Wow.

Okay, so far I've had one comment on my prior posting about the time I spent in Bolivia, as well as three other e-mails regarding it. So, just for readers' sake, I'll just post it here. Bear with me, folks, it's been over 10 years since I went.

And no, it was not because of drug running. ;)

When I lived in Brooklyn, I attended a Catholic High School, run by the brothers of St. Francis Xavier (thus the name of my HS, Xaverian). One of my strongest subjects way back in the day was Spanish (I was pretty fluent back then, and am still pretty decent at it, but it's somewhat rusty due to lack of use), so during my Junior year three of us were asked to take part in an exchange program - myself, a guy from my class named Greg Annunziato, and a Sophomore named Ryan Johnson, as well as Mr. Coro, one of the teachers there. The exchange would be to a "brother school" in Carmen Pampa, Bolivia (in the Cochabamba area, if my memory serves me), where we'd stay for a week.

So, the big day comes and we, with passports in hand, board an American Airlines flight from Newark airport in New Jersey. We then proceed to fly from Newark, to Miami, to Lima, Peru, to La Paz, Bolivia.

Our luggage goes from Newark to Miami and stops. Whee.

So... we arrive in La Paz, Bolivia, and drive half an hour, with no luggage, to our hotel. The airline reimbursed each of us $150 to get additional clothing and stuff while they tried to locate ours.

By this time, I'm sick as a dog. A combination of motion sickness, the high altitude, thin air, fatigue, and airline food have all conspired to make me pray for death in a foreign land. I recovered enough the next morning to walk around the streets of La Paz in the market, but was still woozy for the next few days.

The market was pretty much what you'd expect from looking at tourism posters of Bolivia... old buildings, people hawking wares on the side of the street (everything from fruit to silver), policemen in riot gear with assault rifles and grenade launchers, and cozy little restaurants that served some of the tastiest food I had eaten in a long time - mostly sweet cornmeal, ground beef, and a spicy red sauce of some sort. Kind of like a tamale, I suppose, but nowhere near as gritty as I've normally had them.

Okay, maybe the tourism posters didn't quite showcase the riot-gear laden cops, but it was a definite culture shock from being used to seeing New York's boys in blue carrying pistols and nightsticks, and wearing slacks and button-up shirts. Grenade launchers? Flak jackets? Whoa.

We returned to the hotel just before lunch, had a bit more to eat, then grabbed what was left of our belongings and crammed into a jeep. Drove up the side of a hill, stopped at a toll road (where we were swarmed by a bunch of women who ended up selling us a bag of flat bread and a tub of peanut butter, all for the equivalent of 3 bucks), and we headed off to Carmen Pampa.

Three and a half hours, in a jeep, through the Andes mountains. Possibly some of the most beautiful land I've ever seen in my life, and this is coming from a die-hard city boy. The road was a dirt and gravel thing, maybe 9 feet wide, with a 50-foot tall cliff wall on one side, and a 100-foot drop into the forest below. No guardrails. Lots of traffic slooooowly passing each other so as not to nudge someone off the edge of the cliff. Lots of little crosses along the side of the road to show where people didn't quite succeed in that regard. Absolutely stunning scenery, including a view of the /tops/ of the clouds as we were driving through the mountains, a city built onto the side of one of the mountains (whose name utterly escapes me) that looks as if it was lifted straight from one of the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and a flock of birds that circled overhead that were approximately the same size as a seagull, but were the same color as a fire engine. And just as loud, too.

Well, duty calls. I'll finish posting about Bolivia soonish.