Cochabamba, the City of Perpetual Springtime

Made it to Bolivia! After a lengthy connection in La Paz--at least, 5 hours at 13,000ft feels very long--I caught a twenty minute flight to Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city. On our ascent, a rainbow arched over the valley below. Flying above it, I was literally over the rainbow.

Gonzalo and Mirna Canelas, my host parents, picked me up at the Cochabamba airport, and drove me through the city to their house in Las Lomas, a hill on the outskirts of town with very beautiful views of the city below. Living up here, they said, kept them away from the dust in the city below. I'm sure that the dust is a bigger problem in the dry season; now, on the other hand, the biggest issue is the diesel fumes in the choked streets of Cochabamba.


View of Cochabamba from Casa Canelas.

As my host brother, Rodrigo, told me later, as long as your car moves, you can drive it. Driver's licenses are not necessary here, and neither are seatbelts. Rodrigo says it is funny when you see a thirteen year old driving by, straining to see over the steering wheel.

Driving here is terrifying. Not that I've gotten behind the wheel myself, but every time I get in a car, I reach for the seatbelt and find that either there is no seatbelt, or some essential part of it is missing, like the clip came off or was never there in the first place. Each car made a halfhearted attempt at safety that was carried through differently in each vehicle, but in no cases was the attempt successful. People signal not with their turn signals, but with their arms out the windows. Passengers are required to signal right turns. Traffic lights are mere suggestions, and often cars will not even slow down, and instead honk as they approach the intersection, threatening other cars with a 35 mph sideswipe. At one point Mirna was driving me around, and realized the shortest way to get to where we were going was going the wrong way down a one way road. Mirna paused while a car passed by, and then gunned it with the giggle that comes with a rush of adrenaline, telling me, "This is very bad, what I am doing." No one is safe!

Cochabamba has a climate of perpetual springtime--75 degrees and sunny, except for the occasional drops that characterize the rainy season. Sometimes walking around the city the sidewalk breaks for overgrown flowers that force you out into the very dangerous road.


No new cars in Bolivia. My host family has a car that was flooded in New Orleans, refurbished, and sent to Bolivia. Apparently there are a lot of "Katrina cars" here.

I have been very busy since I have gotten here. I've signed up for Spanish lessons, and have already had two. Mi profesora, Toni, makes me work very hard, which is good! I feel like I am learning. I have met up with Ben, and his brother Simon, and met some of his friends in Bolivia, who are all very nice. Last night six of us hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck, which is the only thing my experience in Bolivia has in common with my time in Idaho.


The tallest Christ statue in South America overlooks Cochabamba.


La Cancha, the biggest market in South America. Here you can buy everything, from Matel toys to human hair, to dried llama babies.


On the walk up to my house, you can see the Christ on the hill over the city.

Today I set off for the Salar de Unuyi with Ben and Simon. I hope it will be very beautiful, and I hope our jeep will not break down in the massive salt lake. Shouldn't be back for almost a week!

Idaho!!

I spent the last couple weeks in Idaho, visiting my sister Cate. What most impressed me about Idaho was that people actually seemed willing to recognize fellow human beings. This was a shock after spending the last couple months in the very-populated Mid-Atlantic region. Acknowledging one person on the East Coast leads to an overwhelming realization that there are people. All around you. Millions of them. In Idaho, all you had to do was step out to the road, and strangers would stop, ask if you need a ride, ask where you were going, where you came from, and what you were doing in the road. My visit depended on this empathy, because skiing in the backcountry was much easier if people are willing to pick you up and bring you back to your car.

During my visit, Cate and I managed to convince five other ladies to accompany us the the Huckleberry Hot springs in Grand Teton National Park. The adventure is recounted in some detail here: Mountainbeering, so I'll just post a couple pictures.

Pit stop en route shows Grand Teton rising above the clouds.

About three feet of steamy water covered mud about two feet deep. The deeper you sunk in the mud, the hotter it got. Also, deeper submersion increased the chances of creatures crawling up your butt.

About a week later, our parents were set to arrive. Cate and I booked a hut about three miles into the backcountry, perched on a ridge above Leigh Canyon. We bought food and supplies before our parents realized two days before they were set to leave that they could not come, because my grandfather is sick. While we were sad, we managed to get quite a crowd to join us up at Commissary Yurt, and had a pretty excellent time hiking up the nearby Beards Mountain, and skiing down again. Also, we made dinner and played cards. Chili, tequila, and bacon were key.

Setting out on the Yurtventure!

Why not make a human pyramid? I look like I'm in a lot of pain. Why was I the bottom middle?

Whole group, minus Cate, sets out to ski Beards Mountain before heading back to civilization.

End of Alaska and the Longest Fall Ever

Alaska was a pretty rocking time. I spent August and September living in a house with 5 other women--much less interesting than my campground abode. I was working for the Park Service as bird counter, data analyzer, and professional hiker and helicopter-rider.

When I left Skagway on October 8th, fall had swept on by and winter had set in. Eventually we caught up with fall on our way back down. It was like turning back time. Sweet!

I managed to hit many spectacular things on the way down South, from the glaciers of Banff to the flatlands of Alberta, down through Crater Lake, Redwoods National Forest, and Yosemite. Pretty amazing trip!

Hiking in the Plain of Six Glaciers in Lake Louise, Banff National Park.

Driving through Alberta, Canada with a storm on the horizon.

A clear day at Crater Lake--deepest freshwater lake in North America.

Half Dome, waterfalls, and snow-capped peaks made Yosemite pretty amazing.

After making it all the way home, I spent two months recovering financially (i.e. working) and planning the next adventure.

Neighbors of Skagway

Sarah’s Panda Blog was intended to document my travels to Bolivia, where I am headed less than 48 hours. Supposedly it is in the interest of my friends and family that I share my stories regularly and in type.

I started this Panda Blog too late. I was a fresh college graduate, heading out to pursue adventure and days of never-ending sunlight, but I recorded none of my adventures for eight months. I started this post trying to give a summary of my adventures, but I didn’t get past my first two months in Alaska, and my crazy neighbors of my place of residence during this time: the Skagway shanty town, Mountain View RV Park and Campground.

On June 4th I travelled through 7 airports to get to Skagway, AK; a town of 800 year round residents nestled in a valley at the end of North America’s longest and deepest fjord. The National Park Service bought and restored many of the buildings in the town in the 1970s, so that Broadway Avenue has the Disneyland-feel of a recreated Old West town. This street is the hangout of the 900,000 or so tourists that flood this port from May through September.

Without the Park Service’s restoration, this town would have very little going for it besides physical beauty and extreme isolation. The town is fed by a barge that arrives once a week with wilted vegetables, precarious meats, and the most expensive bags of potato chips I have ever seen, anywhere. All trash is burned in an incinerator located 5 miles down the only road out of town. Skagway is essentially a snake that doesn’t move. Once a week the snake opens its jaws, and half digested food is divided between the desperate denizens of the intestines (who will secure the only unrotten onion!!!). Waste from each individual funnels back to one uniform solid and is deposited, a snake-length away. Where it is burned.

The cruise ships, though they swell the population of the town by two orders of magnitude, daily, are not a part of the snake. They supply their own (delicious) food, and then dump their waste any which place.

Steep mountain walls keep the town long and narrow, and because of the waste-disposal problem, yards are filled with the artifacts of a town a century old. Old abandoned train cars reside in the woods, cars with bulletholes in the windshield adorn backyards, and, my personal favorite, abandoned school buses and campers that—no longer able to roll anywhere—are inhabited by my fellow residents of Mountain View. My sister drove her tours past the campground daily: “…and this is the shanty town of Skagway. My sister lives here.” And then she would giggle.

My campsite was bordered by a train tracks, one perfectly normal couple, and a pirate. To be fair, the pirate was only a pirate when he was drunk, which was fairly often. About 35 years old, Terry the pirate inhabited a setup so well-constructed that it looked bomb-proof. Or at least saber-proof. Terry had an old immobile camper with tarps strung from clotheslines spiraling outward from the entrance. I never did see the center of his compound, but I could only guess it held an altar devoted to beer cozies.

Occasionally we gathered at my other neighbor’s site: Dylan and Amity had a large-ish site with a nicely arranged fire pit. Terry would wander over and recite poetry, and inquire things like, “how many moons have ye been here lassie arhhh?” He punctuated every sentence with “arghh” without hesitation. When asked how he became a pirate, he responded, “Well! Me mam was a pirate… and me dad was a pirate... so guess what I became, lassie?”

My favorite member of these fireside gatherings was Benny, or as I called him, the African Storyteller. Benny had graying dreadlocks and walked with a limp. He scared me the first week I was there, because without a job I was often hanging around the campground during the day. Every time I went to the bathroom, and came back from the bathroom, I passed Benny’s site, and he would make sure to catch my eye. “Hi How are you?” he would say. My “hi, how’s it going?” invariably ellicited “Oh, fine, fine.” Repeating this twice for every trip to the bathroom, and say five trips a day, was quite exhausting. But I couldn't very well not go to the bathroom, so I got used to Benny pretty quickly.

Benny had one story he liked to tell best of all—the story of the Lion’s Den. The way he tells it, Benny was sent off one day to deliver something for his father. Instead of taking the long way around, Benny takes a shortcut through elephant grass. Here he makes swimming motions with his arms, and suggests struggling steps with his legs.

“…And I was walking through...the elephant…grass, and what did I stumble upon, eh? I step out of the elephant grass, and what do I step into but a Lion’s Den. Right in the middle of a lion’s den!!”

At this he throws his head back and laughs, big deep barks that shake the treetops. Seriously I saw them shake.

Later Benny told me he had been working on a DVD with Paul, a white-bearded man that seemed to be in the same shape as Benny—an underemployed older man who somehow ended up in Alaska and never made it out again. I want to say both were homeless bums, but at that point, so was I—so I don’t want to name names. Later Paul moved into Benny’s campsite, and two one-person tents and associated repetitive conversations blocked my way to the bathroom. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

One day I was walking back from the bathroom and I hear, “HEY!” and saw the treetops shake. Seriously that voice came straight from the diaphragm. How did Benny end up here in Skagway, AK, when he was meant to be a professional tree-shaker and getter-of-attention? Benny handed me his DVD.

Paul’s videography did not do Benny justice. The camera rotates madly around Benny as he stands, singing, on the pedestrian bridge over the Skagway River. On top of that, bubbles. You know, at one point I thought bubbles were a fail-proof ingredient: anything, combined with bubbles, would be better than it was before. In this case, circular bubbles in solid colors bounced around the screen, both obscuring the scene and not quite concealing the wild careening of the camera and Benny’s stooped posture. Something that had potential got roasted in the oven with onions and then covered in strawberry frosting. Carbonated strawberry frosting.

Later Paul and Benny called me their biggest fan, for returning the DVD with a smile.

I lived in the campground for two months—June and July—before vacating my site. It was the rainiest June and July I have every experienced, but I made a home for myself, and made it nice. I lived in a three person tent. I had a cooking table and a picnic table, and a tarp over most of that. I had a two-burner stove, a pot, a pan, and all the mugs I would ever need. I built myself a firepit. By far my most bothersome neighbor was the train—trains really—that migrated from their hangars to the docks between 5am and 8am every morning. Between that and the 20 hours of daylight, I learned to be a sound sleeper. I might have been sad when I moved to a real house on August 8th –-if it was a shanty town, it was my shanty town—but the rotting mushrooms underneath my tent sealed the deal, and I was out of there.