I'd been hearing about couchsurfing.org for some time and thinking that it didn't fit us very well, until Pepa went to Arequipa for several weeks leaving me to suit myself. In case you're not up to speed on CS, it's a social network that connects people looking for a place to stay for free with people who offer lodging for free. When you register you tell quite a lot about yourself, in the hope that people will be attracted to you, either as a host or a lodger. As you can imagine, there is trust involved, and in that sense it's like eBay, where you need to build and maintain a good reputation.
There's a town called Samaipata a couple of hours driving west of Santa Cruz, in the Andean foothills, that I've wanted to visit so I registered with couchsurfing.org to see if there is anyone there offering accommodation. I found a 40 year old Dutch guy whose Couchsurfing page describes him as a professional clown and provides pictures of some of his gigs. I asked to stay with him, offering to make pancakes with real maple syrup. How could a Netherlander turn that down? Unfortunately he wasn't sure he'd be home Saturday night; also the weather was forecast to be rainy so I stayed home.
25-26 August 2012
By the next weekend I had an invitation, without even asking, from a 64 year old British woman who previously was showing up on the CS site as "traveling", ie, not available to host. Early Saturday morning with a cold Suraso wind howling through the city, I took a taxi-van to Samaipata (maybe 10,000 pop), sitting in the back behind heavily-tinted windows that obscured almost everything but transformed terracotta roof tiles to fluorescent orange. I'd heard that it's a spectacular drive but would have to wait for the trip back to see it.
Eve, the UK lady, met me in the plaza. We had lunch and then she led me to the edge of town, across a creek on a slippery log, up a hill past a property with several adobe houses with cupolas and stained glass windows, to her house. It's a bit higher than the town so it has a view of the valley. Two bedrooms, nice big kitchen, small living room with a fireplace, a solarium and tidy little garden. Eve had just returned from a couchsurfing bus odyssey through Argentina. Deciding to retire overseas, she bought the house for $18,000 four years previously and thinks its value has doubled. She told me that Samaipata is about 10% foreigners, attracted by the subtropical climate and tranquil prettiness of the valley.
After I got stowed away I went for a walk. My intention was to climb to the top of one of the hills overlooking the valley but after an hour and a half I still hadn't reached the horizon and in spite of the coolness of the late afternoon I was stripped to the waist and sweat was darkening the top of my trousers, so I turned back. By the time I returned to Eve's I was limping because my knees didn't like the downhill pounding.
Before the walk I'd called a Cuso colleague who lives and works in Samaipata to suggest we do a walk or drink or dinner. She took the dinner option and we agreed to meet in the plaza. I limped over there and on the way got a text that she'd be 20 minutes late. About 45 minutes later she showed up and we went to a restaurant. She talked about her job, which is to write an ecotourism marketing plan for the municipality, but the guy who had the project more or less under control when she arrived several months ago suddenly up and left, and she is completely over her head because her Spanish is poor and she has to consult stakeholders to learn what they want and what they can do. Her employer, an NGO in Santa Cruz, is losing patience with her. They want her to live in Santa Cruz and take Spanish training full time but she refused and instead has two hours a day with a tutor in Samaipata and the rest of the day studying, and hasn't been to work in weeks. She says that she has a huge internet bill because she watches tv online instead of "studying" and told me that she couldn't tear herself away from some tv program to be on time to meet me.
Next morning Eve's gardener Edwin took me in his 30 year old landcruiser to El Fuerte, a (maybe) Inca ruin on the top of a hill that looks like a 100m long spaceship crash landed there. It's a cap of exposed rusty-coloured sandstone that has been carved with zigzags, lines, squares, likenesses of animals (snake, jaguar), niches and water channels and looks like it had a ceremonial function, but no one knows. Edwin was a guard there ten years ago when the authorities decided that people shouldn't walk on it so he had quite a lot to say, some apocryphal for sure, but being a gardener he probably got the botanical part right, pointing out species of orchids, herbs and trees. He took me to a mysterious hole in the ground, about 1.5m in diameter, that was described in the museum in town as of unknown purpose (um, a well, maybe?) and said that beneath the scummy surface of the water and floating pop bottles about 3m below our feet, somewhere down there two passages branch off horizontally and go to other parts of the Inca Empire. Some time ago they pumped it out, he said, and a guy went down and crawled along one of the passages for a few meters before encountering a poisonous gas that caused him to go blind. This has discouraged further exploration.
Edwin got me back to Eve's by noon, in time to help her give the finishing touches to a lunch for some of her expat neighbors. I did some sweeping. Then a boisterous Dutch couple arrived, accompanying a deaf Swiss woman without husband. The next door neighbor, a semi Japanese Muslim woman came, also leaving her husband at home. We were all about the same age, until the last guest arrived, a shapely German woman of maybe 50 with no husband. Everyone brought something, even I (wine), all vegetarian, so I speculated that either the missing husbands find Eve's luncheons tedious or they must have meat. The German woman was so vegan that she turned down most of the dishes, and at the end of the meal she pulled out a bag of coca leaves and fastidiously placed them one by one, stems removed, in her cheek. The conversation was lively, mostly catching up with each others' doings and gossip about other expats, including a story about some fellow striking another across the nose with an iron bar for denouncing him to the police for drug activity. The lunch broke up at 3; I said farewell to my host and walked through the town to the highway to get a ride back to SC.
I got the shotgun seat in a minivan "expreso". The landscape is exciting: the road winds down a valley, sometimes a gorge, with intriguing peep-show views up green tributary valleys as we passed by. Tajibo trees were in bloom with big yellow flowers. I was thinking it would be a fun bike ride since it's net 1200m down to the lowlands, maybe 60km. Also, renting a car for a Samaipata weekend would be ideal because we could stop to savor the views.
Back in Santa Cruz the Suraso, a cold south wind from Patagonia that has everyone in parkas and scarves, had continued, even strengthened. The expreso finished its run next to the football stadium, in a street notorious for mugging and pickpockets. Chanting and furious fusillades of fireworks erupted from the stadium; the air was thick with 5cm square pieces of newspaper like big confetti blowing in clouds from some invisible source by the Suraso. I walked against crowds of excited fans streaming to the gates. Street vendors sold t-shirts and vuvuzelas. In the apartment later, at least a kilometer away, over the keening of the Suraso I could hear goals scored. That evening I had a couchsurfing request for one night from an American, Zennett Coulson, 37, recently from Papua New Guinea where he'd lived for four years, self-described on his CS page as "a bit strange". I accepted and left work a little early on Tuesday to meet him on a street corner near the apartment after his 17 hour bus ride from La Paz. I planned to take a train Thursday to Roboré so the timing was good. After reviewing available resources, Zennett volunteered to make a lasagna and as we worked on that we talked about things we had in common, which turned out to be quite a lot, and things we didn't. Zennett has a wife in PNG, an indigenous woman in a village two days walk from the nearest road. They speak Pidgin; her English isn't good and he hasn't learned the local language well enough. He was making his living buying gold from people panning the rivers and then walking out to sell it. His in-laws were getting tiresome expecting him to support them more lavishly than he wanted to, and stealing from him, so he has set out to find somewhere else in the world to settle down with Pauline. He wants to have two wives and has suggested the relationship to a couple of other women but although initially Pauline was "okay with it", she doesn't seem so now, at long distance. "Zennett" is a name he chose himself.
We got on really well so I suggested that he might like to come with me to Santiago de Chiquitos, a village in a valley in the highlands above Roboré. I'd made arrangements to meet a couple of local people there to discuss the installation of a weather station. Santiago is in the Tucavaca Protected Area, an ecoregion that conservation NGOs have convinced the local government to regulate for land use.
I could barely remember the last time I took a train which is why rail mode appealed to me, even though it's twice as fast by road. There's a butte near Roboré called El Pailón (means "big pot" maybe) that the train would pass closely at about 10pm under a full moon; in fact, it was the night of a blue moon. I could see in Google Earth that the line also passes between a couple of major craggy hills, mountains even, nowhere near the highway. The terrain at Tucavaca is quite bizarre, emerging from the eastern Bolivian lowlands in islands of escarpments for no apparent reason. The elevation difference is only three or four hundred meters but it's enough to moderate the stifling heat and even cause frosts in some winters.
30 August – 2 September 2012
Strangely we were thoroughly checked for ID at the platform gate by some unsmiling plain-clothed police with holstered automatics and baseball caps that said "Interpol". Police are nowhere as visible in Bolivia as in Canada, say, and just today in the newspaper I saw a histogram of federal spending items with "public security" at the very bottom. First was health and second was education. Anyway, I was a little concerned because in my pack I had a plastic container of marijuana cookies. Although they have an exotic spicy flavour, they don't reek of dope as you might think. I had a brief on-the-spot fantasy in which the cop goes through my bag and finds the cookies. I offer him one and he takes it, and then I say, no, take two! Two really gets you off, speechless in fact, so I imagined him wondering WTF?! after an hour or so, meanwhile we're an hour down the line.
The ticket guy in the station said we should pay on the train, and there the conductor offered us a tiny discount if we'd pay without his writing a ticket so that he could pocket about $20, evidently to be shared with the guy back in the station. He'd been pleasant to us and took us to better seats so it was hard to turn him down, and I might have gone along with it except Zennett said he didn't like to participate in corruption and when he did, his price was higher than the buck fifty this guy was offering.
There was a uniformed policeman walking up and down the train. The first time I saw him, a plump middle-aged woman asked him to help her adjust her seat, and he handed his dixiecup ice cream for her to hold while he did it. I was charmed by this and smiled a little, which he caught and gave my shoulder a squeeze as he walked by. Hours later at a station I was out looking for beer and had a chat with him and then later he hung out with us for a while. I remarked on the unusual police presence we were seeing. He said that the railway pays the Policia Nacional to ride the trains because without them there would be criminals preying on the passengers, for example, slipping them knockout drugs and robbing them. Also pickpockets. He didn't know anything about the Interpol guys. He wanted to know what cops are paid in America. Zennett said maybe $30k which I thought was guessing low. The cop said that he gets about $150/month and he has to pay for his uniform and his gun, and then he launched into a fantasy about smuggling a gun in pieces from the US to Bolivia, questioning us about how we thought it could be done. After we passed San Jose, still several hours before our stop, the conductor, another conductor and the cop came by to collect our fares. Again we were offered the deal with some low-pressure encouragement and again, being the linguist of the group, I said no, so the conductor filled out the receipts laboriously with our names and ID numbers. I felt badly. The cop was obviously in on it too.
The train passed through a gap between craggy mountains and stopped briefly at a village called Pailón that I'd seen in Google Earth and been excited by the idea of riding a bike there and climbing to the heights of the bigger massif to the east. Even in the moonlight I could see that would be a serious undertaking: maybe some technical climbing, major discomfort in the heat and no water up there. A half hour further the track took a close semicircular route around the downhill side of the butte El Pailón so I got a close look at it and was impressed. I hope I get back there. Again, hiring a car seems like the best approach.
We arrived in Roboré shortly after 11pm. The train continued on toward Brazil. A taxi woman named Yena took us to a $7 hotel near the plaza and next morning drove us 20km up the mountain to Santiago, directly to my first meeting. Milton Whittaker came out to greet us. He's tall, thin, has a bushy beard, thick glasses and I'm guessing he's closer to 70 than 60. He'd been described to me as English but his accent put him in the Midwest US somewhere, Indiana as it turned out. He's a Quaker and came to Bolivia to avoid being drafted 45 years ago. His wife Kathryn is also Quaker, a lot younger, and they have five children, the youngest 9. They have cattle and also a dairy herd, and they sell the milk every morning to people in the town. He and his wife can't be away at the same time - who would milk the cows? - so they don't get any holiday time together. From outside the house looked well-lived-in, maybe "shabby" would be harsh, but it's clearly a hard-scrabble life there. Milton was going through a poor-health episode which he described in detail with Zennett's encouragement and questioning. Previously Zennett had told me how he'd become the local medic in his Papua village so I could see he was getting into the role again here. Milton went on to talk about the current serious drought situation, reckoning he had only a couple of more weeks of water for his cattle up here and would have to drive them down to the Tucavaca River, a day's ride. He understood from local knowledge that the last time the Tucavaca dried up was 100 years ago and fears that it will again soon because of the deforestation in the basin upstream. Deforestation reduces the capacity of the land to store water so the rains flow straight into the rivers instead of soaking into the trees and their root systems, to be released more slowly well into the dry season. In any case, Milton was confident that pools in the riverbed remain even when the stream stops, so his cattle will be ok.
Milton was becoming a role model for Zennett, who appreciated that he'd done just what Zennett was hoping to do, and Milton seemed impressed with Zennett, so I sat back and watched this mutual admiration society develop. Later Zennett told me that they'd exchanged long emails. He asks everyone he meets where he should go to find a place to settle.
The walk back into town was pleasant but sweaty, especially for Zennett who had left nothing back in the apartment in SC. We passed a little park filled with people ranging from sober to comatose, celebrating something, enduring an absurdly loud sound system that filled the neighborhood with latino (guitar, trumpet and cowbell) dance music. A wall-eyed man staggered up to us and insisted we join the party. Since we hadn't had lunch yet the parrillada aromas were irresistible so we were immediately attacking plates of sizzling beef, yuca, rice and tomato/onion salad. I sensed that some people were scowling at us like we were freeloaders and made a point of expressing our gratitude to the officials ... we learned that the occasion was the town's saint day, an annual event.
Tearing ourselves away from the sticky drunks with difficulty, we made our way to the plaza. The heat made you want to stay in the shade with the two donkeys lounging in the dust under a big spreading tree. We agreed that Zennett would stay with our gear while I looked for accommodation. I soon learned that we were competing not only with the highway construction engineers but also with outsiders attending a baroque music festival happening over the weekend. After an hour of trudging around drawing blanks I found a young couple, Laura and Eduardo from Sucre and La Paz respectively, who offered a room with two single beds in the house they rent, for 50 Bs ($7) each per night which seemed a lot but about right given the market. They've been in Santiago for 6 months helping an artisanal shop get organized.
By this time, 3pm, I needed to meet Santiago Echeverre, the FCBC employee operating the nature centre. This meant sneaking by the party again unnoticed and we succeeded pretty well with only one drunk glomming onto us. Santiago was born in Santiago and educated in Santa Cruz with the support of FCBC. He showed us into the centre, easily the newest and most modern looking building we'd seen in town, and explained how he makes biodiversity presentations to visiting school groups and tourists. I'd given him the short version of my mission on the phone earlier in the week so he was ready with ideas and enthusiastic about having a met station there because he sees it as adding interest value to the place. The centre is on a hectare lot with a path that winds like a board game over half of it, with plaques that identify the trees. Santiago recited the scientific names. We discussed how the instruments, data logger and data displays could be installed to be secure but as visible to visitors as possible. He showed us a powerpoint presentation he'd made of the attractions of the area, in a pitch to guide us for a reduced (professional courtesy) rate. We declined.
We ate some ganja cookies, had dinner and went to the Catholic church in the plaza at 8pm to attend a concert of local indigenous musicians. Santiago de Chiquitos is one of a string of towns that the Jesuits established in the 1600s, in which they built impressive churches with enormous pillars and beams hewn from tajibo trees, and meter-thick walls of composite adobe and reed. Concepción is another of those towns. When in 17-something the Pope decided that the Jesuits were getting too full of themselves, he banished them from the colonies ("the expulsion of the Jesuits" is an oft-mentioned phrase around here) and replaced them with better team-players. A Polish archbishop among the new guys recognized a large musical talent in the local genes and developed a tradition of baroque music making that continues and thrives today.
The church was packed. We got there early, in the 3rd pew. A quartet of two violins, cello and bass played Mozart, Vivaldi and some folk music. In my perception the virtuosity contrasted startlingly with the general under development I see in Bolivia. Everywhere you look you see worn-out scabbed-together things, and in the midst of it all these people producing this flawless music you associate with professional musicians in formal dress. During one of the pieces the cell phone of a woman sitting ahead of us went off loudly with some stupid raucous pop song. There's no consciousness of this as antisocial; in the movie theatre phones ring and people carry on loud conversations. So with the cookies and the shock of the atrocity I got the giggles for a moment, to the puzzlement of the woman sitting beside me.
Next morning we got off to a late start on a hike up to El Mirador (The Viewpoint). Santiago is in a hollow in the highlands that emerge like an island out of the plain. We walked out of town on a dusty road that climbs up to a gap in the escarpment facing east toward Brazil, and then struggled up a Grouse Grind-like path to an almost flat grassland plateau that you could land a small plane on. Walking along the edge of the escarpment we overlooked the Tucavaca Valley to the barely distinguishable horizon obscured by forest fire smoke. There are many mysterious pillars, that I'd call hoodoos after having visited parks in Arizona, and vultures hanging in the shimmering air. We took pictures of each other standing on the edges of testicle-raising precipices.
On the way down one of the soles of my boots began to detach from the toe going backward. I barely made it to town without it coming right off. I've had those boots since 1986, worn them on three WCT trips, Mt. Everest base camp and countless other adventures and thought they'd be the last boots I'd have. I'm hoping that I can have it glued back on here so that I can get them resoled again properly back in Canada.
We went back to the church in the evening to another concert, this time a choir and school-aged musicians from Santa Cruz, not the excellence of the night before but still impressive. In the morning we caught a ride down the hill to Roboré and waited in a stifling bus station for a 1pm departure by expreso minivan to SC. This time we got a different view of the geography we'd seen by moonlight from the railway line. The road passed well away from El Pailón so I could only get glimpses of it between the trees zipping by: no pictures. The trip back to SC was only 5 hours; the train took almost 12.
I'm nearly up to date. On Monday Zennet cleared out, not unrelated with Pepa´s return from three weeks in Arequipa. She´s doubtful about this couchsurfing thing. I took a trufi (6 Bs., < $1) out to the airport to meet her and we took a taxi (60 Bs.) back. Getting out of the taxi outside our apartment, my wallet fell out of my pocket onto the street unnoticed by me until later in the evening as I prepared for a crack o' dawn departure to Concepción. Not the end of the world because replacing my Bolivian ID would be the only real hassle.
4 September 2012
Next day after a 6 hour bus ride to Concepción I gave a talk to a hundred or so farmers about the results of a study of climate variability I'd done in the reion. They were attending an annual municipal event called La Cumbre (The Summit) where the municipal politicians try to convince them about what a good job they're doing, and the citizens complain about how bad a job they're doing. The mayor was a mini-Evo (Morales, the indigenous President of Bolivia), saying "compañeros y compañeras¨ after every phrase. I finished my part just late enough to miss the 3pm bus back to SC and had to wait until 6:30 for the next one and in the meantime started this missive. A guy called me to say he'd found my wallet and would deliver it to my work next day. At about 11pm the bus squealed to a halt at the end of a long queue of transport trucks and other traffic held up by a Bolivian political mechanism called "bloqueo", in which local people block a highway and don't let anyone through until the government caves in to their demands or sends the cops in to shoot a few people. After dithering about for a couple of hours, the bus driver backed out of the queue and took a clever detour on back roads that returned us to the highway on the other side of the blockade. I tracked it with my GPS for future reference. I got home at 4am ... a long day, with more than 15 hours in bus seats.
At work yesterday the guy showed up with my wallet. He said he'd found it on Calle Saavedra (outside our apartment) without any money in it but he had a shifty look that suggested otherwise. I gave him 100 Bs anyway, just in case he really hadn't already had the benefit of the 300 Bs or so in it.