Loose End In LatAm

Stuff and nonsense

I think I´m the first person to officially note that dogs make more noise at night over 3000ms above sea level. Other things that are odd at altitude: tea tastes terrible and my tinnitus is far more noticable. Something I didn´t know before, but Cactae grow in the middle of forests - or at least in the bit of jungley forest between Tarija and Yaquiba in Bolivia they do, and they´re HUGE! I thought they were desert loving plants but apparently not... and in Camiri the parrots are on the large side

Tarija smells wonderful at night. I think it´s the mix of Eucalyptus and Orange trees. On our last night Norwegian Chris got excited that there was a band that day (17th May - Norway´s Constitution day) , and although it was for something completely different we waved some homemade Norwegian flags all the same. (There have still only been two days while I´ve been in Bolivia that I haven´t seen a band, of some sort). This band included a section of very strange trumpet-like instruments, about 2 ms long with a leather horn at the end... they were unweildy and sounded pretty dreadful, so I´m not surprised they haven´t caught on elsewhere. After I realised I had hidden from view the bicycle that the drum major subsequently fell over, I felt it was time to leave town.

It took at 12 hour bumpy ride from Tarija to Yaquiba, including stops and road blocks, but we made it. We travelled by day (which seems to be an unusual event for Bolivian "long distance" buses). I´d been longing for a bit of lush greenery ever since I´d left Paraguay, and I got it... as we moved east the cloud came in and the hillsides turned from arid scrub to ridge after ridge of thick forest , with only the road and the pockets of cultivated land near the few villages along it making any break in the canopy.

Yaquiba is another border town and is the first place in Bolivia (having arrived after dark) where I have felt even vaguely ill at ease, so we jumped in a micro* (a converted right hand drive Toyota estate) packed with the driver, 3 other people, and a boot full of giant bags of puffed wheat and rice (coloured pink) and headed to Villamontes, (a town we couldn´t get directly from Tarija to because of a landslide). Along the highway (no, honest, it´s paved) we reached one particularly wide river, instead of there being a road bridge, the highway ended at the railway track and all the traffic just went along the railway lines, single file, and then the highway started again when we got to the other side. I love this country!

From Villamontes another micro to Camiri, a town surrounded by the forest and Bolivia's petroleum industry - which makes is sound awful, but it's a good stopover if only to have a go on the giant bird telephones... although they only go through to the emergency number at the moment, but don't bother ringing there a military base on the other side of the road, so I´m sure they'll help out if you need it.

Tomorrow on to Santa Cruz.

* A micro in Bolivia is a tini minivan or car, in Chile it is a local bus, which in Argentina is called a colectivo, but in Chile a colectivo is a taxi with a fixed route, which is sometimes called a remise in Argentina although that can sometimes just be a taxi or a mini cab...confused? I was.

In a big country...

Through the north of Argentina and into Bolivia are a stretch of ravines and canyons that would have most physical geography teachers wetting themselves. The landscape is a series of massive chunks of the earth pushed and pulled in all directions, and eroded by hundreds of thousands of years of water and wind to create an utterly spectactular landscape. But having spent a couple of weeks travelling up through this barren and cold country is with some relief I´ve now started on the first steps towards the lower, jungley south-east of Bolivia.

First proper stop in Bolivia was Tupiza (yes, some enterprising fella has named his fast food joint Tu Pizza) a great little town somewhere close to where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid burst out of the doors all guns blazing and got battered by the Bolivian army. Then a rather bumpy ride over night to Tarija, a thousand meters lower and a lot warmer, thankfully.

Crime and Punishment

Everyone you meet travelling has a story about people being mugged or killed in Bolivia, and while it is incredibly poor and tourists are obvious targets for some nasty buggers, we didn´t get robbed the minute we crossed the border as we were beginning to think we might be. Thankfully the biggest bandit in the badlands I´ve come across so far was in a shop on the Argentinian side: she shoves her hands into your pockets and demands chocolates and caramels... she´s about three years old.

Later, a Candian girl staying in the same hostal at the border asked me, with some concern, "I saw you being led around by that Policeman! What did he want?" I told her I´d been arrested for exposing myself to goats, again, although in fact he was simply helping find out if there was a bus to Tarija (big traumas as the buses have been on strike for weeks). So far the cops have been great, and Norwegian Chris (my current travelling partner) is a good distraction as they always ask lots of questions like "Is it cold in Norway?".


Fanfares and songs

...and the most I´ve seen of the army is in the bands that have been accompanying the various parades, so far one in every town (Villazon - the border - a school parade, Tupiza celebrating the anniversary of the university, Tarija a saints day). Great music and lot of people dressed as angels and devils, and the such like, chasing eachother around.

Halfway up a mountain between Tupiza and Tarija the bus pulled aside for a comfort break, and amoungst the splashing on the hillside of a bus load of passengers finding relief, a wonderful but ghostly sound rose out of the valley below. At first I thought it was strange sounding goat bells, but I was reliably informed it is was a frog night song.

Top tip if you are in this part of the world: Stay on the bus. A lot of the buses run overnight, and arrive at daft times, like 4.30 am, where no hostal you´d want to stay at is open for business. If it´s the end of the line, ask the bus driver if you can stay until a more reasonable hour. We did and he locked us in with our bags so we could get a bit more kip. Safer than sitting around with the tricksters and husslers in the bus terminal.


Riding Shotgun

Think twice about getting front row seats on the bus. Recently I have had a couple: In Argentina I witnessed so much road-kill carnage it quite put me off my plastic sandwich, while in Bolivia being able to "see" the driver throwing the night bus around mountain hairpin bends, whilst driving through blinding clouds of dust, ascattle trucks raced towards us in the other direction had me cletching every cheek imaginable.

Next stop Bolivia!

If the buses gave frequent flyer benefits I´d be in for a bag load... from Asunción I travelled back into Argentina, south to Resistencia to get a connection to Tucuman, where it was raining, so I got on another bus down south Mendoza, so I could spend my birthday in one of my favourite cities. Add that to the mamouth trek to Asunción in the first place and I spent 3 out of 5 nights and a total of 52 hrs on buses!

I´d been very careful to plan arriving back in Tucuman on a Monday, because I´ve arrived in cities on Sundays and they are always dead, only to discover it was a bank holiday so it was even quieter than the quietest Sunday! Anyway, it´s not a particularly lovely city, so I´ve been hopping, skipping and jumping north.

Throughout the little towns on the way my particular style of spanish has been coming in more and more handy, although I was pleased to find in one restaurant a kind of english menu reader, but it wasn´t very accurate: "A local animal a bit like rabbit" turned out to be goat.

Meanwhile this hurried update will have to surfice as I have meet a bus for the border... if northern Argentina is anything to judge by, internet connections and the possibilities to upload picutures may be a bit limited for a while, but keep watching this space.