Floating home: Bolivian balnearios (Drive Day 193: Jan 8, 2004)
Hip travelers from Europe, Canada and South America are catching on to Santa Cruz and you can find luxury Hilton digs with stunning views over a city coming into its own. We, however, come with our own house attached to our truck.
Thankfully Santa Cruz is also home to what Bolivians call balnearios. The closest thing in the US would be a waterpark/resort swimming pool complex, only we don’t have anything close to how awesome balnearios are.
Especially not to the one that agrees to let us camp overnight in the shade of mango trees: Fabio Andres.
Bolivia is starting to feel like a magnet of meant-to-be karma. Because the owners here actually know the family my parents sold my childhood home to – thirty years ago.
Forget the untamed macho Bolivia that attracted my father, the Fabio Andres swimming complex is a magical oasis that makes you believe you really can go home again.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
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