NationStates Jolt Archive

I'm quite bored and in the mood to hear some travel adventures. Who wants to share their stories of fleeing soviet gangsters on a Vesper and finding spirituality in India? Go for it...

I'm pretty boring when it comes to stories. :( Never committed a crime on vacation, or been robbed or anything like that. I've met some fun people on trains, but that's not too enthralling. ;)

I've been to various places, but i'm not a storyteller.

My stories all suck... The best one might have been stumbling through a Bavarian village at 4 am on the way to our tents. Then sitting at the bonfire and listening to others telling their travel and camping stories. Just because of the recusiveness.

I remember a great trip now - Sequoia Nat'l Park. Big trees. I mean *really* big trees. You feel an inch tall after a while. :p

A thing I wrote about a trip to Bolivia several years ago, which you now get slapped before you because someone is too lazy to rewrite it to make a shorter post.

The Top Three Things Not to Do When Travelling in Bolivia

If you are planning on travelling in Bolivia, there are really only three things you should do in order to come away from the experience with sanity, bladder and limbs intact. Or, rather, not do:

Do not worry. Do not drink anything. Do not forget to bring your thermal socks.

Stick to this and the rest should be a piece of cake.

***

1.) Do not worry

You haven’t seen true terror unless you have spent five hours rumbling down the officially designated Most Dangerous Road In The World on board a packed, decrepit Bolivian bus with soap suds foaming on the windshield.
The Yungas rain forest you’re driving through is massive, misty and beautiful, and the road from La Paz, dropping more than 3000 metres in just 30 kilometres, rewards you with a spectacular view of some of the most stunning vertical scenery South America has to offer.
You know this because you just read it in your guide book. Twice. In actuality, you cannot make out anything more than four feet away from your window due to low-hanging clouds covering everything, most importantly the road and the sheer 1000-metre drop-offs right next to it. It doesn’t help that it just started raining and the bus driver had to send his 12-year-old on-board mechanic outside to try and fix the windshield wipers. These, of course, are way beyond fixable, which the bus driver has only known for about, oh, say, five or six months.
You figure only a tourist would be wimpy enough to be upset by the situation, so you do your best not to appear upset at all (in case you’re doing this to blend in with the locals, which of course you are, forget about it – you’re the only tourist on board and everybody knows it). You needn’t have bothered, though - the other passengers are even more upset than you would be if you weren’t so busy not being upset at all, so now you’re really starting to worry. Your bus driver narrowly escapes the mob by whipping out the soft soap and having the lad soap up the windshield, the logic being that a blurry, sudsy, four feet view of where he might be going on that road is better than no view at all – which, in a rather unnerving way, is of course completely true.
Four and a half hours, several close calls and a half-baked passengers’ mutiny later, you finally reach the bottom end of the road, just in time before the closing of the gate for downhill traffic. In an inimitably Bolivian stroke of genius, the powers that be in La Paz decided to make the road a two-way one-way street, open mornings for downhill, afternoons for uphill traffic, in order to cut down on all those nasty road accidents – the result being a steep rise in the already record number of vehicles tumbling off the mountain side, since, with no oncoming traffic to worry about, heartily stepping on the gas has become quite the thing to do. You stumble off the bus, count your blessings and decide that, this being only your second day in-country, it can’t possibly get any worse, so you might as well stop worrying right now. And so you do. Good thing, too. Makes the rest of the trip so much easier on the nerves.


2.) Do not drink anything

Yep, that’s right. Not anything. Ever. In fact, you really should stop drinking completely the moment you step off the plane in La Paz and not start again until take-off of your flight back home. It’s either that or a catheter implant, which can be quite hard to come by when you’re travelling on a budget.
Bolivia is not only one of the highest, poorest, most isolated and most beautiful countries on the planet, it’s also decidedly the one with the fewest bathroom opportunities.
This becomes painfully clear after you’ve sat through an 18-hour bus ride to the Amazon basin with only one (1) lunch-cum-bathroom break, frantically praying for a flat tire or an engine failure and trying not to think of wet, watery things. At the one designated break, you notice that you and your fellow tourists are the only ones rushing to the toilet, while the Bolivian passengers mill around contentedly and order up some food and drink. Not even the little kids ever have to go. But whatever genetic marvel it is that keeps Bolivians’ bodily functions so conveniently in check – fact is, you don’t have it.
And if you thought the bathroom situation would get better once you switched from Amazon bus ride to Altiplano Jeep tour (after all, there are only six passengers on board now and all of you tourists, so that should give you some clout, bathroom break-wise) you might just have to think again. This time, however, the problem isn’t in the stopping, it’s in the landscape. The famously stark and barren Altiplano is pretty much exactly what one would reasonably expect it to be: exceedingly stark and barren. After a few days spent in desperate search of at least a modest bush or rock heap to disappear behind, you solemnly swear off drinking for the remainder of your trip. Which really should make the whole affair a good deal more relaxing and enjoyable.


3.) Do not forget to bring your thermal socks

This is vital. In fact, do not forget to bring any of your thermal clothing. Jacket, sweater, pants, hat, gloves, pyjamas, nose warmer - you name it.
While daytime temperatures tend to be rather agreeable, as soon as the sun drops behind the horizon (or the next house, for that matter) you’ll freeze solid on the spot. To avoid this sad and rather embarrassing fate, you should a) always keep moving and b) dress REALLY warm.
After your first night in an unheated La Paz apartment with sub-zero outside and ever so slightly above-zero inside temperature, your fashion sense will have frozen to death along with about half of your toes and you will have no more qualms whatsoever about piling on mismatched layers of funky-coloured thermal wear. Not that your host would be too cheap to turn on the heat, mind you, there simply is no heat to turn on. One would assume that, considering that the people living in the small cabins in the countryside have an open fire to cook over and heat the house with, the people living in the big apartments in the city would at least have something that gave off a little more warmth than their electric kitchen stoves, but one would in fact assume wrongly. Just why this is so is everybody’s guess. But since this is the way things are, you’d better stop asking questions nobody knows the answer to and simply put on your thermal anythings and sweat it out.
Your thermal socks and their multi-coloured little friends will tide you over bad stretches like the Altiplano’s Sundown-InstaFreeze water pipes (hey, at least you’ll have an excuse for going to bed without brushing your teeth!) or the three days you will spend in the Amazon basin during the yearly four-day cold spell. Sure, the socks will start to get grimy after a few days, but don’t even think about washing them - their constant presence on your feet is vital if you want to hang on to the rest of your toes. Anybody crazy enough to take off his thermal socks while still in Bolivia is obviously not quite cold enough yet, in which case he has either lost all sensory functions or, more likely, his mind.


***

Once you have mastered The Three Bolivian Don’ts, you’re prepared for just about anything that could possibly come up during your trip through the country.
Even if, on your way back home, you should happen to find yourself stranded at Miami International Airport for 18 hours straight, waiting for a connecting flight, everything should go off just beautifully: you certainly stopped worrying about anything a long time ago, you can drink as much as you want and pass the time visiting every single one of the airport’s 137 toilets, and your trusted thermal socks can beat Florida air conditioning any time.

A thing I wrote about a trip to Bolivia several years ago, which you now get slapped before you because someone is too lazy to rewrite it to make a shorter post.

Nice! I've always wanted to take a trip on the Bolivian Death Highway. :p The t.v. makes it look like fun. Gotta love that. :)