Lost in Bolivia

Sajama

2007-09-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

After the Choro trek I have 7 days left here, so I decide to head out to Sajama, near the Chilean border, to see if I can climb this 6542m (22,000 foot) mountain. The scenery on the way out goes from Altiplanar flatness to more and more hills and wide valleys, and soon I am on the edge of my seat, not because of Sajama looming on the horizon, but because of the staggering # of boulderfields and crags we are whipping through. There is bouldering enough here for a lifetime and I even got some crappy bus shots.

At the ranger station in Sajama they say " you cannot climb alone" and then regale me with horror stories of people who went up there and froze their asses/fell off, etc. I am forced to go with a guide, one Ignacio, and we will set out tomorrow at 6:30 am sharp. In the meantime I get to wander around Sajama which appears totally deserted like a movie set and is full of the crystal clear Altiplano light. I eat dinner at a comedor with a bunch of teenagers and the owner´s somewhat precocious 5 year old comes over to demand homework help. Long division is as hard for Bolivian kids as for us North Americans, it seems.

Ignacio is amazed I want to do the mountain in two days--it is a 10,000 foot ascent and descent and is usually done in two days. I get the price down by offering to trade him my old Dragonfly for one day´s work, and we are off.

The first day we walk up a long dusty valley to Vase Camp, where we brew cocoa tea and then head up the gravel wash. We pass herds of wild vicuñas-- the animals that make fine Bolivian wool clothing-- which the locals round up every 2 years, fleece, and release. The sunny wind rips at me. We camp at 5700m, behind a rock tower, brew tea and soup, and by 7PM I am sleeping uneasily.

We get up at 1:30 AM and when I stagger out of the tent the wind nearly knocks me over. The moon is ful to bursting and the snow and rock have a hazy gleam to them. I am wearing every piece of clothing.

The climb is straightforward-- lots of glacier walking, some crevasses, and about 30m of grade III ice. As we move up I find myself stopping every 30 meters or so. I have not been smoking, I am in good shape, what gives? Also I feel like I am about to simultaneously shit myself and puke. I look down the long ridge and realise, holy shit, we are about 2000m and 2 days from rescue if anything goes wrong. A few minutes later, my crampon falls off and I stare at it and slowly realise I have no idea how to put it back on. It is at this point that it kind of hits me that, geez, alpinists are hardmen, and I am most certainly not, and thankGod Ignacio has spare brain cells.

WHen I get to the summit I couldn´t care less. I feel so bad, like a bag of potentially explosive bacteria combined with a case of asthma with a dollop of exhaustion on top, that it is all I can do to take out my camera and snap a few pics. But now get this. Some intrepid Bolivians...wait for it...played a game of soccer on the summit! I can hardly stay on my feet and these guys carried nets, balls etc, and played soccer. The air here is about 1/3 as dense as at sea level. Conclusion: alpinists, sherpas and Bolivians rock.

We get back to the village at 4 and I sleep for 16 hours, miss the morning bus, and end up hitching back to La Paz with first some construction workers and then on a cama bus. Took more pics of the amazing bouldering.

Anyway this blog is almost done. Yesterday I went and did the Death Road ride with a bunch of Brits. This was not technical, but we got some wonderful cardio workouts on hills at 3500m, some serious high speed, and a cool eco-lodge ending which included fending off amorous parrots, monkeys and ocelots while we hoovered spaghetti. The road is now little used by normal traffic and so you can really open up,. but it is terrifying-- there are loads of 500-1000m drops, and it used to kill 400 people/year.

I ate salchipapas in San Pedro last night and today, the day I leave, I am so fucking sick not even ciprophlaxin seems to be putting a dent into whatever is causing horrible unmentionable symptoms. Anyway I get on a plane in 3 hours, and when I am home, I will post a link to photos-- there are loads of good ones coming. Thanks all for reading and check back in a week or so for pictures.

A Long and Varied Career

2007-08-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

So I trekked to Coroico. This was the trek that featured stunning scenery, tropical forests, Californian booty, knee-destroying descent and random conversations.

I arrived in Coroico, found lodging, washed three days worht of slime from my body, and went out for, of all things, German food. One can get enough of fried chicken and meat. The Backstube had a lovely view and terrible Spaetzle (egg noodles), but fabulous, local organic shade grown free range coffee harvested by the war amputee children of indigenous lesbian Communists.

In the evenign I took the mando to the plaza where I had heard various sorts of music. Now, Coroico is 3500m downhill into the jungle from La Paz, and it is a weekend town for Paceños, and on this lovely night the sun set the colour of a Bloody Mary through loads of mist that crept around the steep forested slopes. The plaza was full fo people strolling. And you have your music options. There are the omnipresent hippies with their loud bad djembes. There is the Colombian with his silver jewellery and guitar, and there is the French horn section fo the local marching band. I chose the Colombian and we chewed coca and then played a few Carlos Vives tunes. It was a beautiful calm evening, little traffic, couples parading, kids kicking a soccer ball and old men talking politics. The square has some lovely abstracts which are Chaco War memorials-- cool to see this usually staid form changed. Oh btw Bolivia sucks at war. They ave lost 1/2 their territory and all of their wars. If you want to win, just fight Bolivia.

Anyway the next guy who comes up is a fat aging Italian hippie. he sits down beside me, pulls out a flask of hooch, takes a swig, and then sets up his jewellery blanket. He sells silver. A kid, a black kid, walks by and the Italian says "hey Son, you tell your Mother I want to see her tomorrow," and the kid says "tell her yourself!"

I raise an eyebrow and he tells me in weird SPanish, "yeah, I got a lotsa kids, I likea very much. Five mothers in Bolivia! I work at night!" It´s like Spanish Borat, I am now expecting some kind of "and now we harvest pubis of woman" comment. His name is Andrei and after about two hours of fragmented conversation I piece together his story.

He dropped out of University in the mid 70s in Italy and moved to Switzerland. He got a job doing concert seccurity for the Swiss equivalent of the Hell´s Angels. The deal was, he bought drugs from them, and got to sell them at concerts. The musicians were big buyers, too. "That dickhead from the Rolling Stones, the guitar player, what the %%·&·? was his name, that guy could smoke anything I gave him," etc etc. He didn´t have much to say for the Stones, but really liked the folks from Motorhead. "Lemmy is a gentleman."

This proved lucrative, but not as lucrative as his next line-- collecting all the crap that people left behind at concerts, cleaning it, and selling it.

"If 50,000 people go to a show, and 5% of them leave something behnd, that´s like, uhh, umm, euhh, like a lot of stuff" he said, contorting his head. Tents, jeans, bags of weed, stereos, bikes. This was good $$ but then he got into moving drugs and finally he imagined that the cops had caught wind of him, so he moved to the Vatican. He saw a job add for security, applied, went through about 3000 interviews, and was told that he now had a job doing security for the Pope.

Papal protection was less interesting and remunerative than drug and scavenging work in Switzerland-- and you had to cut your hair-- but the hours were better and you could hit on Italian women with ease, as opposed to "those cold Swiss bitches." A year later he had a kid, a live-in woman, and a serious case of boredom.

I am not clear on this next bit, but I think he went to trade school for machinist on the side, and ended up working for an Arab who shall we say provided instruments of persuasion for those with budgets. It was interesting work, well paying, and of course tax free, and every day was something different. 200 AK-47s needed modified clips. A helicopter needed mounts for a new type of gun. More power was needed in a turbine.

He eventually got tired of hsi new life and second child, and so packed a rucksack and headed for Guatemala. This was in 1984 at the height of the counterinsurgency, which, being high 24/7 and not much of a news reader, he didn´t really notice, except that there was a surprising lack of tourists in this lovely country. He ended up at San Pedro on Lake Atitlan, which he thought paradise. Cheap weed and coke, nice Indians, lovely water.

One day he woke up and the village was oddly silent. He went toward the main square and just befor ehe came around the corner, he heard somebody shouting orders. "Men this side! Women this side!" ANd wqhen he peked aroudn the corner, he saw about thirty soldiers start to shoot at a crowd of civilians, Indians. He fled the blood and the screaming and went back to his pension, and crawled under the bed. For the next 12 hours the soldiers ransacked the town. There was screaming, shooting, yelling and the occasional explosion. At dusk he emerged and found a number of elderly women dragging corpses out of the main square.

After a bout of barfing his guts out, he was washing his face in the fountain when a voice said "¿Qué te parece esto?" and he looked up and saw a group of ragged armed men. These were the guerillas, those who were workign to overthrowq the horrific Ríos Montt government.

Andrei´s political education began that evening, when the guerillas recruited him for arms maintenance. His job was to fix guns, mortars, what have you.

When I asked him how those nine months were, he simply said something liek "I saw some fucked-up shit" and didn´t elaborate.

When the ´86 armistice was signed, he went to South America. There was good work running coke in Colombia. "The C.I.A. were very helpful," he said, grinning. Reagan´s War On Drugs busated the Cali cartel, and so a number of smaller operators were able to get into business and any guy with some get up and go could make money. By '90 he had an estate, wads of cash in his safe, his own helicopter, a few more kids, and, as it turned out one morning when he was coming back to his finca in his Jeep and saw U.S. soldiers outside his front gate, a new reputation.

So he went to Bolivia, where he met up with a Tarijeña who owned a silver shop, and found that silverwork wasn´t that different from machining parts, and soon had an embryonic business selling jewellery. The business grew, he got the Tarijeña pregnant, and eventually moved out and started his own business in Coroico, where he and I chatted on that lovely evening.

Work, he said, was good. He made jewellery for a few months, sold for a few, and sent money to women with children in Switzerland,Colombia, Tartija, and Italy, and helped out with his three kids and mistresses in Coroico.

"Money," he said to me while shaking his finger, "is bullshit. It will kill you. Stay away from it."

Funny who you meet in the Plaza.

Uncle Amable

2007-08-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

SO when I got back to la Paz I decided to do the El Choro trek. I took a bus to La Cumbre, got out into a desert surrounded by massive icy peaks, swirling with mist and sunshine, and started walking. The trek passes one pass of 4900m, then drops 3500m to Coroico, a tropical vacation town. The scenery goes from arid Altiplano to tropics in three days of knee and tendon destroying descent.

On the second evening, Booty Patrol hit the jackpot when it arrived at SanFrancisco, dropped its heavy pack, and saw two blonde Californians in tight pants doing the Downward Facing Dog. This should be illegal in Bolivia, but one thing led to another, and in the warm tropical twilight we, and a Chinese-Brit lawyer whose accent was an odd mix of Chinese, Queen´s English and full on Nof London Yob, drank tea and discussed life.

"Age," said one of the 22 year old Californians, "is a state of mind." And with this my mind went back to Uncle Amable.

* * *

1971. A young Quebecois engineer, a radar specialist, sits at his desk in NASA and opens his mail. Inside one envelope is an invitation from McDonnel Douglas (or whatever they were back then) to come and work on guidance systems for ICBMs. The engineer, bored, accepts. He moves his family to the U.S.

His new job is fascinating for two years. New microchops mean real time onboard guidance, instead of to-ground relays. They are doing different things with missile stages. The field seems to be wide open, the work is great, life is good. The money is very, very good.

One summer evenign the engineer drives up to Montréal to visit an old school friend who has written him. Dinner, for the first time in young Amable´s life, is vegetarian. After dinner, the friend feeds Amable his fith glass fo wine, looks him in the eye, and says "Amable, you look like shit."

"What?"

There follows a convesation whee the friend details his recent life changes. He has quit smoking and eating meat, taken up yoga, etc etc. This was the end of the ´60s and stuff like this happened. He tells Amable that, although he is no expert, somethign is seriously wrong with him.

On the way home, Amable, driving through the night, has an epiphany. When he gets home, a new idea sits in his head. He divorces his wife. He gives her everything he owns, except for hsi two investment properties in Florida, which go to his brother. He quits his job. Whiel doing so, hsi boss offers him a $30,000 raise to stay on.

"We build death," says Amable.

He buys a one-way plane ticket to Ecuador, takes one suitcase, and disappears.

In Ecuador, Amable treks to Vilacamba, Ecuador, one of the places in the world with the highest longevity rates. He begins doing research on the inhabiants´diets. Two years later, he is invited to do scientific work in Bolivia. He works for various organisations looking at diet, doing engineering stuff, doing some surveying.

Eventually he meets Sylvia through work. She is a Kalawayah, a Pelechucan indigenous healer, and they immediately hit it off. She is a survivor. Her mother was raped and Sylvia was the product. Her stepfather sexually assaulted her when she was 14. This happened a few more times. Sylvia left home. She spent time in an institution on a few occasions. Amable met her during one of her up periods, and would later spend lots of time getting her back on her feet.

Sylvia eventually got it together and she and Amable opened a bakery in La Paz. Thirty years later, and ten years after they retired, people still come up to them and ask them for their cookies. Vegan, whole food and innovative were the things that made these cookies.

Amable, always bored, decided to do more science in between odd consulting jobs. WHen I meet him with my former colleague Ellen and her hu8sband Jaques (Amable´s nephew), he is sitting in a crowded market in Cochabamba, slurping carrot juice and mumbling through a mouthful of busted teeth and the biggest beard I have ever seen outside of a biker bar.

He ahs been busy. He hands me a thick stack of paper. It seems that there are problems with the periodic table, and so he has been revising. He also doesn´t like the calendar, so he has built a perpetual calendar. Ellen and I have a mission-- this stuff has to get to the scientists at UBC so it can be checked.

"Amable," I tell him, " the Maya beat you to it."

"Yea, sure, but look how they had to do their months. Their leap years were 5 days. And they needed two time systems. This is way better. And you should try some fruit juie, it´s very nice."

He reminds me of my Aunt Signe. Tuned onto a whole other reality, an oddly distant but entrancing one.

Sylvia is clearly the one keeping Amable going. She has the watch, remembers the phone #s, and, kind of like Haqns and Chewbacca (or the Korean dude and the black guy on Lost), manages to communicate with Ellen and Jaques despite nto speaking English and them speaking no Spanish. Amable forgets his adress and has to have his taxi pull over so he can call Sylvia and ask her where they live (with her relatives in Cochabamba). Amable can spend half and hour opening his backpack. But while this is going on, he is rearranging chemical equations in his head and setting upa new classification system for micronutrients (vitamins).

"And drink some carrot juice" he mumbles and starts off on a rant about vitamins and the meat industry. I hate carrot juice. Hippie crap. I oblige him with a nice grapefuit juice and he beams.

"Sylvia´s never getting married, and I am not going to retire. That´s for old people."

* * *

"Yea," I say to the California girls as they look at Amable-- impishly grinnign through a massive beard and under a wide beret-- "age is a state of mind."

Llama foeti

2007-08-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

OK. Locals here when building bury a llama foetus (or, if they are richer, and entire llama) under the cornerstone of a new building. This is an old Indian practice for good luck, etc. So you can buy llama foeti in the withces´market hewre in La Paz. Now today´s entry is copied from lonelyplanet.com. Engjou

SUBJECT: returning to the US with a llama fetus? how?

I have grown increasingly excited about the prospect of purchasing a llama fetus while visiting La Paz later this year. I think it would make a perfectly unique souvenir. However I am not sure how difficult it would be to get this into the US. Has anyone tried? Have you had success? Also, what does something like this cost and will it easily be sold to a foreigner? As for how I would go about traveling overland for a few weeks with this tucked in my backpack I have yet to figure out...

Thanks, Mike

RE: returning to the US with a llama fetus? how?

I've done it. A few years back. The person who was traveling with me was certain we were going to be thrown in jail. In fact I'd found the perfect matching baby coffin but he stopped me from getting it. They come in varying sizes...the fetus...well... baby coffins do too. The little ones aren't much fun. If you are going to do it get one that is far enough along that it has fur. I forget how much it cost... not important and it wasn't a huge amount. Packing it. At the furry stage they don't dry out perfectly. Kinda rank. Fairly sturdy but you don't want to bang them around as something may snap off. Too big for the pack. So I went to the market and got one of those small, black, nylon suitcases that everyone has. Problem is that they are soft sided. None of the cheap luggage was hard sided. So I got a cardboard box, cut it to fit. Then put the fetus inside and padded it with dirty laundry.

We got to Miami and had to put all our luggage on a conveyor belt that sent it through a computerized x-ray machine. It shows all the items in different colors...the colors representing the density of the material. Big ole third world type customs guy sitting there bored as hell as you can expect having to view 20,000 bags a day. Turns out the skeleton of a llama fetus is a density that shows up as an irridiscent green on the screen. Looked way cool. Customs guy sits bolt upright and yells loudly,

" What do you have in your bag?"

In case you wonder...such an action brings everyone in uniform in the terminal running. Bet you didn't know there is what looks like a fully equipped SWAT team hidden near arrivals. At least they had automatic weapons, tear gas, flash grenades and shields. When everything settled and it was just me and about 30 customs officers I explained to the head customs guy that it was an aborted llama fetus. By then they had opened the bag...not a good idea given the smell that had been building up all those hours. Customs asked was it preserved and was I using it for scientific study?

There I stand with long hair, beard and Grateful Dead shirt. I told him no that it was an object of religious veneration. When I equated it to communion wafers it turned out there were a lot of Catholics present...at least going by the number of folks rapidly crossing themselves. He did not seem happy, nor inclined to admit it into the country. Ignoring him and the questions of others I launched into a spiel about religious freedom and needing to call the Miami ACLU. Turns out they have a monster list of stuff you can't import. They looked up fetus. They looked up llama. They reluctantly looked up communion wafers. Finally, he asked me what it was related to. I told him it was a New World cameloid. He looked up camels. He couldn't find a regulation against it. Bet they added one after.

So then the fun began. I repacked and handed my bags over to American Airlines for the next leg. I was going to fly to LA and then hop a commuter flight to San Diego. Bags checked all the way through. Got to LA and only had a short wait for the next flight. Small plane...if any of you have flown commuter into San Diego you know. About 20 passengers. We get to San Diego. No bag. In fact 5 of us were missing bags. Commuter terminal has little staffing.

We all had to wait for the one person who could take our report. She had a sheet of photos of different types of bags with a bar code. Point to your bag...she scans and that starts the report. My style was on the sheet. She took down all my flight #s. She told me that was a very common style of bag. Asked if I had tagged it specially or was there anything inside that would be distinctive? Sure...an aborted llama fetus, I told her. Sir...you can't kid around if you want us to find your bag. Honest...ask anyone in Miami. Next day they found the bag and delivered it to my place. The lock had been cut off and the zipper broken. Evidently one of the dogs had rolled over. Either the drug sniffing..or the kind that search for cadavers.

So you see it is quite possible. Hardest part is keeping a straight face while all those around you are going crazy and releasing safeties. There was a later confrontation with the San Diego Board of Education but that is another story. Some people are just dam picky about how sex ed and reproduction is taught.

--GoodTimeBob

Politics in the WHite City

2007-08-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

Sucre is in the mid-east of Bolivia and this is where in 1825 the Bolivian proclaimed independence and the Republic of Bolivia. Sucre is named after liberator Simón Bolivar´s right hand man.

Now I had a fine tourist breakfast and then Kym and I split up as is our wont. The city itself is stunning-- masses of white buildings, restored colonial architecture, it´s clean, etc. After churches, churches, coffee, more churches, churches and more coffee, I buy a bus ticket for Cochabamba, where I am going to meet Ellen, a work colleague, and her psychedelic uncle in law Amable.

The next morning, the city is oddly still. DAMNIT! The dreaded paro civico has finally showed its ugly head. For one day, the city is at a standstill in protest of...¡la capitalia!

Political digression: La Paz is the capital, but Sucre is where the supreme COurt is. Sucre was capital for part of the 19th century but since then La Paz has been the political capital. There is nothing in the Constitution saying what the Capital should be.

Now in 2006, indigenous President Evo Morales, with braod popular support, decided that the Constitution should be re-written. A selection of elected politicians from across the board, called the Asamblea Constituyente, was formed and their job is by Sept 2007 to have a new COnstitution. The Eastern provinces and cities, like Santa Cruz and Sucre, are on the political and economic upswing, while La Paz, well, the opinion is that La Paz is basket case full of Indians who suck money from the national treasury, and that Sucre could well be the capitol that better reflects a new modern Bolivia.

So, Sucrenian political operators put into circulation the idea that the capitol should move- This is blatant personal gain, and in many ways a bad idea-- the economy of La Paz depends on government, moving things would cost $$, and there would have to be laods of infrastructure built in Sucre. There would be big gains for big money in Sucre.

The Asamblea recently declared that it was not going to include the Capitol´s location in the COnstitution, and La Paz protested on 20 July against the move. Last Thurs, Sucre struck back with a one-day strike, hunger strikes, and the demand that the asamblea take up the question again.

Students ae all for the move. I asked them if they would pay taxes to support the move. ¿Taxes? was the response. Did they want more ocngestion, way more xpnsive housing, etc? ¿What?

On the way out to the bus terminal in the early AM to check on whether my night bus would leave, there was a group of drunken youths with pipes screaming at a guy. "You don´t support us, asshole?" was the theme. Wow, I thought, this is democracy? You don´t liek an opinion, you get ready to pound on a guy?

At the bus terminal, which is shut, all fo the bus companies are playing along with the strike by officially not runing busses, but of course their employees are out front, selling tickets and using Palm Pilots to access their seating and schedule databases.

In the afternoon I stroll down to the Supreme COurt. Outside aer protesters, screaming but not too loudly (hey, this is Bolivia), burning an effigy of President Evo Morales, and yelling "Evo Evo, maricón" ("Evo, you faggot"). Stupidity obviously isn´t confined to politicians. One local tells me "you guys should split, we Bolivians can get stupidly violent". Another guy says "wow, you´re seeing more than the salt flats and the Indian clothes."

Later I start to feel weird about Sucre, and then it hits me-- it´s the most glaring contrast between wealthy and poor yet. The architeture is out of a Spanish pipe dream, the weather beautiful, the tourist food awesome and cheap...and locals stroll with iPods and designer clothes, yapping on cell-phones...and I have never seen so many beggars. And here they are, whining about not having the capital. Later, I would hear that there were more strikes in Sucre, this time of the rural peasants. What kind of operator convinced these guys that bringing in more bureaucrats would improve things? The rich and the politicians have these guys coming and going. The municipal government organised the strikes. Frogive me for my cynicism, but shouldn´t people, ordinary people be doing this kind of thing?

Anyway, in the evening Kyma nd I found food at a comedor, and then split up--Kym is going to the Kellogg School of Business, and her intro to school is trekking in Iceland with her classmates. We spent three fun weeks together so were were both a bit sad as we climbed onto different busses.

Next-- Uncle Amable and the Revision of the World

Problems

2007-08-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

"¡Gringo!"

"Yes, ma´am?"

"¿What size are your feet?"

"44."

"¡Ay Diós mío! ¿Are all foreigners tall like you?"

"Lots. Here, it´s a problem, like, uhh, I get on the flota, my knees don´t fit in the seats---"

"No te qujes. And if a Bolivian went to your country, he too would have problems. He would have to go to the children´s section of the clothing store to buy clothes. Or to the women´s. Our women would be forced to wear young girls´clothing."

The Man Who Would Be Gay

2007-08-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

This was all in Spanish. Yes, effeminate people in Spanish sound like effeminate people in English.

"Thuper!" says Juan, our driver, "let´th go!"

He pilots the car through a videogame`s worth of multicloured streets, vendors, homeless, cell-phone-scatter-brained Indian women and people riding horses past Mercedes stuck in traffic. The light is warm and yellow and we pull into a market.

"Thweetheart," says J., "can I get through here?"

"No, try the butcher`s end," sniggers a cholita, and J. shakes his head. He has nicely done hair, delicate hands, a crisp shirt, an oddly high voice small, narrow eyes and an almos clenched smile.

Once on the highway to Sucre, I ask J. what kinds of tunes he likes.

"Clásicos," he says, and puts in a Scorpions tape. HERE I AM, duh, duh, da-da, ROCK ME LIKE A HURRICANE. But if you pay the piper you call the tune, so from the back seat Kym requests a change of music. So we get some Michael Jackson and soon there are two separate dance parties going on in the cab, one in the driver`s seat, one behind the driver.

"I like copth," says J., "I jutht can´t afford the bribth." People in Bolivia hand-wave and flash to indicate pig-infestedor pig-free road ahead. "I drive thith road sometimeth five timeth a day. I must say I really like thith road. Ethpecially at night."

Five times a day? It´s 160 km/2.5 hours from Potosí to Sucre, so say you got 1/2 hour of turnaround that´s like 15 hours of driving a day, plus you might not end up in the city where you started when it`s evening.

"Yeth, I thleep in my car. Thee my blanket? Well I have a bottle of whithkey in there. I just play thome Michael Bolton and wrap mythelf in my blankets and I thleep WONderfully¨."

"Does your wife miss you?"

"Wife? I got rid of her a long time ago. Thith--" he pats the Toyota wagon´s wheel-- "is my wife." There follows an extended comparison of the faults (many) of women and the virtues (many) of cars and open roads. Something to the effect of "you can drive your car more" and " it is easier to get into acar than a wife" follows.

"So, uh, what do you like to do in your uhh spare time?"

"Well, firtht, I get home, I wash my car. Then I wash mythelf. I like to be clean. Then I drink whithkey and fall athleep. The next day I thay hello to my friendth--you know, I don´t really like people, I jutht thay "hello," nada más, and that´th it, I go to my apartment, I drink whithkey, I watch a nithe little movie, I fall athleep."

Wow, I think, this guy is your model coporate citizen, no life, loves his job, does it 16 hours a day. "OK now we are in the ghotht area, so we thtop here" says J and we pull over to pool of a rabble of filthy dogs, clean Indians and dusty yellow light and the smell of cooking potatoes and meat. When we get going again, J. explains that this is where the local ghosts roam, and at night, they take your soul, so you end up zombie like, just going through the motions of life without really being there.

"What does that actually look like," I ask, "being like a zombie?"

J. puts in a Michael Bolton tape, the dance party starts again, and he says, "People, they work, all the time. They don´t really remember their family and friendth. They are itholated. But they don´t know they are unhappy. I have theen lotsth of them in the hothpital."

"Yea? They treat zombiehood?"

Then J. is quiet and I ask Kym, ok, is this dude gay? Cos if he is, I want to hear about how life is down here, and if he isn´t, is it weird for him being The Effeminate Straight Guy (do you remember this Dana Carvey character on SNL? "JUTH-tin," he would tell his son, "I need you to go upthtairth to your room until you dethide your father´th Not Gay. Now I´m going to thit down and have thith yummy beer!").

For the rest of the ride, we get J.´s take on people (a pain in the butt), women (ditto), wiveth (double ditto), carth (excellent), work (relaxing), thocial life (draining), whithkey (lovely), the government (¿what´th that?), disco muthic (¡thuper!), lazy Indians who don´t work (don´t feed the beggars, they all have nice houses), bus drivers (slow but professional), 20 year old cab drivers (a menathe to thothiety), tight jeans on women (glamorous), the bar and disco scene (Sucre--good, Potosí--lame, Santa Cruz-- ¡thuperb!, La Paz-- too high but they have exthellent cocaine there).

When we finally pull into Sucre, the Plaza is crammed full of hottie University students and for the first time in 3 weeks I hear Kym say "wow, that´s one hot dude," gringas not typically being intested in short macho Latino men (Spaniards being the exception--women love Spaniards and Irish, also they like educated Brit men (any Brit man in North America is automatically upper class, women love that (and if he is a yob (accent wise), he is one social class up from yobhood).

Finally a very carefully put-together woman walks by. Blonde, built, with everything designer you could imagine, decent booty, etc. J. rolls down the window and says the Spanish equivalent to"¡Hey, baby, yo´milkshake is off da shizzle!"

Well after Kym and I discuss this and I say, gay, and Kym says, no way. So I explain this to a young Bolivian the next day, a guy who speaks English and has lived in Montréal. Straight out of Savage was the response:

"Divorced? No kids? Likes dance music? Please. Doesn´t see his family much? Drinks a lot? Neat and clean? Come ON! Likes dancing to disco and house? Knows all the bars? Likes Michael Bolton? He wants to smoke your pole!"

We both laughed. Later that day I stopped by the gay and lesbian booth in the Plaza. The country´s univerity student federation´s congress was happening, and the square was full of posters, booths and young people texting each other. A very nice and extremely straight acting young man spoke with me and told me some figures. More than one in every two Bolivian gays has been physically assaulted at least once in their life. Some doctors refuse to treat HIV+ patients. The Catholic Church-- which is currently bargaining hard to be included in the talks which are rewriting the Constitution-- opposes sex education, protection for homosexuals (and transgendered people) from discrimination, distribution of condoms, etc. The government defines homosexuality as "a problem." Police routinely raid gaybars and bash. A social youth worker I later talked to said a huge # of her homeless kids were gay, not unlike the U.S. and oh-so-progressive Canada.

That blonde girl from the night before, she did have a nice milkshake. And two people saw him saying so. Mission--hopefully--accomnplished.

Booty Patrol-- updates

2007-08-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

This just in, thanks to Soctty M.

Most of the things that Booty Patrol sees as a good way to improve booty scores-- running, walking, Pilates, cycling, yoga etc (anythign cardiovascular, basically) are also good for the brain. Read about it here.

Booty Patrol

2007-08-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

WARNING This post is racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, Eurocentric, phallocentric, anti-Semitic, misanthropic, classist and istist, and should not be read by anyone.

Gentlemen. Booty Patrol has been regrettably so busy with research that it has had precious little time to actually report on conditions on the ground. But after six long weeks here we are with the necessary updates.

While the finest booty is obviously Irish and resides at 3___ W. 6th in Vancouver, it nevertheless behooves on Booty Patrol to report to its readership on local circumstance.

Now, booty, as is well known, has three essential compenents. And like a tripod, if one leg is missing, the whole thing falls down. The compents are obviously first genetic. You cannot work with what you don´t have. However, Booty Patrol has seldom encountered serious genetic obstacles. Second is physical conditioning. The finest can be obscured by weight, or degraded by inactivity. And the third is display. Tightnes of garment, size and placement (and now, even existence) of pocket in pants, waist position, rest of ensamble-- all these play out multifariously.

When Booty Patrol arrived in La Paz, its initial observations were such a shock to the system that its activities were nearly shut down by the horror of its discoveries, which took the form of a three-fold blow to the trasterista sense.

First was the dreaded pear. But not only does Andean booty appear afflicted with the dreaded pear-- extending at times even to the horrifying twin flaps of skin near the bottom-- but fashion and exercise choices worsen an already poor situation. As we all know, the Stairmaster or equivalent-- like getting out of the house and doing some vigorous walking, or riding of a bike, or regular yoga, or pilates-- is essential for booty maintenance in not only size (too big, too small, and too floppy are all undesirable) but firmness. The Paceñas fail on this count. And to add to Booty Patrol´s misery, the fashion choices make here only fashion victims. High waisted jeans-- a bad idea even for Brooke Shields back in the day--are an even worse idea for people with floppy or chunky pears. Add to this the newer rage for no pockets, or pockets on one side only, and you have a recipe for disaster.

It is an interesting sidenote that the Paceñas have kept their daughters generally free--during daytime-- of the trifold eye ravages of poor booty by enrolling them in schools which mandate either kilts (which improve anything that Booty Patrol has ever seen) or somewhat baggy dress trousers. The young therefore outdo their parents not by virtue of fashion choices or youth, but by being subject to tradition. Booty Patrol also notes that the local cholitas, who favour long, multi-petticoated and multi-slip´d skirts, have very sensibly avoided their less traditional sisters´poor choices.

Dejected, Booty Patrol left La Paz and travelled for some time with an American woman who managed the feat of utterly hiding the booty. When asked why this was-- other gringa travelers evidencing selective, strategic and sometimes lethally effective displays-- she replied that two weeks in India was all it took for the Sevens to be put on a plane back to less juvenile climes.

La Paz: C-

Booty Patrol´s correspondent-- among the most fashionable of travel writers, dressed 24/7 to the nines, a veritable fashion Bible on legs, worthy of emulation by all men in the world-- has visited the Andean highlands, the central Altiplano, and more recently the lower elevation towns of Sucré and Cochabamba. And we are pleased to report that, while certain poor choices are still evident, the overall Bolivian situation is not nearly as bad as it initally appeared in La Paz.

In the highlands, the cholitas are their discreet and tactful selves. In Potosí, we witnesed the misery of not only all the poorest booty choices, but these choices made by bodies decades away from even being having a shot at success with these strategies. In short, 55 year old accountants should not try hotpants. Rating: C+

The situation improved considerably in Sucré, where a fashionable University crowd added different twists of clothing sense to the mix, and the dreaded pear began to disappear. In addition, we witnessed far more creative uses of skirts. However, problems remain-- high waisted jeans and atrophy seriously compromised the improved genetics of the Sucristas.

Booty Patrol had occasional glimpses of paradise, most notably Argie excellence, where the thin elastic of a traveller`s hidden moneybelt emphasised the treasures, and of Italian nd French excellence. But overall, Sucre warranted only a B.

After an overnight bus to Cochabamba, Booty Patrol awoke on Saturday afternoon and promptly found itself in the closest thing to Paradise. The pear is almost completely gone. Aside from teenagers, the hotpants are gone. Sophisticated jean choices-- including flares, low waists and pockets, as well as interesting materials-- abound. And the level of physical fitness, or perhaps genetic luck, has increased to the point where on rare occasions even high waists can be pulled off.

The only off note in Cochabamba has been a conversation with Luis the Colombian, Booty Patrol´s current travelling partner, who compared the local fare with his native.

"What they have here is a dried lime compared to the luscious fresh mangoes of where I´m from," he stated. And since, as Booty Patrol´s readers well know, booty is like a Mormon´s wife choices-- one is never enough, and there´s always something else to look forward to-- we leave our readers with the slight taste of dissatisfaction in our mouth, and hopefull the desire to visit Colombia, which however does not overwhelm the visual pleasures of Cochabamba.

Score: A-

Booty Patrol is off to La Paz, possibly Sorata, likely the Yungas for a few days, and possibly the Altiplano again, and will check in once more. We now return you to Butch, your regular correspndent.

And this is where Booty Patrol leaves

Mines (Hell)

2007-08-20T08:08:00.001-07:00

OK well the next day, having seen Heaven, or at least the Spanish gateway to it, it is time to see Hell. Speaking of Heaven, the Spanish were such assholes in their uhh "colonisation efforts" that the Indians they met-- the ones they didn´t massacre immediately, and the ones who didn´t die of disease-- frequently decided that death was a better deal than Christian life under the Spanish. Such is recounted by Bartolomé de las Casas. AT least you could die and go to an afterlife of your own choosing. We are today about to see Hell.

Cerro Rico is a cone shaped hill above Potosí and today is mine tour day. The Cerro has been comemrically mined for about 500 years now. Although it is runnign out, it is worked by a group of 39 co-operative mining outfits. The co-ops work together to extract ore. Each has a particular section they work. Each contributes to tunneling and transport costs. There is a "benefits plan"-- since 50% of the miners develop silicosis within 10 years of starting mine work, and since 10% of them die each year, there are survivor benefits of, wow $15 U.S./month. Thsi is a pittance even by Bolivian standards, but it sure beats the Spanish, who sent the Indians underground, no pay, for 6 months at a time and their reward was, they got to contribute to the Spanish Empire and not be killed.

There are 6 of us. A Cherman Kirl who speaks absurdly fast, show-offy Spansh, a French blonde bombshell with an errie conspritorial grin, another French bombshell (this one brunette) who appears to be mute, a very tall handsome and funny Aussie, and a short nebbish American who has all the signs of being an Upper Class Art Fag: carefully positioned tuke, designer glasses, obscure Cool Jeans, MP3 player thats not an iPod but looks Really Cool, weird facial hair arrangements, etc. Sure enough, he works at an art musuemand went to Yale or some shit.

OK now, the guide. Rolando. He worked the mines for 2 years. Here are some excerpts from what he tells us. So much for the Bolivians lacking a sense of humour...

"The mines are dangerous. Deadly gasses must be detected. To do this, we use a combination of halide detection lamps and Japanese tourists. All clients who wander away from the mine tunnel I choose will be blown up. We urge clients to bring the miners offerings, which could include dynamite, coca leaves, alcohol, small children and blondes, brunettes being in overabundance in Bolivia. Women do not work in the mines-- they are too intelligent to make such a choice. Gays, who are used to both dark dirty places and horrible abuse, would make good miners, but the filth keeps them away."

Our first stop is the miner´s market. We buy dynamite, diesel-fuel-infused fertiliser which boosts the dynamite´s power (yes, it´s what they used in Oklahoma City and blowed the guvmint up real good), fuses, coca leaves and water. In Bolivia it is every person´s constitutional right to buy dynamite. I am serious, they use it when demosstrating for or against the government. Of course they limit the size of stick you can buy. Dynamite is gooey. The best shit came apparently from a munitions factory in Argentina. They weren´t supposed to make dynamite-- it was a government operation for the military-- but it was such a lucrative sideline that the whole crew started moonlighting making dynamite. When the government got wind of this, they went to shut it down, but the workers blew the factory up to destroy evidence of their uhh capitalist ambition. So now good dynamite comes from Peru.

Then we change from tourists into miners-- rubber pants jackets, boots, headlamps, scarves to filter dust, gloves. We now look like a contruction worker mob. Outside the mine we check out the smelting and separating system. Mining is simple, well in theory. DIg a hole. Secure the roof, pump out the water, and the toxic gasses. Blow up some underground, haul the chunks out, pound them down, mix with various chemicals and water to get the good stuff out, and then pour the toxic waste into the river or local water supply. If you are operating in Montana, USA, get the government to pay the clean up bill.

We walk about 200m into the mine to a small museu/shrine, where there are some basic explanations of mining and a statue of El Tío, the mine Devil (he´s liek MAcbeth, you can´t call him by his nane) to whom offerings of booze, smokes and coca leaves are made. At thsi point Kym and the French brunette get woozya nd have to be evacuated.

The mine itself is staggering. We crawl down vertical shafts on shaky pins pounded into crumbling rock and belly-squeeze through toxic sludge in 50 degree heat. The dust billows. Whumps of explosions and subsequent ear-popping blasts of air sucker punch us. Everybody hacks and gasps. We drip sweat. The mine bangs elbows and knuckles.

We meet one miner, Luis, and his 15 year old work partner. He will spend 12 hours int eh dusty darkness pounding a 10 cm hole into the wall. At the end of the day the dynamite I give him will blow up another 4 feet of tunnel. He will work one month and make B$600 (about $90). He will get drunk every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There is a 10% chance he will die each year and a 50% chance he will get silicosis. This is actually not a bad deal, according to him. And now that silver prices are near record levels the life is reasonably profitable.

Another mining group we meet on the lowest level are surly and quiet. WHen asked what they want and liek in life, they say "French women, hooch and weed." No wonder, they probably feel like museum exhibits, which in a sense they are-- this should have ended in about 1650.

When we get out Rolando builds soem dynamite bombs with 5 minute fuses and scares the shit out of everybody as he smokes a cigarette while holding the bombs which have lit fuses. After what seems like way too long he tosses them down the hill and the explosions push us around.

So the only way to deal with a visit to Hell is to go drinking which the crew does by meeting at 8. Afterfollowing Rolando out to a school to watch 15 minutes of Bolivian Indian music, we head to the bar. The Cherman Kirl wants the Aussie to hit on her but he isn`t interested. The American museum dork only wants to talk to the French bombshell, but she isn´t having any (she has a boyfriend, guess he forgot to ask). The brunette is hotter than the rest of them put together but is corpselike in her silence. The evening´s highlight-- too many people speaking 3rd or 4th languages-- is watching Live 8 on their big screen, and seeing Stevie WOnder pump it out.

Next post...The Man Who Would Be Gay, Sucré politics, and Welcome to Cochabamba.

Lovely Colonial Architecture and Churches (Heaven?)

2007-08-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

BLOG NEWS-- no photos. SOrry, My camera had hassles and so for the last 2 weeks I have been using Kym´s, and our recent batch of CDs is not working. So photos will wait until I get back to north america and Kym mails me working CDs. I will include links for pics where possible.

In Uyuni I again meet Luis the Colombian Hippie. I firts ran into him hiking in Tupiza and his hair, a mix of dredlocks and mess, makes him recogniseable form 500m away. he is walking aroudn with his MP3, taping the marching bands. Guy doesn´t play an instrument but is a tune collector.

Kym and I get on the bus at 7:00 in Uyuni and aim for Potosí. OK they say 5 hours. At 12:00 we get a break for a meal, and at 5:00 AM we pull in to Potosí. We find lodging and immediately crash.

At noon I awake and go and find myself in coloured colonial wonderland. Potosí was the first massive silver strike in the New World (the second was in México near Puebla). I didn`t know this, but in the 1600s, Potosí was the biggest and richest city in the world, bigger than London, Paris or Beijing. As I groggily stumbled around looking for salteñas and coffee I could see what they´d done with the silver extracted from their Cerro Rico. Billions of churches, towers, magificent coloured houses and buildings, an impeccable peacable plaza. The buildings are coloured anything except black, the churches are white or grey and the sky is a deep still blue. The cars are few and things oddly quiet. The only shitty thing that happens all days is, my handbags gets stolen from a Net cafe and so I am minus my guidebook and goretex jacket.

Here are some pics.

The churches, well, the Spanish spent their money on ideas and objects, not people. In an age which lacked power tools and engines, the amount of physical labour necessary to build these structures was immense. Some took a hundred years to build. A few of them have decidedly non-Christian elements in them (e.g. gargoyles that look like quetzales). As usual, the colonial economy remains: slavery built the churches, and the abstract slavery that the IMF; the World Bank and the U.S. Empire create (alogn with local elites´ complicity) enables cheap tourism. I like a nice Third World country, with espresso, for breakfast.

Anyway for dinner it is El Mesón. The girl I am travelling with, Kym, is a foodie and so we HAVE to go the finest restaurant in every city and see what they can do. I am Ok with pique a lo macho and salteñas but no, Kym calls the food shots. It seems like travelling partnerships do this, divide labour. Kym tells me which places to eat and which museums to see, while I have to deal with Spanish, busses and hassles. Mesón does an amazing llama lomo (steak) and a very nice creamy pasta, and killer pisco sours. Kym is also a wine and desert junkie and apparently the cocoa pudding cake is excellent. An amazing dinner costs us about $13 US. You would spend $100 on this in Canada.

BTW I have noticed this about travelling with girls, err, I mean, women. Some things are necessary-- they need to have access to clean underwear, regular showers, chocolate and ice cream and it helps to make them laugh once a day or so. Also women really like clean bathrooms. If you are going to seduce a woman in North America, first thing you do is, you clean the bathroom. Second thing you do is, you clean the bathroom again (unless you are a lesbian) cos you are a guy and you don´t know how to clean. (them you follow Dan Savage´s advice and clean yourself). Hotel owners here who are smart note this. Now what does a guy need? Coffee, and some nice booty to check out.

The Andes part 2, mini Indian Creek

2007-08-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

On the fourth day of Christm-- I mean, of our trip, we got to seee the Lagunae Verde and Volcan Licancabur, as well as steam geysers. The landscape gets weirder and emptier by the day. The ground is piles of rocks, washes of sand and gravel, and what look like flat green circular moss clusters. The sky is a deep, almost glowing purple blue. Landcruisers are tiny smoky bugs onte bumpy grey carpet of volcanoes hills and gullies.

This part of the Andes is like reverse reality. Usually, humans dump shit into the landscape, and shape the landscape. Here, lakes are toxic-- Verde is a natural source of arsenic, other are full of borax and mercury, lending them intense white, green or blue-- and the volcanoes spew sulphur way stronger than industrial grade into ain indifferent sky. Human roads appear and vanish, or braid. We are insects crawling across this brown chemical ceiling under a sky so big your head stops when you look up.

The middle of the day is a stop at some local hot springs. The only bummer is, you have to strip down without a cange room, whic is not a hassle for reasons of being self-conscious (one look at a beer-gutted Belgian in a thing will remove all such concerns) but becuase there is probably 80 km/hr of wind ripping the slat flats into fine stinging sand that could well provide a natural hair removal treatment for one´s scrotum. But I persevere and enjoy a lovely soak while others debate going in. I figure, once ina lifetime.

We also see the flamingoes. Now if you thik the flamingo is a delicate bird, think again. Here at 5000m, in lakes that are half toxic chemical and 100% ice cold, these irds parade around and siphon the chemicals and bacteria out of the water using their wierd beaks. These are some seriously tough bastards.

In the afternoon we end up at H-------, where Kym and I go for a stroll and find Mini Indian Creek. A nearby quebrada deepens as we wander into it and soon I am looking at hundreds of perfect crack climbs. perfect bomber rock that looks halfway between monzonite and sandstone, most of them between 15 and 25 meters high, and apparently there is no end. I count over a hundred 4star projects before I give up. I will have to go back. porm for you crackheads when I get back to fast uploads will have you drooling. I am serious-- some of these lines are as good as anything I´ve ever seen.

In the deepening wind and gloom we put on music and trudge back aross the desert to the alojamiento. Inside somebody has taken some of those green moss pods, dried them, and started a fire, around which are clustered a bunch of Irish and a couple of Americans. They are all reeeling from the altitude. You know this cos the Irish refuse beer. But one of the Irish is a trad and I extract some reels from him. This is how trad hsould be learned-- the guy can´t tell hsi ass from E flat, can´t read music, but knows a few thousand tunes, all ear-learned.

OUR FIFTH DAY takes us to the Salt Flats of Uyuni. There are severl hundred thousand quare kilometers of slat flats, with " islands" of rock and cati. Unreal. Look at the photos in this link for an idea. We watch silent sunride from the midle of the flats as the salt turns blue and orange around us, a fractured sky at our feet. We stayed ina place where the beds and floor and walls were made of salt, and on our final night we drank some of the $5 Bolivian wine Kym bought, which was actualy pretty good. Especially for $5!

When we get back to Uyun, the first priority of course is espresso, and them llama steaks, and then travelling decisions. Next-- Potosí, Sucre, and Cochabamba.

Let the Games Begin...

2007-08-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

I jsut got to Cochabamba and am waiting to hook up with Ellen Chambers and her extended family. More on the fascinating Amable and his wife in a few days. But for now, I draw your attention away from the pleasures of Bolivian travel and toward something infintely more serious. No, not the new wool cycling thong I just bought.

No, seriously, folks, it´s time for...The Greater Depression. Read on! Thanks to Scott McMillan of The Skeleton Project for this one, Scotty whose girlfriend STILL entertains house-babies-suburbia fantasies (taking the usual Vancouver form of a few years in a hip condo-- walking distance to organic food markets and good running right out the door, just past the homeless, before flipping up into the East Side). You can also watch Jim Cramer losing his shit here.

Panic on Wall Street. You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you know yourderivatives from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to understanding the current market freakout.By Andrew Leonard

The U.S. housing crash is going to be a much bigger problem than most of us thought because everything is connected to everything else. There have also been recent Chinese statements to the U.S. to the effect that China, not the U.S., is now in charge of American interest rates. This is explained here and explains indirectly why the Americans are not going to do anything to Iran (or Venezuela for that matter).

As the U.S. market cools, so will the Canadian economy. 90% or so of what we sell goes to the Americans. There will likely be a general cooling off over the next six months. The real question is going to be "what happens to oil?" If recent market highs of around $80/barrel are any key, the answer is that thigns are nto going down much. However, an implosion of the U.S. economy will certainly take some of the steam out of the market since the U.S. uses 1/4 of the world´s oil. This will affect Chinese and other uses as well. Calgary real estate might not continue its unprecedented climb, and might well have a very precedented return to reality.

The Andes, part 1

2007-08-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

How cool are French people? Well if you are 58 and balding, and you can still wear longhair and look cool, and have a second wife your age who looks 45, damn that`s good. Wepile into our Landcruiser with driver Julio, a native-looking guy with what can only bedescribed as awesome hair and a stylish cord jacket and scarf. Our cocinera is Julia,who has a huge smile and serious need for dental work, with teeth jumbled like girls at apyjama party.

Also do all French work for the government, or does the government just give out loads of holidays? All French you meet are either students or working for government.

We are going to spend 4 days in the Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa and one on the Salar de Uyuni, a 13000 square km salt lake. It takes too long to post my pictures so here´s some other ones.

We drive up at least 1000m into country that looks like it needs cattle and outlaws tosteal them, which in fact it was. Butch-- the other Butch, the less famous one-- andSundance came here in 1909, having worn out their welcome in the U.S. where the railwaysgot some serious security together and the Feds got some serious warrants together. Sothey came to Bolivia and promptly robbed a mule train carrying a $90,000 mine payroll. Not that the government cared, but mine owners did, and Butch and SUndance were pursuedand are buried not far from where we drove.

We eat lunch in the middle of a massive plain filled with llamas, which have to be theleast pleasant and intelligent animals you ever had to heard. I mean, a llama looks likesomebody punched it in the face the day it was born, and it continues to bear not onlythe scars of that but also a pissed off expression. Just as we are more willing to benice to non ugly people so it is with cattle. Give me a cow anytime.

Anyway so we drove to a tiny town and found alojamiento in a small hospedaje. The dealis that with these mini towns in the Sud de Lipez, they are basiclaly home bases forllama and sheep herdng. They d not stock food, so the alojamientos offer only beds-- youhave to bring your own food and cook it. This is why you can`t really travelindependently here. No vehicular traffic, no supplies, and God help anybdy who venturesup here without serious map skills. Millions of dusty junctions, unmarked, with windscraping limpid yellow clouds off the gravel and rocks and whipping it into the crystalblue sky.

Kym and I and the French hike a few hundred meters up a hill to freeze andwatch the sunset and then we get to see what Julia can do with two burners and three pots. Dinner is fried egg and tuna balls, cole slaw, bread and a superb quinoa soup. It feelsa wee bit awkward eating with the French who are odl enough to be grandparents, but thenFernands hair such as it is which has been shreded by the wind now has so much style that if you are winded with altitude and exhaustion you can just stare at it and it will entertain.

On our second day we arrive at Quetana Chica in a spectacularly empty basin with a bigwhite cone of volcano on the western horizon. It has been a smooth day so far. Only oneflat tire and one assist to another jeep. The valleys are brown, clear, quebradas andboulders and shrubs etched out by the clear light. Wind rips at our dust clouds, ourjackets and even our jeep when we stop. At Quetana we put on all of the clothing we ownand drive up toward Uturuncu Volcano 6004m (about 20,000 feet) which we will try to walkup today. The volcano looks like it`s 2 km away yet it takes 2 hours to drive up to5100m where we get out on a rubble filled slope into the strongest wind I have ever feltin my life. I can barely stand. Our guide, Daniel, a powerful man with an oddly squeakyvoice, leads us directly up the middle of the scree slope. I chew up and follow theleader and feel suprisingly good. The wind, which must be 100km/hr, is at our backs andthe immense clouds of dust we kick up rocket up toward the summit.

The French woman, Nadou, gets altitude sickness and Julio takes her back to the jeep. Icontinue upward ahead of the rest. This mountain is sulfurous and smells the same as mypiss. Speaking of piss, do you have any idea how hard it is to piss in 100 km/hr winds? You can´t piss INTO the wind, you can´t piss away form the wind, as I find out when forthe first time in my life I piss all over myself as the wind kindly scatters urine evenlyaround a 3m radius of my penis. You could piss sideways into the wind but then it goes2m and your wind-shadow captures it and spinkles it on you. This must be the one place on Earth where girls have a pissing advantage.

ANYWAY. When I get to the summit I have no idea if it´s flat or a ridge, so I crawlacross it to the windshelter and at tmes it is all I can do to stand. Around me dropsaway yellow sulfurous scree slopes to an infinty of brown open valleys, volcano cones,lakes Photoshopped unreal blue and whisps of cloud. I feel pretty good for almsot 20,000feet. Soon The others arrive and man are people psyched, this is the literal igh of alifetime for all of us.

The way down is horrible: clous of sulfurous scree dust fills our lungs and boots and Kym staggers with the altitude. On the way back out in the Landcruiser, I ask Daniel why you have to hire a guide to walk upa volcano.

It seems as if La Paz guiding agencies and tourists themselves aren´t always veryreliable. One agency sent a group of Brits up with a non-local "guide" (this was onLicacabur Volcano) who got so far ahead of his clients that they got lost and then one ofthem slid down a scree sope and broke his head and died. Another group got lost onUturuncu and spent the night, and one of them froze to death. The pisser is that the LaPaz agencies who run these tours are responsible, and manpower is scarce, and few poeplewant to do rescues at 6000m. So the La Paz agencies agreed with the national park thatlocal guides be hired, this making the locals partly responsible for the clients. While this is happening Fernan is babbling deliriously to his wife. The guy is so happy he´s been up that high he can´t keep it to himself. Awesome!

At the hospedaje Fernand actually believes the sign that says AGUA CALIENTE and ends upstanding in our dorm room naked, with a micro towel wrapped around his waist, stammering"l´horreur! l´horreur!" as his body heads toward hypothermia. Dinenr begins with soupand tea and then I can`t remmeber what it was, fried something with rice, I think. OK,quinoa soup when it´s 20 below is WAY better than porn. THat is my arbitrary standard tomeasure things right now. Kym agrees but since she is a woman we nee a different scale,so it is going to be, better than high threadcount sheets? She says, yes, quinoa beatssheets. As I fall asleep that evening there ia marching band outside. The Bolivians are MAD for marhcing bands. It must be 30 below zero and the madmen arre out as Monty Python would say, MARCHING UP AND DOWN THE SQUARE

Carz

2007-08-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

people in Bolivia don´t drive American cars. Lots of Subarus, Toyotas, Nissans, etc. In the countryside, it´s busses and Toyota Land Cruisers, many of them 25 years old.

"Why is this?" I ask our Salar driver, Julio.

"Well," he says, "you can get parts, and these are easy to fix" (big engine compartment, small engine, things are easy to find).

A mechanic in town would later put it more succinctly: " A Ford is a piece of shit. Try changing the alternator on a 350. You might as well take the entire engine out. And they are gas pigs."

It´s interesting--The U.S. has basically spent the 20th century ensuring that its corporations have acess to raw materials in develping nations. This-- and not Communism-- was the real reason for interference in Guatemala 1954, Chile 1971, Nicaragua 1979-1987, Brazil 1966-1986, Argentina 1976-1986, Colombia ongoing, Peru ongoing, Bolivia nice try. But the U.S. corporations cannot force the Latin Americans to buy their crappy cars.

South

2007-08-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

Choose your omen.

As we wake up in La Paz there is a woman´s screaming, yelling, the sound of breaing glass, more yelling, a man´s voice, and then silence. As I enter the open-air terrace, the place is full of cops and detectives. A drunken woman got ina fight with a man, broke the window, and jumped out.

This is either a bad omen for the Slara, or a " get the hell out of La Paz" signal.}

First we take the bus to Oruro, where we find train tickets to Uyuni. The indigenous women´s skirts get shorter, and they display intircate wool leggings. Oruro is oddly calm and almsot warm in late afternoon´s clear blue light. Kym, who is a foodie, drags me to eat at Nayjama, famous for its lamb. Upstairs, in the neon-lit and vaguely bland surroundings, we order colita and some pejerrey. The owner and chef is Roberto, and he´s obviously got his staff trained, because he hams it up in the dining room, feeding his ancient mother (from whom he inherited the retaurant) cocktails and chatting up his guests, staying away from the business of making food.

He was trained in Bolivia and then France. Who has he cooked for? My friend, for whom have I not cooked? Where have you cooked? Where have I not cooked? We get a whole whack of opinions. Oruro lamb is the best in the world, says Roberto, because of the lime in the soil and the minerals in the water, which make the lamb´s meat lack the funny aftertaste that lab eaters elsehwere note and use mint sauce to battle. San Francisco was great until the homosexuals moved in in the ´70s. The French know food better than anybody else but he was amazed at what Vietnamese street vendors could do with one wok.

The colita is indeed from heaven, especially if you like 10 pounds of meat. He has done a sensational job. The pejerrey is not bad either, but man, the Bolivians need a lesson from the Mexicans, who mix it up-- every dish you get in Mexico has fresh salsa and some fresh veggies with it. Bolivians avoid these and tend to overcook (dry out) many of their dishes.

That evening we end up watching Erin Brokovitch which I´ve never seen. it is the usual David-vs-Goliath story, whch in American means, how do I join the powers-that-be? Despite some interesting riffing on the question of boundaries and roles (Brokovitch´s love interest takes the caregiver role; there are class issues (single mom with trashy outfits etc) the film ultimately doesn´t do much more than reinforce the status quo. Most irritating was that Brokovitch changes outfits in what seems like very single scene. How does a single mom afford 70 separate skirts and blouses?

The next day Kym and I head oru separate ways during the day. in the park in Oruro, the local boys showoff their muscle cars while people wo make 1/100th their income sit on the pavement selling candy and fruit. Bolivians talk in hushed tones and the sun is calm and gentle in the clear light.

The train to Uyuni is smooth, and sails through a Nevadan landscape of empty skies, salt marshes and flocks of white and pink birds. I chew coca and read Willin the World , a book about how Shakespeare got his ideas and responded to the cultural and political questions around him. So far it sounds like Will saw and experienced an awful lot of despressing stuff (child out of wedlock, shotgun marriage, Dad´s business failure, theatre politics, repressed Catholic leanings, tough times in the theatre business, etc). It´s fascinating stuff and a great read.

In Uyuni Kym and I disappear to our rooms and wen I wake up the next morning, after a cup of tea, I sit outside int he sun and starting playing the mando. A Dutch man comes up and says " halo, I am Frederik, and I too play msuic, Dutch folk musik, here iss my CD, now I go to tour the slat flats, goot-bye," hands me a CD and diappears.

Uyuni is filled with warm light and I spend the morning eating potato wraps and drinking coffee. In the afternoon I head out to the train cemetery-- a collection of ancient rusting vehiclers, some of which are 120 years old. It is a great place for absract photos and desert light.

In the evening since it is Kym´s birthday I take her out to La Loco, which is a mix of Blivian and hisper East Berlin, and we eat politically correct llama steaks around a very politically incorrect wood fire. WHere in this desert do you get wood?

At 4 a.m. Kym bangs on my door and we stumble off to our 4x4 for the voyage to Tupiza. The jeep lurches through 2 hours of darkness before dawn emerges and we alight in Tacocha where the jeep leaves us, in a filthy main square that stinks of urine. But there is sunlight, and fresh buñuelos-- fried sweet dumplings -- and of course the vilalge drunk who is three sheets to already, and massively annoys a Brazillian, who is already, being 6 foot 3, pissed at havng the scrunch-up back seat of the Landrover, and who is even more pissed cos he is trying to make three connections today to get backt o Brazil, and as the drunk hovers around us, there is no 4x4 to be seen. There is an American group, and one Boliviana, who was smart enough to buy two tickets, so that she issn´t totally scrammed into the jeep.

When our next jeep comes, one of the Americans starts to feel woozy and after a couple of hours there is a sudden hullabaloo and wen we pul over our man is barfing into the ditch. The driver´s remedy is to wipe his forehad with alcohol.

The landscape is utterly empty, not even llamas up here. Endless hills and ridges of brown scrub, volcanoes, empty peaks and a ripping whistling wind in a silent blue sky. When we get a flat I> break out the mando and improvise a cumbia tune-- mi amor, ¿dónde te has ido? etc etc-- these are not complex musical forms and after months of hearing it 24/7 I seem to ba able to spit our SPanish tunes in an instant.

We descend what feels liek 6000 fet to Tupiza. This is near where Butch and Sundance had their last big success ($90,000) and failure (a gunfight with soldiers, where Butch was wounded and Sundance shot him, then shot himself-- not liek the movie ending). Tupiza is surrounded by red salndstone canyons and is pleasantly warm. We immediately check into the hotel and then look for a way to tour the Lipez and the Uyuni salt flats. One volcano? Five days? Slat lakes? Flamingoes? It is like ordering your food at Fatburger.

That afternoon Kym and I head up a canyon and do our best to get lsot, but instead complete a magnificent long loop through dry red quebradas and sage hills. There is the moment at the saddle of our route when we have to decide, int he wind and the deepening dusk, do we go back or foward into who knows where? We opt for forward and the canyon takes us back to Tupiza through a staggering sandstone and conglomerat canyon. In the semidusk I listen to Global COmmunications on my MP3 and the wind carries us with dust and the ditant thump of a marching band back to Tupiza.

On our return we find out we have jeep-mates: A French couple, both 58. Looks like I get to practice my French since only the woman, Nadou, Spanish and we don´t want Fernand to feel left out. We will leave at 9 a.m. the next day. I will post our Lipez-Salar trip story and some killer photos next post.

Apolobmba 4&5, or, "¡thanks, coca!"

2007-08-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

DAY 4

It is getting so cold mornings (last night we slept at 4700m) that Kym and I are now playing hands of gin rummy to see who gets to do odious tasks. Last night I won and now Kym has to get up and do the hot water in the a.m., and also bring me my morning coffee in bed. THERE IS NO WAY I AM GOING TO COLLECT ON THAT ONE. We also played for a foot massage, and I lost, but I have managed to avoid fulfilling that.

Our breakfast is tea, muesli, llama sausage and espresso. Today I ate so much fucking muesli that my stomach is distended and my head is fuzzy. You knwo it`s cold when your guide sleeps in his snowmobile suit and complains of the cold and yourhorses have frost on them.

We chew coca after breakfast to prep for the 1500 feet remaining to the 5100m pass. Coca really works. It`s not a buzz or anything, but you are Ok with the air and your energy stays high.

As we walk up to the pass we meet random people, guys with small shoulder bags who are walking like 60 km that day to catch a night bus in Curva for La Paz, and some schoolkids. Here`s Kym and I on the 5100m pass. and this is looking back the way we came. Humberto tells me that 12 years ago when he first did this trek, "no había roca aquí, solo hielo y nieve." There was no rock visible, just snow and ice, and the glacier was about 1000 feet further down the valley.

So after the pass Humberto says "see you down below" and we find a lake. I jump in it and after my testicles shrink to the size of mandarin orange seeds I stagger out and head for the darkest smoothest rock I can find to recover. Kym who is competitive first launches into a story about how she swam in Tahoe in Feb and then jumps in. This was as cold a water as I`ve ever been in. The glacier was about 200 feet from the lake.

Then we headed downvalley. We had about a 2000m descent and as we wandered down through drifting mist, past stone walls and shepherds´huts, we start to wonder where Humberto is. As we eat we see a woman, tiny against the massive walls of the valley, herding llamas up into the pasturelands. It takes her hours to move what seems like three centimeters. AT the next hut cluster we are asked for headache meds and I hand over some coca. The mist creeps in and out of it emerge Four Swedes in a forest of clicking trekking poles. They are are armed to the teeth with cameras, bug spray, bear repellant (no, dudes, you want bear ATTRACTANT cos you want to see some wildlife) and complex multizippered treeking outfits.

This is the view downvalley (heading north) from the 5100m pass

I ask for directions and ten minutes later, fog now thick, I realise I haven´t drunk any water today, and then I realsie my short term memory is now totally gone. I ahve to apologise to Kym for being an idiot and we spend some time staggering around the area near the next junction looking for Illo Illo where hopefully Humberto is waiting.

The mist rolls in above Illo Illo.

Humberto is pissed we have taken so long. So we suck it up and Kym`s urging and repeatedly apologise for swimming and hagning out in the sun. The afternoon`s walk is like the moon, or maybe the Welsh hills, except with llamas. Twisted weird broken landscape, fog, eerie silence and scrub lead to our next campsite beside a river. As fine a day as ever I have had in the mountains, and certainly among the best scenery.

For dinner Kym makes Packaged Pork Product and canned soup and quinoa, which it seems is a bti spicy for Humberto, who the next morning will eat multiple portions of muesli. The Bolivians aren´t much for the spices.

DAY 5

Today we walk upvalley for an hour, then we see an alpine climbing paradise (you could easily 5-8 killer alpine rock routes here, some of up to 20 pitches), then we stagger uphill to a 4900m pass which has been prepared for us by Bolivians kind enough to spread hundreds of pieces of garbage all over it. The trail is Inca building: 700 years old and going strong, with only the odd piece of retaining wall broken down. On the pass we climb up to a cairn where we get views all the way south to Illmani (over La Paz) and south to ANOTHER alpine climbing area with a stunning arête route on it. We collect garbage and fill a buig bag full of it, which I then tie to my pack at it of course starts to leak diaper slime, alcohol and old chocolate onto my neck.

The view south from the 4900m pass.

Pelechuco welcomes us with warm fresh bread and an oddly built hotel where evry angle including that of the door frame is totaly wrong. We invite Humberto for much and have a very nice asada with veggies and of course several hundred cups of tea. There is a Brit family whose mother glares at me weirdly and refuses to talk, and a Brit group of high school kids who are busy frying up spam dinners and boiling tea.

This is dinner, hanging in the hallway outside our room. I am so hungry I cannot restrain myself.

A lovely warm dining room at the end of the trek. You can´t remove any more clothing than this cos it`s about +1 degrees in here.

The only way out of this town is via the 3 a.m. bus and so we play gin rummy in the drafty dining room: Kym has to buy the beer but I lose the dinner hand. We stagger off to sleep and at 2:30 Kym shakes me to get out of my very warm bed. The busride to La Paz mostly passes unawares for me, drugged on a sleeping pill. We get one flat, one case of indigestion and one irritating wait in El Alto for a cab before it´s time to crash. I wish I were shorter: Kym at 5´9" can fit into both busses and Bolivian beds, while in our hotel I sleep at a 45 degree angle in my bed, which sags so much I feel like I am in a hammock.

Anyway, what a trek. Put this on your list if Bolivia is part of your plans.

Aploobamba 2, or, How To be A Guide

2007-08-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

Day 2 we awoke and the valley was filled with light. The lady from downstream shepherded llamas upvalley and I fucked with the goddamn Whisperlite tryign to make hot coffee come out of frozen finicky metal parts. I start thinkign of ways to get Kym out of bed to do this, or perhaps I should instruct Humberto in the fine art of cussing the stove.

The day starts with a horse drama: Cholo, the punk, tries to take off. "Not so fast," says Alasan, the older smarter one, and steps on Cholo´s neck-rope. Cholo snorts at Alasan and Humberto loads our food bag onto CHolo.

We ascended the Tamblino pass
(4300m) from which we had our first
real views--Akhmani I and the views
northeast to the rest of the Cordillera
Apolobamba. here´s a pic. Akhmani I is in the background.

The rest of the day takes us downhill to
the base of what if it had 4 feet of snow on it would be, a like, totally sick place to shred the gnar gnar. I cannot believe we are going up this thing. The steep shaded snow couloir just to the left of Kym´s head is where we have to go the next day.

We get to camp and Kym and I head upvalley see Akhmani. First I find a boulder problem at about V0 and climb it and in honour of my dear friend and climbing inspiration, The Filth, I call it Blacker Than A Black Man.

This is me on top of the Blacker Than A Black Man boulder. I´m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts...

Then we find a remarkably handsome old shepherd named Raúl who tells me
--man that´s a hard way to get up that boulder.
--But it´s fun
--No, he says, here, he shoves a rock under the start, THIS is how you start to climb it.

We chew up and ask him about his family. He has 12 kids.

--Don´t have 12 kids, he says, too much work and money. Llamas are better. You can sell them.

We have camped at an old ruined shepherd´s hut and Kym is psyched to have an old ruined wall to set up the kitchen on. While she fucks around with 2 stoves and 3 dishes, including fried cauliflower (¿who on EARTH would want fried cauliflower in the wilderness?) I get Humberto´s story.

He became a guiide when 12 years ago this Frenchman came up to him and said
--I need a guide.
--OK said H.
--Let´s leave tomorrow, said the French.

H. managed his first trek, carrying the Frenchman´s gear, and asking for directions in Quechua so the French wouldn´t know that his guide didn´t know his trek from a hole in the ground. They made it. He made B$600 (like $60). With time, he bought some horses. They ran way but he got them back.

The early days of guiding were a bit of a free for all (sound familiar, Bones?). The guides would fight for clients. The guides would go on epic drinking binges in the middle of treks and get into fights and lose the horses. They lacked any language skills. They woudl forget stuff, like the guide who went trekking with three Belgian chicks and forgot al his sleeping gear. Somehow, the women managed to not interpret his "¿can I sleep in your uhh tent?" as a come on and all was saved.

Eventually the guides formed a co-operative and made some rules. These included

-- do not sleep wiht clients
-- fixed prices and payment in advance for Israelis.
-- do not go on epic drinkign binges before the end of trek
-- no haggling
-- customers must buy and prepare food for guides

¿So what were some of Humberto´s memorable experiences?

-- the Belgian they found camped ont he Mil Curvas pass (4700m) with no stove, nearly frozen, the poor vegetarian decided that biscuits and bananas woudl get him through 115 km and five 4300+ m passes. The brits H. was guiding adopted the Belgian.

--The Israelis that on arrival at the end of the trek decided to renegotiate the price. H.´s friend was the bus driver and since there is only one bus out of Pelechuco, the Hebes ponied up.

-- the Brits who spoke not a word of English but carried so much booze they needed an extra animal just for their liquor (beer). H. recalls some midnight frozen mud wrestling and horseshit fights and other staples of young adulthood.

-- The guy who tried to make apple pie on his camp stove and blew it up and so for the rets of the trek they had ice cold mush.

-- best customers: Spanish and french cos they´re strong.
--Worst: Israelis for their stinginess, and Kiwis cos apparently they are wusses.
--You´re kidding, I said, Kiwi wusses?
--Yea, maybe, I´m not sure. I had to give them ropes to hold onto ont he Mil Curvas switchback section, like horses.

DAY 3

THE MOON is now pregnantly full and drips misty white light as I get up and have daily morning warfare with the whisperlite. Theother stove, the dragonfly, is both an alarm clock and a stove, but the fucking godamned whisperlite drives one to distraction. We head up the insane snow couloir called Mil Curvas ("a thousand switchbacks") a very accurate name and here is our view from the top.

OK now proceeds a msot marvellous day traversing at 4700m tjrough the high alpine. H. and I chew up. Coca is like slow smooth coffee, nice stuff, not druggish at all, but Kym the WASP chick refuses this filthy habit. We traverse across around Akhmani above a mining village and find An Even Colder Campsite. We do get 1/2 hour of sun so while Kym reads and Humberto masticates, I head far awy to practice the tin whistle. Now this instrument only appears simple. With mando and guiter you PRESS to amke notes, with whistle you UN PRESS so years of musical habit must be undone. it´s ridiculous how bad I sound. I coudl make you shriek with the repetitiveness of my errors.

Tonight however we have Mouth Porn: pasta with a sauce made of cheese soup, stinky old rotten cheese (the freebie we were given in Yuppie Market) and tunafish. We all groan as we sit in the frozen pasture and piles of llama shit and tongue my confection. Later the moon will be impossibly full and ready to roll through the evening´s ice valley and I am amazed the Humberto´s sleeping rig is 3 blankets and what appears to be a snowmobile suit.

OK that´s all for today. Tomorrow, or whenever i next find a computer, day 4 and 5

Also, alpinists, I have some candy for you. See below. The route starts very bottom right along the dark rock buttress. Looks like 10-15 pitches of bomber granite or quartzite. The some traverseing, then onto the steepening snow arëte which is surmouted to climbers´right (out of sight in photo). Then about 1 km of high cornice traversing to the final 5-6 pitches of 5.7-5.9 roc to the peak in the top left of photo. Any takers?

Apolobamba Trek #1

2007-08-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

The whole thing starts at 6 a.m. with peasants muttering, cramming the Altiplano bus full of vegetables and grain wrapped in colourful swathes of cloth, diesel fumes, and turbulent stomachs. Kym and I are crammed into the back with a guy with two kids on his lap. As the bus lurches and grinds up toward El Alto grey light seeps in. As we leave El Alto, the volcanoes show themselves past the miles of empty scrub, and the bus fills with orange light that traces the outlines of wool toques and women´s bowler hats.

The bus stops at Achacachi where

after a stop at the baño público I get

nauseatingly sweet tea from a vendor

who refuses my ya basta as she loads

on the sugar. This first photo is what

we see as we leave Achacachi.

The scenery gets better and better. The hazy blue of lake Titicaca appears on the right and then slips away as we grind into the mountains, brown hills getting higher and steeper and recedign without end toward the smoky grey horizon. As we crest toward Charazani, we see a heard of alpacas, and above them their wild cousins, vicuñas, the last wildlife we will see.

The guy with the two kids chats me up and after he finds out I´m 38 and childless seems kind of astonished.
--Well you have two kids, that´s cool, I say.
--¿TWO? I have five and he points at the woman across the aisle managing three kids.
--Busy nights, huh, I say, which gets me laughs and a smack in the ribs from Kym.

Charazani, it turns out, was the wrong place to get off. When the bus departs, a few locals stare at our massive green food duffel, a guy on crutches hobbles around, and we stagger off to find the Hotel Charazani. Our host is the less than affable Doña Sofía, who informs us that lunch will be served at 3:30 sharp.

-- ¿Que hay? I ask

-- Pues, lo que cocino. Siéntense, jovenes. (What I´m making. Now sit down, young people).

Lo que hay turns out to be a lovely asada with veggies and rice and potatoes, preceded by quinoa soup, which we eat while the Donña hovers and tells me -- shut up and eat, young man, less talk, meat is coming, shush. The spices aren´t Bolivian, and neither is the Doña´s approach to customers. it turns out that her aprents died when she was 7 and she was adopted by a German woman who worked at the German embassy in La Paz. The Doña picked up omt he Kraut timeliness and spices, and even a few words of Kraut: schnell, sofort, nicht reden.

After this we head for the hot springs where we find three Czechs nursing beers and blisters after their non-mule-supported trek. They fucked up on their timing and spent the night at 5100 meters, bad move, your heart rate is around 120 which makes it hard to sleep at theat altitude.

Next up it´s time to go see a man about a

horse and we find one Prudencio whose

faithful burro, Joaquín, will tomorrow

haul our gear to Curva, the jumping off

point for the Apolobamba trek.

The Doña flatly refuses to cook us dinner, as she has her TV show to watch. So we wander around the square looking for food and find every singly person watching Bolivia getting its ass kicked by Ecuador. We buy a few veggies and eggs, and cook over our gas stoves on the Doña´s porch as her mute assitant goggles at us and the Doña emerges from time to time from her TV room to make cooking suggestions.

Next morning, Joaquín is loaded and toothless

Prudencio and I load up with coca and we head off to Curva. The only hassle along the way is a

step that´s too steep for Joaquín, who is basically pissed that his owner is pimping him out top a

couple of gringos, and he isn´t getting any of the proceeds, and he could be grazing out back and pimping burras. So at this point yours truly gets to drag Joaquin while Prudencio smacks his ass and Kym giggles.

Curva is a town filled with mist and rain that sits on a ridge. The "lovely lake filled with songbirds" the Bonehead Planet describes is a filthy mess whose shores are strewn with garbage. We move our junk into the local albergue, where there is a kitchen you can use to cool for yourself and a fi8repalce. We buy some politically incorrectfirewood and then chat with an American artist and his girlfriend who are here to visit the Kallawaya healers. The girl is doing LAtin American studies and her PhD is on the link between narrative and Kallawayah healing. Basically the Kallawayah idea is, when the body is out of alignment, sickness comes.

I tell them that this sounds like the medieval "humours" theory, the one they debunked in like 1700.

"Western medicine isn´t holistic,¨ says the girl, and proceeds to give me the standard leftist argument that you cannot separate mind from body, and that Western medicine ignores this crucial link. I point out that this has been white well studied, and it´s been quite thoroughly proven that a positive attitude has no effect on cancer recovery, speed of recovery from other illnesses, prevention of other illnesses, etc. The only exception to this is that people who have less stress (and/or who have more regular (and adequate) sleep schedules) get fewer of certain kinds of sicknesses.

Science is no deterrent to the literature student: rigorous scientific scrutiny would destroy the holistic power of the kallawayah medicine, so it had best be left un-analysed. A strangely condescending view from somebody whose whole thesis aims at validating the work of these indigenous healers: if there is any danger of this "non-western" (and hence non-capitalist, non-exploitative, non-corporate, etc) practice being debunked, let that danger be banished. Funnny how this is the standard leftist argument you hear anywhere. God forbid that any corporation or scientist should do good work. Well, whatever, she can write her dissertation. The atist and the leftist in their noble axaltation of local culture of course leave the

The next morningI am up early and watch local kids do laps around the cowshit filled soccer pitch. They sprint liek mad, until one boy punches another int he ear, and the punchee stops running, starts bawling, until everybody is forced ijto two lines and spend the next hour doing military maneuvers

The next day we load up our two horses, Cholo and

Alasan, and meet Humberto Falco Calles, our arriero, and head up the ridge above Curva.

This is our first view of the Cordillera Apolobamba. The rightmost peak is Akhmani I at about 6100m. Our route will take us to the left of then behind that peak.

We trudge through terraces browned by winter, soccer pitches, horseshit, threshed wheat and patches of oregano and mint, pass a group of frozen Israelis thawing themselves after last night´s snowstorm, and camp at Jutunpampa, where we meet a Coloradan horrified by the shitty food his guides are making (boiled potatoes and meat...every day...three times a day...).

He goes on and on about the trekking he has done in SOuth America. he obvsiouly hasn´t spoken English in a week aso I sit patinetly adding layer after layer of clothes listening. Kym has this thing, she won´t sit down, so she stands there imperviosu to the cold. Sometimes I wish I had bodyfat-- Kym and Huymberto get way less cold than me.

We head downhill and realise, fuck, it´s going to be cold. I wear seven layers on top and three on bottom. Dinner is quinoa, fried pork product mixed with onions and chicken soup stock, and bits of random veggies It is delicious, even our arriero Humberto says so. The tent is marginally warmer. But we are of course amazed at Humberto, who sleeps in three wool blankets. Oh my Lord he must be one tough son of a bitch. This is what I realise that morning at 2 a.m. as I am pissing and my urine turns it seems to ice before hitting the ground. Aroudn me the valley is filled with frost and the waxing gibbous moon is a smoky white that dampens the weird stars.

Anyway, now I am going to have some lunch. It is going to have meat in it. I am so fucking sick of meat. Bolivians it seems can´t have a meal without masses of meat. First thign I do when I get back is, I am eating a salad. For my final words for this entry, here is how to properly dress for the cold in the Andes. I am wearing 6 layers and missing only my shell. I will add more about this trek soon.

Testing

2007-08-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

CanI post images? This is a picture of people at the Wednesday session at the Wolf and Hound Pub in Vancouver, Canada, playing Irish music. From left to right, session leader Mary Brunner, then Debbie Budd and Paul Giglitz.

How To Make Phone Call In Bolivia

2007-07-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

Kym and I should be on a bus to Pelechuco. Instead we have ANOTHER day of idleness in La Paz.

Yesterday we got phone #s for Altiplanos del Norte and Transplano busses, as well as for the place in Karazani where we hope to stay, adn we want to call them and gett hooked up with some mules. This is my job since Kym's Spanish is about as solid as my stomach today. So I go to a COTEL to make some calls.

First off there is no answer at the first bus line.

At the second, a small child answers.

When I call the Karazani hostal, the phone tells me, "¡you fucking idiot!, ¿where's that area code?" Ok, well, Miss Phone Booth worker, "¿can I use the phone book, por fa'?" She is busy chatting on MSN and says "no hay".

"OK well, ¿do YOU know how to find area codes? I mean you work in the phone office."

"No hay" she mutters as I can see a string of hearts and acronyms scroll down her MSN windows, reflected in her half-open eyes. I wonder, if I smacked the bitch, would I get in trouble, or thanked?

So I go to the Prado looking for a phone operator who isn't a 17 year old moron and finally get told "dial 80-101010" which I do. Now this leads me to voice recognition software in Spanish asking me which area code I want.

"Charazáni" I say in my Very Best Spanish. For this one word I'm Juan Lopez García himself, born and bred in La Paz. Of course it doesn't work. Please try again, clic, now start over again. OK, so let's see how many ways we can say this. ChÁrazani. CharÁzani. CharazanÍ. Ok, ¿is it my accent or what?

Finally I press zero and get a "we are all taking a three-hour siesta and many of our operators are busy, so please call back after we've finished our debilitatingly large meals" message. I go and have a coffee and try again. Finaly I get a live human, who tells em that Charazani doesn't exist.

" Well according to your government it does, since it's on your military map." So you can mine it, bomb it and map it, but you can't call it.

I get passeed around between various other operators, until finally I get an area code.

Of course when I call the place, there is no answer.

So this morning Kim and I get up at 5:30 to be at the bus for 6:30 and we clal the bus at 6 to confirm that, yes, it exists, is actually leaving, and is going where we want to go. And the answer is, we missed it, it leaves at 6 not 6:30 as per the Bonehead Planet guidebook. Well at least we got a live human. So tomorrow we will be there at 5:30 sharp, we have "reservations" though they didn't take our names, and we are wandering around sunny La Paz.

the mimes, the king of meats

2007-07-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

So Kim and I are going food shopping. We have to buy enough food for us and the guy who is going to be driving our mules and keeping us from wandering into Peru or down to the Amazon. We are really hoping that el arriero is into tunafish and pasta and cheese dinenrs and granola, otherwise he is gonna be one pissed muleteer.

So first stop is the Yuppie Cunt Deli where we spend abut $30 on various kinds of meats including lama salami and pulled lama jerky. The clerk throws in $10 worht of cheese for free. It smells. We need to figure out if this is good or bad. Then it's off to the Supermercado which turns out to be a kind of Lynchian take on your North American supermarket. First off there are the clerk outfits. The guys have yellow pants and black shirts, the women yellow shirt and tight black pants. As Km and I bumble around the soup aisle, the store DJ turns up Pearl Jam to about volume 9. No, wait...it´s Pearl Jam in Spanish. A perfect cover of "Daughter." No me digas hija... Then we are at the sausage section and there are two employees stading there, perfectly still, a guy and a girl, statues, each holding An Item. Both are wearing makeup to the point of lookking like stage actors, all exaggerated when you are close. They don´t look anywhere but smile vacantly. Their eyes barely move. I wave my hand in front of one of them. She slowly swivels without making a sound. I turn to look at Kim and turn back and there is A Different Item in both of their hands. Again they don´t move.

It takes what seems like two hours to gather 18 meals worth of food or the sum of about $80. Given the massive amount of food we have now bought, we will need two mules. Kim is ambitious, aiming for vegetable ingredients; I am sticking to basics. Here is one of my meals: fry some Spam-like stuff, add some soup and ater, pour over quinoa. She is gong to win our cooking competition, to be decided by the muleteer. The employees are either mannequins or they walk slowly with dazed looks in their eyes. They work 14 hour days here, no wonder they are zombies. The customers look like shabby versions of Americans with darker hair and smaller bellies....these are the "middle class" Bolivians. After awhile the live mannequins start freaking me out. The music veers unpredictably from Nirvana to Arcade Fire to cumbia to muzak. I hope I have my vocab right hwen I look at quantities. At least this is better than Tibet,where we just looked at pictures and hoped that the food and the pictures were similar.

Finally we are done and have to walk uphill back to our hotel and start sorting. It is hard carrying th food and walking; Kim says we should get THREE mules. If this keeps up we will be able to have a bar as well: we started with one mule now we are up to three.

Then it's dinner at La Paceña, where we are weirdly ona Saturday night the only ones. And we order the local stout and the Variety Meat Platter. The stout tastes like Dr Pepper. The meat dish has tongue, flank and intestines of cow, chicken, pulled lama and pork. Ok, the chicken, pork and beef taste like they should. The cow guts tastes like boiled nylon guitar strings (which come to think of it was once its use), the pulled lama is excellent (very slightly dried than the pork I've had in this style--George Stady, this meal was in your honour), but the king of meats is definitely tongue. ¡Viva la langua!

Today I have the shits, again, and leave Kim to finish the shopping. Tomorrow we are of to Pelechuco (bus/God willing) and then starting our trek to Curvo and Charazani. We should be done in 8 days.

The Lake

2007-07-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

La Paz gets tiresome after 4 normal days and two of diahrrea, mm, so I graba bus for Lake Titicaca, elevation about 13,000 feet. On the ride out, we come to a ferry corssing, where people get off the bus and get intoa rickety wooden boat powered by a microspoic 40 hp outboard, and the bus gets into a separate rickety wooden boat powered by a microspoic 40 hp outboard. At Copacabana-- Bolivia´s version of, well, Copacaba, except this one is about 50 degrees colder and 13,000 feet higher-- I check into Hostal Solario and get the coolest room, lake view, and across from me on the top of the next unfinished building is a lone Dog. This Dog woofs at me and wags his tail and Goddamnit he has cute eyes, and too bad my arms anren{t 13 feet long or I could pet him. Poor guy is lcoke dup on the roof and has about 1000 of his own turds to wallow in.

The beahc is way too cold to sit at, so I climb up to El Cerrito to watcht he sunset and meet a lone English girl who is a science teacher at a private school in Santa Cruz. SOunds like a shit gig-- no resources, rampant cheating ie you could make double your salary by making parents pay you to pass their kids, which is more or less accepted practice, plus if you are sick you have to pay for your own substitute. Anyway the sunset is gorgeous then we go have dinner, and then I realise, I am eating with The Most Boring Person In The World. This girl´s mental consists of teaching and drinking and smoking. I am all set to discuss my impressions of Bolivia and Evo Morale´s bio and other stuff, but nothing doing. Maybe to her it´s me who is boring cos I am not talkng about drinking and smoking.

Then I go to Hippie Heaven aka Aakwar pub, which is this palce full of reggae music, dreads, beanbag chairs and of course cigarette smoke. I am suppsoed to meet somebody named Kym who emaile dme and wants to go trekking. Kym turns out to be a girl, Yankee aged 29 who appears to have the qualifications for going on a big remote trek-- she is fit and she hitchiked around Ladakh´, and if you ever met Indian truck drivers you´ll know what I mean. We both agree that a hippie hangout is annoying anf leave after one beer. The worst of it is, the fucking hippies can´t even shut the goddamned door on the way in or out. Is that how you show your countercultural cool, by leaving the door open? Oh and by the way there is no difference betwene hippies of different nationalities...your Israeli, Yankee and Argentinian hippies are more or less interchangeable.

The next day we get onto a boat and go out to Isla del Sol. Kym heads north while I get off at the south end and climb past an amzingly intricate Inca stonework staircase and waterfall to the ridge. The Inca were the real stonemasters. They built complex structures with massively irregularly shaped bricks which perfeclty fit together, all eyeballed, the kind of thing that nowadays you would need Autocad to do. After a lunch of fried trout I pass out, that one beer last night really did me in. Am I 38 or at 13,000 feet? In the evening I wander around staring at the weird Southern sky and its Brand New COnstellations and eat witha bunch of French and Mexican girls who agree that, yes, most Mexicans are lazy sods who would rather piss off with friends and family than work. I wonder whats wrong with that.

The next day I hike aroudn the island. There are splendid ruins, remarkable terracing and a system of rotating crops and fallow periods that allow the locals to produce on remarkably bad soil. At the pottery museum I chat and chew coca with a local who is boning up on his Italin fascist history. He talks about how the government doesnt really matter to most Bolivians.

"We have animals and crops and the divine Lake, the governt, well, they can do what they want." he says. Sounding like an American redneck or something. He talks about how the Lake is the interface between the human and the Divine, and how it is an energy portal, but when he talks abotu how Hitler made apilgrimmage here in 1922, he loses me.

The ferry drifts back to Copa in late afternoon, the air smoky and blue, the volcanoes pink on the horizon, and I sit on the roof and play my mando. A Finnish guy comes up to smoke. He describes walking on the island as "difficult sport" due to altitude and as he puffs away hsi face turns the colour of cooked lobster.

The night bus back to La Paz features nothing of interest except somebody on this bus has nasty foot odour and they are right near me.

Friday is awrite off. The entire city is shut down cos they want to move the capital from La Paz to Sucre, which, given that there is no industry here, would basically totally screw La Paz. This is happening cos the wealthy lower East side of the country is tired of having to go all the way up into the hills to deal with government, and cos the government wants to curry favour with the business community. So up at El Alto 2 million people are demonstrating "La sede no se mueve". Everything is shut and so I can´t do my half of the treking prep but the rally sure is cool...biggest loudest crowd I´ve ever seen.

Next-- my surreal shopping experience, then it´s off to the Apolobamba to trek for 8 days.

Cocaine, coca, los gringos hijos de la puta, etc.

2007-07-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

The local coca museum is as interesting a place as I've yet visited. You got your history, chemical data, biology and growing info, folklore, whatnot. The history of coca, I realise after leaving, is the history of Bolivia.

The Quechua and Aymará used coca for thousands of years-- as a nutritional supplement, as an anaesthetic and analgesic, as a mild pick-me-up similar to coffee, and as a part of religion. The Spanish thought coca was diabolical, and so the Church duly banned its use, until they discovered that their Indian mine slaves produced more when chewing coca, and a Papal endorsement was duly produced. Early attempts to render the essence of the coca leaf were moderately successful-- by the 1650s, Bolivia was exporting nearly 600 tonnes per year of coca to Europe, most of which was mixed with alkaloids (to activate the leaf's essence) and used mixed with tobacco as snuff (snortable tobacco) or smoked. Shakespeare used both coca and marijuana, by the way.

Coca never lost its status as a low, godawful Indian drug, and in Bolivia its use among the white elite was almost nil. In the 1860s, cocaine was first synthsised in Germany, and in 1884/5 and a coca derivative was first successfully used as a local and general anaesthetic, also in Germany. Sigmund Freud did early work on coca, and experimented wiht its use in psychotherapy. At the same time, cocaine was legally avaible as a pick me up, and began to be incorporated into various beverages, the most famous of which was Vino Mariani, a French wine which was so popular that Pope Leon XIII eventually endorsed it, one of the few Papal endorsements of a product.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the social gospel movement-- a Christian response to the horryfing conditions of early Industrial cities in Europe and the U.S.-- gained momentum. The social gospellers wanted to found Christ's Kingdon on Earth, and so emphasised a practical religion which looked for aid to the poor, universal education, welfare for the poor and single women, euthanasia for the "feeble minded" and physically deformed, avoidance of drugs and alcohol, etc. These were the folks who founded the YMCA and YWCA and the Salvation Army, among others. In Canada, the famous Tommy DOuglas, widely considered the father of socialised medicine, was social gospeller, who wrote his master's thesis endorsing the practice of eugenics (selective breeding and elimination of genetic undesirables) in an attempt to improve the population. In the U.S., the home of the social gospel movement would be Kentucky, not coincidentally the home of U.S. whiskey industry.

Wartime brought big government regulation of the economy, and in the U.S. one fo these regulations was the Harrison Narcotics law of 1914 which made the use of cocaine, among others, illegal, as well as introducing wartime prohibition. The H.N.L. was, among other things, a gift to the new international pharmaceutical giant Merck, and to the American firm Stephans, which reserved the right to import coca in order to make anaesthtics (e.g. Novocaine) and were able to make enormous profits. The H.N.L. was also supported y social gospellers, and in 1919 when Congress debated continuing Prohibition and the H.N.L., enthusiastic support came from the social gospellers and also, indirectly, the Mafia, who realised that massive profits would be made if drugs remained illegal.

Prohibition in the U.S.-- from 1919 to 1933-- created a massive black market for alcohol and drugs and thereby turned the Mafia from an organisation which primarily affected the Italian community into an international force. It also started the Bronfmans in Canada on their way to wealth. The demand for cocaine after 1914 remained the same; the new black market meant that it cost much more; dealers thereby had ample incentive to increase the drug's sales. Also note that cocaine had been legal, and demand did not simply disappear.

All this affected the Andes, who were now able to sell to both a domestic and an international market. For the masses of peasants in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, in the absence of any meaningful reforms of the various social injustices inherited from the Spanish, coca production was a life-saving way to manage poverty, as well as a tradition.

In 1950 the U.N. decreed the end of coca.

In 1961, the Geneva Convention on Narcotics declared coca the "enemy of mankind" ( a distinction the leaf shares with only one other thing in history...the Inquisition's Devil!). Thus began the Drug Wars. Coca became a political football which the U.S. would use (and still does) to kick Andean governments around when necessary. E.g. in 2003 the Congress donated $91,000,000 in coca eradication aid to Bolivia, which basically paid for U.S. troops to hang out in the jungle and protect companies exploring for oil and natural gas from the peasants who had issues with their lands being used without proper compensation. In Colombia, the U.S. supports the horribly corrupt Alvaro Uribe government (you know you are bad news when the President has direct ties with death squads). The superficial rationale is coca eradication; the real reason is that Colombia is an oil supplier and God forbid the various rebel factions should control oil as well as coca.

The U.S., with 5% of the world's population, uses ver 50% of the world's coca. You can see why the Bolivians elected Evo Morales, an Indian coca grower, to the Presaidency. One of his first acts was to refuse U.S. eradication aid. Rising natural gas and oil prices mean the government can ignore IMF demands and the U.S. and can make its own $$. Morales is now nationalising the gas and oil industry, and soon will be able to call his shots, Chavez style.

The upshot of it is that prohibition creates, not supresses, drug epidemics. Black markets = high prices = incentive to sell (and hispter cred) = growing markets = problems. Such is the history of cocaine, marijuana, psychedelics, heroin, E., etc. Drugs are in their natural state useful; they then become synthesised bycapitalist interests, experimented with speculatively, marketed, eventually banned, and then their use really takes off.

One wonders why, in the U.S., given that so many illegal drugs-- when used, as they are by most people, in moderation-- are not that harmful, they remain illegal, this despite many Presidential commisions (e.g. Nixon's of 1971) which have suggested that most drugs should be legalised. My guess is that there is enough organised crime influence on the U.S. government to maintain drug laws as they are, or perhaps that the government actually sells drugs (an idea forcefully and thoroughly examined in Gary Webb's Dark Alliance) and which came briefly to light in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1985, when it was revealed that the CIA was allowing its Contra-supplying arms cargo planes to return from Nicaragua loaded with cocane.

On the streets, you buy a bag of coca leaves and some alkaloid for $1.50. You chew the leaves, you add some alkaloid, you taste the bitter juice, your mouth goes a bit numb, and you get a comfy, alert feeling, like milder version of coffee. Problem?

Música

2007-07-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

I've been wandering the streets of La Paz and everywhere I hear loud brassy music from inside buildings.

One day I am flute shopping for Margaret. Quenas-- a kind of low whistle that you can get three octaves from and play with lip position similar to a flute-- are cheap here.

I am also toying with trading in my beater traveller mando for a local 12-string model, and as I am sitting there playing, what else, an irish reel, a man who is both long-haired and balding (and stylish) comes up and says in a thick accent "es la música irlandesa, ¿verda?"

His name is Gil and he is a French cultural bureaucrat of some kind as well as an ethnomusicologist by training and this is his 30th trip to Bolivia. He didn't even have to tellme he was French-- anybody who can wear flip-flops, a straw hat, a flannel blazer, peasant pants, long hair, a cowboy hat, a bow tie and a cigarette while talking about 900 w/m can only be either French or a Spanish musician or soccer player. "¿Vos queres descargar?" he asks me, and, what the hell, when was the last time I jammed? At his friend Rolando's tienda we bust out acoustic guitars and the charango and some quenas and away we go. Gil has no idea what a pentatonic blues scale is, so our impromptu version of "Lost Highway" by Hank Sr. sounds like it was made in Colombia. Gil next grabs the charango and blasts his way through "Dirty Old Town" in a soloing style I{ve never heard. This instrument, which looks like a miniature mandolin (my friend Merran will laugh here-- whenever I play the mando, she thinks it absurd, cos I am 6'2.5" and the mando looks ridiculously small on me) has the world's weirdest tuning and string set up, and is played with fingers not pick, quite a feat when you think that it has like the mando pairs of strings. After an hour of improv, we head otu for food and then to a pena a folk music jam session.

The pena starts in a cavernous hall which is slowly being set up for an evening of drinking with Gil teaching a Bolivian crew -- ten zamponas and one huge drum-- a simple repetitive riff. The crew slowly picks it up. The present the music in Andean fashion: moving in synchronised steps in a stomping circle, changing direction when the riff changes or starts over. Gil waves at me to grab my mando. When I do, a woman stops me. "You can't mix this music with strings" she says. She explains that the music represents earth (stomping) and wind (the flutes) and strings are not used in this style. Wow, talk about trad.

After Gil's crew has learned their 20-note riff, a band sets up, music begins, and Bolivians start to filter in. I sit at a table with a long-haired older Bolivian who introduces himself as "Patchouli, yea, like hippie shit" and then tells me he loves both using and selling drugs. He then tells me about his women. he has a wife ("my queen!"), a girlfriend ("my sex goddess!") and a lover ("my everything!").

"Do they know each other?"

"Yea, they hate each other, but what are you going to do, that's how it is" he says.

Everything else he says is incomprehensible: sentences begin without context, diverge into Aymará, and end with obscure references. The German teacher who has joined us in swilling yunguino (O.J. and rubbing alcohol) shakes her head and then the band starts. They are claled Altiploano and are back together for the first time in 3 years after their former singer died. They play typical Altiplenar stuff-- heavy on simple drums, flute, charango (Gil pays this) but they also have bass and a good guitar player. The crowd likes it, but I don{t-- the rythms seem forced and simple, the music oddly graceless.

I wander into the musician's room and join the jam session when the band breaks and the DJ takes over. They pick reels up quickly, and I can fit into their tunes nicely. Gil wants to play some country tunes to the crowd before the band goes back on, but I nix this. people want to dance, not listen to bad gringo tunes. Out on the danceflor, the handkerchiefs come out for the cumbia tunes, then the band comes back.

I eventually realisae what is missing with this music-- improvisation. The Bolivian music is the local equivalent of a brass band. It is ceremonial marching music. They don't jam out, and they don't play with the beats to let things flow. Margaret and I were discussing this (and Guatemalan marimba music, which Marg said sounded like it was made for children) and we wondered, why do some cultures develop good tunes that everybody in the world will groove to, while other suck?

Universally enjoyed music: Cuban, Irish, blues, funk, most Brazillian forms, Colombian vallenatos (even if you don't know it, you will love the beat first time you hear it), jazz, cumbia, most African open forms, Indian classical, Indian pop, etc.

Shitty music: anything from China, altiplanar music, anything Germanic, heavy rock from anywhere (appeals only to young males from white or alienated cultures), Russian folk music, anything made by North American natives --that howling with the bad drums-- with all due respect, God help us).

So what makes music interesting? I think there are two features which stand out. The first is improvisation-- decent music has to be able to evolve away from its origins, incorporate new instruments and lyrics, etc. Open forms-- like the blues, or Cuban son, or jazz-- are frameworks for improvisation. If you look at most of these forms, they have in common that they evolved as originally marginal (or "low") played by the "illiterate" and poor. As such, they had to have learn-by-doing as opposed to classical music's insistence on maintaining the piece as it is. The upshot of this is that these forms invite participation (by musicians and by spectators, who can imagine their own solos, as it were).

The second is informal public participatory performance. If it is played by non-professionals (who may nevertheless be excellent musicians) in public, and others can join in, and it involves alcohol and dancing, you are going to end up with open forms, grooves, playing around and a good balance between standards (what the crowd knows/wants) and improv (Musicians showing off and trying new stuff).

Bolivina tunes remain stuck in either military mode (brass bands) or ritual standardised performance (the native stuff the Indians play). Bummer for them-- just east, in Brazil, perhaps the most vibrant musical culture in the world outside of India, their is dancing, jazz, improv and tradition, wildly mixed, aplenty.

Las Bolivianas

2007-07-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

Lo siento informarles...las bolivianas no tienen potos lindos.

shame vs guilt

2007-07-13T15:53:00.000-07:00

Ok, I´ve been thinking about morality. How do you enforce ethics, or, why act ethically?

Philosophers make the distinction between "guilt" and "shame" cultures. The guilt culture basically tries to make you feel bad inside if you violate a norm in order to keep you on the straight and narrow. The shame culture tries to publicly humiliate you if you fuck up-- what is noticed is bad, more than what is done.

When I was in India, an educated Indian expressed contempt for his countrymen to me. He said that, basically, Indians are amoral: as long as they do not publicly dishonour their family, caste and profession (in that order) anything goes. You can beat your wife, or cheat a customer...as long as it isn´t publicly known. An Indian, he said, doesn´t feel guilty for cheating-- he feels guilty for getting caught.

Western life is mostly a guilt culture with a bit of shame thrown in, this being thanks largely to Christianity and Judaism and their empahsis on prayer and personal relationships with God, and the long slow influence of culture (chiefly, the novel and Shakespeare, which developed the vocabulary of what Harold Bloom calls "interiority", or a deep sense of the inner self). The shame part of things is what makes it so that sex tourists go to Thailand to screw underage girls-- out of sight, out of mind.

Indians-- despite the very interesting presence of almost Kantian appeals to disinterested and abstract reason in the Hindu vedas-- are a shame culture, as are the Arabs. As one commentator has noted, one of the reasons Arabs can fall of the Islamic wagon when visitng the West is that as long as their family don´t SEE this behaviour, it can be rationalised; drinking is fine in Arabic countries, jusat make sure nobody finds out.

I´ve been reasding Ayaan Hirsi Ali´s fascinating INFIDEL (a must-read), which describes the disgusting lengths to which ignorant Muslims-- and most of those described in the book, including the Propher Mohammed himself, are enormously ignorant of anything remotely resembling human decency, not to mention human rights-- go to maintain religious and clan proprieties. A woman who is raped is "shameful" despite it not being her fault. The Islam Ali describes is very much what Lévi-Strauss aptly called "a locker-room religion" with its emphasis on conformity, subservience, cleanliness and ritual. Most horribly, the very oppressed women who are sold into marriage, raped by husbands and fathers and genitally mutilated (literally sewn shut; the first time they have sex, they are ripped open, and sometimes the mother in law has to hold the new bride down...) accept and the endorse these practices. That´s a shame culture--shameful, and for speaking up about it, Ali received death threats (more shame culture) and eventually left Holland.

Bolivians appear more on the guilt side of things. Which is nice. You don´t have to bargain hard, you aren´t ripped off on busses and in stores, and people actually seem to be genuinely interested in you (once you get past their cool exteriors), unlike the Indians I met who were many of them sharkish.

La Paz scenes

2007-07-13T15:27:00.001-07:00

-- a man with no hands playing harmonica and a man with no eyes playing mandolin

-- an Argentinian woman accosted me over breakfast with a massive story about how the Mendozan criminal underground is in cahoots with the cops, and how there is this massive international conspiracy involving Arab immigrants (to all countries), the cops, the American I.N.S. and the Mafia to assasinate George W. Bush. "Lo odio tambien, pero esto no es justo," she added. I suggested she start on her novel with all of that material.

-- two Dutch guys and three Dutch girls having breakfast. The women, check this, are all wearing identical clothes, down to the backpacks and the cell phones.

-- los lustreros (the bootblacks) wear black ski masks and it turns out that these guys are unionised! they have small patches sewn onto their clothes. It´s weird seeing what looks like a ´70s terrorist massaging the dress shoes of a guy on a cell phone.

-- the fierce white sun has twice as much light as you´d expect, but only half the heat. the west walls of the city, where crazy houses crowd up what should be rock climbing areas, turn orange as I eat empañadas (Ithink that´s what they´re called-- the Spanish is WAY different here than in Mexico) handed to me from a steaming pail by a four-foot tall woman wearing an apron and a bowler hat.

-- I shop for flutes for Margaret and sure enough, the first three Israelis I meet this trip, who are buying a padded guitar case for the obscenely low price of $5, are bargaining. God forbid anybody screw you. The stereotypes are all true with these guys, Jewing the merchant down.

-- you have to wonder how many brake and clutch repair businesses there are here; the city is in a canyon and the roads look like San Francisco minus the proper paving and signs and other safety features.

-- los mineros (the miners, did you figure that out or did you need my help?) are having a demonstration, which means hundreds of guys in ratty clothes chanting on the street, blocking traffic, and occasionally detonating dynamite inside massive steel drums, to deafening effect. The bookseller I discuss this protest with says "this is not democracy, this is ABUSE!" But I must admire these guys, actually all of Bolivia for this: when you want something here, you start a full-on blockade, liek the Nepalis, only these guys get results. (wait till i´m on a midnight bus to Quimsa Cruz and they blockade the road). It´s funny how in the western world the only blockades are fuckers on bikes doing Critical Mass. The Bolivias would laugh their heads off--¨"what, you want MORE bicycles? ¡Qué locos!"

-- at the cathedral (you want that in Spanish?) there is a mime who cruises around doing random stuff, like taking a guy away from his woman and pretending to be her, and stealing a small child from his father, and imitating passers-by.

-- the Indians are better fed here than their Guatemalan brethren, but they still look like shit and spend days outside, waiting by their tables of wares to make a few Bs$. Good style here, like a poor Italy, everybody in suits or bowler hats for the women, a kind of quiet dignity to things, amazingly little machismo.

-- A guy came up to me who had no teeth, and no eyes, and he held out his hands for $$, but he had no hands, and I didn´t know where to put the money.

Spanish kleyboards

2007-07-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

fair play tot he spanish with their keybpoards with things liek Ñ and two shifte keys buit i cant get used to it i feel like my name a Borat I no a like type

here

2007-07-11T15:48:00.000-07:00

At an ungodly hour a very nice Persian man drove me to the first of an endless number of check-ins, seccurity clearances, shoe removals, gates and hordes of tall fat Americans in chinos and white golf shirts worn extra tight to show off that they have no problems accessing food.

"HEY FUCKER" scream these bellies "don"t you mistake ME for some third world motherfucker!"

As the planes moved south there was more colour, more talk and more standing around in the aisles, not reallyworrying about turbulence.

Miami must be the world's stupidest airport other than Heathrow. First, each arm of the spider-like layout is devoted entirely to one airline. There is also a total lack of flight information in each arm, so if you are arriving on one and leaving on another, you (a) have no idea where to go and (b) when you get to the arm that has your airline, they say "yeah well we use a lot of different gates so GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM," where there is one gate from your airline with your flight.

We lifted off througha forest of sluggish white cumulonimbal tress drifting through the hazy soil of the sky and then I took my final acetazolamide pill, thank GOd, it makes all food taste like detergent. On my final night Margaret had swilled beer which when I sipped it tastede like a cross between tonic water and Tide.

La Paz is this huge hole ripped into the BOlivian altiplano. The airport is at 4100 m and the main part of the city is at around 3800. Driving in I was blown away by the 21,000 foot volcanoes that ring the city, stuck into the middle of dry empty plains, and vaguely terrified on the snaking descent past the high'up poor shantytowns (the pooor live higha dn cold, the rich low and warm) and then the mess of traffic. Although to be fair these guys can't hold a candle to the Indians. UNlike the Indians, these guys honk ONLY WHEN NECESSARY and they actually use the traffic lights. The busses spew diesel, but unlike Delhi you can breathe here. The street vendors are calm and smiley and folks ingeneral are quiet and kinda spacey, possibly due to the coca they chew (it's not a drug, more like coffee but without the mania tha too much caffeine induces). Oh and they label their streets.

Where the Bolivians fall down is in the food. Sandwiches, meat stew, fried chicken...these guyys can{t touch the Indians with their splendid and often meat'free dishes. I mean I love meat but how much ham can you eat in a day? Coca tea, here called mate (MAH-tay) is nice stuff, somethign like green tea but mius the tooth-destroying acidity of cheap tea. ANyway, my schedule is all out of whack so now I will go and sleep.

Going to Bolivia

2007-06-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

I am off to Bolivia for two months. I leave July 7 and return Sept 3. I will be posting regular updates and possibly pictures.

As of now here is my to-do list:

-- pay for my car
-- buy a travelling mandolin
-- get sheet music for 50 killer Irish tunes
-- pay Merran for all the discounted M.E.C. crap she was kind enough to buy me
-- remember to take my anti-diahrrea medicines
-- figure out if there is rock climbing down there, or merely insane remote high-altitude mixed
-- pack
-- clean my apartmnet in prep for my summer subletter who is a woman and therefore pickier
than me
-- have an immense amount of sex to prepare for 8 weeks of deprivation