So the coffee man never showed up to take us to the coffee farm. A harrowing taxi ride took us to the sultry jungle-town of Caranavi, but the second leg of the trip never quite connected... This is actually pretty par for the course for Bolivian logistics--with more time, of course, we could have figured out how to get there eventually, but with only eleven days until The Return to "Reality" (AH) we just didn´t have time. We did, however, get to spend an interesting 24 hours in the metropolis of Caranavi, which was nothing like any Bolivian city I have encountered. There were no gringos whatsoever in this green, hot, sporadically rainy crossroads, but there was infinite fried chicken. Like, really. Nathaniel and I were astounded. Next to the fried chicken, there were also ladies selling pure un-sugared hunks of home-processed chocolate on the street. I crumbled this delicious jungle-fruit into my espresso while Nathaniel and I read aloud from Philip Pulman´s His Dark Materials series. (A note: I think that the quality that makes both coffee and chocolate delicious is exactly that which tastes like dirt. Coffee and chocolate are delicious dirt.)
After Caranavi another harrowing taxi ride brought us to Coroico, another jungle town (during this particular harrowing taxi ride, Nathaniel and I shared the back seat with an entire family of four). Coroico is mind-bogglingly positioned on top of a sheer jungle cliff, and it was inside of a cloud for most of our time there. Occasionally, though, I glimpsed the world and realized that I have a deep, semi-rational desire to learn to hang-glide. Nathaniel and I had one of the best fondue experiences of our lives at a little German-run fondue restaurant, I glimpsed a firefly, and I picked a coffee berry and observed with wonder and it changed from deep scarlet to brown over the course of a day.
One (final?) harrowing taxi ride later, we are back in La Paz. Today we saw some spectacular pre-Incan ruins with an amateaur archeology enthusiast, and I was reminded how much ancient civilizations baffle me. The ruins were up on the plateau (at about 4000 meters). One of the men with whom I was exploring the ancient rocks, a British-turned-Bolivian writer, was convinced that you could see stars at mid-day at that altitude... I couldn´t see any stars, so I ran my hands over the impossibly smooth masonry and thought about the scope of time. Fifteen hundred years? That´s how old these stone blocks are? What about three months? That´s how long I´ve been in Bolivia. And I´m leaving tomorrow for Peru...
After Caranavi another harrowing taxi ride brought us to Coroico, another jungle town (during this particular harrowing taxi ride, Nathaniel and I shared the back seat with an entire family of four). Coroico is mind-bogglingly positioned on top of a sheer jungle cliff, and it was inside of a cloud for most of our time there. Occasionally, though, I glimpsed the world and realized that I have a deep, semi-rational desire to learn to hang-glide. Nathaniel and I had one of the best fondue experiences of our lives at a little German-run fondue restaurant, I glimpsed a firefly, and I picked a coffee berry and observed with wonder and it changed from deep scarlet to brown over the course of a day.
One (final?) harrowing taxi ride later, we are back in La Paz. Today we saw some spectacular pre-Incan ruins with an amateaur archeology enthusiast, and I was reminded how much ancient civilizations baffle me. The ruins were up on the plateau (at about 4000 meters). One of the men with whom I was exploring the ancient rocks, a British-turned-Bolivian writer, was convinced that you could see stars at mid-day at that altitude... I couldn´t see any stars, so I ran my hands over the impossibly smooth masonry and thought about the scope of time. Fifteen hundred years? That´s how old these stone blocks are? What about three months? That´s how long I´ve been in Bolivia. And I´m leaving tomorrow for Peru...
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