Toro Toro 7 - Extreme Ali

(Posted retroactively)

On the third day, we did another hike, to this waterfall (see picture on right). We ended up going to about halfway up the photo on the right, where it looks like there might be a cave thing.

Meanwhile, that day we were arranging a camera exchange program - you trade cameras with a friend and (presumably they take pictures of you) at the end of the day you see what you got.

Well the picture below is what I got - an awesome photo that looks like I just scaled up the entire cliff (barefoot) and am now climbing over the edge!











Here is also tree ali

















and bridge ali.

Toro Toro 6 - The Crazy Dinosaur Man

(Posted retroactively)

On Sunday, we went to see a very crazy old man who had spent the past twenty five years of his life collecting evidence of dinosaurs in Toro Toro. Over the years, he had collected so much stuff that he decided to turn his house into a museum. Sounds all well and good, at first, but most of the things he collected were rocks that he thought looked like a dinosaur head, or something like that.

For example, the photo on the right is a rock he found that he thought looked like a brontosaurus, so he stuck a brontosaurus head on it.

Although I question his sanity, it was really quite impressive just how much stuff he had in his house. All of the walls of his house were mosaics, and completely covered in rocks.

Toro Toro 5 - The Cave Drawings

(Posted retroactively)

On one of our hikes, we stopped to look at some cave drawings. In the picture to the left, there are two different cave drawings, one on the left in the shadows and one on the right in the sunshine.

Unfortunately, the sun was creating a lot of glare so it was sort of hard to see. Here are closer up pictures of the cave drawings.

This first one is a map of the area. At the bottom, there are big mountains (the mountains that were close to where we were) and little mountains (ones that are far away). Apparently there is a river too, but I can't find it.

This second one is a moral code, according to our guide. It says things like "do not lie" and "do not be lazy." There are three different commandments there apparently, but I don't know what the third one is either.

Toro Toro 4 - The Canyon

(Posted retroactively)

On our second day, we headed out to a canyon known as El Vergel.

After walking down about a million and a half stairs, we came across a little swimming hole, where there were waterfalls in which we swam. We stopped and hung out for like an hour, swimming, tanning, napping, and eating.

Then was the hard part: on the way back we had to climb back up the million and a half stairs, which is hard enough in Cochabamba at the Jesuchristo statue - but Toro Toro is at an elevation of 3,600 m: a whole kilometer higher than Cochabamba, which means it was seriously difficult to breathe.

Toro Toro 3 - The Cave

(Posted retroactively)

We went spelunking, and honestly it was the coolest thing ever. This cave was apparently 7 kms long, but we only saw 1 km of it. And parts of it we had to crawl or squeeze through little cracks, or use them little ropey things to scale down ten-foot drops and stuff. Too bad I couldn't take more pictures, but I was more concerned about getting a decent grip and not breaking my camera than anything else. We got so dirty, but it was amazing fun!

Toro Toro 2 - The Dinosaurs

(Posted retroactively)

After we got to Toro Toro, the first thing we did was look at dinosaur footprints. They were pretty cool, but a little bit smaller than I thought they'd be (at first, anyways).

Not sure what kind of dinosaur this was, but it's next to my foot. They said it was probably two and a half metres tall, so I'm thinking it had pretty small feet.


This is a set of Diplodocus tracks - I think... it's a little hard to translate the Spanish names into English. Lucas or some other dinosaur expert can tell me what they are, I think. Those are some of the other volunteers sitting in the tracks.








This one is a velociraptor. They can partly tell because the middle toe is really a claw and it's all curved, hence the hand demonstrating.





This one is a pterodactyl. They figured that one out because the footprints are right next to each other and judging by the imprints, they can tell it was either taking off or landing (I forget, but I'm sure they know).

Toro Toro 1 - The Road

(Posted retroactively)

We drove to a national park on Friday, and let me tell you, the road was an adventure. We left at 4:30 am, so I couldn't see what was going on for a few hours, but when I could, wow, I was amazed.

The road was in places just a dirt road, in places cobblestone, and in some places just a track in between rocks. On the right is a picture of us following a tractor that was building the road for us.

At one point, we were driving along and the road stopped. There was a tiny sign that said "road closed" and there were some construction workers eating breakfast, and there was literally no road beyond them. They told us to go "follow the river" through a dried up river bed, and eventually we'd make our way back to the road.

Easier said than done. The dried up river bed was not so dried up, and we drove through a few little rivers. I thought the bus wouldn't make it. On the left is the river we drove through.

Going Home

Yes, it's true, I'm going home.

Generally, I've been really unhappy with my placement here - that is, my work and what it is that I do every day. There were problems since the beginning - that's why I switched from CEDIB to Warmi, and then at Warmi they basically had me playing with kids all day. At both places I felt like I could be doing the exact same thing in Canada, and yes, I talked to my supervisors and the FSD support staff here many times.

Although it hasn't been what I expected, and I am going home early, I'm glad I came to Bolivia. It's been a very educational experience for me, both personally and academically, and I got to see and do all kinds of things that most people don't get the chance.

This weekend I'm going to Toro Toro, a national park close to Cochabamba, as a little excursion before I leave, and I'll be getting back to Canada Tuesday evening.

See you all soon!

More wildlife!

In Cochabamba, there's a river that runs through the middle of town. Well, it would be a river in the rainy season, now it's more like a trickle.

Anyways, today there were sheep in the river! This is the third time I've seen them or so, there's this farmer who herds his sheep up and down the river or something like that. The baby ones are so cute!

Things I really appreciate about Canada

Note, this is different from things I miss about Canada. For example, I miss shower curtains. But I really appreciate the fact that Canada has public education. Let's begin, shall we?

• Ambulances - the ambulances here are literally twenty year old vans that have been painted and refitted to serve as ambulances. I would not like to be rescued in one of them.

• Dental hygiene - there is a ridiculous number of people here that are either missing teeth or have false teeth (i.e. implants). How can you tell? All the false teeth have a little gold border around them, which sometimes starts to separate from the rest of the fake tooth and it makes it look like you have straw stuck in your teeth. Permanently. There's a little girl at my work, she's probably six or seven, and all of her front (baby) teeth were all rotted and she was crying because they hurt her so much. I don't want to know what her teeth'll be like when she's an adult. P.S. Mom, can you make me a dentist appointment for when I get home?

• Museums - I went to a natural history museum a few days ago, and to be honest, I was actually shocked by how incomplete their collections were. They had a leg bone from a mammoth, a skull from a prehistoric alligator, and a shell from something like an ankylosaurus that I'd never seen before. They had parts of some 12,000 year old man, but it was more like half a skull, a few ribs, and a bunch of walnut-sized rocks that were apparently bones. In museums in Canada, things like that would never happen - a museum wouldn't even consider showing an incomplete skeleten before at least making plaster replications of the bones they were missing.

• Traffic laws - in Bolivia, there aren't any speed limits, you don't need a license to drive, traffic lights are optional, most cars don't have seatbelts and many have headlights that don't work, and no one's going to stop you if you drink and drive. I saw a really terrible car crash up front and personal about a week ago, where I think a car was going the wrong way down a one way residential street. Both cars were going at least 50 km/h, and I'm honestly surprised no one died (as far as I know).

• Refridgeration - in my house at least, it's quite common for food to be left out of the fridge for hours. If someone isn't hungry, their food sits out until they feel like eating. If meat's for dinner, it's probably going to sit on the counter in the hours between when dinner gets planned and when dinner gets cooked. No, I don't think I've gotten stomach worms yet, but we'll see when I get home.

• Clean running water - of course Canada is the land of freshwater, but it's nice to remember that every once in a while - in Canada we don't need to boil water before drinking it, we can brush our teeth with tapwater, the toilet doesn't randomly decide not to flush, nor does the shower randomly decide to turn off while you are in the middle of shampooing. And having prevalent, cheap, drinking water, means people actually drink water with meals instead of soda (which is cheaper here)... see point number two about bad teeth.

So basically, all the things that I'm coming to appreciate fall into the category of health and safety. Jeez, I feel like a mom, I should start driving a minivan.

You've GOT to be kidding me

So it's been winter vacation here for the past three weeks. Today was supposed to be their first day back.

But no! It's too cold, they say. So believe it or not, school has been cancelled for another week on account of the "cold."

Look. Right over there. That is a weather report, for today, for right where I am. It's evening, the sun has set, and it's 21 degrees out!

Please, someone, tell me. How exactly is that cold?

Parade!

Yesterday, there was a parade that I accidentally stumbled across while heading home. Not that it was hard to miss or anything. Anyways, they had amazing costumes, and I bet that everyone was exhausted because they were dancing down the streets like all day.

I looked it up, and the parade - well really the whole weekend, is the "Virgen Carmen" festival. Being horribly uneducated, I didn't know what that was. Wikipedia is my friend, and it turns out to be a festival for Mother Mary, who has as one of her titles Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Apparently, it's a big deal here.

As a side note, as the festivities are the whole weekend, I got woken up this morning by fireworks. At like 8am.





















And this one's for you Josh. If you read it closely, it says "From Alaska with devotion for the Virgen Carmen festival."

Weird brown cloud

This is what I saw looking out my window today. Probably just smoke from a fire or something, but looks pretty nifty.

Mom you wouldn't like this...

Okay first of all, the event in recent history that Bolivia is arguably most famous for is the Water War of 2000, where basically the whole city staged huge protests against the water company. The reasons for it were basically because people didn't like their water being owned by a foreign multinational, but the reason it got privatized to begin with is because historically, water provision in Bolivia sucks, and something like 50% of the people in Cochabamba didn't have running water.

Second of all, it's the dry season, which means that for about six months, it doesn't rain. At all. And up here, we're way up in the mountains, so there's no humidity whatsoever and rain is even more rare.

So the question I have to ask is, why do people in Cochabamba care about having green grass? They don't even have sprinklers, so people just hose down their lawns, which I imagine causes all kinds of soil erosion and stuff, and it makes big mud puddles.

Birdies

Back at home, I remember my dad calling Purple Finches "Raspberry Sparrows," because he said that they spilled raspberries on their tummies.

I wonder what this birdie have been eating too much of? (Sorry it's not a great picture, but they fly away so damn fast!)

I'd call them Banana Birds, but it's more of a lemony colour than banana... Lemon Larks?

Funeral

Don't worry, not my funeral. On my way here, I came across the most odd and interesting procession of cars that we got stuck behind. I was so confused as to what it was, at first.

First, I heard music. I figured someone was playing it really loud at their house, then I realized it was moving with us. Then I noticed how slow we were going, we were stuck behind this bright lime green bus with fire painted on it. Sorry I don't have any pictures, but I didn't bring my camera.

As the taxi driver went to pass the bus, I looked inside and saw that there was a full brass band inside, that was playing the music. Sort of like a marching band... but not. Then, I realized that the bus was following a hearse.

It finally dawned on me, like five minutes later, that the bus was the funeral procession. Well. That's pretty cool, in my humble opinion.

Soap

I mentioned previously that Warmi makes soap. Most of what they make is like industrial strength, brick-sized soap, probably for washing clothes or what have you. But one of their recent... inventions? Is... Paper Soap! Yes, very exciting I know.

I put the word inventions before a question mark because I have no idea if it's their invention or not, but it's the first time I've ever seen it. So allow me to present the coolest thing since sliced bread.

This soap comes in a little book, sort of like a match book, and in the inside, there's a whole bunch of what looks like paper. It is paper, but it has soap soaked into it, or something. I'm really not sure how they make it, but it's so cool. I tried it, actually, you just get the paper wet and it's all frothy and soapy. Weird. The downside is that the paper doesn't dissolve, you have to throw it away when you're done, but hey, there's usually garbages in bathrooms, right?

Anyways, why is this so amazing? From a development studies point of view, it's a really local solution to a local circumstance. Most public bathrooms around here lack soap (and usually toilet paper too - I try to avoid them), so they came up with a product for ladies to carry around in their purse so that they can clean their hands if there's no soap. Very interesting, and obviously something that most Canadians would never think of, because we're used to having soap available all the time. But from the point of view of a traveller, it's really cool too because you don't need to pack a wet slippery bar of soap into your toilettries bag - it's really portable. Anyways, this is what I learned at work.

What I'm Reading

Although I'm not done it, I'm really enjoying reading White Man's Burden, by William Easterly. He's an author I was introduced to in second year in my development economics class as a really educated, really cynical economist, who started off trying to save the world and then realized how much everyone trying to do the same thing screws up.

Now he writes about how people in the development field have no idea what they're doing and keep screwing up, and writes about things we should be doing instead (but probably never will).

For example, in White Man's Burden he writes about how Development Plans will never work because they lack accountability and feedback, two things that he says are vital for improvement. Since these things are missing, a scary amount of money is being wasted on things that people don't need, can't use, or don't want.

I'd recommend this book to anyone in the international development field (i.e. people in my class).

¡Cows!

I am very much enjoying the randomness of life here. You think everything's going all calm and normally and then BANG, there's a bunch of cows and sheep eating from the dumpster a block from your house.

The letter "R"

... or more specifically, "rr." My new pet peeve.

Allow me to explain. First of all, most of you know that I can't roll r's to save my life, therefore, I can't pronounce the Spanish r sound. My fallback default, the French r sound, is not correct either. So I get the choice of swallowing my r's (and sounding like I'm dying) or saying the horrible American pronounciation of the letter r, you know, as in the word "argh". Put that sound into "arriba." Just doesn't quite sound right.

But, I am taking Spanish classes, and I've been workin on it, and now I don't sound quite so horribly American, and I thought I was doing okay.

Then EGAD! I started working at Warmi. Most of the kids there speak both Spanish and Quechua, so they have weird accents. That and they talk like kids. For a while, I just didn't understand what they were saying. Then slowly, it dawned on me that they pronounce some sounds differently.

Por ejemplo: we were talking about Shrek. For some reason, the kids think I have a crush on Donkey, who in Spanish is called "Burro." But do they pronounce it Burro? No, they pronounce it Bujo. Once I realized that, I freaked out a little bit, but then I remember reading something about that in our orientation package. So I calmed down a bit.

Then, I met a guy who runs the youth group at my work, who introduced himself as "Zay". I asked him about it, and he said it was short for "Zaynaldo." Oh! You mean "Reynaldo!" Yes, that's what it was.

Thus, I come to the following conclusion: the letter R is out to get me.

This broadcast also brought to you by the number 3.