Blogs from Cochabamba Department, Bolivia, South America - page 14

As part of my homestay costs, I recieve breakfast lunch and dinner each day. Althought strange to be served my meals everyday, I have had the chance to try some interesting cuisine. The Grandmother of the house, Dido, usually prepares the lunches since she is retired and spends her days at the house. The other day I came home from work ready for a big meal. As an aside, many families here have a very big lunch around 1 or 2 and have bread and tea around 6 for dinner. I usually get a big bowl of soup and then a large plate of some kind of meat, maybe some rice and a vegtable. This particular day, everything seemed routine. I sat down around 1 and received my first course of soup. After the bowl was ... read more

Yesterday the Bolivian people voted in a referendum for or against the current president, Evo Morales. Things are pretty heated right now as there is a very strong divide between Bolivians. My host family invited me to go with them to vote. Another volunteer came over to the house to join us and around 11 we walked to the nearby school where they vote. The law states that no cars are permitted on the roads unless given permission so things were strangley quiet. When we arrived at the school there were some people mingling outside where a few food stands were set up. Others were chatting in the school yard and then there were the long voting lines. My volunteer friend, Sebastian, and I followed my family up to the second floor of the school where ... read more

Hi all, So much has happend since the last blog entry, from the nazca we got on the nicest bus to arequipa and woke up quite fresh. We stayed at the point hostal again however this one wasnt as lively as the lima one. We met up whith a couple of ppl in the hostal and had a little look around the town that day, there was a protest on about something or other but it was interesting to see. Then went to a museum with a frozen inka sacrafice mummy inside which was nice...zzzzzz oh sorry bout that lol. Went out for go karting and a standard night out in the evening to deja vu which was quite a nice club. The second day in arequipa was much more eventful we went white water rafting ... read more

Sorry for the *huge* post, but there is much to say about the past 5 weeks volunteering and living with the monkeys at Parque Machia in the jungle in Bolivia. There are three main types of monkeys at Inti Wara Yassi. The first, the capuchins are hightly intelligent. One of the smarter capuchins, Boodie (the alpha male) has actually escaped three times from a locked cage in the clinic. It is thought in one of his escapes he bribed or convinced another capuchin to steal the keys and let him out (the capuchins are also highly adept at opening locks). Another of his escapes was even more impressive. He started to become very attached to the blanket in his cage and refused to let the volunteers take it for washing. Eventually they gave up as he ... read more

After spending spending an extra cold night in Uyuni due to the one and only cash machine in town running out of money, and us not having enough cash on us to get a bus out of there until the machine was refilled, we eventually arrived in Cochabamba. The bus journey there was terrible. We took a night bus and the driver seemed to think it was reasonable to play Bolivian pop music at full blast throughout the bus. Any music would have been annoying at this time of night but unfortunately for us Bolivian pop music has to rank amongst the worlds worst musical genres. Every song sounds pretty much the same, the lead instrument is a keyboard, with an effect that wouldn´t have even been cool in the 80's, that sounds like a trumpet ... read more