Bolivia (Part Two)

BOLIVIA!!

Hola mi amigos!
Let us pick up where we left off, shall we?

Sucre

We’d been wanting to do Spanish lessons pretty much from the moment we set foot in South America. If for nothing else, we wanted to avoid making the same perplexed face at people when they started rapid-firing Spanish at us. The tiny town of Sucre seemed like the perfect place. On our arrival, however, we were told that our reservation at our hostel had been screwed up and we now had to be in separate rooms. Normally that would suck and we’d deal with it, but we needed to be together so we could study.
‘That is unacceptable,’ I roared at the man who shrugged and said it wasn’t his problem. We tearfully demanded a refund on our deposit which he refused to do and then he goes ‘oh, there is a 3-bed room you can have’. Ummmm???? It ended up being an amazing room, but that man continued to baffle us for the week we were there. He’d always tell us one thing and then change his mind mid-sentence, without any obvious reason. So strange.
Anyway we ended up spending 90% of our time in that room. ALL WE DID WAS STUDY!!! We’d wake up at about 9am, study, have breakfast, study, go out for lunch (taking our books with us so we could quiz each other on verbs), study, go to class, study, have dinner and then update our vocab list before bed. Our profesóra Monica, a kind woman who always wore red, loaded us up with so much homework every class because she said we were such ‘muuuuy bien estudiantes’ (very good students). We, being the nerds we are, didn’t want to disappoint her and nearly killed ourselves in the effort. We ended up hating Monica, despite her kindness, just because of all the homework and we practiced our Spanish with sentences like ‘I do not like Monica’ and ‘my teacher is not very good’ (hey, we never said we were any good!)

La Paz

Where do I start with La Paz? It was basically just a cesspool of drinking, inappropriate behavior and an abundance of smelly chat. Nik and I especially out-did ourselves in the obnoxious mole department. But more on that later. We arrived in La Paz after a comfortable-but-oddly-sleepless night on the bus (perhaps it had to do with Nikola eating an apple in my face… core and all!). We were all feeling a bit stressy as we’d witnessed Nik and my bags being put on the bus but not Hez’s. Alas, when we collected them in La Paz, Hez’s was AWOL. Luckily, we found it… it had been put on another bus that was thankfully headed for La Paz as well! Naughty Bolivian bus system!
Anyway we got to our hostel, the wonderful Loki, and was thrilled to discover they had effed up our reservation and we were now in a private 3-bed dorm! We couldn’t check in right away so we decided to go for a stroll. It is a beautiful city in the way that those rolly dogs are beautiful… ugly, but utterly appealing. That night we got smashed on red wine (remember people, we hadn’t gotten drunk since Brazil!) and behaved appallingly (can’t say more than that as family members read this!)
The next night was pretty much a repeat except this time Nikola and I went out. Hez was supposed to come too, but at the last minute she peeped out from behind a pillar nervously and told us she didn’t want to. Uncool Hez! So Nik and I were let loose on the streets of La Paz and we ran an absolute muck! We bumped into a troop of policemen, attempted to steal their hats and chased them up the street yelling ‘WE LOVE POLICE’ in extremely poor Spanish. At first they were refusing to partake in our mischief, but by the end they all had their camera phones out and were taking photos of us sprawled all over them! Hilarious. We went to a bar after that and didn’t emerge until 9.30 the following morning.
We actually did cultural things as well (although it still involved drinking)… we saw a futball (soccer) game!! Bolivia v Argentina, the World Cup Qualifier! It was AMAZING!!! Everyone in our hostel drank together before. All the people who knew anything about soccer were going for Argentina. Accordingly, we went for Bolivia. And guess what? THEY WON! Not only that, they SMASHED THEM!!! Six points to one! Haha! Take that Argentina, you big thieving bullies! It was so funny though, because La Paz is at an altitude of 4200m, everytime Bolivia scored we’d all jump and down screaming for about two seconds before we’d get out of breath and have to sit down. It was especially bad for Nik, who after the game pretty much collapsed! Nothing a bottle of water and a KitKat couldn’t solve!
That night there was a trivia quiz on at the hostel to raise money for a local orphanage. Excitedly, we signed up. Oh dear. it was AWFUL! The questions may as well have been written by a three-year-old, the amount of sense they made. Most were about movies from the 70s that nobody had heard of or events that only caused a minor scandal in Bangladesh. We thought Nik the bartender, who was reading out the questions, was the one who had wrote them and we were heckling him pretty bad. However, it turned out to be the orphanage owner who wrote them and he read our answer sheet on which we had scribbled ‘THIS QUIZ IS SHIT!’. Whooooops!!!! Insulting an orphanage owner… that is a new low. Naughty girls.

WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS ROAD

No, the title does not lie. We really did ride down (on a mountain bike, no less) a road named most likely to kill you. I think 13 tourists have died doing it and thousands of Bolivians too. The number of crosses on the track were ridiculous. Basically, its just a narrow, bumpy dirt track perched on the edge of thousand foot drops. So scary. But the worst part was the pain! Have you ever clung for dear life onto bike handles for five hours? Have you? Give it a go. Our hands were BRUISED at the end. So sore. In our group we had four Israeli girls who made it pretty clear they had no desire whatsoever to befriend us. We’d ask them questions and get a sullen ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and then they’d just speak to each other in Hebrew. It was so annoying. They were also ridiculously slow going down the hill so we ended up being the last group to finish the track. The other groups were psycho though, so its maybe it was a good thing. They were all yahooing (grandma-sounding word but that’s exactly what they were doing) down the hill, being so reckless and nearly side-swiping me! I was nearly in tears.

We went to the Amazon jungle and did the pampas tour after this, but that will be a long article so I’ll put that in the next one!

Adios! xxxx