Dons mail from Sucre april 12th 2003

i'm in Sucre, the capital for bolivia, it's beautiful
here... we actually weren't going to be staying here
but we missed the bus to Cochabamba by minutes! it
worked out really well though... last night we were
treated to a wonderful fondu dinner!!! thanks girls!
and then went out to a bar to throgh back some of the
local beer (canadian beer is much better!) and a few
Mojitos. and before we knew it they had removed some
of the tables and opened a dance floor! we started to
dance and the bar tender handed us these crazy cool
big aviator glasses and these even bigger old lady
shades along with some great ugly hats and we danced
up a storm! i should also let everyone know that Cam
is a dancing god! long live the 'sizzling bacon'
move! we found our way home at what seemed like a
late hour but it was probably about 12 or 1.... i'v
been getting up at 8 every morning! i need to get
home soon and waste the days away again... yeah right!

we came here from a small city called Potosí. this is
where one of the greatest silver rushes of all time
took place... this city was at one point one of the
richest cities in the world... rivaling london,
paris... and other big cities(???)
we went on a tour in the mines where miners still mine
for zinc and copper for next to nothing in some of the
worst conditions you could imagine. we crawled
through small tunnels maybe 20m in length crouched
down on nearly hands and knees (holy claustrophobia),
we climbed through crevises, and stepped around large,
sometimes seemingly endless holes all the while
hearing the distant dull thuds of dynamite explosions.
on the bright side we got to blow up some dynamite
ourselves (well, our guide). i was sitting on a rock
at a safe distance and was nearly knocked on my back
by the force of the explosion... AWESOME... i hope the
picture turns out.

tonight, we head to cochabamba on a night bus and then
some time tomorrow we head to Villa Tunari where...
we.... will.... be.........

..... working with all types of jungle animals for 2
weeks!!!!!! we have a friend there and she said that
they are actually short on 'cat people' and she told
them that we would be there in a few days!!!! i might
be working with a puma!!!! A PUMA!!! if not probably
monkeys or birds both of which i am soooo excited
about. A PUMA!!! this will probably be my last
letter for awhile because i don't think that they have
internet there... although cam and i are going to have
to take off for atleast a day to get our entrance
stamps extended in cochabamba, so you might all hear
from me then... A PUMA!!!

during my last letter i was so depressed by recalling
my 'trip to hell' that i think i forgot so many funny
little things form the Salar de Uyuni (salt plains).
for example us streaking in the plains and then
sitting in a car for the rest of the day covered in
salt from the water... the other tour who's truck fell
through the salt, it was pretty funny... and then we
played soccer... sorry fútbol on the plains, very
surreal. on the second day we climbed the salivor dali
stone tree and got a great 'mean face' picture on top
of it. on the third day we got up really early early
and booted it to these gysers (sp?) while pumping the
Pult Fiction sound track. "if any of you motherf*ckin'
pr*cks move, I'ma execuit every motherf*ckin' last one
of you!" what a movie!!!
we went to some hot springs later but it was still
early enough in the morning that there was ice on the
ground! cool to see but not to walk on.... especially
after posing naked under our ponchos!!! what a great
picture! and yes we have ponchos... Mmmmm, alpaca.

i think thats all folks

Bolivia Part 1 frm Aitch, dated April 12th 2003

This is a little long but its been an eventful 2 weeks here...


This is some amazing country.

Its legal to buy dynamite, ammonium nitrate and cocoa leaves (chew for that authentic cocaine flavour...) in the same shop. And blow two of the three up on a mountainside.

You can crawl into a mountain 5000 metres high, eroded like Swiss cheese by 20,000 claustrophobic tunnels, watch miners digging by hand for 36 hours at a time for less than 4 dollars a day, looking for silver, tin, zinc, copper...and feel the rock all around reverberating at midday as they set off their dynamite. And you will never be so glad to see daylight again.

And last week Bolivia even managed to superimpose my life onto Kiefer Sutherlands. To re-create your own 24 little adrenalin-filled hours, we have devised a sure-fire recipe :

Firstly have your shit-my-whole-life-is-in-it bag snatched from your feet in a bus station by a gang of professionals. Hurrah for the police, who catch the swarthy Bolivian-looking culprit legging it with said backpack proudly displaying its Canadian flag (full marks for observation. But sadly he later escapes by pulling his hand through the handcuffs, leaving only a trail of blood and the backpack behind him and a hole in your pocket when you have to tip the police(see Don for a more detailed account...).

Next, fling yourself in front of a moving bus to get on it. Only to find that they have sold double the amount of tickets as there are seats . But you get to spend the next 9 hours lying UNDER the seats with your decapitated head sticking out into the aisle and sharing this small space with kids wrapped in blankets, guinea pigs in boxes and endless stinking feet claustrophobically hemming you in on all sides (again, see Don for more information...Cam and I had seats!).

Finally, add a sprinkling of another rocky dirt track, stir in a no- toilet-stop policy, liberally dose with temperature changes of minus to plus 15 degrees and no temperature controls apart from a window and 100 sweaty smelly bodies. Leave to vinrate and stagnate for 9 hours and you finish up with 3 very unhappy people at 6 in the morning.

But then, up ahead, town lights, twinkling in the dark. Until the exhaustion makes them look like fires and Cams voice rises out of the dark ¨I heard the road to Hell is rocky¨. Indeed the town seemed very like it and we certainly felt like it, but sadly without Hells heat, it being about 15 below zero on arrival. So for that finishing touch, sit in Hells town square in a sleeping bag with the packs of stray dogs, freezing, find your friends, argue for 2 hours with a Bolivian tour agent to get said friends off/on/off/on a prebooked trip, miss getting on your own trip in the meantime, see your friends heading off and have to retire to a room for the afternoon to recover.

All in 24 unforgettable hours travelling to Uyuni.

Thankfully the following 4 day Salt Plains trip we had come here to do more than made up for the journey, which was a sizeable achievement!White flatness, water reflecting the clouds so you couldnt tell where land and sky started and finished, naked Canadians cutting their feet up running on the salt crystals (very stupid idea...), ponchos (naked and otherwise!), natural thermal baths, coloured mountains, so cold nights you sleep in all your backpack clothes, blankets and sleeping bag and still chiver, flamingoes, dust, llamas, basketball with village kids, not enough food to support naked sports and the cold, making friends with 12 metre cacti, jumping between the roofs of rusty steam trains abandoned in a train graveyard.... it was awesome! Recommend that everyone does it.

Another recommendation whilst we are talking of Bolivia, is to go to the Amazon. Take plenty of photographs but dont take the medical advice for how to avoid malaria - by covering up all your limbs - as the Amazonian Basin mosquitos have read the said same advice and laugh in its face as they bite through all your clothes a hundred times on your bum and upper thighs. Making sitting in a river boat for days agony, your state of mind pretty miserable and avoiding going to the mosquito-paradise of the toilet (hole in ground with wooden seat) for a whole 3 days an obsession (and it IS achievable!). Although seeing annocondas, eagles, howler monkeys, alligators, birds of paradise, pink dolphins and wading through pampas up to your knees (waist if you are my height!) was incredible. But after 3 days of no shower, no relief from insects and no toilet, I was craving a low oxygen, high altitude mountain to sit on.

So I flew (no more buses) to the highest city in this part of the world, La Paz, so inappropriately named (The Peace) given recent events. Looking for some more adventure, as if I hadnt had enough. And there I found plenty of gun toting individuals but no one volunteering to shoot me. So in the absence of bullet holes and the words ¨never again¨ from my available vocabulary for the day, I went mountain biking AGAIN. Oh the follies of youth....

Theres an amazing survival mechanism the body has that works to dim the memory of pain and fear. This works fantastically well in women after childbirth, encouraging further procreation, but less well in women after the Ecuadorian Mountain Bike Episode, encouraging further life-threatening activities. And so with memory sufficiently impaired I turned up the fear factor and signed up to ride down the officially Most Dangerous Road in the World - affectionately locally referred to as The Road of Death.

With hindsight, the word Death is entirely appropriate but Road is an oversophistication of what is, in essence, simply a mud track dynamited into the side of a rock face in a 3000 metre high series of mountains. This leaves 1500 metres of loose topsoil-and-tree landlide potential above, and 1500 metres of gravity-assisted death-drop potential below.

The track was designed to be one vehicle wide. Unfortunately due to a planning oversight they measured this against a standard small family car and not the average south American tourist bus. And then agreed to allow two way traffic. Every hairpin bend is also a blind corner. Theres pot holes big enough to bounce the endless speeding banana trucks right over the edge. Cover this in thick fog like cold gruel. And then add the ever present crumbling edges over which tyres hang precariously, aided in its premature demise by frequent landslides and waterfalls that cascade across the road and take half of it with them. Now you have it.

Quite simply the rules of the road are 1) loudest sounding horn 2) right of way (uphill?) and 3) right of weight (bigger = better). As I was about to undertake a 60 km downhill suicide run on two wheels I didnt qualify on any of these three counts. And judging by the crushed vehicle carcases littering the valley floor, the rules are frequently and fatally contested en route by everything going this way.

For too many kms to remember clearly, my fingers were gripped tightly in a battle to first to burnout - between the bikes brakes and my courage. Before you leave you pray to the God of Mother Earth by sprinkling alcohol on the ground before your tyres. Then you cross yourselves on the way down at every memorial to people lost over the edge (and thats a lot of crossing, trust me). And in between the switching between praying to any God that will listen and blaspheming them all at every corner, I was secretly praying for a small miracle like a (non disasterous) puncture so I could retire legitimately to the support bus trundling teasingly along behind me. No such luck, just pain and fear and mud the whole way. Vertigo kicked in big time and I got drop-fixated which only added to my severe balance problems on the huge potholes at 40 km/hour speeds....it was all going horribly wrong for a nice day out biking in the sunshine and pleasant country scenery.....

So to cut a long story short, on the long, long, long, long, long etc etc route down it was ROCKY with ROCKS, my sweaty palms and racing heart the only testament to me being alive. My face was set into a permanent frozen grimace of sheer fear that my friendly Kiwi guide mistook for glee as he hurtled ,without even acknowledging the presence of brakes ,around every corner ahead of me. The bumps and slides were so frightening but great in a sort of near-death-experience sort of adrenalined-up way....I think. At the bottom my bruised hands and arse were only outdone by my bruised ego at not being able to keep up with the testosterone-fuelled freewheeling of the guys on the trip. The only bit I really enjoyed was the uphills, where I got to work hard and sweat and be in control. Not appreciated by the Dutch girls who were confused by the concept of hills but were scarily keeping up with the guys on the downhills.

And I got to the bottom alive. I got over it. But this time I MEAN it. If I ever suggest going downhill mountain biking again with 1500 metre drops and tracks laughingly called roads, someone please please hand me a gun and i will shoot myself. Although (post note) the next day I did then get on a 16 hour Bus Ride along the same winding, treacherous bumpy road and felt equally scared but less in control. Ive suddenly found an urge to fly everywhere!

Now sitting in the wonderful colonial city of Sucre, trying to find a route through Argentina to Brazil without need for buses and debating whether to spend some time at an animal refuge walking pumas and talking to the animals. Decisions decisions....

Bolivia Part 2 to follow....

Love
Aitch
xxx

Don´s mail after the salt flats dated April 9th 2003
*WARNING: THIS LETTER IS VERY LONG... FEEL FREE TO
TAKE IT IN TWO OR THREE SITTINGS, IF YOU ARE TRAVELING
RIGHT NOW AND PAYING FOR INTERNET, SKIM!*


so some time last week we hoped on a bus to head down
to a town(AKA HELL... i'll get to that later) called
Uyuni so that we could see this great big salt plain.

the journey there was less than enjoyable to say the
least... actually, i'm not even going to be sarcastic
it was terrible! but led to some delierious laughing
fits. we managed to just make on bus, due to my lack
of punctuality(sorry cam and aitch), to Oruro form
where we would be connecting to Uyuni... we were
promised a nice bus since it was going to be a long
night bus and the first 3hrs to Oruro were aboiut as
enjoyable as a bus can be. *this is where all the
shit goes down* we stopped at the bus terminal and
were waiting for the connecting bus. i put my
packs(big, and day pack) next to cam to get some water
for the long ride... "don! was your bag just
there!!!??"
"HOLY SHIT!"
we ran to the exit and i ran to the nearest corner adn
then to the next... people everywhere... "where's my
bag!?"
everything in my day pack is flashing through my
head... my glasses, all my books and maps... shit! my
journal! oh, my, god,... my passport! my visa! my
drivers license! my birth certificate! AHHHHHHH!
i ran back in and cam and aitch have found the police
and i was instantly lead all over the terminal to each
different office, finally a plain clothed officer is
leading me up stairs... i've got my shoes tied and i'm
ready to chase down this kid....
we get to his office and i'm telling him everything i
can in my best spanish(terrible)... i told him that my
bag was black and blue... after a quick look at the
bloody hand cuffs locked to a metal chair in his
office he pulls my bag out from his desk!
he had caught the kid almost right away, running out
of the terminal with a bag with a flag on it... the
canada flag comes in handy yet again. he arrested the
kid and handcuffed him to a chair in his office... in
his absence the kid had pulled his hand through the
cuffs!
of course this being bolivia i have ot tip him a hefty
50 bolivianos... that actually only equals about
$8US... i really didn't care though i'd have given him
all the money in my pocket
i'm starting to calm down now but i'm feeling
physically nauseaous and we have to se if we can still
catch our bus... aitch has already arranged for
alternative busses thinking that we would not be able
to catch this one and we did nearly miss it until she
jumped infront of it while it was trying to leave the
station! *the story doesn't get better* they've
already given our seats away but they've told us that
we can sit in the aisle... that doesn't sound too bad,
this was we can just lie down in our sleeping bags and
hopfully wake up in Uyuni. we board our less than
satisfactory bus to find that we will be joining 15-20
other mothers, fathers, children, infants and more in
the aisle! we were lucky, for the first time in this
episode, when one couple gave up thier seats...
originally ours, to us.... there are still 3 of us
though.

*A GOOD HALF WAY POINT TO REST*

we started with aitch on my lap, then she figured that
she could find a comfortable space on the floor at our
feet and under the seat... that lasted for half and
hour. after a few more switches i found myself lying
diagonally under the seats in front of us and through
our foot space with ust my head and shoulders laying
in the aisle next to the feet of a bundled up,
sleeping child and nest to the feet of a man who was
standing nearly directly over me(he stood the entire
9hrs!) amazingly enough i was quite content due to
the fact that this was the first bus ride so far that
i could actually fully stretch out in. i futilly tried
to sleep cramed under these claustrophobic inducing
metal chairs next to the smelly feet of two
individuals, while the bus shook constantly.
we knew we were getting closer when cam spotted some
lights in the distance. as the bus continued to shake
the lights started to look less like lights and more
like a blazing fire spread across the horizon.
"i've heard it's a bumpy ride to hell" cam says.
we arrived shortly... in Hell and gathered our bags in
the sub-zero temp. we found breakfast in the nearest
hostel complete with eery hellish decor... even the
crucified jesus was staring through us... not to
mention a psycotic looking porceline bunny rabbit.
there was now way we were going to sleep there so we
walked around in the freezing cold until the sun rose
and we started to look for a tour agency to do this
salt plain thing with.
3 more hours of stress followed as we failed to
coordinate with our friends on a tour, got into a
verbal fight with one lady at an agency... and finally
failed to get on a tour at all!

we bought a number of beers
smoked up in our room
passed out feeling much better

*that's a haiku poem for those of you who didn't
know... check the syllables*

enough stress... i'm getting tense re-calling all of
these events

we got on a tour the next day and 'evryting was
irey'(in a jamaican accent)

the salt plains were incredible in a desolate way...
glad a had my glasses, it was all bright white. we
found an area that still had water on it... only 2cm
though, enough to create a great reflection until it
was ruined by two nameless delinquent streakers who
ran into the distance until their feet hurt and
returned for there clothes. kids these days! must have
been on drugs (right Dale)

the tour was 4 days. we saw some awesome deserts, some
amazing rocks that had been sculpted by the wind...
some of which actually inspired salvidor dali himself!
we saw flamingoes, lots of llamas, viscunas (like a
deer), viscachas(a weird rabbit, squirrel, chinchilla
thing), some kind of ostrich type bird, a number of
colored lakes (blue, green, red), lots of mountains,
cam and i climbed lots of rocks, caves with real human
bones including full sculls, we swam in hot springs
first thing in the morning while there was still ice
on the ground... i can't think anymore

sorry for the length guys

kerry - you're first! i know your b-day is coming up
but i don't know if i'll be in touch until after that
so HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR KERRY
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!!!

martin - i'm glad to hear you are treating everything
well... and stay away from my colorful pillow you
bastard! send some music too if you can, one track at
a time... just the real gems

mark - unfortunatly we won't see you in la paz we're
heading to potosi then cochabamba

jenn - thanks for the letter, it's nice to hear from
you... where are you moving too?

tom... where are you?... want to buy a school bus with
me and drive to central america... fcuk school for a
year... i know it's what you feel

mom and dad - i need to talk to you regarding real
estate and building... i want to build a bar/hostel in
panama or guatamala.... dad, take 6 months off work in
a year or two and come build a house in c. america!
you'd love it... all the building and such!

everyone - change of plans... we are no longer going
to Iquitos. we are going to climb a real mountain
(Illmani, near la paz or huyana potosi) over 6000m
with ice climbing and everything... and then... we are
going to do a jungle trek for 8 days from sorata to
mapiri... WITH MACHETES!!! how cool is that, and no
doubt very challenging

that's it i'm gone

peace love happiness and laughter
don