Just outside, as I type, La Paz's main drag, the Avenida Santa Cruz, is closed to vehicle traffic, and squads of heavily armed riot police with tear-gas canisters and shields and lots and lots of machine guns are milling around, and occasional loud-but-unidentifiable crackling booms sound every minute from a few blocks south, briefly drowning out the chanting demonstrators. Just another weekend in Bolivia.
Last night I saw TROY (the two set-piece duels and everything between them are excellent; the first and last twenty minutes are tedious. Sort of the inverse of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN) and there was an unexpected intermission. I stood up, walked out of the theatre, entered the men's room, lined up for the urinals, and had the sudden terrifying realization that I had absolutely no idea where the hell I was, theatre, street, city, country, anything. I guess it was triggered by a) first day in a new city, b) I'd been in movie-world and hadn't had the ending's closure yet. I don't think that's ever happened to me before, not even on waking. I'm very glad it only lasted a few harrowing seconds.
This morning I went (eventually, after a lengthy dispute with my conniving dishonest taxi driver, which I half-won half-lost) to a gym, and an hour of weightlifting just about wiped me out. It had a kind of slow-build effect; I felt OK when I left the weight room, but had to sit, head between knees, and breathe heavily for several minutes after getting out of the shower. La Paz is not the most oxygenated place in the world, between the pollution and the 4100m altitude, and while I'm well enough acclimatized for walking and hiking, lifting really sucks the O
2 out of you. Also I ate right before working out, always a bad idea.
Also visited the
Museo de Coca - which reports, among other things, that Coca-Cola still uses 200 tons of coca leaves per year for flavouring, and that Western countries are allowed to legally produce cocaine, but developing nations are not - and then the Witches' Market, about a dozen stalls womanned by fierce old witches (I presume) selling carvings, etchings, unidentifiable herbs, hides, bones, and other animal parts; most disturbingly, large assortments of dried llama fetuses (fetii?)
I would like another week in Bolivia, to see the Uyuni salt flats and the Potosi silver mine, but c'est la vie. Well, la vie is flexible, I could blow a few hundred bucks to move my flight from Lima back a week, but...well...
See, the thing is, ironically, I'm not at all a dedicated traveller. About half the people I've travelled with in South America are long-termers, on the road for nine months or a year. The longest I've ever done was six months, in Africa, and man, I love Africa and can't wait to go back, but that was enough and then some. I think the difference is that long-term travellers have nothing much calling them home - friends and family, sure, but they'll still be there in a few months, and a job that they don't necessarily dislike, but is generally a dull rut - whereas I'm itching to write, and to hook up guitar and keyboard and mixer and computer go from aimless noodling around with music to slightly less aimless noodling around. Besides, with my globally farflung friends, visiting them implies travel anyhow. The urge to go home and write has a lot to do with why my travel-stint-duration has diminished to about six weeks nowayears. (North American readers with steady jobs who get two weeks vacation per year have permission to now be nauseous.)
Tomorrow, I go to hike El Muela del Diablo, aka the Devil's Molar, of which no less an authority than Neil Armstrong is alleged to have said "It's just like the moon!" Although, judging from the pictures I've seen, either NASA is hiding quite a lot from us, or he then threw in "...except for the cacti." Then, Sunday, I dice with death down
The Most Dangerous Road In The World!(TM), known locally as "el camino del muerte". Fortunately the trip includes lunch. I mean, you wouldn't want to dice with death on an empty stomach. I'll tell you all about it (the lunch that is) ... if I survive.
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