Bolivia

Im here, made it ok, long fuckin flight though. the next day i passed out til like 3 in the afternoon. I saw some guy puttin a jacket on (it was raining off and on) and i was hungry as shit, so I asked him if he was going to town and if I could tag along. He said sure. His name is Simon, a polish guy, my age, 28. We walked in to town, got some food ( a bombass steak, fries, salad, beer, and espresso, for like 8 bucks!). Then we walked around the town and checked out the area. We ran into another guy from the hostel named Luiz, Brasilian, 33. He needed to finish up work but agreed to meet us at some irish bar for drinks in a few minutes. So we all met up there and had some bolivian (Paceña) beers. Interesting guys. The polach is a computer sciencey techy guy who couldnt stand his job anymore so he quit over a year ago and has been traveling since. He looks like Doogie Howser, Im not kidding. I didn´t tell him so, but its funny because he likes the show "How I met your mother", isnt doogie in that? Anyway, He´s been all over Asia- Iran, cambodia, thailand, vietnam, laos, china. Then he came to South America, went to brazil, argentina, chile, now here. He plans to travel a few more months.

The Brazilian is cool, he´s working remotely, so he takes his laptop to cafes and works all day, travels more on weekends. He is a musician and makes background music for websites, among other things. He has an audio blog in which he records the sounds from wherever he goes and posts them on the blog with minimal text to give it context.

So we drank some beers and talked a bit. Then some Australian backpacker girl came in to the bar with all her luggage and sat alone drinking coffee. The gregarious polach invited her to our table. She´s been all over. Had dreadlocks. 24. Cool i guess. she was interesting to talk to, she was on her way out of Bolivia, but told us the cool sites she saw and recommended some routes.

Me and the polach started talking about this city called Samaipata, 2 and a half hours from Santa Cruz (where I flew in to), and decided we´d go together the next day. So now I am here. What a difference from Santa Cruz. Real small town, i´d say 2000 people live here maybe? There is a really cool, laid back vibe here. People selling stuff on the streets, dirt roads, shack looking shops and houses. Almost feels like the small towns that California and other western states probably had when it first started out. There was some sort of musical, marching band type thing going on with the kids of the town. The smaller kids played in the band- trombones, trumpets, drums, not bad either. Then there were the teenage boys who were marching, hitler army style-high kicks and all. The whole town came out to watch and cheer them on.

What else. Oh at one point the polach and I were taking pictures of random things and then he snapped a shot of some kids playing, a sister and brother. I got a few too, and the girl starts posing like a total ham. I crouched down to get a shot and she's putting her arms around me, hugging me, it was a little weird. Then like 5 other kids came over and I was showing them the pictures on my camera of them. Then, this fucking little girl sticks her hand in my pocket trying to rob me! All casual about it too. I didn't have anything in there, but was like "ai ai ai" and pulled her hand out. Then we left. Funny though. Fucking opportunist she was!

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