Sandboarding

Look at meee!!!!!!!



(I promise I am actually sandboarding...it just looks like I am trying to salsa down a giant dune)

The Salar in Bolivia

So I am back in Peru. Bolivia was amazing, and I wish I had more time to spend there. The highlight of my trip was visiting the Salar de Uyuni, the worlds largest salt flat. It is approximately 4,085 square miles wide and is the remains of a prehistoric lake that dried up around 40,000 years ago.

There was an island in the middle of the salar that we went to visit filled with cacti and fossilized coral. I as i walked around I amused myself by envisioning that at night little iridescent, translucent ghost fish swim around the dead coral; sort of mimicking the way the humming birds swam through the air, hovering around the cacti during the day.

There is a small area of the salar that is still covered in water. It grows during the rainy season, but last week it was just the size of a small river. But living in this small salt river were about 50 flamingos. Don´t ask me how flamingos can live 4,000 meters in the air, in the freezing cold (it reaches 20 below in the winter nights), hundreds of miles from the ocean. But they are there.
After seeing the salar, we drove through the desert that inspired Dali`s paintings, saw a pink lake, and a forest of more fossilized coral.



I also found out (after I finished the tour) that the reason the tour companies can afford to buy the Land Cruisers that shuttle the tourists around the salar during the 4 day tour is that they double as cocaine couriers. The salar is in the South of Bolivia and sort of runs along the border of Chile. Many of the companies pack a bunch of cocaine into the cars and later give the packages to the families that we stay with at night so that they can take them across the border to Chile where the coke is sold a quadruple the price it would be in Bolivia. Hmm.


The other highlight of my time in Bolivia was my trip to the collective mines in Potosi. Our group bought a bunch of cigarettes, dynamite, and coca leaves (the leaves that are used to produce cocaine) for the miners and headed up. Potosi is the highest city in the world and so the miners, while underground, are all working at altitude. They work 8 to 13 hour days and don´t eat anything other than coca leaves while they are underground. The miners also carry out all the minerals under their own power. Some of them carry everything on their backs. Others have carts that they push along the tracks that run through the mountain. About every 20 minutes we would hear a distant rumble and our guides would start yelling at us to get off the tracks. Suddenly out of the pitch black two or three guys would apparatein front of us, running at full speed and pushing their mineral cart in front of them.

After crawling through the mines for a couple of hours, we gave an offering of coca leaves to Tio (spanish for uncle) and then sat around drinking with the miners who were getting off work. Tio is a lump of minerals formed roughly into the shape of the devil. The miners always give him cigarettes (he likes filtered best)and coca leaves as gifts. They believe that he governs the space under the mountain and that by giving him offerings they can ask for favors (i.e. safety or prosperity). Every time we took a drink of the 99 proof alcohol that the miners like (yes, we were still underground at his point) we first had to poor some of our drink on the ground for Tio. The next drink went for Pacha Mama, or mother earth. And so on...

So that was Bolivia. Ghost fish and lakes, devils under mountains, cocaine and coca.

Mary North Face

The other day, as I tottered across the Bolivian border at a surprisingly slow pace, I started wondering how on earth my backpack had gotten to weigh at least 35 pounds. So I did a mental inventory of my belongings and discovered that, in fact, I am much more like a travelling art store/library that can camp out in the wilderness for several days at a time (you know, so I can supply the llamas with crayons and reading material) than like a normal backpacker.
Here is a list of things found in my backpack that will startle, amaze, and suport my previous claim:
1. Can of spray paint of that mint green color that is found in older bathrooms
2. Manilla file folders for making stencils
3. a bag of 90 white plastic doves that normally belong on the tops of wedding cakes
4. a compass the kind for drawing circles, not the kind for finding your direction, although I have one of those too
5. several notebooks for journaling and general scribbling
6. exacto knife again for stencils
7. about six tiny tubes of super glue and one tube of something that i think construction workers use to glue pieces of buildings together when welding fails
8. eight books
a. a book of literary criticism that focuses on travel writing that I sort of stole from the DC public library
b. a spanish childrens book about Lorenzo the penguin, who totally kicks ass and is my travel hero
c. Peru guidebook
d. spanish dictionary
e. spanish coursebook
f. spanish verb book
g. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (hopefully not indicative of my social future)
h. guidebook that focuses on trekking

How do I fit all of this stuff, along with a tent, a camp stove, a sleeping pad, clothes, two bags of dried beans that I have had for at least a month now, and various other odds and ends, into one single backpack, you ask?? My only answer is that Mary Poppins and North Face must hace some sort of contract going on.

My Wannabe Hero

This is how the spirit of Joe Thornhill saved my life in Bolivia.
I met met Joe´s Australian double yesterday. He is dark, slightly hairy, has big eyes and long lashes, likes to drink, is quite jovial (unless incised, for example by corrupt police officers, at which point he beings to yell and make large arm motions like an out of control windmill), and he saved me at the Bolivian border checkpoint.
Let me explain. I didn´t have an entrance stamp for Bolivia (the Peruvians failed to give my passport to the Bolivians at the border crossing, resulting in a lack of official stamp). I, however, was unaware of this. About an hour past the border, everyone had to get out of the bus in order to make a ferry crossing. The bus was put on a barge, and everyone had to stand in line getting their passports checked before they too were ferried across the river. This was the point when it became obvious that I had no entrance stamp. I was detained. The border officials told me I had to pay $150 biolivianos to get the stamp. I became angry. Crossing the border is free. This was extortion. I was not giving into this intimidation and corruption. I was a tower of righteous strength. I also did not have any Bolivianos to pay them with, even if I wanted to, and there were no ATMs in this town, rendering me penniless. I argued some more with the police. At this point, I, the tower, started to crumble rapidly as I watched my bus floating down the river, further and further away from me, with my backpack on top of it. I started to become desperate. I pulled out my wallet, opened it up and dumped all my change on the desk. "I have nothing!!" I yelled. The police told me I could leave my passport with them, go to La Paz with my bus and come back the next day to pay and retrieve my passport. I laughed manically at them and told them my passport and I do not separate. At this point the bus had reached the other side of the river. I was ready to start crying.
And then I saw an angry Joeseph Thornhill flailing and yelling in an Australian accent. The same thing had happened to him, and together we took on the Bolivian Border Patrol. He did his windmill flail and yelled in English. I looked small and angry (as I often do) and interpreted everything in my totally kick ass Spanish (which consists of about 40 important nouns and unconjugated verbs). Eventually we gave in to the corruption and he paid my fee, saving me from having my passport confiscated.
Lessons learned?? Dont leave the border without first checking all stamps. Also, get to know Joe Thornhill and make him love you (just buy him a beer, a nice one). It will pay off when you are about to be deported from Bolivia and his spirit appears in an Australian body to save you.

Happy Makes Me a Modern Girl...Angry Makes Me A Modern Girl

So I have some anger problems. It´s true. I think it´s a result of having Irish-Italian blood.
But it´s what makes me a good barback and what propelled me through college even whilst wallowing in despair. It´s why I love punk music, even really bad punk music. (tangent coming) All those bodies writhing around feeding and bouncing off each other´s sweaty anger. It´s release and transformation. I fucking love these photos taken by Edward Clover. They show people flying, overcoming gravity. They show people ripping apart their bodies in attempt to release eveything inside. Punk wraps up all the gutteral and raw, blasts it through huge amps, and creates motion. To me punk is motion. And (for me) motion is freedom (thus my love of things like running, travel, and the bike). It moves people in the crowd to dance, break things, to want to do something. It propells. Sometimes it just propells people into a drug/alcohol induced blitz, but sometimes it does more. It is corporal and cerebral. Anyway, I greedily horde my anger (for when I need propulsion), and I love punk.

Most of my anger is self induced as well as self directed. I get indignant and sometimes enraged when I feel like I am being held back, not achieving things, wasting time, stagnating. Worse still is when I start dwelling on how I have no idea how to get what I want; I only have fledgling ideas that flail hungrily about in my mind. So anyway, the old fury was starting to flair up again. I was getting really fustrated with myself for not taking intiative and engaging in something that would make my trip more than just a escape from DC (albeit a total awesome one). I was not being creative, sponaneous, agressive enough. SO I started thinking of things that would make it more. I came up with the idea of collecting indegenous stories in hopes of publishing a trilingual book. Pipe dream, I know, but something to work for. So, I am working. Probably I am just doing a lot of work for nothing. But fuck it. Why not. It has made me a lot happier. It has been amazing to watch these people get excited when they understand what I am trying to do. They have sung for me, let me stay in their homes, watched me play games with their children, and allowed me to photograph them. So I might not get published, become famous in the literary world, and thus get to have hot art-fag sex on top of elephants while researching my next book in Nepal (although I am still hoping). At least I can know that I tried to push myself further and understand these people more than the average tourist. And for that I give myself two hells-yeahs.
Anyway, another thing that I thought would help to elevate my trip status to "totally kick-ass" would be making street art in all of the major South American cities I visited. But I am shit at drawing and I don´t really have access to photoshop to make cool stencils. What to do?? Well one day my love of the odd brought me into a strange little shop selling notebooks, hairspray, sequins, and plastic figures of things like fat angels, doves, and St. Francis. Doves...I bought a hundred tiny plastic doves meant for things like weddings, baptisms, ...and the streets of Cusco. To me they were perfect...hopeful, peaceful, beautiful. So last night, after hitting up the bars, I came back to my hostal drunk and ready. I set out with doves and super glue in my backpack. I had grand visions of a hundred doves flying along the wall that followed the street up to my hostel. I started glueing........my fingers together. ::Sigh:: The glue was completely liquid and slid off the plastic doves like water off a duck. Also, glue (even super glue) doesn´t work so well for attatching things to dirt walls. The dirt just absorbs it. Go figure. So I ran out of super glue after about 5 minutes and 10 doves. So yeah...I need some practice before I become the next Banksy. But it´s a start...and I still have 90 doves left.....