A kind of conclusion

Instead of trying to sum up my whole trip, and the meaning of everything, and how it all changed me (which would take more than a lifetime to do), I want to leave you all with an experience I had on my last day in Cuzco, which was all at once odd, disturbing, commonplace, and in some strange way an appropriate ending to this series of other-worldly events.

I spent the last couple days living in the house where I began when I first came to Cuzco, spending time with Rosita and reliving old memories in my head. Things had changed; the family was practically uprooting the entire house, redoing all three bathrooms. Mijael no longer works in the fish store underneath the house; his brother-in-law, who owned the store, decided to sell it. Rosita now sits at the table to eat with the rest of the family, instead of at a seperate table in the same room. She is almost finished her thesis and will soon be moving out of the house, but only once my host parents manage to find another maid (they really can't live without one).

At the same time, not much had changed. Erika, the maid in the house of my host mom's daughter, had off for awhile, the result being that Rosita kept being asked to come over and take care of the kids there. My host parents were away for the weekend in their house in the country while Rosita had to stay in the house and wait for all the different repairmen to come. Seeing as she was supposed to be taking care of the kids in the other house at the same time, I ended up having to stay in the house waiting for the repairmen to come.

Finally at mid-day on Monday Socorro and Ramiro returned from their weekend house. I left the house for a few minutes to buy something at the general store, and when I came back my host parents were gone, and at the kitchen table, like a ghost, was seated an elderly indigenous woman I had never seen in my life. It startled me, partly because she was obviously indigenous, in the characteristic sweater, hat and skirts, and for that reason I knew she couldn't have been any blood relation of my host family. It crossed my mind that maybe she had broken and entered, but I knew that was utterly ridiculous. Not knowing what to do, I entered the kitchen and just kind of stood there, looking at her, struggling to make some sort of connection but feeling as if there had never been two people on earth who understood each other less. Finally I said hello and asked her name. She said it was Juliana, and I introduced myself, explaining that I lived there. She just looked at me apprehensively and a little fearfully, and said she was waiting for la Señora Socorro. Mystified, I went up to my room.

Later it was explained to me what relation Juliana had to the family. When Socorro was growing up, Juliana had been the maid who took care of her. Yet it was impossible for me to imagine that this modest old woman had once had the authority to discipline Socorro. During lunch, which was kind of a going away party for me and in which I opened a bottle of wine from Argentina that I'd been saving, Juliana sat at the same table where Rosita used to sit. She was served a child-sized portion of wine and spoken to like a child. After lunch, Juliana sat at the table and waited there while Socorro went upstairs, watched some TV with the kids and took a short nap. I was waiting for Rosita to finish taking her shower so she could go out with me, so I came downstairs and sat at the same table as Juliana, neither of us saying a word to each other for several minutes. Finally Juliana asked me, "Is la Señora Socorro coming down, or has she fallen asleep?"

"She's not asleep right now," I said. "Should I tell her to come down?"

"No, she'll come down."

She sat and waited for another half hour or so, until Socorro finally came down, and started talking to her as if it were official business, about God knows what. During the part of the conversation I witnessed Socorro was giving Juliana a pair of earrings and saying they made her look so pretty--still speaking to her like a child. And to think, there was a time when Juliana spoke to her the same way.

Is anything sacred?

A conversation between me and Carlos and a woman who sells vegetarian food in the market in Cochabamba, Bolivia, as we were sitting down to eat lunch. A little mean perhaps, but hilarious. It started with the woman saying something about me being Carlos's wife.

Carlos: We're not married, and we're never going to get married either.
Señora: [gasps] Why?!
Carlos: Because...because we're not. Why did you think we were married?
Señora: Well, because I saw you two together and I figured people from other countries couldn't be so different from us. We're all human.
Carlos: Well, we're never getting married. Naomi, tell her why we're not getting married.
Me: We're not getting married because we don't believe in love.
Señora: [gasps] Really?
Me: Really. My mother used to always tell me that love doesn't exist. Carlos, didn't your mother ever tell you that?
Carlos: My mother never told me anything. That's why I don't believe in love.
Me: See that?
Señora: They say that if you know God's love, you know the love of the universe...
Me: Shit! Carlos, we don't believe in God do we? That must be why we don't believe in love!
Carlos: Dammit, you're right!
Señora: And the president of the United States...he's a believer isn't he?
Carlos: In Satan. Yes. He worships Satan.
Señora: Good lord, he must, otherwise he wouldn't have started so many wars and killed so many people.
Me: Yeah, but that's normal in the Unites States. Lots of people worship Satan.
Señora: How horrible!

7/29/07 -- Roadblocks, assaults, etc.

So, just when you think Bolivia can't get any crazier, it does. What a country, I tell you--it makes Peru look like a very stable place. That said, now that I'm back in Cuzco my friends have been telling me that the strike of professors between Cuzco and Puno only got worse after I left--apparently the Peruvian president has proposed to give funding so that future teachers can take extra preparatory courses, but the teachers are protesting because they'd rather just be paid more. Meanwhile in Bolivia, there was a big controversy about the price of bread, which went up from 4 ´pancitos´ (little breads) for a peso to 3 pancitos for a peso, causing complete and utter chaos. OK, well maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but then add to that huge student demonstrations which resulted in universities in some areas being suspended for two weeks, a giant demonstration of 2 million people in La Paz protesting the proposition of moving the political capital back to Sucre (the country's historical capital), and an enormous mining strike that happened to be centered right where I was, in Potosi. Every single road out of Potosi was closed due to roadblocks, and I ended up being stuck there for five days, originally having planned to be there for two. Not that there's anything so bad about being stuck in Potosi, but there's something incredibly unnerving about not being able to leave a place and having no idea when the situation will change. I was staying in a small, very personal hostel and when I came down for breakfast the third morning the receptionist said to me, 'You seem to be suffering from a bit of anxiety.' I just nodded in consent.

So, I did go on my tour of a cooperative mine, but the day I went was the first day of the strike and not one miner was actually working. It was still an unforgettable experience though; the good thing was that I had my own personal Spanish-speaking guide, since the rest of the people on the tour were Belgian and had there own French guide. My guide was the same age as me, 21, and worked in the mines from the time he was 18 to 20, for lack of a better option. We ended up becoming friends and hanging out for the rest of the time I was stuck in Potosi. Anyway, a couple interesting things about the mines: first, I couldn't believe it when my guide told me that during the colonial period the miners were basically enslaved and would be forced to stay in the mines for up to 6 months at a time without seeing the light of day. When they came out, the sunlight was so shocking to their eyes that many went blind. The production of the coca leaf was supported in this time period because it decreases hunger and made it possible for the workers to go longer periods without rest. Another interesting thing is that in each mine, to this day, there is a little sculpture of a devil to which the miners offer coca leaves every Friday, which is said to watch over those who work underneath the earth. There is also a sculpture of the Pachamama, the female counterpart who watches over the earth (but not the underworld).

After Potosi I went on to Sucre, which is where Bolivia's independence was declared, and which was the capital city until La Paz took its place by sheer power of numbers, I guess. It's also said to be Bolivia's most beautiful city, and has a much different feel than the rest of the country, full of beautiful colonial buildings. The week when I was there there was also a fair of miniatures, which I was really excited about because several people in Peru had told me about this Bolivian phenomenon. It's basically a big market in which all of the vendors sell miniatures of pretty much everything you can imagine--foods, toiletries, clothing, money, alcohol, Bolivian passports, marriage certificates, etc. Other than that, I went to an archaeological site in which some dinosaur footprints have been found (which sounded more interesting than it actually was) and La Casa de La Libertad, the very place where independence was declared which is now a museum. Pretty cool.

After that I went to Cochabamba, one of the biggest cities in Bolivia. I can't really understand why it attracts so many tourists, but I mostly went there to meet up with a friend I met in Cuzco, Carlos, who is kind of a nomadic jewelry maker and happened to be travelling in Bolivia at the same time as me. I was in Cochabamba for three and a half days, during which time I did basically nothing. The first day I was exhausted from having taken an overnight bus, and the second day, well, Carlos and I had the idea of walking up to a lookout point in the city, which involves going up a few hundred stairs. About halfway up, around 3:00 in the afternoon, we stopped and sat down to take a rest, and kind of ended up getting robbed, and the assaulters kind of had knives. Neither of us were hurt and it was mostly just a scare (my assaulter was dumb enough not to notice I had a digital camera, and Carlos somehow convinced his to leave him his passport) but there was the slight problem that we were left with a total of 5 pesos between us. So Carlos, conveniently being an artesan, went to sell some of the jewelry he makes in the street, and we managed to scrape up just enough to get buy until the next day when my parents wired me enough money for both of us to get by in Bolivia for probably about a month (thanks ma and pa).

Anyway, that pretty much ended our desire to do touristic things in Cochabamba. A couple days later we were off to La Paz, and spent the good part of a day there walking around looking for a movie theater playing something decent and not finding one. Luckily Carlos is quite entertaining and somehow we managed to keep each other amused. I spent the next day in a bus back to Cuzco, and here I am, just saying my goodbyes to everyone, trying to explain why I was in Bolivia for two weeks longer than I originally said I would be (this is difficult with Peruvians, who like to ask you the exact date and time you will be returning to see them, despite the fact that they themselves are never on time), and preparing to return to the US on Tuesday.

7/16/07 -- Adios to my plans

Alright, that last email I wrote makes me laugh because just like usual on this trip, nothing that I mentioned has gone according to plan. It turned out I couldn't go to Quillabamba because there was a landslide blocking the only road that goes there from Cuzco. At that point I was a bit anxious to get out of Cuzco, so I told Braddy I was going to begin my travels in the Bolivia direction a bit early and that I would meet him in La Paz. On Monday I bought my ticket to Puno for Wednesday morning, only to arrive at the terminal and find that there had been a roadblock strike going on since Monday and that no buses were leaving during the day. I changed my ticket to that night and left at 10 pm. On a trip that was supposed to take six hours, the bus stopped at 5:30 am and informed all its passengers that it could not go any further and we were going to have to get off and walk. So at 5:30 am in the freezing cold with my little rolling suitcase, I walked about a half hour over a bridge, from where I had to take two mini-buses to get to Puno, finally arriving at 8:30 am. I was happy to finally be there.

Well, then my friend Braddy was busy for awhile with an art show and by the time he got done with that he informed me that he was sorry but he no longer had the time, money, or energy to come to Bolivia. Such is life.

But I will start from the beginning of my travelling adventures. As I've mentioned, my first destination was Puno, a small tourist city on the shore of Lake Titicaca, which is the highest freshwater lake in the world and was sacred to the Incas. The Lake is split between Peru and Bolivia, and a Bolivian friend I recently met on a bus told me Bolivians like to say that the 'Titi' belongs to Bolivia and the 'caca' to Peru ('caca' in Spanish means 'shit'). In reality though, the whole of the lake is quite gorgeous. Anyway, after a day spent wandering around Puno (in a day you can do pretty much everything there is to do in Puno) I took a boat to two different islands in Lake Titicaca, Amantani and Taquile. Taquile was particularly interesting to me because at Middlebury I wrote a paper dealing with the weaving tradition and tourism there. The paradox of the island is that it's both a fabricated tourist attraction and an isolated place where people really do still live somewhat 'traditionally,' if you ignore the island's many rstaurants and bars. Amantani is less touristy and people there live more 'rustically', but they do have one little tourist-attracting niche, which is staging little 'discotecas' for tourists at night in which they dress you up in the traditional clothing that they themselves don't wear anymore and everyone dances to a band playing traditional music. It's quite a show. While on the Peru side of the lake I also visited a couple of the Floating Islands, which are man-made islands built completely of reeds, no more than 20 meters in diameter. These communities were initially built as a way for people to escape from widespread tribal warfare, and people still live quiet lives there in tiny communities although they now get things like education and medical services in Puno. They're something you really have to see to believe.

After visiting those islands, I continued across the Bolivian border to Copacabana. On the bus ride there I met a fellow traveller from Morocco and another French guy that the Moroccan guy had met on the bus from Cuzco to Puno. The three of us decided to spend the night on the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), which is the mythical birthplace of the Incan civilization. Ironically, the first night there we got caught in a hail storm and ended up just sitting in our hostel drinking cheap, gross Bolivian wine and chewing coca leaves. The next day was a little clearer and Romain (the Frenchie) and I hiked to some really cool labyrinth-like ruins on one side of the island before taking the boat back to Copacabana.

After that I continued on to La Paz and spent two days there hanging out with Tarik (the Moroccan), visiting markets and museums, and the usual stuff you do in cities. While Lake Titicaca is the highest freshwater lake in the world, La Paz boasts being the highest capital, at something like 3800 meters above sea level. The main part of the city is situated in a bit of a valley, but like Lima, the outer boundaries of the city just keep growing due to people migrating there from the country, and from several lookout towers in the city you can see just how packed all the buildings are on the side of the mountains. It's pretty impressive.

It just so happened that Tarik was also planning on doing a tour of the salt flats and desert near Uyuni, so I decided to go with him. It was a very uncomfortable 12-hour overnight bus ride down to Uyuni, which is a freezing cold, isolated and desolate town which earns its livelihood almost completely from tourism. There are dozens of tour agencies that do three-day tours of the desert, and we ended up going with a different tour agency than we had made the reservation with, which apparently happens a lot. The tour group consisted of me, Tarik, two youngish Polish couples, and a local tour guide and cook, all packed snugly into a jeep. The tour was memorable both for the spectacular scenery (only my photos can describe that, which I unfortunately might not be able to posr online until I get home) and for the fact that the tour itself was comically bad. The guide and cook seemed intent on speaking to us as little as possible. The jeep arrived at the tour agency an hour late the first day, then stopped at several places around town to pick up a few personal items and some food items that our guides had neglected to pick up beforehand. Every time we arrived at one of the sites the guide would tell us we had 15 minutes to walk around, then after ten minutes would yell, 'Let's go, let's go, we're late!' On top of that, the cook made a hot dog casserole for the two vegetarians on the trip, then on the last morning when we asked for the scrambled eggs we had been promised, said that there were eggs in the bread. She finally brought us a bowl of scrambled eggs but without forks and plates to eat it with. Following breakfast we revolted and spent an hour and a half in the hot springs mostly just to piss of the guide. Because of this we arrived lateat the town in which we were apparently supposed to stop and get gas (the guide had told us nothing about this, of course) and the gas station was closed. But instead of telling us that he was going to try to find the owner of the gas station, the guide pretended we were at another stop in the trip and asked if we wanted to get out and see the local market or church. This resulted in all of us being quite confused when we ended up waiting 45 minutes for him to come back. We arrived back in the frigid Uyuni at 8:30, 2 and a half hours late. The good thing was that we all got along really well and were able to laugh at all the silly mishaps. Unfortunately we arrived back too late to stage a protest in front of the travel agency.

At the point of reaching the Chilean border on the last day we parted with Tarik, who was continuing on to Valparaiso. Coincidentally, me and the two Polish couples all had the same plan, which was to move on to the religious and mining center of Potosi, where I am now. On the bus here I was sitting next to and chatting with a Bolivian guy who is studying in Sucre, which just happens to be my next destination. The city of Potosi supposedly has a fascinating history, of which I know little because I unfortunately do not have the Lonely Planet Guide to Bolivia (this appears to be an essential). My Bolivian friend told me that at some point in history it was the biggest city in the world. Anyway, despite my ignorance, I am highly looking forward to taking a tour of one of the cooperative mines tomorrow. More on this to come.