Journals
Saturday,Sep 29 2007, 01:36:35 PMMadidi and San Xavier
Thursday, September 06, 2007 San Xavier
The last few months have seen quite a bit of travel but very little in the way of posting pictures and journal entries. At the end of July and the beginning of August I was lucky enough to go to the Amazonian town of Rurrenabaque, which is the jumping off point for swamp tours and rain forest tours in the National Park Madidi. Parque Madidi has been featured twice in National Geographic magazine and along with Peru’s Parque Manu is considered to be the best preserved park in South America. Madidi is such a rich center of animal life that it is said to contain over 50% of new world mammals including Tapirs, Jaguars, spotted Andean bears, toucans, parrots, and thousands of other birds. There are really only two ways to get to Rurrenabaque. One is to ride an old school bus anywhere from 18-24 hours from La Paz down the world’s most dangerous road which I biked down last year. The other and option I chose was to fly into Rurrenabaque which takes about 45 minutes from La Paz or an hour from Trinidad which is closer to Santa Cruz. Now the planes that you go on to Rurrenabaque would possibly not even meet the English definition of a puddle jumper. Boarding in Trinidad consisted of a lady shouting, get on the plane, find an open seat and make sure you use both of the seat belts, shoulder straps included. So after choosing one of 11 available seats, mine being right behind the captain and co-pilot to keep an eye on them, we got ready to go. The flight actually went well and the views of the endless swamps and jungle in the morning were incredible. When we got to Rurre about and hour later and were landing my fellow volunteer Jenny remarked that she felt like we were landing in Jurassic Park which was right on the money. The landing strip in Rurre is a dirt strip that stretches out from the jungle and is capped on the other end by 600 foot mountain foothill. It was truly incredible and definitely one of the most beautiful surroundings for an “airport” that I have ever seen. So after we touched down at the airport and waited for our bags to be thrown off onto the runway we hopped in our tour company’s land cruiser and made our way the 2 hours to the beginnings of the swamp. We spent 4 days in the swamp and saw everything from pink Amazonian river dolphins, monkeys, caimans, alligators, and capybaras which are the world’s largest rodent. Our camp was basic along the river and completely full of mosquitoes. I have never seen as many mosquitoes in my life, and it was the dry season. Apparently during the wet season there are so many mosquitoes that the screen doors and windows of the cabins are black. So after 4 days of cruising up and down the river in our small boat, and wading through waist high water in the swamp searching for anacondas it was back to the town of Rurrenabaque for a shower, good meal, and a nights sleep before headed off for the jungle part of the tour in Parque Madidi. The Madidi part of the tour was amazing and while we didn’t see many animals, seeing trees that were over 1500 years old, and watching different types of macaws fly by was awesome. The sad part about all of this is that the local people are constantly being under pressure to sell the trees and immigrants from other parts of the country are constantly encroaching on the fringes of the park and subsequently engage in slash and burn agriculture. Unfortunately the future of Parque Madidi is anything but secure and one can only hope that the positive impact of tourism and outside dollars can preserve one of the last unspoiled areas of South American forest. So after Madidi it was back to Rurre and then back to Santa Cruz before going in the completely opposite direction to Argentina for a few days. I had a few days vacation left and a free place to stay in Salta, which is about 17 hours bus ride from Santa Cruz, so off I was again. Salta was nice and once again the contrasts between Bolivia and the rest of the world were apparent in all sorts of ways. Taxi’s with meters, police officers doing something other than looking for bribes or getting drunk, dogs on leashes and all sorts of things like that highlight the fact that Bolivia still has a long way to go. So after taking advantage of the great restaurants and wine in Argentina it was back to Santa Cruz before headed to my close of service conference for a week in Cochabamba. So here I am back in San Xavier and things are going great! We just finished our second workshop that we organized that had all of the tour guides from the entire Jesuit Mission Circuit involved. I think the guides are starting to realize the potential for tourism and the basic fact that if they fail to organize themselves as a solid network they will not be able to capitalize on the tourists that come to the different towns. In July we had over 1200 tourists come by to tour the Mission. To end this entry I want to relay something I heard yesterday. So during conversation yesterday someone brings up a recent scandal that happened in town. Apparently during the last major soccer match between the two main teams in San Xavier a fight broke out. Someone decided to call the Police station who dispatched two of their officers to come and “investigate”. Well it turns out the police were not exactly the best people to call because they were both hammered upon arrival to the field. It also turns out that the officer who was driving was so drunk that he crashed the police truck into a car that was parked watching the game. It turns out the car was owned by the mayor’s office and had been driven there personally by the mayor. Needless to say it was not a good career move for either officer who were subsequently shipped off back to wherever he came from.
Sunday,May 13 2007, 07:25:49 PMMay 2007
Wednesday, May 09, 2007 9:42 AM San Xavier
Yesterday the first Sur of the year came in so it is really cold. It was raining, cloudy, and about 40 degrees, which may not seem that cold but for people used to temperatures in the 90’s most of the year 40 is really cold. I got back last week from going out near the Brazilian border to help Donovan teach some video editing techniques in his site. Donovan lives in Roboré, which is on the train line that runs to the Brazilian border. The only way to get out that direction is to ride 9 hours in what lonely planet calls the “death train” or you can drive in a private vehicle which takes even longer. Currently this is the only way for Brazilian goods to be imported and for Bolivian goods to be exported to this side of the country. Luckily though, the European Union is funding a new Concrete highway that will one day run from Corumba at the Brazilian border, all the way to Santa Cruz. I think the train actually averages about 35 miles an hour because of the bad conditions of the tracks. So after we finished our work out in Robore I decided that I was going to try and visit Ashley and Jenny in nearby San Jose de Chiquitos because it was their town festival on the 1st and I might as well take advantage of being somewhere close. I figured I would try my luck hitchhiking from Robore to San Jose as the highway has recently been completed between the two towns. Because the highway is completed the 5 hour train ride between the two towns has been cut down to a 2 hour drive. The other problem with the train is that it only leaves at 10pm and gets in to San Jose at 3 in the morning. So I marched with Donovan out to the highway and waited, waited, and waited. Eventually I gave up trying to catch a ride after 3 hours of waiting. I guess the death train was going to be the option of the day. So come 10PM I got back on the death train for the 5 hour ride to San Jose. In San Jose I got to see Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, again. He was in San Jose to commemorate the opening of a hospital that the Cuban government has supplied with most of the equipment and several of the doctors. Check out the photos to see the Cuban flag flying at the same level as the Bolivian flag. So things other than that are going great, I am coaching the 17 and under boys basketball team amongst other things that I am involved with in San Xavier. Geoff
Sunday,Apr 22 2007, 12:12:44 PMDengue Fever, Cooking, and Basketball
Monday, April 09, 2007 San Xavier
Well I turned 25 the other day. I guess it almost makes a week now and though I don’t feel any older I can’t wait to get back home to reap the rewards of lower car insurance rates. I had a great time for my 25th birthday but let’s just say that Bolivia didn’t choose to repay me in kind.
On Friday the 30th we had a big bbq in Santa Cruz and made real hamburgers which I had been craving for a few months. Here if you get a hamburger it consists of probably about 20 grams of meat that is pounded to the thickness of a fingernail. We did them right, New York strip steak ground into hamburger meat. The burgers turned out great and we proceeded from the bbq to the hottest club in Santa Cruz where I had some tables reserved for us there, being a VIP at the club and all ha ha ha. So we stayed there until about 5 in the morning and used the next day to recover. I started feeling really bad late Saturday night and attributed this to celebrating my 25th birthday with a little bit too much fun. Sunday I felt worse but still made it back here to San Xavier despite everything. At this point I was thinking there was some limit that happens once you get older that your body reaches and says no more. I had a presentation planned with all the feria productiva members and with Andrew, a agri-business volunteer and a fellow Texan. On Tuesday we talked about the process of selling their products to supermarkets and all of the different stages that the process would entail. We finished about noon and I still felt horrible with a headache and everything. Wed morning I woke up and had a huge rash on both arms and decided that I should probably call the PC office and maybe go see a doctor in Santa Cruz which I did that evening.
Bolivia, not wanting to miss out on my birthday, decided that it would like to give me a little present in the form of the mosquito born Dengue Fever. Now Dengue is a disease also known as break-bone fever and essentially is a 10 day fever where you feel like hell and the platelets in your body explode and make you look like you have a rash. If you want to read about dengue you can Dengue. So anyways I win the award for best birthday present ever.
So that is pretty much all that is going on here right now. More updates to come.
Geoff
Monday, April 16, 2007 9:11 PM San Xavier
Today has been a pretty eventful day here in San Xavier. This morning we recorded the voiceovers for the first commercial that we are doing. I was working with Marco – my friend who does the local television reporting and Neko the camerman. Marco went to high school in L.A. for two years back in the day so he knows all about the states. The commercial is the first part of an anti-littering campaign that Marco, Neko, the mayors office, and myself are doing to be put on the local airwaves here. The idea is that San Xavier is a town that generates quite a bit of income from tourism and should strive to take pride in its town. In most of Bolivia the accepted method of disposing of plastic bags, coke bottles, candy wrappers, chip bags, etc . . . is to just through it down on the ground. As one can imagine, this can lead to some pretty nasty trash piles in a town of 8,000 people like San Xavier. My hope is that by using local actors for the radio and television spots, as well as designing locally relevant posters and so forth, we can educate the people in town that throwing trash on the ground is unacceptable. Especially when there are public trash cans available.
The other thing that happened today was my first practice as head coach of the San Xavier, all city basketball team. We surprisingly have a few players with some ability, even though most of them have never seen a full basketball game in their lives. Part of Peace Corps goals is to share American culture with host country nationals. Tonight I accomplished that by sharing the American tradition of running gasers or suicide sprints. For those who have never had the pleasure of running a suicide it is where you begin at the baseline of the basketball court, sprint to the free throw line, back to the baseline, to halfcourt, back to the baseline, to the far free throw line, baseline and finally baseline to baseline. At first I think the kids thought I was a little crazy when I showed them what they would be doing. I think they liked it even less when I told them the last 2 to cross the baseline would have to run again. About the 5th set of gasers I think I had almost killed all of the kids. You would swear they were not all 15-18 year olds but rather out of shape thirty year olds. The players ran more tonight then they ever do in soccer training. It should be interesting to see where this whole basketball team goes. We have our first game June 1st so we have some time to prepare and I hope the kids get a lot of it. More than anything I think the lessons that serious sports training can teach them are lessons that everyone, and especially Bolivians teenagers, who live surrounded by a cultural attitude of “poor me” can learn from.
Geoff
Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:40 AM San Xavier
So today in San Julian, a town about 30 miles from here Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator, I mean President, is going to make an appearance and give away a few thousand dollars to locals. I thought about going, just out of curiosity, to hear Mr. Chavez and his anti-imperialist rants that he goes on. I am sure everyone heard his comments at the U.N. when he said “the devil was here yesterday” referring to Bush. I am sure some of you might agree with him. Under a normal administration such remarks would probably go unnoticed or even discarded as crazy by most people in most countries of the world. Unfortunately under our current administration our standing and reputation has been damaged to the point where the kind of communist drivel that Chavez endorses is being listened to and accepted by more and more people.
After thinking about it for a few minutes I decided that going to San Julian would be a bad idea. In San Julian most of the people are highlanders who have immigrated down to the lowlands and also tend to be anti-gringo aka “imperialist” and subscribe to Chavez’s type of thought. After talking with Marco we just decided that it wouldn’t be good for Chavez to be up there talking about the damn gringo imperialists and our evil ways only for some highlanders to point out, “there goes one of the devils now” and for me to get killed by a mob of angry San Julianos.
In other news over the past few days I have been teaching one of the local internet café owners how to reformat here 4 computers. She had no anti-virus running and several of the machines, ok all of them, were infected to the point of no repair. Our winning computer had something like 1235 viruses on it. I was there all day but I hope the internet café owner learned a little bit and will continue to generate some income. More than anything she saved about 100 dollars that a tecnico would have charged her. Tonight is our second basketball practice so we will see how many repeat players show up tonight.
Geoff
Saturday, April 21, 2007 10:19 AM San Xavier
Last night I held my first cooking class for some of the ladies here in town with the goal being to show they how to cook something a little bit different. Hopefully the things I teach them how to cook will contain quite a few vegetables as most people don’t really know how to use vegetables. So on the menu last night was sezuan beef with carrots, green beans, and peppers and for dessert I taught them how to make banana bread. They loved both plates and especially the banana bread. They used to have so many bananas go bad and before I showed them the banana goodness that is banana bread, they didn’t really have any good uses for the bad bananas. It was so funny hearing the ladies leave my house saying, oh yeah I am going to make this for my kids tomorrow but with chicken breast. Or wow this would be good with peas. So check out the photos of us cooking last night. It was truly a good time. PHOTOS
Geoff
Monday,Feb 26 2007, 03:16:17 PMSalar de Uyuni
Sunday, February 25, 2007 7:45 PM San Xavier
Well here I sit in the bus on the way to Santa Cruz to go and get my money for the month. What an interesting few weeks packed with carnival, getting stuck in the desert, a visit to the former richest city in the world, and a fun few days in San Xavier. It all started on the 15th of February when I went in to Santa Cruz to buy a few things and meet up with my traveling companions for the Carnival this year. We were going to the Salar de Uyuni, which is the worlds largest salt flat and one of the must see’s for anyone coming to Bolivia. First I had to get there which proved to be a little bit more difficult than I thought it was going to be.
This rainy season has been particularly brutal here in Bolivia. It has been raining non stop and several of the roads have been flooded out due to mud slides that have occurred over the past month. Let’s just say that wet roads are a pretty big deal in Bolivia where only 2% of the roads are paved. Dirt roads plus 20 inches of rain in a week doesn’t really make for that good of a time. So the Salar de Uyuni is next to Chile and the Atacama dessert which is pretty much on the other side of the country from where I live. Our plan was to ride a night bus to Sucre from Santa Cruz, normally 12 hours, and then continue on from there. The road turned out to be washed out to Sucre and even if they were leaving it was taking 30 hours so I had to buy a plane ticket. At this point I should have read the writing on the wall and realized that our trip was doomed from the start!
So we all arrived in Sucre which is a beautiful historical colonial city at a little under 10.000 feet. Everything was great in Sucre and when I met up with my traveling companions, 6 girls, we took a 2 hour taxi to Potosí. I guess mistake number two was going to one of the most deserted places on the planet with 6 girls! Now Potosí is an interesting city that most people have never heard of. During Bolivia’s colonial days the Spanish discovered a mountain high up in the altiplano that had large amounts of silver in it. It turned out to be the richest silver vein that has ever been discovered and the story goes that the Spanish could have built a bridge all the way to Spain with the amount of silver that the they took out of the mountain over 4 centuries. So over 400 years the Spanish Kings and Queens took all of the silver out of the mountain and financed the their luxurious lifestyles and palaces in a large part due to the silver dug by the indigenous peasants that were forced to work in abysmal conditions in Potosí. At one time in history Potosí had more people living in it than lived in London and it was also the richest city in the world. It is currently the highest city in the world at 4100 meters which is about 14000 feet. The history books say that the gutters of the rich mine owners were made of pure silver, and that the street between the mayor’s office and the church was paved with silver bricks. Fast forward 400 years and Potosi is still the highest city in the world which makes it extremely hard to breath. Potosi is also one of the poorest cities in Bolivia as the mountain has been virtually stripped of all the precious metals. There are still several mines where local people work together in cooperatives in order to make about 2 dollars a day extracting tin ore and some silver. The conditions are abysmal and haven’t improved much in the last 100 years.
The life expectancy is only 14 years after entering the mines and in fact the miners are eligible for pensions once their lung capacity has diminished by 50 percent.
So of course once we got to Potosí we tried to get transport to Uyuni, which is the jumping off point for the Salar, only to find that all of the buses were booked and we would have to wait until the next day to travel the 8 hours on the school bus to Uyuni. Now Uyuni is a pretty interesting town. As we were pulling in to Uyuni my only thoughts were, this is where George Lucas got the inspiration for Tattooine, the desert town where Luke Skywalker grew up. I mean here is this town where there is almost no vegetation and nothing anywhere nearby except for the salt flat. I swore that I was going to roll in to town and find Jawas running around. All we found were a bunch of foreign tourists, a lot of Llamas and perhaps the best pizza in Bolivia. It turns out that there is an American that has established a pizza restaurant in Uyuni that is truly top notch.
We finally booked our tour, 75$s each, and prepared to leave at 10:30 in the morning. It turns out that the land cruiser, in typical Bolivian fashion rolled leisurely up an hour late. We didn’t even make it to the Salar before we popped our first tire. Sign number three. The first day went relatively well other than that and the salt flat is truly one of the most interesting, strange, and surreal places I think that anyone could ever visit. We stayed the night in a hotel where the beds, floors, and walls were made completely out of salt.
The next day was when our troubles really started. We left our hotel, and unbeknownst to me the last bit of civilization we would see for a while. Everything seemed to be going well. We made it about 20 minutes before our muffler fell off. Well it didn’t fall off completely. It was still attached to the frame by one bolt. After the driver realized he didn’t have the right size wrench to take it off he came up with a great solution. It turns out that we would, “just drive until it fell off and then pick it up so you guys make sure to keep your eyes out” Obviously I objected to this on the grounds that driving with no extra tire with a sharp piece of metal dragging behind us couldn’t be that good. After convincing the driver of the folly of his logic I used gringo force and Natasha’s leathermen tool to finally get the muffler off of the car. This made for some noxious fumes for the other 2 days of the tour.
So we continued on until we arrived in a secondary salt flat that is about 60 miles long. We were at least 4 miles from anything other than salty dirt when our rear tire popped. It turns out that this was our last spare as the first tire we popped was never repaired. So here we were in the middle of the dessert with no spare tire. Luckily the driver had a spare inner tube, yes they do that in Bolivia, which come to find out was like all of our inner tubes – patched at least 20 times each. We started to jack the back wheel up and I was thinking to myself, damn this 2 foot jack is not big enough for our car. Here we were in the middle of the dessert with a jack designed for a Honda civic using it on our SUV. Turns out I was right as the car fell off the jack and the rotor was sitting dug in to the sand. After we patched the tube, replaced it, and inflated the tire again . . . with a freaking bicycle pump . . . we started to work on getting the rear wheel out of the sand. Our driver’s solution for this - use the highly pressurized propane tank we have for cooking to support the entire weight of the land cruiser while we jack the SUV up little by little. Hmm, 2 tons resting on a propane tank . . . only in Bolivia. After three hours of slowly working the civic jack in to position we finally got the tire on.
So we climbed back in to the SUV to find that it wouldn’t start. Now we are at almost 3 hours lost and it turns out that the distributor cable was “fregado” or broken. How do we fix it, with precision engineering, he decided to fix our distributor cable with speaker wire. Yes a carbon cable with speaker wire! It really didn’t work out to well and we limped along the rest of the trip at a great 20 miles an hour. I was really pissed off as the vicuñas, a wild relative of the llama, were running faster than us at one point. We finally rolled in to the next stop at about 10 pm and the driver promised to fix the car for the next day. I guess there was a large supply of speaker wire at the hotel or something.
The next day didn’t get any better and the trip pretty much proceeded in the same fashion until our vehicle struggled back in to Uyuni 2 days, five more flat tires, and more motor trouble later.
The Salar was impressive and lakes at 5,200 meters, about 18,000 feet were very impressive. If anyone wants to know that some form of life can exist anywhere on this planet, I can think of no better place to witness this than the abysmal dessert of the altiplano, the photos tell the story.
When we finally got to Uyuni I demanded to see the manager of the company we went with so we could get our money back. I was told that this was impossible until tomorrow as it was fat Tuesday or the last day of carnival. I decided, in all of my fury to take a little deposit or guarantee so that I was sure the owner would show up the next morning. I got on top of the land cruiser and stole the propane gas tank and told them they would get it back when the owner talked to us. So here I was, steaming, walking through the cold streets of Uyuni carrying a confiscated gas tank. We finally did get 200 of our 500 dollars back. The Salar is one place I will never ever visit again in my life despite its strange beauty.
Geoff
Monday,Feb 12 2007, 01:06:46 PMWelcome Dinner, off to the Salar
Saturday, February 10, 2007 10:26 PM San Xavier Well here I am after a great night. The feria productive, which translates roughly as the producers fair, held a welcoming dinner here for me in San Xavier. They are the group that solicited my help. They seem really with it. I mean they brought up setting the date for their next meeting, the 26th of this month which is utterly incredible in Bolivia. I mean that is like 16 days away. I was shocked. I mean here I was eating a great dinner that they organized and put together, and there they were planning for the future. Who would have thought this could happen here in Bolivia. Maybe I am just running on a high, or perhaps I am in shock after living with the realities that were San Antonio for over a year. I suppose I also feel a little bit guilty right now because I feel like I am just living to nicely. I guess over the last year I got used to the fact of the way I was living and even more frustrating, how work was going. Or for that matter not going! Either way I am in a much better place now and am ready to kick ass and take names and for now at least, it seems that the group is going to be there right along side me. So besides working with the guides, and the rest of the artisan makers there seem to be a plethora of opportunities. I think I will try and do at least one business simulation during the first three month with a small group of high school kids and I might teach a 10 course small business course at the soon to be opened alternative technical high school. This school is where they teach kids to be mechanics, electricians, vets, etc . . . After talking with the director he said that there was a big lack in learning on how to actually run your business and he needs someone to teach a few classes on the basics. So that might be another option. That is it for today, still rainy and muggy around here. If it clears up tomorrow I am off to the pool in Concepción! Geoff
Monday, February 12, 2007 9:20 AM San Xavier So I went to the pool over in Concepción yesterday and it was a pretty good time. I had to pick up a sleeping bag from the volunteer there because I am going to the Salar de Uyuni, a huge salt flat at one of the most remote places of the earth on Friday. Because this salt flat is located above 10000 feet it gets pretty cold at night. Well that is it for now I hope everyone has a good mardi gras, carnival, and for those of you who are in Chicago, Wisconsin, Michigan etc. . . every time it takes you 5 minutes to get ready to brace the cold outside just think of me sitting by the pool sipping a fresh squeezed passion fruit juice. Geoff