Timeline

So the Andes were large and spectacular and there wasn`t enough air. I hiked with Nathaniel and his mother and brother, and our guide brought us up a "little hill" that was actually a 17,000 ft. mountain (we then skied down the snowy face without skies). I began to empathize with the cult obession that surrounds summits. We also walked on soft nobules of spongy creek moss through landscapes of snowy spires, and I experienced simultaneous hail and sunlight. Goofy parades of awkwardly shorn alpacas made me giggle. The snow-mountains produced their own light when the stars came out. I was gasping; it was alien and beautiful and very very cold.

Then we went to the sacred Lake Titicaca where the Incan universe began. It all came from a very unremarkable rock, apparently, a rock on an island in the lake called "Isla del Sol." It was sunny there, but it also rained. I spent a lot of time frenetically reading random books and looking out over the waters that the guidebook called "limpid" eventhough "limpid" seems like a word that is way too flabby and lame to describe the iridescent womb of the Incan universe.

And then Nathaniel´s family left, all too quickly. They were great--Nathaniel and his brother argued in lawerly detail about everything. Once when they were arguing particularly hilariously their mom stepped in between them and started singing this song that goes "I am a pizza! With pepperoni!" I miss them a lot like they were my family or something because of all that mild dysfunction and love and three part harmony.

Now Nathaniel and I are in the city of  Cochabamba, looking up a fellow Carleton alum that runs a chain of bookstores called the Spitting Llama and is writing a book about the history of coffee. We might get into early-morning Tai Chi; I don´t know. Mostly we´ve obssesively been reading Michael Chrichton´s Timeline which we found in the La Paz branch of the Spitting Llama. We read almost 300 pages aloud in just two days. Yesterday we read aloud in a restaurant owned by a crazy Frenchman--we met a drug-lord with reflective aviators who told us about his friend who was a concentration camp survivor, and then we ordered a bottle of wine before noon and kept reading about quantum foam and time-travel. Later a lady with an impractically small chair on her head walked by. I don´t know.

And I have purchased an alpaca sweater which I believe to be authentic. It is frumpy and long and is spattered with irregular green and red geometry. I love it a lot, especially when I wear it, am warm, and think about how alpacas look like ewoks.

So that´s the timeline of my life, in a nutshell. As soon as Nathaniel and I finish Chrichton´s Timeline I´m probably going to head back to Sucre and continue trekking through my beloved Frailes mountains with interesting people. I just found out that I can fly from Cochabamba to Sucre with the Bolivian air force for $30, and it revolutionized my world. (On the bus to La Paz I awoke at 2 a.m. to the driver telling all of the men on the bus to get out and push and then we ran out of gas and had to wait for another bus to deliver diesel in 5 gallon buckets). Yeah, so I´ll buy that ticket soon. And did I mention that I´ve purchased my ticket back to the States? It´s for May 11th, from Lima, Peru to Chicago. AHHHH.