Hello
Things from Boliva are going well. Hard to believe that I have a little less than 2 weeks left of the trip. I had no idea that 6 months could feel like it could pass so quickly. People often ask me if I am ready to go home and I am and I’m not. I have found that I’m ready to come home because I know that my flight leaves in 2 weeks. If my flight wasn’t for another 3 months then I would have no problem travelling around for that long. At the same time I am definitely ready to wear some different clothes, have a home again, drink water at a restaurant, see friends and family and meet my neices for the first time.
Now back to the recent past. I ended up spending a day in La Paz just sort of hanging out in town waiting for my flight to the jungle. La Paz is a real pretty city that is set in a valley at about 11,500 feet. It is kind of cool since the airport is on the altiplano above the city set at 13,000 feet and has some 19,000 feet peaks around. So you snake around this valley to drop down into the city and it just spreads out before you...very pretty. The city is just jam packed with people selling stuff everywhere on the streets...what ever you need you can pretty much guarantee that you will find someone selling on the sidewalk somewhere in town. Toothpaste...check, spiderman customes...check, food...no problem, stickers...got them also, pirated CDs...yup, dead llama fetus (supposed to be buried under your foundation for good luck)...no problem finding those either. Just interesting to walk around and sidewalk shop. Of course it makes walking on the sidewalks difficult since all the stuff is spread out everywhere and that means you are risking your life with all the cars zooming around on the too narrow streets. All good fun though...even tried some local popcorn which is just huge and really just tasted like corn pops. Other than that my day in La Paz was pretty uneventful except I did get to see another protest...they really like to protest here as there is a protest almost every day...at least these days they are pretty calm...in the recent past couple of years protests would shut down the roads for days at a time.
I have had a couple of this would never happen in America airline experiences the past week:
1. In Sucre after we had checked our bags I realized that I left my pocket knife in my carry on bag. After some haggling and wise ass comments by airport personnel (which admittly were deserved...an airline employee waved me behind the ticket counter and onto the tarmac (Sucre only has 2 gates) where a luggage cart was standing full of bags. I find my bag on the bottom of the cart with the zipper facing the wrong direction so I come up with another option...put it in Monica’s (one of the people I have been travelling with) pack which is one top of the pile...turns out that she has locked her zippers shut. Back to my bag which with the help of the guy we pull out from the bottom of the pile and I put my knife way, throw the bag back on top of the cart, and then I walk back into the airport. God only knows what I could have put in any bag if I had so choosen. As it turned out there were no xray machines at the airport and I think that I walked into the gate before the security personnel even started checking bags.
2. My flight to Rurrenabaque (the jungle town) was delayed by almost 8 hours because we had to wait for the runway in Rurrenabaque to dry out. Sounds strange until you find out that I was flying in a 12 passenger Cessna that had to land on a grass runway. Yup that is right a small plane landing on a grass runway. About an hour before we finally left I was talking to the pilot (he was hanging out at the ticket counter with the rest of us) and we found out that because La Paz was a high altitude airport and because the air tempature was too high that they weren’t going to be able to take all the passengers and their luggage..too much weight. Either 12 passengers and no luggage or 10 passengers and all the luggage. Why didn’t they tell us that earlier as my friends flight (they were on one later in the day had been cancelled) and I would have just flown the next day with them. Anyways the passengers haggled and we got half the bags on the 1st flight and half on the 2nd flight.
3. The flight gets cleared to leave and we walk onto the plane (via the tarmac again even though La Paz International is a little bigger but still only has 9 gates) and I board the plane. Make sure to leave your carryon bags at the back door and take your seat. It is then that I realize that their is nothing separating me from the pilots. Even got pics of the pilots mid flight working their pilot magic. So we all got to watch everything that they did and get a little freaked out every time some random buzzer went off. Paul and Ranjeewa you would have loved it.
4. No xray or security personnel at the airport in Rurrenabaque...so much for security there.
5. On the flight yesterday back to La Paz was once again delayed because of rain. It wasn’t able to leave from the airport that it was connecting from. One plane was able to take off with puddles splashing everywhere before ours even landed. After it stopped raining and the horses (cheap lawnmowers I guess) were shooed off the runway by a guy on a motorcycle and his dog, our plane landed and we were able to take off.
With all that said the flights were great. We fly low right over the mountains surrounding La Paz and coasted over them all the way down to Rurrenabaque which is almost at sea level. Along the way we had great views of the surrounding mountains and numerous chocolate brown rivers snaking their way to finally join the Amazon River a lot further north in Brazil. I think that you can get on a boat around La Paz and sail all the way to the Atlantic via the Amazon River.
The jungle and pampas tours that I took were great but to be honest I’m tired and need to get some sleep as I have to get up early tomorrow. I will write about the trip and my time in La Paz in the next day or two. Once again slow speeds are preventing me uploading any pics except for the one of the turtle but I think that there are some new pics in my last entry.
Love
Scott
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