Hotel Aranjuez Cochabamba

... use loo roll and they dont wash their hands afta the toilet so u can imagine!! Hope none of u have just eaten sorry! i was meant to be partying it up in La Paz (one of the capitals, Bolivia has 2) this weekend but obv i cudnt go coz i have still been sick today, shame coz i had already paid for my flight there and it is my last weekend in Bolivia, o well. I have to say i am very much looking forward to coming home and getting back to ...

... be teary but its not my place to cry. it broke my heart when 2girls in particular just start crying for no reason n stare at the floor, it must be v confusing for them as one girl had only been there for a week!! the orphanage isnt even given the information as to what has happned to them!! can only do my best to support them and help them whilst im here but i do feel slightly helpless coz i cant change the ...

... to hang out in Cochbamba for a day or two then head to Sucre early. There wasn't much to do in Cochbamba but I immediately liked the feel of the place. Plus the weather was fantastic, very warm and balmy. The main highlights of our stay were eating at a delicous Italian restaurant and going to see the largest "Jesus on a hill" statue in the world...yup even bigger ...

... de Janeiro fame) on a hill behind the city, but this one, rather than being 33m tall like the one in Rio (one for every year of Christ´s life as the story goes), is just a little bit bigger. The justification is that apparently as Christ lived for 33 'and a bit' years, they would build their statue just that 'little bit´ bigger (we think probably to just outdo the Brazilians more than based on any scientific facts ...

... the city, whats not to like about the place? And it also has the added bonus of not really being the biggest tourist attraction in the country, therefore you can easily spend an entire day without seeing any other obvious tourists. Lovely. As a result, i have spent my two weeks (so far) here doing only a few things... Perusing the market, otherwise known as La Cancha, finding myself new and wonderful things to keep amused ...

... Stromleitungen und hundert meter tiefe Abgruende. Sicherlich superinteressant einen Einblick in diese Unmenschliche Arbeit zu bekommen... so weit geht meine Abenteuerlust dann aber doch nicht. In den Mienen und an den Folgen der giftigen Daempfe sollen hier bereits bis zu 6 Millionen Arbeiter gestorben sein. Also rumpelt unser Bus weiter in die Hauptstadt Boliviens, Sucre. Hier gibt es zumindenstens eine nette Plaza, eine Menge alter ...

... bringing a pack back, but my bag's too full of souvenirs. Hehe. All the Little buildings are made from salt bricks. Quite funky really! Then onto the Salar. 12,000km2 of pure, whilte, flat expanse, stretching around you. We stopped to look at salt "mountains" - mounds of salt piled up to dry. Then the salt hotel - a hotel made of...surprise surprise...salt! Placed right smack in the middle of the Salar. Then the Isla del Pescado. The world famous island in the middle of the ...

... go to the hostel I'd booked myself for a 4 hour sleep. I wondered to the main plaza (Uyuni is TINY! built originally by a franco-italian architect who thought that it would be a huge booming town due to all the mineral exportation to Chile, so built it around large wide streets, but then the town came to nothing, except to provide for tourists, so very funny looking!). Dropped my bag off at the tour agency, and encountered some North American sounding tourists who I joined to ...

... familiene deres hjemme i Norge ogsaa, og at de hadde begynt aa vaere ganske skeptiske mot alt og alle. Vi ble sittende ved et lite bord og prate, og fikk vite at de hadde sitti 8 maaneder naa, og at dommen enda ikke hadde falt. Minimumsstraffen var 10 aar... Det var tydelig at aa sitte i boliviansk fengsel ikke var goey, men at de etter forholdene hadde det bra. De fikk tilsendt penger fra Norge, og det var ikke mye de manglet, eller ikke fikk tak i der inne. Men fengselet var lite ...

... other day when i got called round to play guitar for the dad at about 2 in the afternoon. When i got there, he was ******. He'd been drinking chicha since 9 in the morning. He kept turning the music up to full volume and crying. We didn't really know why and so we tried to just ignore it completely. We found out later that he was crying because he was a communist and had been tortured in Lebanon by Israeli terrorists! The mum responded to him coming home drunk by getting some beers ...