An expensive overnight bus ride and an overpriced taxi brought Juanita
and I to the Bolivian border. After waiting an hour and a half for the border
to open at 8am, we exited Brazil and walked to Bolivia. The man looked at
Juanita’s pretty New Zealandish passport and smiled and handed it back to her and then he looked at
mine, tutted a bit, and then brought me a slip in Spanish which told me the
things I needed: A yellow fever vaccination, an exit ticket out of the country
and a bunch of money I had to give to them.
Trying to hold back my rage at the unfairness of it all (I knew Bolivia was a tad visa unfree for me but the internet told me I had to give them a bunch of money and then it was smooth sailing. Money I had (although always ill-parted
with) but the other two were harder to find. We took the expensive taxi back
into Brazil and the vaccination place and were told vaccinations were only at 1pm. So after some internetting
and food, with nothing better to do we waited at the vaccination place for 3
hours until it opened. Luckily this got me number 1 in the queue of about 100
people (SCORE!). The vaccine lady shouted a bit at people in Portuguese and
then made me fill out a form, jabbed my arm, didn’t give me any kind of sweet
for my pains, didn’t ask me to pay anything and the whole process took about a
minute and a half! YAY. Luckily my bus ticket I found online to get me out of
Bolivia was accepted and Juanita and I were soon waiting for the Death Train
which was to take us 15 hours to Santa Cruz.
It arrived happily on time and soon we realized that it was aptly
named as it rocked on the tracks, side to side all night, and at times I was
sure at some point it would just tip over. Apparently it was named the Death Train as it
used to carry yellow fever victims, though Juanita was sure it was because of
stowaways who couldn’t hold on to the top of the train and would tip off
because of all the mad rocking.
Death train or no, we arrived in Santa Cruz tired but
not dead and made our way to our Couchsurfing hosts house. He was no English
speaker and somehow I had organized everything online in Spanish and after some
serious phone confusion we found his street but not his house. His house number
was 256 and we found 254 and 258 but 256 was missing from the earth. A run back
into the town and a phone call later we found out that in South America,
numbers are not logical and if you cannot find it in its order, it will be
later down the street. Of course. We entered his house to find a family, our
host Ronnie, his sister, his sister’s baby one year old twins, his mother with
a hole in her throat (presumably from throat cancer), his brother and his
friend from Spain. Luckily friend from Spain could speak English and we got
through the day with Juanita’s funny Portuguese and my failing Span-talian.
After a nap that took us to an Irish pub (why eat Bolivian food in Bolivia?) we met our couchsurfer we were going to stay with the following night and
ended up at a live Reggae show where we met some incredibly pushy Amazonian
Peruvians and our couchsurfing host bought us an unnecessary amount of wine.
Our new Couchsurfing host was a very short and beautiful
girl named Liz with long dark hair and a gorgeous face and for some reason
Ronnie (who was a very big guy) decided to warn us against her and say we
shouldn’t stay with her because apparently she wasn’t really from Samaipata
(the place we were going) and he had some other problems with her which we
didn’t really understand. Luckily we are not ones to be deterred and we
supposed Ronnie’s real problem was that he didn’t like Liz’s hippie pants or
the fact that she would rather spend her night at a reggae concert with dirty
hippies than buy an expensive amount of beer in an Irish pub.
Anyway the next day we met up with Liz and her German friend
and headed forth into the wondrous mountains of Samaipata. The ground rose and
the beauty continued as we wound around cliff and huge mountain, passing
beautiful waterfalls and wondrous green trees. We arrived in Samaipata, went to
pick up some supplies and began a pretty long and tiring ascent up a crazy dirt
rode to her little house in the woods. We made supper and tried for some
conversation but it seemed like the hippies of Samaipata had got too far into
another dimension that it was hard to get many answers from them. When asked
what she does, Liz replied “I breathe” and Kai (the German hippie) was even worse. They seemed to think all our normal questions were irrelevant and after
trying to ask some “getting to know you” stuff Juanita and I fell into silence
and soon made our way to bed.
We woke up early the next morning and, wanting to go and do
things and ask each other questions which would be answered we went for a walk to the village to
discover what to do in this pretty mountainous town. After some not very
friendly Spanish conversations we found someone who spoke English but could and
would only offer us tours for the amazing price of $120 minimum. No one seemed
to want to tell us what direction to walk in to simply go for a walk and we frustratedly ate breakfast and
then picked a road and walked up the mountain because no one could tell us what
we can or cannot do. Deciding that the next day we would rent motorbikes and go
for waterfall adventures we felt better and returned to the house where we met
up with Kai and Liz on the way who, when asked what they did for the day
replied “we played” which was very informative.
Later we found out they had gone for this wondrous waterfall
adventure about 30 minutes away and I was more than a bit jealous and rather
frustrated that they could have given us the tourist information that everyone
else seemed to want to withhold from us. Oh well, we passed the rest of the day
“playing” and after a nap well into the night I went downstairs to find OTHER
PEOPLE! Liz’s brother and friend from Santa Cruz (who seemed a lot more able to
answer questions) and an Austrian and later arrived a beautiful Colombian girl.
Everyone who came seemed to smoke a lot less and was able to hold conversations
and seemed to want to tell stories and such so we joked around and played Jenga
and the energy of everything turned on its head.
The next day we suggested a big group waterfalling and so
about 8 of us got together, took a taxi down the road to this park FULL of
waterfalls! We ran around and played all day, we showed them some poi and Capoeira tricks and played hackysack and gloried in the beauty of the day. We
arrived back and got a million pieces of food ready for her brother’s going
away party as he was going to Germany for an internship and millions of more
Bolivians showed up and played drinking games well into the night as we mad our
way to bed as we were tired and I was starting to feel a bit sick. I woke up a
few hours later to be moved into another bed and in the other room people were
smoking and there was so much smoke, combined with my sickness I thought I was
going to choke to death in my sleep. After freaking out a little I calmed
myself down enough to find some sleep and luckily I woke up, coughing, but
alive.
We left the next day, maybe we would have stayed, I am
unsure, yet we had only enough money which would get us back to Santa Cruz which
we needed as there were no ATMs in Samaipata. Or maybe we would not have
stayed. Samaipata was a very beautiful place where a lot of hippie travelers
roamed the streets, people who had got stuck and there and begun to make and
sell bracelets to get by. This has become a bit of a theme in certain places
along the tourist track, in Peru and Bolivia and I don’t really mind what these
people do if they weren’t so freaking high. Or not even that, I feel like if
these people have got so far as to save money and leave their countries they
could come up with something a touch more creative than selling bracelets
(always the same kind of bracelets) and hair wraps. Regardless, it was beautiful and in another world I would go back there and spend more time and find all those waterfalls and wonderful hikes and maybe buy a bracelet off a hippie or two. Maybe. Though probably not.
No comments:
Post a Comment