countryside.  Every time we cross the street we almost die...seriously.  It is totally insane, but the architecture is stunning, and the set up of the city, which is stretched out over enormously steep hills, is like nothing I´ve ever seen.  It is filled with amazing artesenal crafts, and it´s fun just to walk around and take it all in.  We were supposed to leave this afternoon but missed our bus because apparently a bus and two taxis crashed into Lake Titicaca, which is where we were headed, and they suspended afternoon service, so we are here for one more night.  We´ve got a few days left in Bolivia and then we´re off to Peru for the last leg of our journey.  We are hoping to possibly volunteer a little bit more, because we like it and also for financial reasons, but as of right now we have nothing else lined up, so we´ll see.  We head back to the states in early March, so we´ll see you all then!
Just a little funny tidbit to leave you with...two days ago we were heading to La Paz and had to switch buses in Oruro, another large city, and I went into the bathroom in the bus station.  There was a woman with a lamb on a leash in the bathroom, and the lamb was just pooping all over the floor of the bathroom.  Oh Bolivia!

Is that a baby under that chicken stand?

Ah Bolivia, where the food is cheap, the street dogs are cute and plentiful, and the people look at you like you have six heads.  Bolivia brings up a lot of complicated feelings in Luke and I as we travel throughout its beautiful lands.  There is much to see here--tons of natural beauty, from misty and lonely mountains with herds of wandering sheep, to deep red canyons where there is not a soul around.  Everything is here for the viewing and the experiencing.  Some things are unbelievably cheap here, like food.  The last few days we have been eating our dinners in the central market of Tarija, and for the two of us to eat dinner it costs just under 2 dollars.  Granted, the first night Luke accidentally ate shredded cow stomach, but still.  You can get salteñas, the amazingly delicious traditional Bolivian breakfast food for about 15 cents a piece, and a freshly made in front of you apple carrot juice for fifty cents.  On the down side, food hygiene leaves something to be desired.  Raw chickens are on every counter top of every corner store, and on the hands of most people who are handing you your change, whether you are buying chicken or not.  We´ve seen pigs being cut up on the sidewalk in front of clothing stores, and yes, babies hanging out underneath meat stands where blood and guts are running down the sides.  Needless to say, it keeps you on your toes!  Also, in general, it definitely feels like people do not want us here.  We feel like outsiders in a way that is profound, and that is challenging.  Yesterday we spent some time with a wonderful and odd Bolivian family on our way to a lake out of town, and they told us it was their first time interacting with foreigners, which was exciting.  It was so fantastic to be so taken in by them off the side of the road, and so special to feel a little bit accepted for a brief period of time. 

We are currently in Tarija, which is the heart of Bolivian wine country.  The wine is not so good, but it´s still a beautiful area with lots to do and see.  Unfortunately we are now in the rainy season, so it rains pretty much very day.  This has put a damper on some of our outdoor adventures, but we are still making it work the best we can, getting a bit soggy in the process.  We have climbed some beautiful large hills/small mountains, hiked through some amazing canyons, seen petroglyphs, and eaten some pretty delicious (and some fairly dicey) food.  We spent Christmas in Tupiza, which did not turn out to be quite what we had hoped for, but we got out and did some trekking around in the surrounding countryside.  There is a serious, and I mean serious, littering problem here, but we are not contributing and trying to get far enough away from the heart of things to get away from it.  We begin what will probably be our final job today-tommorow, meaning we arrived at our host´s house today, but we begin work tomorrow.  He growns organic greens in the city and sells them to a few local restaurants.  We will work only mornings with him and have the afternoons to ourselves.  His place has a bit of what I imagine a Bolivian prison cell would look like look/feel, and we are praying for not so much rain because there is a hole in the ceiling over our "bed", but we have our game faces on!  He´s really nice and hopefully in the dark it won´t be so bad.  I´ll keep you posted.