No Hay Tierra Como Mi Tierra

Soy una fábrica de humo,

mano de obra campesina para tu consumo

Frente de frio en el medio del verano,

el amor en los tiempos del cólera, mi hermano.

El sol que nace y el día que muere,

con los mejores atardeceres.

Soy el desarrollo en carne viva,

un discurso político sin saliva.

Las caras más bonitas que he conocido,

soy la fotografía de un desaparecido.

-Calle 13, Latinoamérica

Huayna Potosí, seen from just outside the El Alto Airport on our very first day in the country

And so, it's finally happened: I'm in Bolivia. I'm not, of course: I'm actually in my Michigan living room, watching the falling snow through the window, and dreading having to go outside in 14º weather. But I still have a month's worth of adventures in Bolivia to write about, so I might as well get started.

Most of you reading this are probably aware that this was not my first time in Bolivia; I lived there for a year as an exchange student in high school. So, while arriving in the El Alto Airport was an arrival in a new country for most everyone else on my program, for me it was more like coming home. After shelling out $135, and accidentally getting a 5-year visa instead of the usual 30-day visas (they were out of the 30-day stickers), I was officially back in the country I'd called home three years ago. The great thing about flying into the capital of La Paz is the altitude: the whole city is built on the walls of a valley, so planes have to fly into El Alto on the plateau up above, at the elevation of over 13,000 feet. Having flown in from Miami, which is essentially right at sea level, it was quite the entertaining adjustment for all of us. I never had altitude problems when I was there the first time, but for some reason it affected me to an extent when I first arrived; even in the first few days, spent in relatively low-lying Cochabamba (about 8000 feet), I was suffering from a headache and constant dehydration.

After a brief early morning layover in La Paz, we took another short flight to Cochabamba, which was our home city for most of the month we were there. I'd only been there very briefly during high school, so it was nice to have the opportunity to explore a new part of Bolivia. There's a local saying that says "las golondrinas nunca migran de Cochabamba": The swallows never migrate from Cochabamba. That's in reference to its climate, which is said to be the most even-tempered and agreeable in all of Bolivia. It's a valley in the eastern Andes, surrounded by dramatically shaped mountains. It came to international attention at the turn of the millennium, in the midst of worldwide anti-globalization protests, because of the 2000 Cochabamba Water War, when cochabambinos rose up in protest over the privatization of its water and the subsequent price hikes. It's a center of progressive thought and social action in Bolivia, and also known for having the best food and some of the nicest people in the country. Definitely my kind of place.

The only picture I took in Cochabamba, on my second-to-last day. I have the bad habit of never taking any pictures of where I actually live. Maybe I should work on that for the new year.

After the less-than-ideal programming we had in Morocco (see my final Morocco post), Bolivia was a breath of fresh air for all of us. Most people on the program spoke at least a little Spanish, and many host families spoke English, which was a welcome change. Furthermore, many had never had exchange students, and from what I understood every family genuinely took an interest in learning about our lives and, you know, treating us as people, something that had been a problem. My own host family was wonderful- they were quick to welcome my homestay partner Izaak and I as part of the household, not simply paying guests. The accommodations were really a welcome change as well; we had our own rooms, and internet that they didn't turn off at random intervals without telling us. Both of my host siblings did Rotary Exchange (the same program I took to Bolivia the first time), and spoke perfect English, which didn't matter as much for me, but was great for Izaak, who spoke no Spanish. In short, it was basically the perfect host family.

We were given a couple days to settle into Cochabamba, then promptly bundled into a bus and send down the mountain to the Chapare region, where a huge amount of Bolivia's coca is grown. I don't have time or space (nor do readers have the patience) to describe the issue of coca in all its complexity, but it's hard to describe Bolivia's current political and cultural situation without including coca. The coca leaf, of course, is the base ingredient in the root of a huge portion of America's problems: cocaine. It's also an important part of Coca Coca to this day, so I guess you could argue it's the root of even more problems than just Canadian mayors and racially charged police tactics. In the Andean cultures, however, the coca leaf is mostly used for chewing only: on its own, it's a mild stimulant that takes away hunger and helps with altitude sickness. It also turns your teeth green, but it doesn't give you a crash afterwards, nor does it make you crash cars or turn horridly obese like some of its other derivatives. It's extremely important, both culturally and economically, for millions of people in the Andes, so it's easy to see how many Bolivians did not take kindly to the US' insistence on enforcing a zero-tolerance coca policy for decades, despite the fact it led to huge human rights abuses and economic hardship, and did nothing to stop the flow of cocaine. I have many less-positive things to say about the coca industry that aren't related to narcotraffic, but for now I'll just state that equating coca with cocaine is dangerous and inaccurate.

The drive from Cochabamba to Villa Tunari, the largest town in the Chapare, was itself one of the most beautiful landscapes I'd seen in Bolivia. We started in the valley of Cochabamba, then climbed past the city and villages into a high alpine environment, where bushes didn't grow more than a meter or so high and we were basically driving through a cloud. Descending towards the Amazon Basin, we entered the cloud forest, where trees covered in hanging mosses towered over the road, and epiphytes and other climbing plants carpeted every available surface. The forest was only broken when the road opened onto a precarious cliff-edge, with views across huge, green valleys. Going further down, the trees got larger and the air warmer, and eventually we were in the actual rainforest. 
Villa Tunari itself is a town of about 2,500 people on the banks of a winding tropical river, notable mainly because it's in the center of the most important coca-producing region in Bolivia. I've received differing accounts of this, but according to my (very conservative) host dad in Santa Cruz, most of the coca produced in the Chapare is destined for the drug trade, rather than legal consumption. Whether or not this is true, police are ubiquitous, and our program director regaled us with tales of working with journalists and human rights organizations in the region during the bad old days of the DEA. One of our first visits was to a cato de coca, the 40-by-40-meter square of coca plants now legally allowed for cocaleros. It was relatively near to the town itself, but it still felt like it was miles from civilization, down an unpaved road shaded by tall trees in parts, but showing signs of slash-and-burn agriculture in many others. The farmer we spoke to talked to us for a while of the structure of the coca-growers union (now one of the strongest popular organizations in the country, and an unshakeable supporter of president Evo Morales, who is still its honorary president). I also got to see a coca bush for the first time of my life. 

Pictured: the root of a huge portion of the world's problems.

The family lives elsewhere most of the year, and only comes out here to harvest; this is just a temporary makeshift kitchen. That said, what she was cooking still smelled pretty delicious.

Forest cleared for agriculture. I know it's for the livelihood of a lower-class family, but my inner tree-hugging hippy still can't help but be a little dismayed whenever I see things like this.

The river beside Villa Tunari. About 5 miles upstream, it's a raging rapids surrounded by steep-sided mountains.

Our stay in the lowlands was depressingly short- less than two full days. On our last morning, a couple friends and one of the professors decided that we wanted to see some actual rainforest, so we took a hike to the Parque Machía, a small park just outside of the town. It ended up being much farther away than we had expected, and involved lots of sweaty climbing up steep mountain slopes, hoping that the rest of the group wouldn't leave for Cochabamba without us. Nonetheless, it was totally worth it- we got to be in some beautiful jungle, and more importantly see lots of monkeys. Pictures below.

That's a coatimundi, a fairly common jungle animal-still felt pretty cool to see.

At the top of the hill around a small hut were 4 spider monkeys happily lounging around- and on top of! excited visitors. They weren't truly "wild", of course, but rather rescues from circuses or illegal captivity who were now allowed to roam free in the forest.

We were told to watch our pockets, because many of them are expert pickpockets!

A view of Villa Tunari- it really is on the very edge of the mountains.

I believe this gold-colored monkey is a type of marmoset, but I could be very wrong. I really should drop this schooling and just apply with National Geographic with stunning wildlife photography like this.

One of the promises I made myself when I knew for sure I'd be coming back to Bolivia was that on my first free weekend I would go to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, my old home city, to see family and friends. Sure enough, we ended up having the first weekend off, so I bought my plane tickets and jetted off the morning after we returned from the Chapare. My old host family met me at the airport, and I spent a wonderful lunch with them, catching up on some of the things I'd missed. My little host brother, who had just turned 4 before I left, is now 7 years old, and won't stop talking about his friends, his school, his tennis lessons, and everything in between. My host sister now has a baby (according to my little brother, I'm little Alejandra's tio de intercambio), and my older host brother, who went on exchange the same time I did, is now studying in Boston and spending all his money on popular music videos. And the whole family sold the old house I knew and moved a couple blocks away. So I had lots to catch up on. 
Santa Cruz has very little in common with Cochabamba, or really any other Bolivian city. It's the largest city in the country, with about 3 million people (for comparison, the population of the whole country is a little less than 10 million, in a country twice the size of Texas), and very much in the lowlands. It's sprawling, brash, loud, and almost always swelteringly hot. It became hugely important economically a few decades ago when agriculture really took off, especially huge Brazil-style soy plantations.  When I was there 4 years ago, it still retained some of its small-town feel, with a relaxed atmosphere and a lack of high-rise buildings. However, the economy has been growing ever since, and there are new skyscrapers popping up practically everywhere, and even entire new fancy neighborhoods being created out of thin air, where previously there were only ghettos or cow pasture. The cambas have always considered themselves hugely different from the rest of Bolivia; they're generally wealthier, speak in an accent that's practically unintelligible to non-native speakers, and boast more European ancestry than indigenous. If cultural stereotypes are to be believed, they're also more relaxed, more welcoming, and fairly racist against indigenous people. From my experience, those stereotypes are mostly fairly inaccurate, except for the racism bit, but that's okay. 

The afternoon of my first day, I took a trip with a couple of my good friends from Bolivian high school into the foothills of the mountains, just a couple hours west of the city. The geology of the area is breathtakingly beautiful, with the deep green of the grass and trees contrasting with the blue of the skies and the red coloring of the rocks. There are lots of cool rock formations sprouting up all around, and, even better, lots of waterfalls to swim in. 

My friend Fernanda at an overlook

You better believe I swam under this waterfall.

The next day, I spent the morning with my host family at mass, then went out to the country house of a Rotarian couple I knew from my previous time. The husband is Argentinean, and therefore makes possibly the best barbecue in the country. Anybody who hasn't eaten Argentinean grilled beef is missing out on one of life's finest pleasures. Beef isn't particularly healthy, especially from a barbecue, and also incredibly environmentally destructive, but boy do all of those concerns melt away once I'm actually eating it. I've learned to accept cognitive dissonance as one of the keys to enjoying life as an educated person.

I got a ride back into the city to catch a plane with another older couple from my Rotary club, and there I got to experience one of the more troubling inconsistencies with life in Santa Cruz: how such wonderful, welcoming people can also harbor horribly racist sentiments at the same time. I happened to mention that I was highly disappointed with President Morales' environmental policies, since complaining about the government is always a good way to become friendly with a camba. The husband's immediate reaction was to say that "it's because we live in a government full of indians, who think we're still living 500 years ago in the Incan Empire." I kept my mouth shut (I've gone down that road before), and continued the conversation without acknowledging the comment, but it reminded me why I think I'll always have problems fitting in in Santa Cruz, much as I adore the city and its people. 

I flew out of the city that evening, just in time to get home and work on a homework assignment due the next day. It was an oddly short visit, and unfortunately ended up being my only time back to the city that semester. However, it was still wonderful to see old friends and family, and remember how much I love Bolivia. I also had to remember to appreciate the flowers and greenery surrounding me, because that was my last time in that sort of environment for a long time. As we'll be seeing in upcoming posts, I had quite a bit of quality time coming up in far dryer, colder, and weirder environments.

Ah greenery, how I miss thee...