The rest of Bolivia

I´ve skipped over a few places, mainly Sucre and Copacabana, not because they weren´t worth mentioning but because my friend Melissa was traveling with me and I was spending less time on the computer and running around Bolivia with her for 3 weeks! Sucre was an okay town. It was very pretty, but the way I had heard it described I thought it was going to be amazing. When we got there, we realized there was very little to do. We went to a Jurassic Park-type place one day, where there was a giant stone slab that had dinosaurfiitprints that has been preserved since - well - the dinosaurs roamed the earth. It was a little cheesy but I thought it was interesting and we took some fun pictures with the giant dino replicas. The food was slightly better there than the rest of Bolivia (we found a place that had giant potato croquettes filled with spanish cheese and tomato sauce - delicious!) and there were lots of chocolate shops, but not nearly as good as Bariloche!
Copacabana was a really cute, relaxing town, but since it´s winter, the weather was awful. It got so cold at night that we had to wear THREE sweaters (I finally caved and bought another llama sweater, but in a giant size so it fit over all my other sweaters!) We met back up with Cassie & Kenzie and tasted delicious trout, which is Copa´s specialty.  One day we tried to do a hike but were stopped by a tiny dog that seemed to not want We went to Isla del Sol and hiked around the island and saw the Incan ruins, The whole island was so beautiful and it was a great hike, of which I´ve returned with my 4th sunburn of the trip. No, I haven´t learned my lesson and my sunscreen is still untouched in my suitcase waiting for the beaches in Ecuador.
We had a little hiccup that altered all the plans in Copacabana. We were on the way back from Isla del Sol when the friends we made from California, who are here on a med school internship in La Paz, told us their program director had emailed them that they didn´t have to work the next day because there was a transit strike in La Paz and there was no way to get around.  Well, we had to get to La Paz in the morning so Melissa could make her flight back home.  We get back to the island at 5:30, go to the internet cafe to see if we can find anything out (the people at the buses will typically lie to you to get you to buy a ticket and not care if you actually reach your destination or not). No one seems to know about the strike, not even the Bolivian newspaper La Razon that I´ve gotten pretty good at translating. We walk up to the buses to find out what time we can leave in the morning, and the man tells us there are no buses tomorrow until 6:30 pm because of...the strike. Now it´s 5:50. The last bus out of Copa to La Paz is 6:30. Our stuff is all over the hostel (which we already paid for), so we have to RUN back to the hostel, THROW our stuff in our bags and run to the bus. We both are almost out of money, we have just enough to pay for the tickets and buy ´dinner´, which consists of Pringles and Twix since we can´t afford anything alse and have about 6 minutes to spare.  We do make it back to La Paz successfully, and Melissa makes her plane and I hang out for the day until taking a bus to Cochabamba, which I was planning on skipping but have no choice now since I still can´t get to Peru quite yet. I´m going to take the long, 4 bus 2-day route on Friday to get to Arequipa, unless a miracle happens and I can get a flight for under $200 (they´re currently pricing around $500).

Oddly enough, I found my new favorite food in Bolivia that turns out to be a Dutch snack.  Bitterballen, most common in the Netherlands and Belgium, are little balls of meat, beef broth, flour and spices served with a little bowl of mustard dipping sauce. There are a surprising number of Dutch places here, and I´ve had it 3 times and am kind of obsessed!

On to the last stop (sorry for skipping around, this entry has been in progress for over a week): Cochabamba. Now, I was going back and forth about coming here, and once I decided I´d had enough of Bolivia I was trying to get out and move along to Peru and the warmer weather, nicer scenery and less crowded streets that come along with the crossing of the border. However, that didn´t happen as I´ve been incessently complaining about, so I took an overnight bus to Cochabamba instead. This town is known for having the world´s largest statue of Christ (bigger than the one in Rio!), and that´s about it.  But I heard there were also treks in the area around it, and it´s the paragliding capital on Bolivia, so either way it would give me something to do.
The one thing I didn´t realize was how much of a non-tourist town it was.  I wanted to climb to the christ statue, but couldn´t because there´s danger of being robbed. I can´t walk anywhere past 9 pm, and I definitely heard gunshots from my room before.
That being said, the weather is great, they call it the City of Eternal Spring, and I´ve found better food here (corn and cheese hornitos!) than in most of the other places I´ve been.  I did get to go paragliding, which was raelly cool although not as much of a rush as I was expecting.  I guess after going bungee jumping and sky diving, biking death road and walking down the street in La Paz everything else can seem much tamer.  It was really fun regardless, and I had a great view of the whole city.  I spent 2 days wandering, retreating to my hotel (yes, I checked myself into a hotel. I even did a great job at negotiating the rate down to nearly half what they were charging, AND checking in at 6:30AM without paying for the extra night! I´m learning!), and the highlight of my time was finding a bracelet with Bolivia´s flag´s colors and a little icon of my boy Che. For only 3 Bs (that´s about 43 cents).

Paragliding was awesome. I´m glad that I waited to do it instead of going in Argentina where it was more than twice as expensive. Here it was $50, overlooked the giant Jesus statue and I loved every second of it. I´still have an awful fear of heights that wont go away despite doing things like sky diving and paragliding, but I will keep trying!  This was a little different than jumping out of a plane, because when I went sky diving I was attached to someone who just pummelled us out of the aircraft.  With this, I had to run with the guy until my feet weren´t touching the floor anymore.  Then I sat down (the backpack has a seat in it!) and enjoyed the view.  I begged him to do tricks, but he said that doing tricks makes you come down too fast so he just did a couple little turns to appease me.  It will still cool and I´m SO happy I went.

My trip here was an even bigger success when I found out I could bypass going back to La Paz, and take a bus straight to Arica, Chile tomorrow to begin my journey to Peru. From there I spend a night, take a bus or train over the border to Tacna, Peru and continue to Arequipa, where I´ll be climbing into a canyon that´s twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.  I´ve heard it´s amazing and I´m so excited to get to Peru and see for myself!! Fingers crossed I get over the border this time!