Monday,Mar 13 2006, 02:09:10 PMCarnival round up and ride back to San Antonio

Saturday, March 04, 2006                              11:06 AM        San Antonio

I am back in San Antonio after a wonderful Carnival LINK TO CARNIVAL PHOTOS. http://www.zorpia.com/cgi/album.cgi?421691

I spent carnival in Valle Grande, a town about 6 hours west of Santa Cruz that is in a big valley, duh, surrounded by nice mountains. Needless to say the change in temperature was appreciated from the balmy heat that is every day in San Antonio.

           

            Carnival in Bolivia is really cool. Here the big deal is water balloons. If you have ever seen the pictures of the tomato festival in Spain, where people just pelt each other with tomato’s for 3 days, then imagine that kind of atmosphere except with water balloons, spray foam, and buckets of water. It was absolutely awesome and I think I threw over 300 water balloons.

            We stayed at Jonathan’s house in Valle Grande as he has a 5 bedroom place and I would like to give him props for putting us up for 4 days, even if he didn’t move the dead kitten in the yard for the entire time we were there. For my readers abroad Jonathan and Joy, there are two volunteers in Valle Grande, live a very different lifestyle then myself and the stereotypical PC volunteer. Joy lives in the penthouse apartment with a terrace on the roof above here house. She has electricity, a phone in her house, running water, hot shower, flush toilet, etc . . . (Not that I am jealous or anything) Joy’s top floor terrace was an awesome place to attack with water balloons from above and we definitely took advantage of it.

            Our shirts were luminous green which did not help as hitting a gringo with a bright green shirt in Carnival is pretty much the best target to go for if you are from Valle Grande. Needless to say we got hit our fair share. We made up for this however with our superior throwing ability. It turns out that all those sports we play in the States where we use are hands, football, baseball, basketball . . . really helps out when you are trying to peg a moving target at 30 yards. Thus although we may have been outnumbered I figure for every one of our water balloons we were about 3 times as likely to hit one of them as they were to hit one of us.

            So carnival was basically a success, I definitely plan on going back to Valle Grande, especially if I do not go to brazil or somewhere like that for carnival next year.

            I was lucky enough that the third year volunteer, Darren, was going to a town near mine in the land cruiser so I definitely took advantage of the air conditioned, fast, comfortable ride to get back near San Antonio. On the way we had a pretty cool occurrence. We were driving and we passed what looked like roadkill. We thought it might have been a monkey so we decided to stop and check it out. It turns out that it was not road kill, not dead, and not a monkey. What we saw was a 3 toed sloth that had somehow made it to the middle of the road. Now this animal moves slow, I mean it isn’t called a sloth for nothing. It is a miracle that it made it as far as it did without someone hitting it. So Darren picks up the sloth, see photos, http://www.zorpia.com/cgi/album.cgi?421705

 and we move it to the other side of the road where it hopefully made it back to the safety of the forest canopy.

            Later on in the ride we were fortunate to see some amazing rainbows, LINK http://www.zorpia.com/cgi/photo.cgi?9621569.591105

 of which I also took pictures. I think the last time that I saw rainbows as full and beautiful was when I went on vacation in Kauai with my parents.

            Finally we get to the last of the week’s happenings before going back to San Antonio. It turns out that I spent the night in Concepcion, a beautiful mission town of 14000 people that attracts a lot of tourists due to its history as a major Jesuit mission, and that the largest Baroque music festival in the world is now centered there. There is a Volunteer there working with the school’s there Payne and he took us out to the 2 karaoke bars in Concepcíon which happen to be the best I have been to in Bolivia. Somehow since I have been here I have developed a fondness for singing Karaoke as the people love nothing more than to hear a gringo sing Hotel California. I have sung that song at least 10 times since being in Bolivia. To my surprise however the song selection in English was really really large. I sang amongst other song\, George Strait – I cross my heart. Garth Brooks – the thunder rolls and Huey Lewis and the News – the power of love.

            Now who of you could imagine that in a small 14,000 person town essentially planted in the middle of jungle, where three toed sloths are encountered on the drive, that a bar would have George Strait of all people, on Karaoke. That was defiantly my absurd Bolivia moment of Zen for this month.

Geoff