The Village of Happiness

Below you will find the day by day account of my time at the village of happiness (not its actual name mind).

Day 1:

I arrived at the village with very little fanfare. I met some of the devotees and 2 English girls who were already volunteering there and who were to become my besties for the next week. 
In terms of people, the village is divided up into:

Devotees: They stay for free it appears. They chant a lot and wear a great deal of orange and the males have rat tails at the back of their heads.

Workers: They get paid and actually look like they do some work.

Volunteers: These suckers PAY to work at the village, while hopefully being converted to vegetarianism.

Highlight: Making bread.

Lowlight: Being told that I have an Australian accent

Day 2:

I did some light yoga in the morning, followed by some heavy weeding of the sweet potato patch for several hours before lunch. In the afternoon a few more people arrived to join our volunteering happy family. We even attempted a sing-a-long to a guitar and ukulele combo in the evening (before our dinner of a dry sweet potato and piece of corn bread). Everyone agreed that I had the voice of an angel and kept asking me for encores. It was embarrassing.

Highlight: Fleeing the coop for a few hours to the town down the road and eating ice-cream.

Lowlight: Dinner.

Day 3:

Yoga in the morning to welcome in the new day!

Highlight: The art workshop in the afternoon, which involved drawing the other volunteers in various poses. I remember winning an art prize in like Grade 5. Not sure what has happened to all that raw talent as I was completely rubbish at the drawing. But it was still fun and we had a lot of laughs.

Lowlight: Cleaning out the shitters. The village only uses ecological toilets which are basically large buckets with lids on. One performs ones business and one then covers said business with a layer of saw dust. We had to empty the contents of the buckets into the massive shit pile at the back of the farm and wash the buckets out. To be fair not the worst thing I have ever done in my life.

Day 4:

Too lazy to get up for yoga.

Decided to go to the evening session of temple. I spent most of my time chanting and learnt a bit about the religion. Unfortunately though I can’t get a particular chant out of my head as it is quite catchy and I found myself chanting it wherever I went. I even chanted it to a shop keeper in the town to his surprise. Brainwashed much??

Highlight: The theatre workshop in the afternoon. The village has a small stage in a field where a horse is tethered. This poor horse was treated to an alarmingly bad display of theatrics. One of the devotees in his past life used to work in the theatre and he led a session in which we all had to create several characters. This pretty much involved charging around the stage shouting and screaming and walking funny like. It was highly amusing.

Lowlight: Painting the path stones white. Roo and I volunteered to do this because we thought it sounded like fun. But in fact it wasn’t. We spent several hours with backs bent, painting the 12000 stones in the village white. We did amuse ourselves greatly though by painting our faces with white path stone warpaint and threatening to make white some of the peacocks and the lettuces.

Day 5:

Escaped to the town again today and had more ice cream.

Highlight: Lunch. It was a magical vegetarian concoction of rice and black eyed peas with a heavenly potato and vegetable curry type affair. I say curry type affair because it seemed to taste of curry but I know this to be not true as spices inflame passion apparently and this is a no-no. According to the religion, there are 3 qualities in the world and in people: goodness, passion and ignorance. Obviously you want to stamp out the passion and ignorance in yourself and cultivate the goodness. And going along with this, foods are divided into the same categories. Spices, garlic and onion etc. inflame passion which supposedly leads to doinking and the like. Mushrooms are ignorant. This is because they grow in dirty places. I know this to be true as I saw mushrooms growing in the shit pit.

Lowlight: Cleaned the shitters. Not sure how I landed this job again.

Day 6:

Woke up with a dodgy stomach. According to one of the devotees 94% of the volunteers get sick on account of the large quantities of minerals found in the water! And not in fact because we handle faeces on a regular basis and only have the use of vinegar as a disinfectant. Spent a lot of the day in bed feeling sorry for myself. But still managed to be well enough by the afternoon to eat cake. There was this fabulous devotee called Alejandro who produced the most scrumptious baked goods in his teeny weeny little “bakery”.  I told him on a number of occasions that I loved him, most notably after he made donuts with chocolate on top and with chocolate INSIDE them as well. He thought I was insane. I had envisaged myself living off the land for a week and being healthful and giving my body the goodness it has been sorely lacking. But instead I flooded it with chocolate covered items.

Highlight: CHOCOLATE CAKE

Lowlight: Having to run out of yoga in the morning to find the nearest bucket.

Day 7:

Highlight: MORE CAKE

Lowlight: What a surprise! Cleaning out the shitters AGAIN. Emma, Roo and I felt it was only right to clean them as we had contributed a substantial amount to them the previous day.

On Day 8 I left the village to go back to Lima to catch me a bus to Cusco.

In summary. I am glad I went to the village. Not sure I will be devoting myself to the cause any time soon but I really admire the people who have. It isn’t a charming life – business in buckets, cold showers for the rest of their days and giving up certain things to centre their lives around their god, but they seem genuinely happy with their lot. The devotees were all lovely and I also met some really cool people volunteering – almost none of whom I wanted to punch in the face.

I have to mention here the hilarious email I got from my brother yesterday telling me that he thought my idea of a “holiday” was crap: volunteering cleaning toilets, embarking on 22 hour bus trips and “going to school again” which I am assuming refers to learning Spanish. He thinks that if I volunteered less, travelled on fewer buses and didn’t go to school then I would have more time to shave my legs and exercise more. Although strangely he does kind of applaud my lack of grooming, if only on the grounds that it makes me look so unattractive that I am apparently not fit to be kidnapped, which is his gravest concern about my trip. And in response, I agree I should be eating less chocolate and possibly shaving more but I don’t think this trip really classes as a holiday. I am not doing this to work on my tan, RICHARD. I wanted to travel to see the world obviously but also to work on some of my deficiencies: namely my impatience and my lack of self-confidence. And to gain some perspective, become more aware and hopefully decide what I want to be when I grow up. So put that in your pipe. Jokes. Love you.

Peace and love and potatoes, People!

Operation Get My Ass to Peru

Word.

So I know I said I wasn't posting for awhile but instead of trying to mission straight through to hippie town one time I decided to stop over a night in Lima - mainly because I am exhausted but also to eat meat and dairy products and I wish I could say engage in non-marital relations but I can't. All things frowned upon by the hare's.

I am ensconced in my lovely hostel (a nice smelling, comfy bed and clean bathroom with not a pube in sight - what more could a girl ask for?), after venturing out into the rain for a DOPE crispy pizza (chorizo, REAL mushrooms - they seem to like a canned mushroom over here as far as I have seen - and avocado) followed by - remember that this is a judgement free zone - the biggest Starbucks cafe mocha EVER. I know it's not very travel-y and instead of visiting corporate America I should have been getting amongst it at some road side stall eating barbequed cow offal and talking to the locals in Spanish about the meaning of life blah blah. But Starbucks was warm and had comfy couches and they were playing Jack Johnson and so I drank my bucket of mocha and read my book surrounded by English speaking people and it was bliss. Tomorrow I will go be uncomfortable in a local dive bar and grow as a person on this journey that I have undertaken but today I chose easy and familiar.

So I mentioned that it was kind of a mission to get here. The normal border between Bolivia and Peru has been shut for over a month now due to protests (something to do with Canadians and or mining apparently) so it takes a bit more effort to get from the one country to the next. To do so - I left La Paz on Saturday morning at 7am and it only took a 10 hour bus trip with 1 border crossing in the middle (Bolivia to Chile), another border crossing (Chile to Peru) via a collectivo, straight away followed by another bus trip - this time for 22 hours overnight - and lastly a taxi drive to my hostel from the bus station - during which I had to direct the taxi driver using my 2007 Lonely Planet. Oh well. To be sure I am here and it wasn't that bad. It was issue free for the most part and I arrived alive which has to count for something.

I do have to make mention though of how serious the Peruvians took their security during the second bus trip. Before I boarded the overnight bus I had to show them my passport with entry papers even though I wasn't going through a border. They then videoed me and my seat number, as well as everyone else on the bus before we set off. Then at least 4 times during the trip, including at like stupid in the morning, the bus was stopped at certain check points and random bags were pulled out of the cargo hold by the police/army/scary looking dudes and the entire contents scattered gaily over the cold dirty ground. Luckily my bag wasn't picked out because if they had yanked MY smalls out to be sniffed through by some large dog I would have broken someone in half. For realz. It was amazing at how patient my fellow bus mates were while their possessions were being man handled. Those were some serious Mona Lisa smiles I saw.

Another pleasantry on the bus was the fact that, although they had a toilet on board, we were strictly prohibited from dropping the kids off using said toilet. If we wanted to do a number 2 we had to tell the bus conductor and he would tell the bus driver who would then stop at a suitable location. Then everyone would watch you get off the bus, WIF toilet roll in hand and they would know what you were about to do. Lucky for me I don't do number 2's, so I was ok.

And that is all. A post about nothing really. And not very exciting. But I find that if I don't do this as regularly as I can, then it doesn't happen.

Be well.

PS Thanks for the blog love peeps (via the Facebook, as it seems commenting through the blog is somewhat troublesome.) It can be somewhat nerve racking posting things for all the world to see here. I know my mum and dad will be amused at most of what I write but I can't say the same for the rest of you lot.

Loco La Paz + Rumble in Rurre

I got back to La Paz today, after my foray into the jungle. (I say jungle because it sounds cooler but I was actually on a ‘pampas’ tour. Just so we are clear. And you don’t think I am an imbecile.)

So I flew to Rurrenabaque (or Rurre for short) on Monday afternoon and was greeted by this amazing whoosh of warm tropical air as the doors of the teeny weeny plane were opened. Thermals, jerseys, jumpers, jackets and the like were whipped off right there on the grass runway and I almost ALMOST performed a celebratory running man at the excitement of being warm. To be fair, Bolivia hasn’t been that cold. I am just used to having feeling in my fingers and toes at ALL times, having mostly lived in lovely warm climates. (I also have a mother who mock charges when she is cold. So no hope for me really when it comes to making friends with temperatures below 20 degrees.)

Anyway Rurre was cute and run down and kind of reminded me of Thailand. And I was lucky to be on a tour with some cool people and I got along with them rather well. We were definitely a mixture but it seemed to work.

Highlights of the 3 day tour were seeing the “pink” river dolphins and swimming near them. Although to do this I had to forget everything I had learned on Kariba about not swimming near the shore if I didn’t want the crocs to eat me breakfast. When we swam with the dolphins I was basically standing chest deep in the river water and was able to see all the caiman (think small crocodiles) sunning themselves on the river banks – I was just waiting for them to get off their lazy asses to come and chomp us but they didn’t. Other highlights were the DOPE fish dinner in Rurre the night before the tour left, chilling on the boat wending its way slowly down the river and also catching pirahnas and being man enough to take them off my hook by my clever self. The only lowlight was a brief period about an hour into python hunting on day 2. We had been bashing around the swampy bush in the hot sun, getting bitten to all hell by all the mosquitos on God’s earth and I was well and truly over it. Picture the following (you know how I love this): me at my most attractive, one frigging giant sweat patch, a too-small army camouflage wide brim hat (purchased on a whim in Rurre) yanked low on my head cutting off the circulation to my brain, several stray hairs plastered to my puce face, swamp water leaking into my too-big gumboots, into which my dirty backpacker- poo-grey-quick-dry pant were tucked. I had also sprayed myself with so much insect repellent that when I cradled the massive bottle of water (that was going to save me from heat stroke and certain death), the blue and green colouring from the label spread all over my arms so that I looked like a sick smurf in the arm region. I had also managed to bugger up my neck sleeping funny the night before and I was unable to rotate it more than 1 degree in either direction without feeling serious pain. This caused me to behave like I was suffering from a mild case of Tourette’s Syndrome. Every time I moved my neck slightly to take in the beauty of the nature it would hurt and I would yelp out curse words. How we ever managed to locate a python with me shouting out ‘Shit! Arse! Balls!’ is still beyond me. But luckily one of the Canadian girls managed to spot one that was obviously hard of hearing and the outing was deemed a success and we were able to get the ‘Shit! Arse! Balls!’ out of there!

So yes. Back in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia and apparently the location of the highest most things in the world. For example, before I left for Rurre, I went for “the highest curry in the world” with some people I met at the guesthouse I stayed in when I was in Sucre. It was while consuming this highest curry that we were got round to discussing something that I had already kind of started to realise: La Paz is crazy.

I will now list the main list of attractions of this city and you can decide for yourself:

The world’s most dangerous road: You basically get driven out of La Paz and bike 30km or so down this crazy road where, these days, most traffic fears to tread. A few weeks ago a Japanese tourist went off the edge of the track and died. Several people who I have come across are also sporting injuries from their ride. I therefore decided to give this a swerve. Call me crazy but I don’t want to spend the next few months in Latin America with my arm in a sling or a wedge of titanium holding my jaw in place.

San Pedro Prison: If you have read the book ‘Marching Powder’ you might have heard about this crazy prison, where inmates have to buy their own cell and can bring their families to live with them. It is used to be possible to visit the prison and even stay overnight with the inmates.  I think some people still do. Possibly after smoking some crack. Pure craziness!

Route 36 Cocaine Bar: It doesn’t have a fixed address because it moves around to avoid the authorities shutting it down, but this bar is still here – for tourists to ‘score some coke’. Or at least I think that’s what the cool kids are still calling it. As you may have gathered I am not really down with it. If someone offered me cocaine I would probably try and sprinkle it on my muesli.

The witches market: This was not as crazy I had thought it was going to be. I was expecting a musty dark alley, hunched witches with gammy eyes hiding in dark corners muttering evil curses at me while chewing on newt eyeballs plus the odd live animal sacrifice. Obviously. All I really got was smiley women offering me love potions, dried llama foetuses and handbags.

Cholita Wrestling: Basically these sweet little ladies get dressed in traditional Bolivian outfits and beat the bejesus of out each other, apparently not unlike WWF but with less spandex. And people go and watch and cheer them on.

Anyway tomorrow I head off on what can only be described as a mammoth journey to my next destination in Peru. Because I didn’t spend as much time in Argentina as I thought I would, I have a bit of time to kill before I go to Cusco to mission on the Inca jungle trail that I have booked for the beginning of July. So as one does when one has time to kill, one volunteers at an eco yoga park.  Now don’t be alarmed, there will be hare krishnas there and I may have to participate in some light chanting. But if I am cool with it, you should be too. Please note that due to this, for a good while I won’t be engaging in blogging (Marita!) or emailing or Facebooking or texting, as I will be shunning the evils of technology and so on and so forth. But should have lots to tell when I next come into contact with a pc computer et al.

Peace and love and tofu cheese, bitches!   

PS Was going to load photos. But then I didn't.

Welcome to the Jungle

Yes. I am that cool that I am quoting Guns N' Roses.

Anyway this is just a super short post to say that I hit the jungle today and will be up the Amazon (tributary) without a paddle for the next few days.

Picture me fishing for pirahnas, swimming with pink dolphins and hunting for anacondas - basically just being at one with Mother Earth and most of her mosquitos.

May I have lots to tell when I get back to civilisation.

But if you don't hear from me by at least Sunday it will be because I have found a lost Amazonian tribe and they will have asked me to live with them and be their god. On account of my fabulous haircut. 

That is all.

My llama's name is Pepe.

Spanish lessons this week went swimmingly, but are now over. I slowly progressed from sounding like a caveman (i.e. "Coffee.") to sounding like a 2 year old (i.e. I want coffee, please). However I am finding it frustrating that I still have no personality in Spanish, and even worse no sense of humour. Unless you count the jokes I made about riding on llamas, which I don't. But which my Spanish teacher seemed to enjoy.
Besides from llamas, whenever I was asked to make up example sentences in Spanish they always seemed to involve Lady Gaga. This is because I had her mug staring at me all lesson from the cover of the lovely notebook that I bought from the market on Monday. I wrote in it all the millions of things I tried to squish into my brain over the last week. And I feel it added a little something something to my lessons.

Anyway apparently I just need to practise speaking now. I might also do a few more lessons in Ecuador or Colombia. For now I will have to be content with: 'I ride my llama while listening to Lady Gaga' but one day I will be able to discuss THE zeitgeist.

And in other news. I had a hair cut yesterday.
I know. Alert the media. I just thought it was kind of worth mentioning since I hadn't done any hairdressing vocab in class yet so there was sort of a breakdown in communication. Basically the hairdresser gave me an undercut and now I look like a lesbian. It's all good though. It's only hair and will eventually grow back and I will like boys again. At least I didn't have to make boring conversation with her about how her cat got run over by the lawn mower or my impending spinsterhood.

Anyway. Must go. Very busy and important.

Peace and love and Lady Gaga. X

Salar de Uyuni Tour Photo Extravaganza

Hello.

I was having a look at my Salar de Uyuni tour photos and despite my serious lack of skillz as a photographer, some of them are actually cool. I therefore thought it would be a shame not to share some of them. So here they are:

One of the many lagunas we visited.



Sunrise over the salar.
In this particular part the salar was covered in about 20cm of water.





View from Ilsa de Pescadores - right in the middle of the salar.



Self explanatory.
Me on a Pringles tube.
All the proper ones are on someone elses camera.

Intelligent graffiti on one of the rusted trains in the Train Graveyard in Uyuni.

Me getting all Roger Rail on the world - also at the Train Graveyard in Uyuni.

That is all.

Peace out. X

Bye Argentina, Hello Bolivia

Original title I know. I have been working on it all day.

Now because I am so alarmingly lazy at posting stuff, about 4 years have gone by since the last time I could be arsed, and so shit has happened and now I am going to tell you about it.

As you can see, I have cleverly titled each little section so you know what I am on about.

I like wine, please.

So I thoroughly enjoyed Mendoza (in the north of Argentina). This was mostly, because it has a lot of vineyards and thus a lot of wine.

To make sure I consumed an adequate amount of wine I did a full day’s wine tour with a guide and tour group and then a DIY tour the next day on a bicycle in the region of Maipu  (pronounced 'my poo') - with a Welsh girl from my hostel. All in all I went to 6 wineries and tasted 28 buckets of wine.

Unfortunately I still can’t tell tobacco undertones from grassy undertones. And I also still feel like a tool swirling the wine around my mouth like I have a clue. But like the hot wine tour man at one of the wineries I visited said: 'wine is a personal experience'. So it's ok that the guy next to me might be able to taste plums and or marmalade, while I can only taste wine. I did learn though that in Mendoza, 2004 was a good year for wine as the grapes were sweeter that year for some reason. So far I have managed to drop the following into approximately 12 conversations I have had since learning that little titbit: ‘Oh I say - 2004 was an excellent YAR for the Malbec.’ It isn’t really relevant to the political situation in the DRC or Arnie’s lovechild but whatevs because this chick knows STUFF.

[Number of times I have written the word 'wine' in the above 15 lines: 354]

Salta

Salta was a quick hop, step and a jump away from Mendoza. And by ‘quick hop, step and jump’ I mean a 22 hour bus trip. The city is lovely – with cool old buildings and churches and a hill behind it that only took 1070 steps to get up. (There is a sign so that’s how I knew how many steps there were.)

I also did a spot of horse riding while I was in Salta. With 2 seriously enthusiastic Americans. I say horse riding but I am pretty sure they put me on a mule. But it was fun anyway and I even managed to get the mule to canter into the sunset. Although I felt bad when I looked at a photo of me on said mule, as I was pretty much the same size as the poor thing. But I brushed its mane afterwards and spoke to it nicely (in English, MIND) and I think it felt better.

In between rides in the morning and afternoon in the countryside we had an Argentinian BBQ (called an asado) and I ate AN whole cow and a mouthful of blood sausage - which I really wanted to spit out but felt it would have been rude. Anyway all in all a splendid day. Although I did walk very peculiarly for the next few days and had several bruises to show for the day’s activities.  

A Border

I am not going to lie to you. I was less than ecstatic at the prospect of doing a border crossing in Latin America with the 12 words of Spanish that I know. But luckily things seemed to go my way. And when I got off the overnight bus from Salta to La Quiaca, the border town in Argentina, I found a sweet little Bolivian lady who was carrying her bundle of firewood, and what looked like chicken feet to the border, and with the use of Spanglish and sign language I asked her if I could join her on her quest. She FREAKED OUT that I was from Zimbabwe. In a good way though. And we walked in companionable silence to the border and afterwards went our separate ways into the soft dawn light.

Border crossed. Boom!

Salar de Uyuni

After getting through the border into Bolivia I caught another bus, this time to Tupiza, where I was hoping to get on a 4 day jeep tour of the Salar de Uyuni and surrounds. I had to stay 2 nights here, which was more than enough, before the whole group was assembled and then off we went.

Our Bolivian guide / driver was lovely and reminded me of our tour leader on the Everest Base Camp trek, in that he was knowledgeable and little and I wanted to squish his brains out of his head and put them in a jar he was so precious.

Besides from the guide and cook (who were in the front) I spent 4 days in the jeep with a strange Frenchman who insisted on wearing a red poncho and took to pretending he was Superman A LOT and a Croatian couple who must have been Japanese in another life because MAN they could take some photos. The scenery was so gorgeous and yet these 3 insisted on sleeping as soon as the jeep started moving and would only wake up when the car stopped for us to get out. They would then suddenly jump into action. The Frenchman would go off and pose like Superman on all manner of rocks and would demand that people took photos of him with his fist in the air and his “cape” behind him (he didn’t have a camera so these pictures of him are on OTHER PEOPLES cameras). The Croatian chick would pose (mostly like a flamingo on one leg, but often also with her arms outstretched in front of her like she was going to dive into a swimming pool) while her dude would snap away. You can’t make this shit up, people! We also shared the tour with a jeep of Israelis and another jeep with a lovely Belgium couple and a German guy.

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world and was apparently formed when the massive lake in the region dried up and left behind a whole lot of salt, amongst other minerals. The Salar contains most of the lithium reserves in the world which Bolivia is only just starting to exploit. According to our guide, Bolivia is going to be “as rich as Saudi Arabia and Switzerland” due to the lithium extraction, because the mineral is used so extensively in batteries. Besides the salt flats we also saw geysers, volcanic rock eroded over a million years to form interesting shapes, many many lakes or lagunas, some with flamingos, as well as hot springs and canyons and miles of nothing and everything.

The last day was definitely the best as this is when we actually got to the salt flats. We spent a crazy amount of time taking photos which is the quite the thing to do here, since the flat landscape and thousands of square kilometres of open space kind of skew perspective and make for awesome photos. There will shortly be an amusing video clip of the 12 of us on the tour climbing out of an empty Pringles tube circulating on the Facebook. Well I hope so at least, since it was on someone else’s camera.

Uyuni to Sucre by chicken bus

After arriving in Uyuni at the end of the tour I stayed the night there and then caught a bus to Sucre in the morning.

It was a fairly uneventful bus trip – just really long. To be fair it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it wasn’t exactly roses and puppies bouncing around in toilet paper either. Luckily my iPod was charged and Kenny Rogers and Tinie Tempah kept me company for most of the trip.

The bus stopped regularly to let people on and off  and then at about the half way mark the bus driver told us we were having a break and we were allowed to get off. There was a mad dash to find a vacant bush / rock / llama behind which to relieve ourselves. Although that was just the tourists, as the Bolivians bless them were happy to just squat on a vacant piece of ground for all the world to see.

Anyhoo by the end of the 12 or so hours I was NOT 100 cement ox (hi Quinno). I was exhausted from the previous few days and was cold and I couldn’t feel my bum cheeks or my feet or my brain. This didn’t make me fun to be around. People who made eye contact with me literally turned to stone. Thank goodness my hostel wasn’t too far away and I was soon tucked up in bed and the world was a better place again.

Spanish in Sucre

So Sucre is lovely and I have decided to stay for a bit before I possibly head to La Paz.

I have also signed up for a week’s worth of intensive Spanish lessons, because not understanding what’s going on is getting old. And I specifically asked for a teacher who is not hot so that I can concentrate this time.  The language school administrator was at first slightly taken aback by my request but I think we are all on the same page now and I will be tutored by someone suitably unattractive.

I want to throttle the person next to me

No story here. I just wanted to share. Is everyone in this hostel on some special form of crack that makes you LOUD and ANNOYING and SMELL LIKE GARLIC?? Go catch your taxi already, like you have been threatening to for the last 2 hours! Before I maim you with my USB STICK!

I am going to watch ‘Legally Blonde’ dubbed into Spanish and will go to my happy place and everything will be ok.

The End

And in conclusion, as the strange Englishman who I have just met says when he leaves the room (usually to go to the loo): ‘May you have blessed lives.’ Or some shit like that.

PS

Sorry the blog is looking a bit photo-less but the wifi here is weak and uploading a photo is slower than a wet week (hello Marita). Plus as you all will know if you read my last post I am looking less than fabulous so I shall only be uploading photos of my image when children no longer cry in my presence and dogs don’t howl at me when they see me in the street.