collected notes: Bolivia

1. in new cities it is funny how you don´t see people you know, of course, but their mutations, adaptations, alternate lives. celebrities, acquantainces, close friends, all reincarnated.

2. in latin america in general you can find anything for your domestic life on the street. in some cases it is a form of begging (clothes hooks, individual band-aids for sale), but usually it is just someone´s business, on a table, on the street. you also find that shops exist in clusters , selling exactly the same thing. the interior of the shops will even be identical. it´s like they´re modelled on a bus station rather than a village. oh look, i´ve come to the sandpaper district!

3. Marce was 'accidentally' splashed with a bottle of water and I was finally called a 'gringo' (by a small shoe-shine boy).

4. in La Paz, maybe shoe-shiners wear full sleeves and balaclavas, despite the heat. apparently, so we found out, this is to conceal their identity.

5. mountains cut off like a sponge cake by a ceiling of white icing.

6. a landslide occurs 25kms out of Coroico. we stop and I go to the front of the queue of minivans. various men start clearing away the boulders by hand. I pick up one big stone and move it to the side of the road, dust off my hands and give everyone a satisfied smile.

7. Coroico. it rains very hard here in the Yungas (essentially the beginning of the Amazon basin). on our first night here at El Cafetal we witnessed what I took to be some very hard rain and some very loud thunder. the following day our hostal's crepe-making owner - Augustine (big french nose, jandals, short shorts) - told us that was 'nothing'. the rain, he said, gets so hard sometimes 'you really shit' (my translation). apparently what happens is that the really hard rain falling on the corrugated iron roofs (the roof of choice around here, apart from thatching) creates an electrical charge that can then be dispersed through your houses circuit board, destroying your appliances and making your fridge spontaneously combust. when it starts raingin around here (and it can rain for 5 days straight), people unplug their fridges... if they have one.

8. there are birds here that sound like cats crying.

9. a beautiful pink and black butterfly got its 'mack on' with my forearm. Marce captured it on camera.

10. the 'World´s Most Dangerous Road' (La Paz to Coroico) did not feel very dangerous, even with a minivan full of 16 Bolivians (18 of us in total). in comparison to Ruta 11 in Chile, it´s not even nail-nibbling. the corners have large margins and fences and very few verge on sheer drops of more than 300m. this is not to say the figures of deaths on this one road are remiss (100 a year) but that it is not the most dangerous - to my mind - in terms of the leave your lane = die for sure equation.

11. in Villa Fatima, La Paz you get the chance to see the backs of a lot of economico buses (same price as a minivan, but a little more room) which are usually adorned with an airbrushed image. prime choices include:
Mufasa in the clouds
Speedy Gonzales
Goku going Super Sayan
a detailed depiction of the Twin Towers memorial in New York City flanked by busts on Osama Bin Laden and Jesus H. Christ

12. many camioneros on Ruta 11 drive with a female companion. she is routinely a white blonde woman in a red dress that reveals ample mamories. each time it takes a moment to realise she is a seat cover.

13. i bought a charm of the Virgin of Copacabana and attached her to my swiss army knife. now i cut with the miraculous.