I stayed one night in Cochabamba and decided to split straight to La Paz the next day (remember, de facto capital of Bolivia, not the administrative one). I thought that with the hustle and bustle of a big city I would be able to concoct a new plan. Plus, I have the pleasure of Helen Breens company here (Irish friend from Berlin) to inspire me.
Not only do I have a new plan, but I have it booked and payed for: Tomorrow I will fly from here to Rurrenebaque. (Thats right, the second flight of my odyssee, and a slight cheat to my claim of South America Overland)... and guess where Rurrenbaque is... let me give you some hints... Indiana Jones, Tarzan & Jane, the King of the Swingers... thats right mi amigos... I am now officially going into the Jungle at long last!
Before I came to South America I had visions of this... visions of yours truly hunting for giant anacondas, swinging from vines and battling with piranhas and leeches for Amazonian domination. So thats the new plan... Myself and Helen are flying to Rurrenbaque to do a three-day Jungle tour... after that she will return to La Paz and I will stay on and do a three day Pampas tour (dunno what Pampas really is, but its supposed to be wet and have lots of wildlife). I'll come back to La Paz afterwards to relax here for a while because its a pretty impressive city. (More about La Paz in a later "La Paz dedicated" post).
Two things that I have done here in the past few days, I do have to reveal though.
First of all we went to the Coca Musuem and learnt all about Bolvia's coca leaf. Not Cocoa, but Coca... the plant that cocaine comes from... Anyway, Coca to Bolivia (and other South American countries, but especially Bolivia), is what the pint of Guinness is to Ireland... except a lot more important...
It has mythical, religious, social and health ramifications in Bolivian society and has done so since approx. 2500BC (the European Bronze age). Remember that La Paz and much of Bolivia is at very high altitudes (La Paz is at 3500 metres, thats three and half kilometres above sealevel) and at these altitudes, the air pressure is significantly lower which has many effects on the human body (throbbing of the muscles, headaches, shortness of breath etc. Collectivly known as altitude sickness)... When you walk up a flight of stairs here, you feel it a lot more than you would at sealevel.
Chewing coca leaves is supposed to relieve these symtoms and in my experience, it does that quite effectively (I have not suffered from any symtoms of altitude sickness except for that I am seriously out of breath after even the lightest exertion)... for more information about the coca leaf and cocaine, click here. And don't worry mum, chewing coca is not like taking cocaine... they even put coca into coca-cola (would you believe).
Also, yesterday, we rode mountain-biked down the aptly named "Road of Death"... a mountain biking tour in one of the most dangerous roads in the world. After brekkie, you get a bus up to an altitude of 4.700m where you cycle down 3600m in about 5 hours. (some pics here, more to come)
The first part of the road is asphalt which is great for some seriously fast cycling... then you get onto this death road... which begins nice and gingerly and then goes uphill for about 25 minutes (an absolute fucking feat of endurance at this altitude) before you start to plummet down this ridiculously steep and narrow dirt road only inches from dropping into some canyon to your death...
If you can tear your eyes away from the road (this is dangerous, cos you may just have to pull over in case an articulated lorry comes your way and leaves you teetering on the edge), then the landscape is pretty amazing, because of the change of the nature from the altiplanic zone till the subtropic zone. You also go under two waterfalls and get generally soaked and muddy. It was quite foggy when we did it but it was an unbe-fucking-lievable adrenalin rush...
The last part is quite low, so the weather is nice and warm and the roads are a little wider. I realised half way down that if I lifted my arse off the saddle and only held the handlebars loosely, the the rocks wouldn't shake me senseless and I would have more strength in my hands to pull the breaks (which is more or less
necessary all the time)...
When we were finished we went to this hotel for lunch and then had a gruelling six'hour journey back up the road of death in a bus... where there were serious traffic jams... and oul' ones risking life and limb to sell anything to the waiting punters..
Actually, the oul' ones here deserve their own paragraph at least... according to my observations, they are the only ones who seem to work in Bolivia... the men sit around chatting while the women run a street stall for anything and everything ("dried llama foetuses... two for a pow-end")... They wear these ridiculous hats which don't do anything against cold, wind or sun and they wear more rugs, blankets, dresses and general layers of material than you can throw an empenada at... apparantly, its trendy to wrap yourself up so that it looks like you have a huge arse (huge arse=wide childbearing hips= fertile, good potential partner)... But for all I know, all the bolivian women are skinny rakes packed in various layers of clothing...
Furthermore, they work like oxens... they open their little street stalls at five or six in the morning and sit there (with their childer strapped to their back in another ten inches of carpet) until about eleven at night... I'm afraid to say that this lifestyle isn't conjusive to good looks, and the Bolivian women seem to age before their time... they seem to go from 15 straight to 45 without passing the years in between...
It's quite sad actually, you can see every day of work on some of the older womens faces... !
Anyway, enough of the depressing stuff... all that coca and biking was great craic and I will shag up some pics once I'm back from my alligator arm wrestling in the jungle...
Thats all for now... hopefully will update from the jungle, if not, then from La Paz when I get back...
Arividerci amigos...
No comments:
Post a Comment