I finally found a hostel and ate breakfast at a wonderful market right outside of it. The breakfast area of the market was like a bunch of little kitchens, each with their own table. Each of these small kitchens had just enough room for one woman (i am not being sexist...there were just no men there) to stand behind the counter and hand out the food to the people who came to sit at her table. I had coffee and two pieces of pan amasado (homemade bread) with jam for a grand total of $0.45--that's my kind of breakfast. I then found a bus to the mine. Potosí is an old mining town thus pretty much all of the tourist attractions have to do with mines. I took the bus up to a plaza and then started walking toward what I hoped were the mines.
And then I realized that it was Sunday.
One of the few things that I literally hate about Latin America, is the fact that NOTHING is open on Sunday. nothing. It is so frustrating. and to make it even worse, I have to live this frustration every week because I somehow, throughout the course of the week, forget this horrible fact about Latin America and get my hopes up time and time again.
Someone offered me a ride up to the mine and I of course accepted, because it was free. He then offered to give me a bit of a tour around Potosí which I accepted...until he suggested we buy a bottle of rum for the road. Not okay. It was rainy the rest of the day...actually it rained almost the entire time that I was in Potosí (an omen? perhaps). Thus, the rest of the day I spent writing in my journal and reading and responding to facebook messages regarding the earthquake which really made me want to be back in santiago. That evening I also ended up going into a church as mass was starting...so i stayed.
Day 16. The next day I got up early and took a bus all the way up to the mine. I knew there were tour companies that take groups down into the mine, but I was lazy and had been told that i could find someone to give me a tour at the mine itself. Also, I figured a tour company would be more expensive. And boy was i right. A kid that was about 12 years old came up to me right when I stepped off of the bus (how he knew that i was a tourist, i have no idea) and offered me a tour for 25 bs (less than $4). I automatically took him up on the deal and he led me and two other guys (both latin american) quickly up the hill (too quickly. i had to stop because I couldn't breathe at one point. the air is super thin because everything is so high up. I walked really slowly everywhere and the instant that I thought my head might be starting to hurt i would pull out my coca leaves to chew on). We walked past the tour groups of blond people putting on white mining suits and helmets and going over what i imagined to be safety procedures, to a tiny house on the side of the hill. There we were given helmets with lamps as a little girl offered to sell us precious stones.
And then we entered the mine. Somehow, when imagining 'going down into a mine,' I had created this vision of getting lowered DOWN into a mine. What i really did was walk about 10 minutes into a large hole on the side of the hill and then turn around and walk back out. Admittedly, inside the hole it looked mine-ish, but so did that ride in disney world and...i mean...i'm pretty sure that wasn't real. Once inside the mine there was a cave-like space in which there was a "tio" which are these god-like (i'm really into the hyphenated words this paragraph) figures that can be found throughout the mines. They keep them happy by putting cigarettes, alcohol, and coca leaves all around them.
There were little flags and confetti around el tio as well because they had just finished their carnaval. Overall, the mine was a bit disappointing, but for less than $4, what was i supposed to expect? It's not like i could fill out a complaint card or anything.After the mine i decided to see the other tourist attraction in Potosí. El Museo de la Moneda. Everyone I talked to told me that you can see the foot marks of the slaves that worked there...but i wouldn't know, because it is closed on mondays. Potosí fail. And then I fled to Sucre.
Day 17: Sucre is a university city. I stayed in the center and there were constantly tons of college and school-aged kids around. My hostel was right across from a market where you could buy vegetables, fruits, toiletries, jewelry, or meat (i literally saw a skinned cow's head...the only skin left was on the tip of the nose. definitely one of the most disturbing/nauseating things I have ever seen).
(http://www.panoramio.com/photo/123278)My favorite part about this market was the juice stands. These worked basically like the breakfast tables at the market in Potosí, only here there was no table. There were a few chairs and if you were lucky, the newspaper. I literally went here every single day for a late breakfast of jugo de chirimoya. Absolutely delicious. And oh so cheap; for about 50 cents I could buy a glass of juice and she would refill my glass with whatever was left in the blender when i had finished my first glass. It was magical.
I enjoyed my first day of Sucre looking around the mercado central and the center. Sucre is very proud of the fact that they have dinosaur tracks, but paying money to ride in a dinosaur tour bus out to the desert to see them really didn't sound fun to me. Instead, I decided to go to the Castillo de la Glorieta. It was the castle for a man and a woman that owned an orphanage and the kids lived next to the castle.
It was really pretty and, architecturally, it was a weird mix of cultures. Not to mention the fact that they had made the orphanage area of the castle, which was directly across a small creek, into military barracks and all of the land was training ground for the military. It was a bit odd to say the least.I got to the castle in the middle of a tour, so i saw the last part of the tour first and then went for the first half of the next tour with another group. The second tour was with a group of older missionaries from Iowa and only one of them spoke any spanish, so I got to help translate a bit for the tour guide. It made the tour a lot more interesting. And on my way out the guide had asked the lady at the front desk to get me to write some of the words that he had forgotten down in English. Good deed for the day? Check.
After looking around the city a bit more, I felt satisfied that I had seen enough and went to buy my bus ticket. My plan was to go back to Santiago by making my way through Uyuni and the salt flats and then into Calama, Chile and back down. When I went to buy the ticket to Uyuni, though, I was informed that there were no buses going out. The bus stations are filled with many different bus companies that each have only a few destinations, but they each have someone standing out in front of the company's stand yelling where the next bus is going...which normally turns a trip to Oruro into something like this: "Orurorurorurorurooooooo." It took me a few tries until someone finally explained to me that there was a nationwide bus strike taking place and that the buses wouldn't be running until friday at the earliest. It was tuesday...and I was pissed. This meant that I would have to waste more money on hostels and food than i had been planning on. I had literally been keeping a budget, but this threw things completely off. I just kept trying to look at the bright side: at least i wasn't stuck in Potosí.
That night I decided that I would attempt to meet someone to talk to (i had been basically alone for 3 days and was already tired of it...and seeing as how i was going to be stuck in Sucre for a few more days, i wanted someone to hang out with). I walked to the center, or the town square, where all of the hippies gather, and happened upon a show. There was a man in the center of the square doing tricks and when i stopped to watch some kids offered me a seat on a bench. We began to talk and I found out that they were two bolivian freshmen studying engineering in sucre. It was interesting to talk with them because they were both from a small town near the border with brazil, so they knew a bit of Portuguese, but at the same time they were quite from the rest of the world. They didn't even have email addresses or know how to type. We got to talking about what religion we are and when I told them that I still am not sure, one of the guys, Leonardo, literally said, "So you don't believe in God? Hasn't anything bad ever happened to you?" I couldn't help but laugh as I thought back over my trip. Oh Leo, if only you knew.
Day 18: The next morning I found out that when they say national bus strike, they mean every single bus in the nation has stopped functioning...even the city buses. I didn't have money to spend on a cab, so I was stuck in the center of town which I had already scoured pretty heavily the day before. I decided to ask some college students how to get to La Recoleta, a place that looks out over the town. It just so happened that one of the guys owns a motorcycle and offered me a ride. So instead of walking the eight blocks up the hill, I just hopped on the back of his moto and we were there in a jiffy. Sometimes I love being a gringa.
La Recoleta was absolute perfection. It was just a place to look out over the city, but I fell in love with the view and the serenity of the area. It was perfect to just spend time writing in my journal and I would have enjoyed soaking up the sun there...had my entire body not been peeling for the second or third time from my horrible burn on La Isla del Sol...STILL.
There was even a nice restaurant area looking out over the city with reclining lawn chairs and tiramisu. I was almost glad I had lost my debit card, cause I know i would have been all over that had i had any money on me.
(p.s. i stole these sucre pictures from paualvar on viajeros.com)Later that night I went to eat dinner at the mercado central. I was tired of the lack of meal variety in Bolivia. I loved Bolivia, but the food was not my favorite. I would have given anything for a tasty pupusa from El Salvador. It was literally impossible to continue my semi-vegetarian thing that was so easy to stick to in Chile. It was either eat fried chicken and french fries for every meal or eat cow. There was no in-between. So i gave in and started eating meat again which made me sick (at least i think that was what was wrong with me...). The sad thing is, the meat was not even worth it to eat. The meals at the market basically consisted of chewy meat with mote and ensalada or soup with a chunk of meat in it. I did however enjoy the bolivian version of the hamburger and french fries. It was odd, but there was never a hamburger stand without the option to add french fries to said hamburger. Normally you would come away from the stand with a hamburger topped with sauteed onions and four french fries.
Anyway, while I was eating dinner at the market, I met a Peruvian and a Colombian who were supposedly traveling and had met each other randomly. This would be totally believable, except they were oddly old and 'normal' to have dropped everything to travel through bolivia randomly. Turns out that they were really working in Sucre though and didn't have a work visa so it had to be on the DL. One of the guys was 'an author.' He told me all about the book he is currently writing and even gave me one of his books full of cliché, plot-less, moral-at-the-end short stories. Not my favorite book, but a good souvenir none-the-less.
I also met an Argentinian guy in my hostel. He had just graduated from law school and was traveling a bit before finding a job. We walked around the town together and went out at night to some of the touristy places where all of the tourists and wealthy Bolivians congregate--I was just along for the ride. He only spoke to me in English, but I didn't really mind because it was the first time in over two weeks that I had spoken English. Not to mention his English was perfect, so it was hard to insist that we slow down the conversation so that I could stumble my way through forming sentences in Spanish.
Day 19: This day I went to La Recoleta again with the intent of writing in my journal, but upon my arrival I found a group of guys playing soccer in the courtyard (they hadn't been able to go to work because of the lack of buses). Every once in a while the ball would be kicked over the wall and down the hill and someone would have to run after it so that it didn't roll all the way to the center of town. It added a bit of excitement to the game...and when this happened a few guys that weren't running after the ball would come over and talk to me, asking me questions about the US, etc.
I think it is so interesting to find out how people from other countries view the US. In Bolivia, I found that most people that asked me about the US thought that it is all big cities filled with big buildings and they were sure that we have a lot more natural disaster than they do. I'm serious. It was always..."Oh, so you must really like all of the nature here. What is the US like? You have a lot of natural disasters, right?" I'm not really sure where they got the whole natural disaster thing from. I wanted to point out the fact that CHILE just had a really bad earthquake...but i let it go.
Day 20: I woke up at 7 so that I could get to the bus station at 8 to buy my ticket to Mendoza (I had decided to go back through Argentina because, 1. i had heard it was cheaper than chile and 2. i wanted to see something new out the window of the bus). Upon arrival, I immediately regretted not getting to the station earlier. Evidently there is only one bus company that has a bus going to Villazón, which is the last town in Bolivia before crossing into Argentina, and there was already a line filling a good part of the station at this bus company. Every other company was empty, but mine had a huge line. Figures.
I started talking with the woman in front of me and we each told each other why we needed to get a ticket for today. I, because I am running out of money and I really want to get back to Santiago, and she, because her daughter needed to get back for her medical residency in Córdoba, Argentina. When we got up to the front of the line, all of the buses for that day were filled and the bus for the next day was almost completely filled. I had to buy a ticket for the very last seat in the bus. I was very frustrated because now I was going to have to waste even more money on a hostel that I didn't want to be staying in, but the woman that I had been talking with earlier invited me to stay with her. I knew there were ulterior motives, I had gathered that her daughter wanted to study abroad and I figured she wanted me to practice english with her or something of the sort. That's a small price to pay for a place to stay, so I took her up on the offer.
To be continued... (i promise i'm almost done with this bolivia trip)
