Living in the Jungle
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2007
1
25
35
Trip End
May 29, 2008
Santa Cruz,
Bolivia
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The trips from La Paz to Cochabamba then to Santa Cruz showed the incredible contrasts of Bolivia. A professional couple in La Paz probably lives much as in most big cities in the world, eating out, going to the office, watching cable TV, yet on the edges of La Paz is El Alto (La Paz is in a bowl shaped valley which is full, so all expansion takes place at the top of the cliffs in this new, ajoining city), where most of the houses are made of mud bricks and corrugated iron, and some have no electricity, and the roads turn to slush when it rains
Cloud forest
. Just an hour out of La Paz you can see villages where the mud brick cottages are all thatched, where pigs are tethered at the side of the road and ploughs are pulled by oxen. In the rural altiplano most people are subsistence farmers, and the women still dress as they have for hundreds of years, with bowler hats, hair in long plaits, many-pleated skirts, aprons and woven blankets tied on their backs, carrying anything from babies to loads of potatoes and kindling.As we left Cochabamba we descended through cloud forest into a long stretch of lush jungle, also inhabited mainly by subsistence farmers who grow coca (the raw plant for cocaine is not illegal to grow here, in fact the leaves are used widely for tea that supposedly releives symptoms of altitude sickness) and bananas. Houses here consisted of a single room wooden shack on stilts, most without windows, where people slept. Underneath, concreted or dirt, was the area people used to cook and wash and chickens scratched about in the dirt. We then came out into cultivated plains where we passed chicken farm after chicken farm (fried chicken and chips is everywhere) and lots of crops that looked like sugar cane, as well as some of the wealthiest looking houses we´ve seen since we arrived in south america. They wouldn´t have been out of place in westlake, but all were surrounded by 8 foot fences with razor wire.
Santa Cruz has an airy, distinctly colonial feel about it
More cloud forest
. Enlike the altiplano, the majority of people are of european or mestizo descent, and light coloured people seem to have most of the money while the indigenous wait the tables and do the cleaning. We are back in siesta country, where most of the town closes between 12.30 and 3.30, and people laze under the trees in the tropical central plaza. Two-toed sloths also used to laze there, until they had to be relocated to the zoo because of problems with traffic and occasional electrocutions.We´ve bought mosquito nets and wellies, and tomorrow we´ll arrive at the wildlife park, after a bus trip of about 6 hours (and 300km). While there is no power or phone there, we expect to be able to do the odd blog entry at one of the neighbouring towns from time to time (parents please read ´we will not be blogging weekly; don´t fret´). At any rate, our visas only allow us to be in the country until 25/03/07, so we´ll be back in Santa Cruz before then, either to get an extension then do more volunteering, or to go out to the pantanal in Brazil (the huge area that floods for months of the year, causing amazing concentrations of wildlife (giant otters, anacondas, giant anteaters, capybara, tapir, pumas, maned wolf, etc) on the remaining dry land and in the waters), and to find out why the train that goes between Santa Cruz and the Brazilian border is called ´the death train´.
While we´ve grizzled about being caught up in the festivities of carnival, we recently found out how lucky we were. In Santa Cruz, carnival is celebrated for several weeks by youths with paint ball guns and paint bombs - their are hundreds of large white pillars outside buildings in the city centre which are currently being repainted. So in a way we got off lightly with a small mugging and a lot of water balloons and foam.
