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Published: July 30th 2005
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Arrived from Sucre Today. Forgot how nice Sucre was, a "small clean" town. Cochabamba is the third largest city in Bolivia. I will just spend the night and head towards the jungle. Maybe meet up with some people i know. The market in Cochabamba is huge. You could spend the entire day there and not see all of it. it is amazing how much used clothing there is from the states. The clothing is the stuff that doesn´t sell in the US thrift stores. obviously, Cochabamba isn´t the only city with clothing from the US, there are cities all over the world that receives our excess stuff. Not to go off on a tangent but, i remember a conversation i had with my teacher in sucre. here mom never had an oven, couldn't´t afford one. i told her in the US people give their stoves, refrigerators ... away, sometimes every few years, after they redecorate or what ever. here and in other parts of the world they use things and repair them. we throw them away. i had a pair of shoes repaired yesterday, if i was back home i would probably have thrown them out. but then again, it would
have been cheaper to buy another pair (in a thrift store) than repair them. I only paid $.60 to get them fixed.
while waiting for the bus driver to get ready, he tore a plastic bag he was loading on the top of the bus and a bunch of cereal fell on the ground. the owner of the cereal and some helpers picked up what they could and put it in another bag. An old women sitting near by scurried to pick up the rest of what was on the ground and started to eat what she found
I left Cochabamba yesterday, July 14th and headed to villa tunari. The old saying "The grass is greener on the other side of the hill " was definitely true when I went over the hill. It was like I went to a totally different country, from a desert like climate - sunny warm and dry with cactus, to a tropical, green lush jungle - a cloudy humid climate in a matter of a few minutes!!!!
Tunari is a quiet, laid back place. reminds me a bit of a Caribbean town. it is on the road to Santa Cruz. Most
people stop here to visit or volunteer at the local animal refugee. I may stay here for a couple of days, why not, it is warm (almost hot and humid), you can get a nice hotel room for $3-$5 a night and have lunch el plato del dia for around $.80 - a big bowl of soup and a nice plate with meat and rice!!
The night after I wrote that it was warm a storm came through town. two of the Dentisitas took me to a discoteca to teach me a little rhythm. I must add that us gringos definitely lack something in the blood. Supposedly my dad could dance, I must be the mailman's kid. There were a couple of gringas in the discoteca and they just could not come close to dancing like a Latinas!!! anyway, after the disco closed it was puring outside!!! and of course no taxis to be found. We finally flagged down a bus to take the Dentistas back to the foundation - about 2-3 miles away. the charge, 20 bolivianos. i paid only 12 bolivianos (about $1.50) for the 4 hour bus ride to villa tunari. anyway, for the next couple
of days it was cloudy, rainy and cold in the jungle!!!
Hmm, I forget to write about a lot of little things, like all the women with their long braids and hats, the people on the bus pitching their garbage out the window, where are all the trucks with fruit going? speaking of trucks - all the trucks are full of people standing on the fruit, or how do they fit 20 pepole in one car, or a whole family on one motorcycle, the old lady who picked up two huge bags of rice and carried them away on her back into the dark, why i can´t learn another language and "uneducated" people speak 2 or three languages, playing fooseball at the fair and breaking the dam handle, or the look i get when i pay to pee inside - instead of in the streets, when in Rome, oh and about the bridge.
There is a bridge just before the animal sanctuary in villa Tunari, it is wide enough for two trucks to pass but not any wider - and a sidewalk, na, there isn't one. I call it the bridge of death. A few times, i swear
i felt the trucks brush me and trust me, they don´t slow down, i think they speed up! so if you go there, cuidado!!. But I found out that the real bridge of death is another 3 miles or so. I guess two years ago on Christmas eve, the bridge collapsed and there were a few buses on it at the time it collapsed. I heard that about 200 people died. well Let me check the web to see if this was true. Guess what, yes and no. the bridge collapsed but only about 75 died. well the red cross had the number at 100, and that was only a few days after, maybe it was 200.
click here to read about the bridge colapse Today, July 20th, I am back in Cochabamba and will probably take a bus to La Paz tomorrow. Hopefully I will do some hiking in the area because lately I have been pretty lazy and I need to get some exercise.
i better keep these short or nobody, including myself will read them. maybe i should just put a bunch of photos here and leave it at that.
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Marshall Reavis
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Remember me?
I'm with your cousin...and Lance (the guy he drove to Iowa with). We're in Indiana, not much like Bolivia. You're welcome here anytime (Syracuse, IN; Lake Wawasee). We live in Lake Bluff with your former Abbott clones. Talk to me at marshall.reavis@svmcard.com. Good luck; be safe. mwr.