...although that should probably be “Paddington, I´ve a feeling we´re not in Brazil anymore” For those of you who don´t already know, I am being accompanied on my travels by a little Paddington bear. I loved the marmalade-sandwich eating bear when I was little, and as I´m living in Peru for a few months I thought I should take one back there to visit as he´s originally from darkest Peru. Also, he was actually called Pastuso before the Brown´s named him after the London train station they found him in - for those who didn´t grow up listening to tales of Paddington´s adventures in England and/or actually have jobs, and therefore no free time to sit reading childrens books when they should be doing something more responsible (a la moi).
If you hadn´t already guessed, I´m in Bolivia now – it´s beautiful, but it´s a BIG culture shock after Brazil. I´ll get on to telling you more about it later, once I´ve updated you on the last of my Brazilian travels, but I´m definitely looking forward to the next week or so!
So I last left you in Bonito, when I was about to go freshwater snorkeling – it was unbelievable; definitely lived up to the hype. We snorkeled in such clear, shallow water, and as we went at midday they sun was at it´s highest and the colours of everything – fish, water, plants – were brighter than I´ve ever seen. In total we covered a couple of miles, although there´s a gentle current in the first mile and a half where it´s shallow so it wasn´t hard work. I just couldn´t believe how close the fish came – because we weren´t swimming and creating any splashes they were coming within an arms length of us. There were so many as well – we probably saw 20 different types, a lot of them getting on for half a metre across and swimming in huge schools of 50 or so. Bearing in mind the water was only a few feet deep, so it felt like you were surrounded the whole time! We snorkeled through rock-lined rapids (a few near misses there), under fallen trees and in the main river for half a mile or so – when I was very thankful for my wetsuit as it dropped about 20 degrees in 2 seconds! There were also a couple of pools where we dove down to play with the underwater thermal springs (ças there´s so much sediment on top of them, so it looks like the sand is bubbling – very odd!) And best of all we hired an underwater camera, so I can show you all what it was like – you also get to see my highly attractive (ahem) wetsuit, so you´ll all get a good laugh too, lol
We went out in the night to see what was happening with the festival – stood in the street outside the concert hall with a few hundred people and listened to some well known Portugese love songs (apparently - it´s not exactly a genre I´m familiar with!) and walked around all the banners of fish and macaws (the two think Bonito prides itself on). Snorkeling had pretty much exhausted us though, so it was a relatively early night for once!
The next day we got a minibus to the Pantanal, which is the worlds largest area of wetlands – half the size of France! We got into an open truck and started the hour long drive to the farm we would be staying at, but we´d only been going about 15minutes when the sky suddenly turned black and we ended up in the worst torrential rain I´ve ever seen! It came out of nowhere, but within 5 minutes the road turned in to a mud bath, we all got drenched, cars were sliding all over the place – although as the name ´wetlands´would suggest, this was pretty standard for everyone there but us ´gringos´(people keep thinking we´re American so we´ve gotten stuck with this unfortunate tag, lol – there´s a lot of stories of how it came about, but as ´griego´ is Spoanish for Greek it most likely came from the Spanish wording of ít´s all Greek to me´, when the American´s first entered Central & South America during the gold rush and the native people hadn´t heard English before. Although the less complimentary version of the stories is that it was named from ´green´and ´go´, referring to the American´s making their money – which was green – and then pissing off once there was no more to be made!)
So we eventually made it, and were shown our sleeping arrangements – a dormitory of hammocks! Now I´m growing to love hammocks, as they seem to be everywhere we go and they´re the best things in the world for an afternoon doze in the sun – plus it´s like a swing for grown ups, which is very cool. We had dinner then sat out in the socializing area (again – more hammocks) listening to music, watching the very impressive thunder and sheet lightening and making caprinhas – our tour guide Max also introduced us to the culture in that area, which is to pour the first part of any drink opened into the ground, for Mother Earth (so she can get drunk too, according to him!). Then it was bed/hammock time, and we all crashed out – except that no-one warns you it drops to about 10 degrees at night and I woke up at about 2am freezing my arse off, had to basically get dressed and find a blanket in the pitch black, and then settle back down in to my hammock (which in total blackness when your hammock is hanging a metre off a concrete floor, is nothing short of an extreme sport).
The next day heralded a relatively early rise and then a couple hours of horse riding across the wetlands (incidently despite the storm the day before, it is actually dry season so the water wasn´t much more than a foot deep and that was only in places). My horse did not attempt to avoid the water wherever possible – like the other, sane, horses - but rather splashed through it with the enthusiasm of a small child in wellies on a rainy day. He also seemed to have an obsession with sniffing other horses backsides, eating at least every 30 seconds, and had a phobia of being at the back of the line – to the point that it nearly bolted and threw me off when another horse wouldn´t let it in front; he was great fun, lol. We saw a lot of wildlife – a toucan (my first one! very exciting), howler and capsin monkeys (where I wished I hadn´t asked whether howler monkeys were the ones that threw their own poo if they were disturbed, as the guide merrily assured me that they were – ignorance would have been bliss), deer, caiman, macaws, storks – it was great. Then we had lunch – which was identical to last nights dinner, and we would soon learn was the same as that nights dinner (Pantanal is not the place to go for variety of diet, as it´s in the middle of nowhere!) – and headed out Piranha fishing!
I loved the fishing, it was the most different thing I´ve done so far and I´m so glad we got a chance to do it. We had cane rods about 4-5m long, with about 5m of wire and a hook attached at the end – you put a little bit of scrap meat on (the piranhas especially like the fatty bits, so it works well), wade a few metres into the water and then cast your net – as soon as they nibble you yank the rod up pretty violently and if you´re lucky, there´s a piranha on the end of it! Although credit to the piranhas – they got a lot more pieces of scrap meat than we got piranhas, lol. The best bit was that because of all the fish swimming in near us (the fish are normally only 5 or 6m away when you catch them) the caiman – they´re these small alligator like things by the way – came right in to us, so whilst you were fishing their heads were poking out of the water only a couple of metres away. Luckily both piranhas and caiman are scared of humans, so we were fine, but we had a lot of fun playing with the caiman – they can´t see very well and hunt by sensing the motion of a fish, so out guide caught a pirnanha and tempted the caiman up to the river bank with it. We were nice to the caiman though – whenever we caught a fish that was too small we threw it back in, so they probably got a few good snack out of us as well!
I caught two in the end, and later on the kitchen cooked them for us – there´s not much meat on a piranha but what there is is actually very nice! By this point one of the other groups we keep bumping in to had arrived, and together we all had a huge bonfire and sat around that until late – the generator goes off at 11, so I was wandering around with my torch on my head (like a miner!) looking like an idiot but throroughly enjoying myself :) That night was even worse than the last through – it was a gorgeous sunny day without any cloud so it dropped an extra few degrees, and combined with the insect-repellent-immune mosquitoes (I have at least 50 bites on my feet right now, no joke) no-one slept much!
So the next day, sleepy and bedraggled (no hot water either, so no-one took very long showers despite being covered in mud!), we headed to the Bolivian border. There were a worrying 20minutes where our guide went to get his passport stamped – having told us he didn´t have a visa to work as a guide in Bolivia as they won´t issue them, so we had to go to passport control in separate groups so it wasn´t obvious we were with him - and didn´t come back for a while, but he said after a bribe of 12 reals (about 4 quid) there were suddenly no problems at all, lol.
Within a few hundred metres you could tell you were in a very different and definitely third world country. Children being made to beg on the streets by their parents, no real buildings – just shacks – and just a general feel of the place suddenly having a fraction of the money that the one we´d spent the last fortnight in did. We didn´t stop long at the border sight as we had an overnight train to catch to Santa Cruz, but just two hours there made a huge impact. Incidently the train station – a plain two floor concrete building, with some big windows to the front, about 40 cheap plastic seats and a little fuzzy television in the corner of the waiting room – was considered so impressive it was one of the main features of the tourism poster for Bolivia (along with a flag pole in a park, and a picture of a train). That may give you an idea of how geared towards tourism Bolivia is – i.e. not much at all!
So, the train was a train – they gave us food, they played bad films (´Her Best Move´in Spanish, anyone?!), I thought I might freeze to death in the air conditioning so I slept with football socks and a wooly hat on… frankly I spent far too much time interrailing around Europe to get excited about trains that much! Santa Cruz was another shock – it´s the second biggest city in Bolivia, but it´s not much bigger than Redditch (that´s only ean anything to home folks unfortunately, sorry!). Each area of the city has a particular purpose – there´s an eating and drinking area, a road that only sells party clothes (the flamenco type outfits), one that only sells printers, etc. – which is odd, but I guess it´s pretty efficient if you want to do/find/buy one particular thing! We had a thoroughly uncultured day there (it´s the business capital of the country so there isn´t much culture to be found) involving playing pro evo football, watching The Dark Knight (finally!! I left 3 days before the UK release date so it´s taken a while to get to seeing it, lol) and going to an Irish pub which had about 12 Énglish´songs played on a loop, including such classics as 5ive´s “If Ya´Getting Down”…
Which brings me on to today, where we got a little plane to Sucre – where I made friends with a very sweet Spanish woman by showing her how to use her seat belt, who then insisted on trying to talk to me, despite my continual explanations that I was English and didn´t speak Spanish (unless she wanted a conversation which involved me trying to order food and drink, count or ask about the time – I´m pretty sure she didn´t). The roads were closed for the independence day parades, which we managed to see a little of from a distance – the main parties were yesterday though (not much happened in Santa Cruz, there were just a lot of people in the main square watching a TV broadcasting of a report about it) so it was all finished by early afternoon. Just driving through the streets you could see the difference – the people are still very poor, and there are still so many small children forced out to beg and work on the streets which is heartbreaking to see because there´s nothing you can do to help (as you know giving them money will only encourage it to happen more, as the adults who send them out make more profit) – but there isn´t the same Western influence, it´s as though it´s been left relatively untouched since Colonial times. The buildings are beautiful, and the people still wear traditional dress – the bright woolen shawls and the black or brown rimmed hats. There´s ATMs and the odd instruction in English, but that´s about all – I absolutely love it here, as it doesn´t have that touristy feel at all and as foreigners we´re in a very, very small minority.
Earlier we saw a film at one of the restaurants ´mini cinema´ (for the price of 10 bolivianos – bearing in mind that there are 14 bolivianos to the pound. Just another example of how weak the economy is here and how poor the people really are) about the Potosi mines and the child labourers who work there now – Potosi is the next place we visit in a couple of days, and the documentary we saw was pretty disturbing. I´ll write about it more after I´ve been and seen it for myself, but I think it´s likely to be a quite upsetting visit – in the centuries since the silver mining started 8 million miners have been killed, and it´s still horrendously dangerous; but people are so poor they have no choice.
On a more cheerful note – so as not to leave you all depressed and dreading hearing about Potosi – I also had my first Pisco sour, the local drink of Bolivia and Peru. I can´t remember exactly what it had in it but there were definitely egg whites and a lot of alcohol… an odd combination but it actually works pretty well! We also met the four new members of our groups – James, a 19 year old guy who´s traveling at the end of his gap year, and Hannah, a 25 year old Londoner who quit her job to go traveling for 6 months (and is also my new room mate) – who are both joining us for the next month, until we get to Lima. And two Canadian medical students (seriously, us medics are everywhere!) called Melissa & Diana who are 24 and 25 respectively, and traveling in their summer break – they´re only with us for Bolivia though, as they´ve done Peru already.
So I´m off to have dinner now, and get to know our new members – and hopefully Sucre – a little better. Hope all the new doctors are having a good (or at least bearable) new week – it´s very odd that now you´ve all started I´m officially unemployed, lol! And I do apologise for the length of this blog – I didn´t realise quite how much I´d done!! I´ll try and get on the computer more regularly so you don´t have to sit here for half an hour every time I update :) And I´ve got internet for free for the next few days so I´ll try and get a few pictures up – take care of yourselves and keep me updated on home life!
Lots of Love,
Kat
xxx
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