Katherine, monkey and I have arrived in the highest capital city in the world, though officially Sucre is the capital of Bolivia. The airport is at 4000 m, luckily the city is about 400 m lower in the valley, a spectacular sight as you enter from above by bus, a sprawling, expanding city that is literally crawling out of the valley over the rim. This creates a new city, El Alto(the fastest growing in SA), housing the populations migrating from the countryside.
Sucre was on the news yesterday, it appears that there has been demonstrations and violence in the city and the parliament has been suspended. If this continues, we might well avoid it, though many postings on thorn tree say that there are always demo's and road blockades in Bolivia and that usually foreigners aren't targeted, just disrupted and delayed by them.
On Sunday, we are booked on the 'most dangerous road in the world' mountain bike ride(Google it) an incredible downhill ride from La Paz to the Yungas, a sub-tropical climate, a drop of 3500 m and 80 km. Can't wait!! lots of people from our hostal(adventure brew) have done it and say it's fantastic. This hostal has it's own micro-brewery(one free beer a day) and a designer bar at the top of the building with glass windows all around with great views of the city at night.
We are going to stay in the Yungas for a little while, where there are some beautiful walks to waterfalls and trips to coffee plantations etc and then back to La Paz to head south towards Argentina. We've decided against going to the amazon, a mixture of cost, mozzies and dengue fever and are we doing it just because we should. People have said that you could be unlucky and hardly see any wild life anyway. Along with this, we are keen to see as much of Argentina as we can before working at David's and when the weather is at it's best(i.e Patagonia).
By the way, I'll go back to edit and write more on previous posts when I get time.
a travelogue in the time of the information superhighway
1994
My story starts in drizzly, dreary, grey England. I worked as a nurse in a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. One day, I suddenly entered her world, there she was. At once beautiful, but decaying visibly. Eyes that melt you, fumbled for reasons. High on morphine, she slumped on the chair. Her legs, previously long and graceful, were now fat and full of fluid. She was loosing her hair, something that upset her most. We all witnessed her struggling with the remains of her dignity and modesty, but she carried on fighting. Her mother applied facial cream like a corner man at ringside, her father just looked lost. She was a twenty seven year old woman, right before us, dying in her prime. She seemed to hold up a mirror to the thoughts sailing across my mind, a metaphor for what we've all become and what will become of us. So much potential, so much waste. It is at moments like this that we can take the looking glass to our own fragile existence, and ask questions of it. Cancer had infiltrated her womb, the very giver of life. I became aware of a feeling that her death had released something else, a thirst for living itself. She haunted me. Four months later, I set out on an adventure to view the world that she would no longer see.
Posted by don quixote
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