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Published: February 12th 2007
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Api and Buñuelo
My breakfast at the local market in Tarija. Wow! I can't believe that I got ten hours of sleep in on vacation. Collapsing at about 10:30PM the night before, my body most have needed some sleep. When do I ever go to bed that early? My plans for this day was to go to a small town north of Tarija called San Lorenzo to explore it and make my way out to a waterfall, which is suppose to be really nice to see. So after getting ready, I headed to the Mercado Central (central market) for a small breakfast of api and buñuelo, which is becoming one of my favorite things to eat while travelling. Eating in the market is always an interesting experience, as it is full of life and local people. Running into another tourist eating breakfast in the market is not something that happens to me very often. I can't believe the food they were serving at 9:30 in the morning. All the lunch food was already made and people were standing around the vats of food eating lunch food for a few bolivianos. Api, is a drink made from purple corn, and it usually only served in the morning during weekdays and can be found
more often on the weekends. Buñuelos are dough that are deep-fried and then coated with a sweet syrup and sprinkled with powdered sugar. They are soooo good, however, I realize there is very little nutritional value in them. Api and buñuelo to me is like a Tim Horton's coffee and a donut, or maybe like a hot chocolate and a beaver tail while skating on the Rideau Canal. Maybe someday when I return to Ottawa, I'll have a little booth on the canal selling api and buñuelos...however, I may have to sell the combination for more that 2.5 bolivianos or 35 cents Canadian to turn a profit 😊
After satisfying my hunger, what I thought might be the difficult part of my day, finding a minibus/collectivo to San Lorenzo, actually turned out to be very easy. Just a block or two away from the Mercado Central, I saw a minibus sitting there that had San Lorenzo written on the windshield. This half hour ride to San Lorenzo would cost me a whooping 2 Bs. From the city centre out to another part of Tarija where locals don't go, I was the only one on the minibus, but outside of
a market, the bus went from empty to overflowing. People were having their goods strapped to the roof of the bus and every empty space on the floor of the bus contained fruits, vegetables and other goods that were purchased at the market. The two women who sat beside me, one being from the other side of the border in Argentina, were wondering where I was off to for the day, why I was 26 years old and not married, and was I in Tarija to find a Tarijan woman. Funny women I tell you! It seems like a lot of people think there is something wrong with me that I am still single and I am 26 years old, only because Bolivians seem to get married early and by my age may have one of two children. Finally after a half an hour in the minibus, we arrived in the town centre of San Lorenzo. I was hungry again so I headed into the small market to see what I could find and ended up my some empanadas with cheese and onions inside. So I took a quick walk around town to check it out. As I was walking
by one house, this child came outside crying for his mother. I tried talking to him, but talking to crying child is difficult and when it isn't your first language either, it is even harder to understand. I kept asking him if the house he came out of was his house and he kept saying no. Nothing was making too much sense to me. Finally, his mother came out from around the corner and took her child back into the house. Quite the strange experience I must say.
Before siesta kicked in, I decided to visit the Museo Moto Méndez, the home of José Eustaquio 'Moto' Méndez. I'm not really sure who he is, but this museum seemed to be the main attraction in the small town. It seems he was a local war hero of some sort, especially by the collection of swords kept in his house. For the 2 bolivianos it cost to enter the place, it was worth seeing. Afterwards, I decided to walk to the neighbouring vilage of Lajas to check out a chapel that was recommended in my guide. My first attempt to head to the village was a flop. I ended up at
some dead end at once again, another dried up river. I figured I wasn't going in the right direction when there were cows and horses roaming around on the road. Finally, I found the right road that would take me to the next village and found the chapel after about 45 minutes. In all honesty, I didn't find the chapel that overly interesting and when my curiousity took my to the back of the chapel, I was chased off the grounds by three angry dogs. After that, I headed back to San Lorenzo and take another road to head out to a waterfall. Luckily this time, about 30 minutes into my walk I started talking to a local and he told me that because of the lack of rain this year, there was no waterfall to see. I should have learned my lesson about waterfalls when I was in Tupiza and there was none due to lack of rain. I'll know better next time 😉 I headed back to San Lorenzo to catch a minibus back to Tarija and ended up running in Lesley again, who was leaving for La Paz at 5PM. We went to find a restaurant to
grab a quick bite to eat, and we ran into Arianne, the Dutch girl that I met in the Salar de Uyuni. As I was heading out to a restaurant with Lesley, Arianne and I set up a time in the evening to meet up again. Lesley and I found a restaurant on the plaza to get a quick bit to eat and ended up meeting and sitting with another Canadian from Vancouver. He was in town waiting to hear about a job opportunity and had been traveling mainly through Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile to that point. Lesley ended up leaving to catch her bus back to La Paz at around 4:15PM and I continued to sit around a talk with Ira, the Canadian guy. We ended up going for ice cream at another place, as Tarija is known for its ice cream, and talked until I had to meet up with Arianne at 6:30PM. Luckily, I just had a small bite to eat because Arianne wanted to go for dinner, so off I was again to another restaurant for a good dinner. We went all out and had wine, a meal and dessert and of course, as we
were in Bolivia, it didn't cost too much for it. Afterwards we decided to check out if we could go on a wine tour the next day, but none of the agencies were open by the time we were finished dinner. We decided that we would check again in the morning for a tour the next afternoon. And that concludes another day in the life of Pat!
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