Building a Road in Bolivia

Bolivia generally isn’t known for its elegant, efficient highways and state of the art road traffic management systems. If you take a second out of your day to picture a Bolivian road you’ll probably picture something dusty, something half-finished, something unsafe, and you’re probably seeing some kind of wild animal – a sheep or alpaca maybe – standing around doing nothing much.

Well, you’re right. I’d love to sit here and be able to dispel that image and call you a stereotyping meanie, but I can’t. Why? Because I actually found myself involved in the building of an impromptu road in the middle of god knows where. Yes, friends, I built a road.

I was on a bus from La Paz to Cusco, by way of a simple change in a town called Puno on the edge of Lake Titicaca. That was the plan anyway. It should have been a really simple journey and although I was travelling alone at this point, my Spanish was passable — okay, I could ask the tired-looking woman in the bus station, “Cusco. Mañana‎?”, then hand over some money. Easy. I wasn’t expecting this to be difficult.

Route from La Paz to Cuzco.

I got on the bus late the next afternoon without any problem at all and found myself sitting next to a fellow Brit. His name was Rob and he said he’d been living in Bolivia for two years teaching English. He’d done the same in Saudi Arabia for a few years before that. He was half a dozen years older than I was at the time and I was in awe of him I suppose. He had a life I wanted. And it turned out his hometown was a place called St Ives, a village about 10 miles outside of my hometown of Cambridge. Serendipity or what?

Anyway, we chatted for a while, then we suddenly looked out the window and realised we were about to die. There was no road out of the window at all. There was just a 30 foot drop and, I repeat, no road beneath us. The bus’s wheels were scrabbling around in vain on loose stone on a road that had been winding upwards for a while. I was sure I could feel the bus wobbling up and down like they do in the movies, right before a last-gasp hand from Tom Cruise as the bus drops off the edge and explodes in a glorious fireball.

Obviously the fireball didn’t happen, nor did an appearance of a Tom Cruise (not even an Adrien Brody) and we survived that scare and continued on this road. People began whispering and translations got fumbled around six different languages but eventually news filtered through that this wasn’t the road we were supposed to be on. Apparently locals were on strike about low wages and were blockading the main roads so we were on an alternate route.

An alternate route that looked something like this (stolen affectionately from http://jefflynchdev.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/that-red-dirt-road/).

Only the alternate route turned out not to have been finished. The road dwindled into dirt path and then nothing more than flat ground. Then it stopped being flat. We rolled to a stop, tried to back up, couldn’t, tried again to move forward, couldn’t. The driver barked some unhappy words and everyone got off the bus. We were stopped in loose gravel in front of a tiny slope which we evidently couldn’t go forward nor reverse from.

After a lot of standing around everyone started trying to pile the biggest, flattest rocks they could find in front of the bus’s wheels. Then someone found some odd-sized planks of wood and laid those on top of our rocks. We’d built a road.

Somehow this giant coach managed to not flatten this makeshift road and we managed to get back onto flat ground. High fives and clapping commenced. “I’ve never done that before,” Rob said to me.

Our euphoria was short-lived. As if we were puppets in some novel where the author loathes his characters, we soon ran into a huge, uncrossable ditch. It came out of nowhere and separated us from a path that actually looked like it’d go somewhere. There were no planks, no rocks, no anything. I wish I could say we found a way around it by some heaven-sent lightning destroying a huge tree or something equally preposterous but in the end we had to turn around and go back exactly the way we came. That’s how life goes sometimes. No happy ending.

Or maybe the lesson in all this is that life sometimes makes us go the long way to find the simple solution. Who the fuck knows. Point is, we got to Puno eventually. Then the ride from there to Cusco was all sorts of crazy but I’ll tell you about that later.

Cycling the World’s Most Dangerous Road

Back in June 2009 I cycled down what is supposedly the world’s most dangerous road, outside of La Paz, Bolivia. Presumably it was given this unofficial title long before roads in the Middle East were given the added challenge of IEDs. The road is known as Death Road colloquially or alternatively Yungas Road or Coroico Road or Holy Mother Of God That’s A Long Way Down Road. I’ll be calling it Death Road as it’s the easiest to type.

Death Road, as discussed by three middle-aged men on prime-time British TV, is something of a challenge in a car. It also happens to be incredibly fun to cycle. Quite literally the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything, in fact.

I was with a handful of other people that I’d been travelling with from Cusco, Peru, onto La Paz, Bolivia. One of them spoke respectable Spanish so we were relying on her to avoid the rest of us having to rely on wild finger-pointing and loud-talking like ignorant British tourists on the Costa. This Death Road day was the last one before I was to go solo and try and rely on my own fragmented Spanish around some random towns in South America (I survived so it must’ve been good enough!). This day out was to be one of the last times I ever saw these people.

Downtown La Paz

We waited outside the hostel about 6:45am to be picked up by a minivan and driven to the start point. We were all given helmets and padded jackets, although I couldn’t see the point. If you were to fall off the edge, it was so far down that not even being inside a padded box inside a truck rammed full of bubble wrap would’ve saved you. But we did all “look the part” with helmets and bright jackets.

The first part of the cycle was the easy part – it was all downhill, all tarmac and it was still early and the road was quiet so we raced down it, although we always had to stay behind one of the guides at the front . After that part, which was maybe a solid hour of cycling, we  (and there were about 25 of us altogether, from other hostels and hotels) all piled into a small cafe and had some bread and jam, bananas, juice and some coca tea for breakfast.

After that the road was entirely gravel and dirt track, wide enough for about one a half cars in most places. It was a two-way road, somehow. On one side was rock face with the occasional dainty waterfall and overhanging trees; on the other was a sheer drop, no railings, no fences. If you fell, your cries of “oooooohhhhh shiiiiiiiit” would be quickly swallowed up  by the forest of trees below.

We split up into groups, each with a leader from the trip organisation – a slow team (I don’t want to be sexist here, but that group was mostly girls), a medium team and a fast team. The fast team was myself, a fellow Brit and a Dutchman (both of whom I was travelling with), a French guy and a German. After a while the latter two dropped back, leaving the Brits as leaders, restoring the natural order of things.

My photos are long since lost, so I’ve stolen this affectionately from http://teacherontwowheels.com/2008/09/30/the-death-road/.

It was a painful ride. Cycling over gravel solidly for four hours is not comfortable, no matter what bike you’re using. Your numb hands start slipping off the handlebars because you can’t grip anything properly. The bike seats are no better and sitting down gets really uncomfortable too. But the more painful it gets, the more you can focus on the pain rather than spend time being terrified of hitting a big stone badly and flying off the edge. Every cloud and all that.

We did stop a few times, to flex some feeling back into fingers and to wait for the, ahem, girls. On a couple of these stops, we found ourselves next to wrinkled old women standing next to huge tarpaulin sheets covered with coca leaves. Coca is involved in the process of making cocaine (Wikipedia has details) and a lot of locals chew coca leaves during the day instead of eating/drinking because it’s basically a “superfood”. I’d love to see the Daily Mail write an article about that. I tried chewing the leaves once but it involves chewing a leaf for hours. It gets kind of gross. Coca tea is freaking amazing though. And no, it doesn’t get you high or anything. It just tastes nice and maybe gives you a little more energy than normal. Pity it’s illegal/impossible to get in the UK (and presumably most other places).

This one stolen from http://www.aroundthisworld.com/mountain-biking-bolivias-death-road/. They have some more cool pics. Check them out.

After several hours, we got to the bottom. After we’d settled in with some beers, the girls joined us, looking every bit as exhausted as we did. “Wow, Chirpy,” Sarah said. “I’m impressed. I wasn’t expecting you to be so good at this. You’re too intelligent.” The polite way of calling me a geek, I guess, and to be fair, anyone looking at me would probably assume I’d be more at home in chess club than leading the pack cycling down the world’s most dangerous road for four hours.

After everyone had recovered some feeling in their fingers and backside and had a beer, we were all taken to some hotel with incredible views over the Andes, where we could jump in the swimming pool and have some buffet lunch/dinner.

The view from the hotel. This is one of my own.

“I think this is what they call a perfect moment,” Aaron said, as the six of us travellers sat cosily around a table out in the sun with some condors gliding past the mountains behind us. He did actually say that, I’m not making it up to have a nice ending. He said it, we all agreed, then clinked glasses. Then it was time to go.

Suddenly full of energy, we all jumped back on our bikes and headed back up the hill. Only joking, the bikes were put into one van and the 25 of us separated into a couple of minivans and we drove back to La Paz. It seemed like we drove back on the same goddamn road but it became dark on the journey and we were all exhausted and fell asleep in the van. Night night.

Meanwhile, Somewhere in a Place No One’s Ever Heard Of…

If you don’t know where Bratislava is, you’re forgiven. It’s the end of semester. If you sort of somehow recognise the name from somewhere but you’re not sure where, half marks. If you know that Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia in eastern Europe and a charming little place, you can come sit on teacher’s knee. Come on now, don’t be shy.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much, if anything, about Bratislava or Slovakia before I visited. Like, literally — I didn’t research it at all. I jumped on an overnight train in Krakow, Poland and arrived in the city at dawn the next morning.

Sometimes when I travel I’m mildly concerned I might’ve been on the wrong train, but thankfully the train station in Bratislava comes with a huge “Welcome to Slovakia” sign as you walk through the station. I suppose because they’ve had a lot of people get off the train  and immediately say, “What the fuck is this place?”

I crunched through the snow, past the bus stops and over a pedestrian bridge, following the signs for “historic centre” and “castle”. It was cold and I was tired and I probably should’ve taken the bus. But it was worth it when I turned a corner and saw the castle on the hill.

The surprise reveal is always a memorable moment – a castle on top of a misty hill, a song by your favourite band in a film’s soundtrack or an unexpected penis on a girl you’ve been dating. Life is full of such moments. They’re what make life great.

But I wasn’t thinking that kind of stuff at the time. Walking through the snow had soaked my socks through my shoes and I was getting hungry so I was mostly thinking about looking after myself. Problem was, it was way too early. Not even McDonald’s was open yet. So I wandered up to the castle itself and looked out over the city.

Beyond that, there wasn’t much to do in the city, I’ll be honest. The old town was a bunch of winding streets which were nice I suppose, but they weren’t like Jerusalem’s Old City. You can’t get lost in Bratislava’s Old Town because you can walk through it in about two minutes. Where Jerusalem was an intense medley of spices and fresh bread, the clanging of pots and the shouts of stall owners, in Bratislava you could hear your own footsteps on the cobbles beneath your feet.

If you get a chance to visit Bratislava, you’re probably better off going somewhere else instead. But if you’re in Vienna and fancy something more interesting, Bratislava is only 40 miles away. I guess I’ve already spoiled the surprise of seeing the castle looming large on the hill through the mist at dawn though. Sorry about that.

Auschwitz (and Birkenau) with a Million Dead Jews

I’ve seen more than a few memorable things in my time – Machu Picchu, Petra, the Grand Canyon and New York City from the air - but my visit last week to Auschwitz, an hour’s train ride from Kraków, Poland, will live long in the memory for all the wrong reasons.

I’ll be honest, I walked through that iconic “arbeit macht frei” gate of the Auschwitz main camp and saw the brick buildings and I thought, “Well, this isn’t so bad. I’ve seen more unpleasant boarding schools.”

Yeah, sure, there’s guard towers and barbed wire but every authoritarian regime needs some method of control; the Nazis used guard towers, the NYPD have a “go nuts” policy with tasers. Everyone’s different.

It’s the “exhibitions” they have set up inside some of the buildings – and the whole place is entirely free entry, as it should be – that are the emotive heart of the main camp. I’m of the Internet generation and I’ve seen my share of weird, disgusting stuff at /b/ and /r/spacedicks (out of curiosity rather than regular visits, I hasten to add), but seeing the hair collected from an estimated 140,000 victims in a huge pile behind a glass display case is way more disturbing. There’s a plaque at the exhibit saying that forensic tests showed that the hair contained traces of hydrogen cyanide. You know, from the gas chambers.

In the other exhibitions at Auschwitz I (the main camp), there’s a collection of shoes, a collection of suitcases, and photos of individuals and families forced to the camp. They’re going for the personal connection, making you think that “woah, they were normal people, just like me if I was Jewish and lived in Poland.”

But for me, getting a sense of the scale of what happened is better for giving a yank on my heartstrings, which you can get from a visit to Auschwitz II – Birkenau. There’s a free shuttle bus that runs between the two sites and you’ll get off at Birkenau to be greeted by that iconic gate you’ve seen in countless movies and documentaries.

Although in most documentaries, there’s not normally a garish American tourist getting in everyone’s way. I guess Spielberg has someone edit them out or something.

Step through the gate and you can start to see how bleak a place Birkenau is. The train track runs towards some trees a mile past the gate and then it just stops. The end of the line, in more ways than one.

It’s easy to imagine there might’ve been a “Welcome” sign there somewhere back in the day as families stepped off the train to be escorted to the cabins in which they’d spend their remaining days.

Then, of course, there’s the gas chambers themselves, dynamited in a hurry by the Nazis before the end of the war to try and cover up some of what they were doing, which is kind of like trying to fight off a tsunami with a couple of plastic buckets. Silly Germans.

Auschwitz is somewhere worth visiting, that’s for sure. If you’re a student of the humanity, are interested in world history or have a hair fetish, you simply have to visit. Leave right now. Just go already. But if you’re thinking about a romantic weekend away for you and your special someone, you might want to stick to Paris or Venice, although if you were considering Auschwitz as a vacation spot, I don’t want to know what you get up to in the bedroom. Sick freaks.

Note: apologies for the lack of posts guys. I’m not a full-time traveller so I was always going to run out of interesting material at some point. There should be a few more from this trip posted soon though. Look out for them!

Why You Should Study Abroad (if you get the chance)

Studying abroad is one of the best ways to travel. You’re not just visiting the place, you’re living there. You learn the price of milk and learn to spot a bargain in the thrift stores and can join in the complaints about the price of “gas” even when you know back home it’s three times as expensive and it’s called “petrol”. Every new person you meet treats you as the foreigner but you know about the coupons to save a quarter on buck twenty five pizzas. Your average tourist ain’t gonna know that shit.

What I’m trying to say, poor confused person, is that studying abroad is invaluable. If you get the opportunity, do it. Don’t worry about leaving your friends behind – you’ll meet people who are way more awesome and interesting than you ever would back home. Don’t worry about being homesick – there’s always something to occupy your mind and, you know, there’s Skype. Don’t worry about not fitting in – being the “exchange student” gets you so much attention and people will invite you to everything if you make a little bit of effort.

But you can study abroad right and you can study abroad wrong. My first semester abroad I spent at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I lived with other international and exchange students, got invited to the international and exchange student events, and barely met any Canadians. Thankfully I did make a Canadian friend, belatedly, and she’ll be one of my fondest memories, but mostly, Canada was studying abroad done wrong.

After New Year I went to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in, err, Charlotte, North Carolina. That’s America for those who live under rocks. Only this time I’d chosen to live with Americans rather than in the international student accommodation. This was studying abroad done right.

For example, I’ll never forget the time I asked my housemate to borrow his “saucepan.”

My housemate looked at me like I was having a stroke. “What? I missed that.”

“Can I borrow your sorsepun?”

“Dude, I literally have no idea what you just said.”

In the end I pointed it out in his cupboard. He then said, “Oh, a saaaauce-paan.”

And there were other activities that were quintessentially American that I got involved with, with Americans:

– Watching the Superbowl (I was a Packers fan that year (2011)).

– Weekly trips to Walmart with one of my housemates

– College basketball games

– Not to mention the stays with my housemates families and family friends in Asheville and a tiny redneck town in Tennessee.

That last one is the big one. Studying abroad, however you do it, gives you a chance to get out and explore different cities but if you don’t know  people, you’ll probably stay in hostels with other backpackers. I stayed with real Americans and with local people I’d become good friends with.

In addition to all of that, the university you go on exchange to will invariably be better than your home one. Here are some photos of UNCC (my American university):

Signs like this aren’t exactly a fool-proof method against mass shootings.

Cockroaches Crawling Over Toothbrushes in the Amazon Rainforest

Back in 2009 I left my old job as a lab technician pushing rabbit blood through a syringe to volunteer with a conservation company in the Amazon Rainforest in Peru. It was the first time I’d ever been away from home without being on a school trip.

That’s where I lived for three months. No doors, no windows, no electricity or phone lines, no hot water, no McDonald’s just round the corner. The photo shows one “dorm”, I suppose you could call it, with six beds up top and a bit of storage space below for muddy, wet clothes, where wasp’s nests may or may not have formed inside certain people’s trousers. There were two other identical dorms. There was also a similarly-styled bathroom area and a “main pod” which was made up of the kitchen/pantry area connected to a dining/communal area.

We had a generator which we powered up, say, once a week, through which we could connect a laptop to the Internet to email home to let loved ones know we hadn’t yet been eaten by a puma. I always ended such messages with a smiley face.

Cockroaches were the main enemy on a day to day basis. More than once did I creep into the bathroom after dark to detect the slick surface of cockroach shell glinting in the moonlight on top of somebody’s toothbrush they’d left out. The first time you accidentally left your toothbrush out became an initiation right because after your first slip up, you’d make sure to buy spares next time you were in the closest town, Salvacion. And new guys came and went all the time – scientists, researchers, new volunteers, hell, we had a whole film crew there for a month or so – which meant there were always new victims to tease at breakfast.

Being squeamish about the roaches passes the first time you grab the spray and go nuts screaming “die bitch die!” while spraying the roach skittering away to a safe hole. The roach would eventually stop, flounder around a bit, then finally cease moving entirely. It’s amazing how fast any moral high ground you might occupy about killing things falls at the wayside when you find a cockroach has nibbled its way inside a packet of Fruit Pastilles you’ve been saving for two months as a precious home comfort. We still ate those Pastilles though, nibble-holes be damned.

There’s also the bugs, especially after dark. After we’d eaten and it became dark, we’d crack out the candles and sit around playing cards. There wasn’t much else to do. After a few months we started entertaining ourselves by torturing bugs in the candle flame. I’m not mentally unstable, I assure you, and it wasn’t me who started it. Besides, the bugs mostly flew into the flame themselves, flapped a bit, then fell into the wax at the bottom. We just then encouraged them to make a return visit into the light.

Apart from roaches and other bugs, the rain was the biggest problem. I arrived at the start of March, still in the wet season. Most of our work was done outside – macaw-watching at the claylick at dawn, tagging certain things on the trails, biogarden work at our base and in Salvacion – and when it rained it really rained so we had to stay inside. It was frustrating but watching torrential downpours never got old. 

For those curious, I organised the trip through http://travellersworldwide.com/, whose website doesn’t look like it’s been updated since 2002.

I’ll post more about specific jungle activities in the future, especially on some of our “expeditions”.

Helicopter Tour over the Grand Canyon (South Rim)

There’s a big hole in America. I’m not talking about the hole in the economy out of which all the money is going or about the hole in Oprah’s face into which food is shoved*. I am, in fact, talking about the gigantic hole across the south-west of America, the Grand Canyon. It’s pretty big. Almost as big as the hole my brother and I dug on a beach on Costa Brava back in 1997. For anyone who doesn’t know where the south-west of America is, here’s a handy map:

I went to this big hole while I was in Las Vegas – where I got married, got divorced and snorted cocaine off a toilet seat, all of which involved a hooker called Cindy (I might’ve made this part up).

I arrived in Las Vegas after missing my scheduled bus from LA, which totally wasn’t my fault. So I got to Las Vegas later than expected, about 11 p.m. I took a taxi from the Greyhound bus station to the Imperial Palace mega-resort – as they like to be called – and checked into my room. I then checked a few travel plans and realised that my day-trip to the Grand Canyon was the following day with pick-up at 5 a.m. I could only afford one night, which was a weekday, and Memorial Weekend prices skyrocketed from about $28 to $128. So I was in that hotel for less than six hours, from a little after 11 p.m. to a little before 5 a.m, which was plenty enough time to shower, get a hooker and do that stuff with her (which may or may not have happened), then shower again.

Anyway, part of the Grand Canyon day trip experience includes a visit to the Visitor Centre. Thrill a minute, huh? But I’d blown the last of my student loan money on a helicopter tour so while everyone else was learning about the history of the Grand Canyon and how it was formed me and an Australian couple were flying over that bad boy in a helicopter — the South Rim if anyone’s been there and wants to know. Here’s the helicopter:

You know how most people these days don’t pay any attention to safety demonstrations on flights because they’ve seen them a thousand times before? Well, during the safety video about what to do and what not to do in the event of a helicopter emergency, I was blasé about the whole thing because I knew it all having done a helicopter tour before, over Manhattan.

But even though I’d been through the process before, actually taking off, flying over a forest of trees and then seeing the hole approach…

…Well, bub, you have to experience it for yourself. It’s a feeling that doesn’t compare to anything else. And once you’re out there, over the hole…

…and…

…It’s a perfect place for someone to hide a body, say, by pushing them out of a helicopter.   In addition to myself and the Aussies, there were also two Asian girls. If it came to voting, I think the Aussies would’ve had my back as I’d chatted to them on the bus. They were nice.

After the helicopter tour, which only lasted about half an hour (and it felt a lot, lot less than that), we caught up with the others at a couple of look-out points. You can get some nice photos from those kinds of places…

…but it’s the Niagara Falls syndrome all over again. It’s too busy. Everyone is fighting for spots at the railing and trying to take photos of each other trying to make it look like they weren’t part of a massive tour group all trying the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a stunning place, and I preferred it infinitely to Niagara Falls. But it’s better if you ‘do it’ in a special way – a hike, a helicopter tour or a road trip to a quiet part of the place where you’re not surrounded by hundreds of other people.

*I apologise to Oprah. She’s great.