Ok, so it's been a good three weeks since the last post, and some family members might think I'm dead. There is good reason for this - my liver probably thinks I should be. As a result some bits of the last three weeks are a little hazy, it's been pretty hectic! Note that this may not be entirely suitable for grandparents.
Back on evening 25, Stacey (South African from the ear group) and Kathrine (Dutch girl from my third trek) did indeed do the dinner party on their last night in Sucre. It was great, but a little bit lacking in meat for my liking, so I decided to have another one the next day (which they were gutted they were missing!) based on chicken satay and egg-fried rice. Easy enough at home, but peanut butter here is so lacking in flavour that the sauce wasn't one I'm proud of. It still went down well though, despite the portions being a bit big. Turns out it was even better re-fried for lunch. :D
Obviously dinner parties mean lots of wine, so on evening 27 I was going to have an early-ish night. However, I saw Randall in a bar 50m from our house so I thought I'd go in and see what was up, so ended up playing poker with him, Tom who was an ex-volunteer at CT, and a bunch of Tom's mates who he was meeting in Sucre to travel with later. After poker I kind of felt like karaoke, so we went to a place called Nanos. When I was at the bar I said 'hola' to a girl called Clare and she immediately asked if I could salsa, so I had to quickly finish off my cuba libre before dancing the night away. I saw Tom an hour or so later and he started complaining to me that after 5 minutes in the place I was dancing with the only really attractive girl in there. I just told him it was the scar, and that there was nothing I could really do about it!
I can't remember if an awful lot happened for the rest of that week, I just know I didn't have any treks, and I probably slept a lot for the next night or two to make up for everything. I will have gone to the Folk music night at Amsterdam (really cool non-profit Dutch bar) on the Thursday, it might have been that week that we had a massive sing-a-long with George afterwards (he's an English guy who learnt guitar to go busking in Spain a few years ago), and it could well have been that week that we met Rohan and Nienke (some Dutchies) who are dinner partying it up this week. It could also have been the week before, but I'm assuming it was that week because otherwise I can't remember what I was doing! Anyway, lots of going to Amsterdam, because that's been happening for the last 4 weeks. One thing I do remember VERY well is that after what was presumably a big night out on the Friday, Brid and I had the biggest brunch ever of pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon and tumbos (like unripened passion fruits) before heading up to the Mirador (excellent view point over Sucre) for sunset (yes, it did take that long to get up, eat and clean the dishes), then we went over to Randall's cinema (we stole a projector from a German guy, and he has since stolen it back. GRR!!) to watch what might well have been District 9 or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. We made good use of that projector, so it's hard to know exactly which films were which nights.
I do remember the next week surprisingly well, however! Patrick moved in with us (sharing my room) on day 34 after getting evicted from his 250Bs/month room for being too messy and arguing back when his landlady shouted at him unreasonably. She was a bit mental to be fair to him - she told him to scrub the walls when he left (so he said she was 'loca', check your Ricky Martin tunes). Evening 34 was a great night out at the Amsterdam pub quiz, despite the fact I had a trek the next morning, had told people not to give me beer (didn't work), and ended up winning a tequila pinky bet over what the biggest city in the world was (it's Tokyo, the guy who argued that it was Mexico City lost us the quiz, and therefore more beer!). After the quiz things got really cool though. George got out his guitar, and I started drumming along for him with some empty plastic water bottles while everyone at the table who knew the words to the songs sang along.
Day 35 was a 1 day trek (hence me not wanting to drink much the night before - but the countryside air does help a lot the next morning!) with Patrick leading the way, and a couple of French Belgians and two Aussies. After going to the world's most important dinosaur footprints site (because it proves the 4 main types of dinosaurs coexisted in the same place on the same day), and getting the necessary photos of clients sitting on my shoulders so that they could reach up to the anus on the life-size argentinosaurus (one of the sauropods - bit like a brontosaurus I think) model, we went off for a great wee trek to some waterfalls. Luckily Patrick got us slightly lost - he thought the road would go a different way so we hitchhiked for a few kilometres - so we got an extra hour of walking along a beautiful ridge. When we got to the waterfalls I decided I fancied a bit of a rockclimb before swimming, but got a bit stuck and it took me so long to get back that there was only enough time for a quick paddle and a dunking of my head in the waterfall. When we got back, the Belgians (who had been going to leave that day) decided they'd stay an extra night (on our sofas) and ended up helping out loads with the trek prep for the next day. The plan had been to meet the Australians at a salsa place, but preparation took to long and we ended up going to Nanos after picking Brid up (I'd guess in Amsterdam) because I'd had such a good salsa night there the week before. However, at Nanos you always do the thing you weren't planning on doing, so we did karaoke instead! It was a great night, and I ended up joining up with a bunch of English girls when the others went home because I wanted to sing more and unlike Patrick I wasn't having to get up early the next day to help send the trek off, unlike Brid I didn't have Spanish lessons, and unlike Marie (the Belgian who stayed out with us) I didn't have to faff about buying a bus ticket in the morning.
The next night was the Thursday folk music night at Amsterdam, always great fun, and I ended up joining up with a bunch of volunteers who worked for Nanta (one of the organisations we support). With them being from Quebec, and their leader being French, I knew it wouldn't be simple English for the night, but I reckoned I could handle a bilingual night. Unfortunately it was trilingual, because one of the Quebecois was drunk and refused to speak anything but Spanish to me! Still, it was good fun, and I got a good taste of Mitos - the club that Ruben (one of the Bolivian guides) had been telling me about. I think Delphine (the French one) took pity on my crap Espancais (I was mixing them up pretty badly!!) because she spoke a reasonable amount of English to me.
Friday was dinner party night again, Brid's turn to cook this time, and my liver was starting to feel the pain after 3 late drunken nights in a row. Still, some wine, beer, tequila and rum later I was drumming along for George again (this time I had one real drumstick and a hand on a soft chair - was a good sound!) before leaving at a not-too-unreasonable time of 12.30 on a Friday night. We still had a couple of complaints to our landlord though... Anyway, it was another night in Mitos, but I just needed my bed and had to go home at what was beginning to seem the early time of 4am.
I'd stupidly promised to meet up with the Quebecois and Delphine again on the Saturday, but by the 5th night out in a row I could only cope with a small amount of alcohol and needed a relatively early night. The next day I was lucky, Randall decided to sober me up by sending me on a three day trek with a Dutch couple and a Swiss French girl, so Ruben and I had another good trek together and I was able to avoid having a Sunday night out!
The trek left last Monday, which must be day 40. The first day is so much less rushed than the 2 day (it's all the same route for the first day, but you stop earlier and camp), which was great because we got a campfire and kind of did a bit of singing along to songs Ruben and I had on our phones! The second day is just brilliant on the 3 day trek. You climb up the last bit into the crater, then see it in the full light of day (and the views from the north and west sides and from near the middle are just so much better than from the south side which is what you get on the 2 day! I took a bunch of photos but won't bother uploading anything til I'm home or find a really good internet connection and a computer that works with my camera). You've got time to visit the caves and waterfalls (well, you can see the caves if you don't get stuck rockclimbing down the waterfalls... This will be a recurring theme for my last few weeks I think!) which are pretty stunning, and then once you've climbed out over the top of the crater (about 3500-3600m ish, it's not easy when you're suffering from a cold that you've not bothered to rest enough to recover from!) you go through some incredibly weird and colourful scenery towards some dinosaur footprints that are on a suitably inclined rock plane that they won't slide off and crush the tourists (unlike Parque Cretacico on the one day), so you can actually go over and touch them. After a couple more hours of walking (and yes, we were pretty tired already!) through a few Quechua communities where we can offload unnecessary extra food, we camped down by a river bank on a wee beach. Day 3 was quite easy in the end, we got to where the camion/'bus' stops after only about an hour of walking, and Ruben said we could either go to where you're meant to get the bus from a couple of hours down the road, or dump the backpacks and check out the gorge and hot springs. Was quite an easy choice!
I got back on the Wednesday for another quiz (hosted by the Quebefrenchies), and needed plenty of sleep that night. Having woken up a little early to get some breakfast, I just went back to bed until 4.45 on Thursday afternoon. Thursday was the Nanta people's last night, so obviously I had to join them for more trilingualism after the folk music, and by Friday our house (other than Franz, who was at some Bolivian student party) all had a very much needed night off.
Saturday was Brid's last night in Sucre (and she has left a void that only another crazy Irish woman could fill! Although a Belgian couple are hopefully moving in at the weekend and the girl likes making chocolate brownies...) so it had to be more karaoke, more Nanos, and more Toto - Africa. Sunday afternoon was spent up at the Mirador again (biggest and best fruit salad in town!) and she left in the evening on a night bus. Unluckily for her, Potosi is blockaded, has been for ages, and things are getting worse, so she had to go along the worse roads to Cochabamba on her way to La Paz for a 20h+ journey, and we still don't know if she arrived ok because she had no time to spare once she got there - she had to meet friends in a nearby town who were leaving on a 5 day trip to the jungle this morning.
Sunday and Monday were relatively quiet, so I'll just say a bit about the Potosi thing to give people an idea and myself a reminder about the social issues in Bolivia. Potosi was a town founded by the Spanish way up at about 4300m altitude because they found an excellent silver seam there, and ever since millions of slaves and local workers have died in the mines while all the wealth was redistributed to almost anywhere but Potosi and the local countryside (Spain and Sucre both benefited a lot). There's always been a bit of angst there. More recently, in the 1950's, the government gave Bolivian people the right to the land they lived on, but didn't give them papers. Now, rich city folk are using dodgy methods to get papers saying they own land in the countryside, leading to some fun territorial disputes (and mineral wealth or suspected mineral wealth may also be involved). Obviously this has pissed off the campesinos, who started blockading roads and going on strike.
This was a bit of a cue for everyone else in the city and surrounding area to go on strike and block roads/railways etc if they had any gripes with anything, particularly with the people who were already blocking roads. There was talk of a 100,000 people demonstration in Potosi (the largest in Bolivian history), there was a Molotov Cocktail thrown in Oruro which burnt down a sizable area by the looks of the photos in the papers, the mayor or Oruro appears to have been kidnapped or something, and large swathes of the country are now practically inaccessible. Sucre is still perfectly safe, despite a couple of small demonstrations that started yesterday, but the only places it is possible to get to from here are Cochabamba (and from there La Paz), Santa Cruz, and you can also fly south to Tarija (and from there you can get to Argentina). As a result, I might be unable to do the salt flats tour (Bolivia's Machu Picchu - by far the most popular tourist thing in the country), but that would mean I could stay longer in Sucre, so I'm not sure I'd mind all that much!
Anyway, don't worry about me, Sucre's safe and I'll be sensible. If things get dodgy I'll fly out to wherever I can get to before they block the airport (they did that in Potosi, where it sounds like there might be a bit of a lack of food after a good two weeks of blockades, but I did hear about an American guy who got out in a media helicopter). The situation is pretty localised, and is exceedingly unlikely to spread to La Paz AND Santa Cruz (and not likely to reach either of them, to be honest) due to the extremely different social makeups of the cities. I shouldn't have any difficulty making it to Peru with enough time to visit Lake Titicaca, Machu Picchu and still make my flight to Quito on time!
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