Tales of the BowelCrusher

EAT MORE STREET-FOOD

The day after I shat my pants 74 clicks outside of Oruro, I woke up in the middle of a crowded curtain-draped hospital room  flanked on both sides by folks who look liked they´ve been shot out of a meat grinder. In comparison, I was the spitting image of picture perfect health, even though I still felt like shit. I was taking up precious space for more serious cases, so I called for the nurse and asked to be checked out. In ten minutes I was out of there, and found myself roaming the steep city streets of La Paz.

Vicuñas outside of Oruro

As I looked around for some affordable lodging, I began to mentally retrace my steps for the past couple of days. It hadn´t been so long since my stay in dreery old Challapata, where the head matron of the residencia I was staying at refused to let me use any of her many faucets to filter water, and if I had asked permission to use my own toilet,  I´m pretty sure she would  have said no. Challapata was quickly turning out to be the last straw in terms of my interactions with the locals of Bolivia. Not only was the head mistress of my residencia intent on destroying me via dehydration, but I quickly found that even the smallest amount of help was hard to find in this fair town. My simple quest to find a couple of black garbage bags at the local ferreterias were met by rude requests to get the fuck out, and it took at least five tries before someone finally told me how to get back onto ruta 1. There was something about my appearance that suggested to these folks that I was some kind of drug mule or worse...a gringo.

A couple of kilometers outside the most miserable town in Bolivia, I entered Pazña, the happiest town in Bolivia, for it was here that I came across some hotsprings. I spent half the day splashing around in the spiciest water I´ve encountered since Córdoba and slamming volleyballs into the faces of heedless Bolivian children. It´s ok, they were good sports, and they restored my faith in Bolivians albeit temporarily.

After my quick reprieve in the cozy waters of Pazña, I continued towards Oruro. However, the omens were not good. Some massive storm systems were developing to the east and the west, and as the city started to take over the horizon ahead of me, so too did these dark sky bubbles of death decide to merge and create a wall of lightning and hail that threatened to stop me dead if I dared approach any further. With the storm now heading directly for me, I had no choice but to break into one of the many abandoned mud brick houses on my route and take shelter for the night. The city was less than 7 km´s away.

My arrival in Orruro was a little anti-climactic. The city was effectively shut down due to a construction workers strike and with just a handfull of the stores open, there was no use sticking around except for a small snack of two salteñas (que ominous music). I asked around to see what everyone was up in arms about and found a lot of these folks were angry because the countless construction projects sponsored by the government had been brought to a halt, and now thousands of people were out of a job. As I entered and exited Oruro, I found the outskirts of the city surrounded by hundreds of finished and half-finished buildings and houses as far as thine eyes could see...all of which appeared to be completely vacant. I can only assume all this contruction was brought to a standstill because the government couldn´t find enough folks and businesses to pay for all these new buildings. So now there are plenty of places to stay for free outside the city.

So I continued on my way, and to make a long story incredibly short, I started throwing my guts up, crapped my pants, and found myself incapicitated on the side of the road with my limbs twitching like a fresh piece of road kill. It wasn´t long before a family in a pick-up realized I needed some help and lifted me into the flatbed for a quick hour and a half ride to La Paz. I wanted to talk to these folks, to thank them for all the help they were giving me, but I was having one of those days where I was just too damn sick to be translating words in my head. I hope they somehow find my blog and realize just how much I owe them for all their assistance. For all the bad folks I´ve run into in this country, there sure are a lot of people that go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to helping people.

Government Palace - La Paz

La Paz, like so many other Bolivian towns and cities (except Oruro) is surprising in all it´s colonial beauty and European sophistication in terms of architecture. The city-center lies at a shallow dip between two steep mountain valleys and is surrounded on all sides by what appears to be inversed limestone stalaktites exploding out of the tips of the mountains. While most of the towns and cities in Bolivia I´ve seen lie at the base of some vast mountain range, La Paz reaches a new level of ridiculouslness in terms of geography.

Great or greatest Imperial Guard?

Even though I´ve been here close to a week now, I haven´t had a lot of time to enjoy this city. With all this E. Coliciousness floating around in my guts, I tend to get winded pretty quick when I´m walking around and always have to be close to a bathroom. The only items I´ve been able to keep down in my stomach for the past couple of days have been rice, mangos, lettuce and sprite, so I haven´t had the chance to enjoy all the great goodies that line the streets every day. And like every other place in this country, the hail kicks in around three o´clock so you definitely don´t want to be caught outdoors when that happens.

It´s not a lot of fun being a gringo in La Paz either. The gringo toll is annoying, and when I refuse to pay twenty bolivianos for a bar of soap that has an eight boliviano price tag on it, these street venders will actually get pretty heated at me. Now that I think about it, this is the main reason I´m not really enjoying my stay here. I have to haggle for everything, right down to the last grain of rice, and even then I get stiffed.

One such incident got pretty bad yesterday. I got up early to snap some pictures of a few interesting sights and to avoid all the pedestrian traffic that clogs up the streets later in the day. As soon as the camera comes out, some creep sneaks up behind me and in his most seductive tone whispers into my ear "gringo, mira...hey gringo", and repeats this until I finally turn around. He has some busted up ancient trilobites that he´s trying to sell for twenty bolivianos a piece. As soon as he sees I´m not interested, he dramatically lowers the price to ten, but I still don´t want to buy that stupid shit so I tell him to leave me alone. He pretends that he doesn´t understand what I´m saying, so he continues with his sale pitch until I can´t take it anymore and head down another street. He follows me for a block before he wanders off to talk to some other dude.

I go back to taking pictures for five minutes before this cholo looking asshole rounds the corner and starts shouting at me in perfect Los Angelese, "Hey white boy, why aren´t you buying my man´s fossils?" I´m getting really pissed at this point what with all the diarrhea in my system and all these street creeps bugging me so I go right up to him and ask what´s his problem. He´s mugging me right back and saying that I disrespected his man by turning my back on him. I say to him I´m not here to buy that stupid shit. He says, "Why not? You´re rich. You can afford it". He keeps playing around with some junk in his pockets so I ask him if he´s going to do something about it if I don't buy something. He tries to get up in my face one more time but his stocky little legs can only bring him up so high before he says, "I better not see you here again, faggot", then immediately spins around and runs back to whatever troll cave he spotted me from.

Every city has assholes. It's an unavoidable reality of metroplitan life. But it's the troglodytes that make the empty threats that get on my nerves the most. I went back to the same street later that day to have some coffee and the troll was nowhere to be seen. I hate that guy. I hope one day someone spots him crying over the fact that he has no friends.

Cathedral de San Francisco - La Paz