Bolivia
Witches market (Drive Day 187: Jan 2, 2004)
You only think you’ve seen street markets until you duck into La Cancha – so big it devours an entire section of central Cochabamba, so famous (or infamous) you better keep your hands on your wallet and try not to look like a tourist.
Margit hustles us through a maze of tarp-covered alleys to the Witches market, reportedly the biggest in South America. This isn’t any Harry Potter, Halloween-kitsch superstore. It’s where you buy q’owa – custom, burnable representations of whatever in your life needs a spell to fix. Which, in our case, is the flooded-out road over which we need to drive a rapidly disintegrating old camper. I’m a believer as soon as I see a green sugar mold of a camper van enough like ours to be more than coincidence.
It’s the dried, self-aborted llama fetuses that give me pause but Margit insists the newspaper funnel concoction wouldn’t be complete without all the traditional ingredients.
I relax on the crowded bus ride home – everyone else’s q’owas have stiff little llama legs sticking out the top as well. Don dons his best pointy hat to set our q’owa on fire and “bless” our camper with its billowing smoke. Abracadabra; let’s hope this works.
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.
Beautiful Bolivian beginnings (Drive Day 186: Jan 1, 2004)
It’s hard not to be optimistic on New Year’s Day in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It’s just too balmy — 66 degrees — and bountiful. Girls in their holiday best hats dot the plaza, with its palm-lined buildings and bustling market.
I expect the vast potato selection and obligatory squeals of pigs but not the cornucopia of fruits and lettuces.
Circle back to the 66 degrees though and it’s understandable; Cochabamba has one of those always spring-like climates that draw expats like Margit’s husband Don and her Brazilian son-in-law Claudio. Who sorts through fresh shrimp and beans to prepare his country’s New Year tradition: fejoida. It seems discordantly exotic, until I remember that Brazil is one of the five country that borders Bolivia.
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.
Ringing in the New Year with Tia Eva (Drive Day 185: Dec 31st, 2003)
I have never been more grateful for my training as a journalist. It’s why I feel no trepidation about striking up conversations with strangers. Or looking up the friends of friends of friends on New Year’s Eve. Which is how we end up at the packed dinner table of these two women: Margit and her aunt Eva – a one-time German refugee married off to an older Bolivian man to escape the Nazi’s. We accept Margit’s invitation to camp the Avion in her driveway and ring in the New Year with a new appreciation for the kindness of strangers.
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.
Crossing into Cochabamba (Drive Day 184: Dec 30th, 2003)
We are trying to make it out of the troubled capitol before the respite of the holidays is over. That’s when locals predict the riots to return and the threat of another coup to return. So we continue the search for my father’s camper. According to his memory, he sold it to the husband of a Bolivian woman we met in La Paz. Thirty years ago we traveled this route with Sonja and her little boy James. Now it’s just the two of us, stopping to marvel at what has been abandoned in the years between these trips in time.
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.
Moon valley (Drive Day 183: Dec 29th, 2003)
My stomach isn’t quite ready for cobblestones, but streets of pale yellow stone are the only way to get to the Valle de Luna. If you poke at the tips of the spindly mounds of earth the dirt crumbles in your fingers. Only cactus seems to take grip and prosper. But the spirits are okay with subdivisions here. Signs in front of half-built mansions advertise prices in the $400,000s or $2,000 a month to rent. But hey, you have a view of the moon.
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.
Chola ladies and pork sandwiches (Drive Day 182: Dec 28th, 2003)
I am recovering enough to try the local La Paz delicacy – Chola sandwiches. The ladies who make them are also called Cholas. They need they layer, standing in outdoor market stands all day slicing freshly roasted pig, offering buyers a taste before committing. Then they pile the slices onto a cheesy bun with a spicy relish of pickled onions, carrots and peppers. The finishing touch is a dollop of mayonnaise so delicious that I tell myself “who needs refrigeration” at this altitude?
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.
Silencio es salud(Drive day 181: Dec 27th, 2003)
I am recovering from another round of motion-sickness meets altitude-sickness meets unnamed parasite but we hire Eosebio to take us on a taxi tour of La Paz. I have to laugh at the signs warning against honking cars – silence is apparently healthy. Our native taxi driver’s presence helps shield us from some of the more tenacious street hustles and persistent beggars and he points out places tourists never go – like the Valle de las Animas or valley of the spirits. No one lives in these hauntingly beautiful foothills of the Illipimi mountains; the spirits don’t want to be overcrowded.
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.
The Heights – of irony (Drive day 180: Dec 26th, 2003)
Even though La Paz is the highest (in altitude) of any South American capitol, it actually sits in the base of what looks like a collapsed pit. Which is why the slum town-turned-third-most-populated-city in the country is called El Atlo. It perches on the edge of the pit and is the site of the most recent rounds of riots. It’s easy to see why – people here have nothing left to lose. And yet one of them, a taxi driver named Eosebio, guides us down into the city so that we arrive safely at the only hotel he knows of with a parking lot big enough for our camper. A Christmas gift indeed.
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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