The Blaus - South America and Europe

22 de Abril - Leaving Bolivia

After spending 37 days in Bolivia, we had mixed feelings about leaving for Peru. It wasn´t the same sadness that we experienced when we left Argentina. I had tears in my eyes when the taxista bid us a safe journey at the bus terminal in Mendoza as we departed for Chile. Leaving Bolivia was different, especially since it took us about a month to identify and understand so many of the important subtleties of life in Bolivia. We were just starting to get into the groove of traveling in Bolivia, but we were also ready for a change.

We have both been fairly ill in Bolivia over the past month (either from altitude or stomach bugs), so we have hopes that our health might improve in a different country. A big part of the issue has been diet. We were warned by our guidebook not to eat salads or uncooked veggies in Bolivia, but it is hard to live on meat and starches alone for a month, so we broke that rule quite a bit. When it comes to starches, Bolivia has no shortage of these. It is good to see that most Bolivians don´t go hungry (especially in the poorest country in SA), but we noticed that many of the middle-aged Campesino women are overweight. They are round and beautiful, and I couldn´t imagine them to look physically different, but they must live on a diet of nothing but starches, which can´t be healthy. They grow a type of grain called Quinoa, which is an ingredient in most soups. They eat what seems like hundreds of types of potatoes prepared in a hundred ways, including dried potatoes, yucca, boiled potatoes, and fried potatoes. Rice and corn (or maize) are also staples here. At dinner a few nights ago, we ordered a chicken dish that came with sides of mashed potatoes, pasta and rice. It is common to get both french fries and rice with just about every meal. As a Canadian family told us in Rurre, their son (who loves french fries and is rarely allowed to eat them at home) said that he would be happy to never see another french fry again after spending a month in Bolivia. I can´t believe that I am writing this (as the junk food junkie I am), but I have to agree with the kid.

Another lesson learned about food in Bolivia is that Bolivians don´t do takeout...not even at the Chinese (Chifa) restaurants. We learned this the hard way in Sucre. We asked for our comida para llevar (to go) at a Chinese restaurant and they tried very hard to accommodate us. They put everything in plastic bags (including won ton soup), and carefully packed all the sauces into small tube-like plastic bags. We brought all of this food back to our hostel and discovered that we wouldn´t be able to eat any of it without plates, plastic utensils or napkins. In the end, we had to go back to the restaurant and explain that we had changed our minds and we would rather eat there instead. They took all the food out of the plastic bags and served it to us with very suspicious looks. Silly Americans. Conversely, in Copacabana when Billy was sick and didn´t want to stray too far from the bathroom in our habitacion, I asked for half of my lunch to go to take back to the hostel to my husband. They sent me packing with soup and rice on the ceramic plate and bowl it was served on. They gave me their silverware too, all of which I carried like a waiter on wheels down the street to our hostel. They trusted me to return all of these items, which I later did. The concept of para llevar hasn´t caught on in Bolivia yet, except in Chifa restaurants in La Paz.

The concept of time in Bolivia is something that we were finally beginning to understand after some interesting misunderstandings and mishaps. "Un rato" (or "un ratito") in Bolivia is one of these things that took us awhile to figure out, but is very essential in understanding how things work and it helps to prevent you from tearing your hair out from frustration at times. "Un ratito" is an unquantified amount of time, and you hear this expression spoken in just about every interaction. It is not equivalent to "wait a second" or "wait a moment" and I´m not sure if it has a literal translation in English. It basically means that you have to wait awhile, and the answer you seek is uncertain. This sums up the Bolivian concept of time, which is very foreign for North Americans like us who are obsessed with time because we generally have so little of it. After awhile we began to adjust to this idea of a nebulous amount of time spent waiting for something. You learn not to be bothered by setbacks like flat tires, cancelled flights, or laundry that is missing or isn´t ready when promised. There is also the expression "en punto" which means exactly on time...sort of like "on the dot" or "on the hour." We have often heard this said about the departure time of buses or planes (it is a great ticket sales technique), and it generally means that the bus or plane will leave when it is good and ready to leave, or when the ticket agents have successfully sold every seat. We are happy that we are not necessarily pressed for time here, because these delays are much easier to digest since we aren´t on a tight schedule. Sometimes this actually works in our favor. Like the time I accidentally left my pillow (almohada) in our hostel and realized my mistake just as we were boarding a bus to leave Cochabamba. The bus was scheduled to leave en punto, but in reality Billy (my hero) had 20 minutes to run back to the hostel and get the pillow. He arrived at the bus terminal just in time for departure.

Then there are the Bolivian showers. In over a month in Bolivia, we still hadn´t mastered the art of taking a perfectly hot shower. There are a few secrets that nobody tells you about the showers. First of all, there is no guarantee of the availability of hot water for a shower all the time. Water is a scarce resource in some parts of Bolivia. You have to check with the hostel for the shower hours. The showers are all electricly heated by a device that is attached to the shower head. You are never to touch the shower head or any part of the pipes in the shower, because if you happen to be standing on something metal, you will probably get the shock of your life. There are no hot and cold nozzles, there is just one nozzle, which you learn (with practice and a lot of trial and error) to control the temperature with. The more you turn the nozzle to the left (to let more water in), the colder the water gets. There is a very delicate balance, which you achieve by slowly and carefully turning the nozzle to the right (less water=more hot water). And just as you have the water temperature perfectly hot, someone in the hostel flushes the toilet and you are left standing in the cold with soap in your eyes. When the water eventually comes back on, you are scalded and you go through the process all over again. We learned to appreciate the consistency of cold showers in the jungle, where there is no fussing over hot water and you emerge from the shower feeling like a very clean icicle.

Aside from these mostly amusing inconveniences, sometimes Bolivia felt so comfortable that we forgot that we were away from home. In Sucre especially we would have a sudden realization that we were in Bolivia when we´d see Bolivia on a passing car´s license plate. Then there were the times that we were very aware that we were far from home, like when we went shopping at the witches market or when we happened upon the brown, smelly, polluted river that snakes through La Paz.

But as with everywhere you go in the world, the people are very much the same. The girl´s giggles sound the same, and you are sure that they are laughing about the same things that make little girls giggle everywhere. People are discontent with their government and they struggle to fight for better living conditions, political justness, better business practices, and human rights just like we do at home. People have similar dreams of prosperity and success, like the kid we met in Sucre who was tending bar. He was a student of tourism at the local university. He dreamed of buying a small airplane that he could use to fly around his beautiful country and travel from the jungle to La Paz in less than an hour. He´s the one who taught us that the Bolivian greeting is to kiss only once on the cheek (not twice like they do in Argentina). I must´ve turned bright red when I went in for the second kiss and he quickly schooled me in the art of the Bolivian greeting. Luckily he advised Billy that men just shake hands with eachother before Billy could practice his Argentine-learned manners on this unsuspecting Bolivian guy. People say "salud" when you sneeze, they say "buen provecho" before and after dinner (perfect strangers walk into restaurants and say the equivalent to bon appetit to everyone dining out of sheer politeness). Bolivians are extremely polite and very down to earth and often think of Argentines (especially those from Buenos Aires) as snooty. There are small and large disputes with bordering neighbors here as there are at home and everywhere else in the world.

We began to observe so many unique subtleties about Bolivian culture and communication. When you see someone making a hand signal the way we would say that something was "so so" or "just alright," with their hand extended, palm down, fingers together and moving from side to side, you know that means "no hay" or "there is none." We´ve seen this one a lot. We learned it from a taxi driver who gave that hand signal to every person trying to hitch a ride on our route. There is also the word falta, which is similar, but different. Falta means that something or someone is missing. We often hear the bus driver yell, "¿Quien falta?" after a pit stop on a long bus journey, just before the bus speeds away, and if we are lucky, we haven´t left anyone behind. Or, like when we first arrived in South America, and we weren´t as astute with numbers in Spanish, we would hand the largest note we had to the person at the cash register and hope for the best. If we had not given them enough dinero to cover the bill, we would hear them say, "Falta cinco pesos." Luckily, we quickly deciphered numbers, as they are essential to almost every interaction here. The way that Bolivians add "ito" or "ita" to the end of words is so endearing that you can´t help but adopt it. On Isla del Sol, we met a little girl who fell in love with Billy and soon learned that she could sweet talk him with the words "una mas" when she wanted him to pick her up over and over again and spin her around in the air. She taught us that even the smallest things are treated with reverance and given a name that reflects this. She had a tiny little plastic baby doll that she called her muñecita (her little doll). We even started to hear the slight accent in Bolivian Spanish, which was confirmed by a women we met from Barcelona. The Bolivians don´t roll their Rs most of the time, and the result is that the Rs sound like Zs. So, Rurrenbaque sounds like Zurzenbaque.

In Bolivia we even began to appreciate South American pop music, which we thought was hideous sounding 3 months ago. There is a song called DA ME MY GASOLINA (give me my gasoline) that we hear everywhere we go, and we have caught ourselves singing along with it. In La Paz we heard the song and asked a local if it was a song about Bolivian disapproval of President Mesa´s controversial deal to export natural gas in 2004. We learned that this song is actually Venezuelan and is more likely about the resentment of US attempts to destabilize Venezuela´s socialist government in order to gain control of their natural gas resources. Little did we know that we´ve been humming the tune of a very anti-American song all this time. Beyond that, there are cheezy love songs (that everyone here knows the words to) and Brazilian sounding dance songs that we hear on the very strange South American reality TV shows that are beginning to grow on us as well.

We have adopted many Spanish expressions that come in handy in all kinds of situations. A lot of them are the same things we say in English.
Igualmente - The same to you
Estas equivocado - You´re wrong
Ya veo - I see
Es una pena - It´s a shame
Nunca sabes - You never know
Muy rico - Yummy food
Por si acaso - Just in case
Nunca digas nunca - Never say never
Some expressions, however, are completely lost in translation from English to Spanish. "Speaking of the devil" is not an expression that is understood in South America. I made that mistake and will not make it again. It was impossible to explain what I meant by speaking of the devil, and I gave it my best shot, then began profusely apologizing for the comment. Billy thinks it is the equivalent of a very offensive insult based on the reaction of the Bolivian woman who was on the receiving end of it.

The day before we planned to leave Bolivia, we looked at the Bolivian stamps in our passports and realized that we had accidentally overstayed our visas by 7 days. YIKES. Upon entry, North Americans are supposed to get 90 day stamps to remain in the country, but we didn´t check our passports when we entered Bolivia in Uyuni, so we wrongly assumed that we had 90 days here. Apparently, this is some sort of scam that the immigration offices are notorious for pulling in order to make a little money off of unsuspecting tourists. In the end, we couldn´t sweet talk our way out of the situation and paid the Bolivian immigration officers $20 in order to exit the country. Not as bad as a story we heard from a Dutch couple who overstayed their visas in Nigeria and spent a night in jail, then had to pay hundreds of dollars after being intimidated by Nigerian immigration officers with very large guns.

The final factor that gave us pause about leaving Bolivia was the safety factor. We read in our guidebook that Peru is fairly dangerous (especically Cusco after dark, and we happened to be arriving in Cusco after dark). We had become so comfortable traveling in Bolivia without any incident that we were worried about tightening up the security to travel in Peru. It turns out that Cusco is Gringoland by day, and we are staying in the charming, artsy barrio of San Blas, which seems to be very safe.

Bolivia was not an easy place to travel, but the experience was well worth the hassles, and once we figured certain things out, we were able to go with the flow much more flexibly. Every country we visit after Bolivia will have big shoes to fill.

posted by The Blaus @ 6:53 PM