Bolivia

Six month backpacking trip through Bolivia, Peru and central America: update 4/14

Thought I’d have a nice extra hour to write this post, turned out Bolivia doesn’t do daylight saving time. So, unfortunately, this had to be a quick one.

Since my last post, I’ve been through some stuff. I can finally check off the “armed robbery” from my list. But let me start with the laundry.

In Cochabamba, it was time to take my entire wardrobe to a local laundry spot. Trust isn’t a strong suit here, so the lady wanted to write down everything I handed in, so I could check on pickup that she didn’t swipe one of my awesome boxers. Turns out, I gave an odd number of socks, and her paper only allowed her to note the number of “pairs of socks” I had to wash. Muchos problemos. I didn’t mind if she didn’t write down that one sock but still washed it for me, but that wasn’t possible. So, in the end, I took that one sock back home.

Now, onto “the armed robbery.” A new chapter in Johan’s life. At 1 pm (!), two 30-year-old teens cornered me with a kitchen knife, demanding money. Luckily, I only had 30 BOBs on me (with the known exchange rate of divide by 10 and multiply by 1.5, it was a manageable problem). Unfortunately, they also took my camera from my pants. Besides my camera, I lost my newfound naive sense of security (had never been robbed in my life).

After Cochabamba, I spent two and a half weeks in the jungle, initially babysitting five spider monkeys and, in the last eight days, looking after two pumas. The coolest part was taking a walk through the park with the “monkey family” (mom and dad on two long ropes, and the little one on my head). Negro (the male) loved flipping over every turtle he encountered and then moving on. Every time Negro wanted to walk, he came to me, took my hand, and dragged me in the direction of his desired destination. One day, he took me to their previous home. Until then, I didn’t know where it was (knew it existed, had tried searching alone but couldn’t find it). Negro took me through the whole route (pulled me), showing me the place. We sat there for 5 minutes, and then he took me back through the jungle. The problem was that Negro preferred all the shortcuts, including the rappelling route. It was fun to see a spider monkey rappelling, but then you had to descend with a bored spider monkey waiting below, wondering why it was taking so long.

The last eight days, I worked with two different pumas. The first one was 2 years old (almost an adult), 80 kg, and much stronger and faster than me. He was on a rope, and the plan was to take him for a walk every day. The first two days, I stayed out of his reach (the other guy had the rope), but on the third day, I gave him the chance to come to me. I regretted that. Within a second, I had an 80 kg puma hanging on my body. He had jumped from a tree trunk onto me, and to prevent sliding down, he had embedded his 20 nails (nicely spread across my entire body) into my skin. What you have to do then...boredly say, “No Shai-shoo, no,” but it’s not easy with a heart rate well over 200. Then you have to grab his claws and calmly unhook them from your skin. Got 10 hefty scratches (hope they all turn into scars, so Papa Johan has a cool story to tell later), and my shirt had 8 big rips. The last 4 days, I worked with a baby puma (7 months old). He became less dangerous each day as he was losing his milk teeth.

On the way back from the jungle to Cochabamba, I hitched a ride with an old truck. I was waiting for the bus when this truck passed by, and the driver asked if I wanted to come along. I had no idea when the bus would come, and it seemed like a fun opportunity to brush up on my Spanish. But after being overtaken by all the buses on that route, I realized I had found the slowest truck in Bolivia. And the driver spoke an incomprehensible dialect. He could understand me, though. So every time he said something, I had to try to guess what he said until he finally nodded yes. But hey, we had plenty of time, especially since we ran out of diesel (transferred some diesel from another truck whose driver he knew). We finally arrived after 7 hours, with an average speed on the odometer of 20 km/h. Next time, back to the bus.

Now I’m back in La Paz. Tomorrow, five of us are doing downhill mountain biking on the officially most dangerous road in the world. 6 hours of biking without touching a pedal, they should invent that in the Netherlands too. Not sure if they have internet there, so maybe another internet-free period, but I can’t promise anything.



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