Santa Cruz surprise (Drive Day 191: Jan 6, 2004)
This city was an outpost when I saw it last. But modern Santa Cruz slides by my window in a stream of diesel exhaust and sagging telephone lines. I can’t keep up with the hustle but I’m clearly not the only one.
For travelers, this is the Houston of Bolivia – oil the latest of its natural riches.
I find the woman’s house whose backyard we camped in thirty years ago. But it feels like the past is crumbling under progress and I’m wishing there was a signature drink to go with this Wild East city.
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.
East and dropping fast (Drive Day 190: Jan 5, 2004)
Gary’s journal documents the direction and descent – from 6,073 feet at our last camp spot to 1,558 feet tonight in Lemoncito. I’m feeling lost but grounded at the same time. Somewhere in the eastern half of this amazing, land-locked country is the camper of my childhood. Maybe that’s why even the smallest survivors seem so plucky and miraculous.
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.
Ode to asphalt (Drive Day 189: Jan 4, 2004)
The rains have stopped, which means the drive goes from terrifying to simply traumatic. We breathe through wet t-shirts tied around our mouths and stop periodically to check how much has leaked from the disintegrating water tank inside the dust-smothered camper. And then, without warning, the secondary road reconnects with the southern highway to Santa Cruz.
I have to remind Gary to shift; he’s been in first gear since we started on this “detour.” We don’t normally stop to take photos of fancy houses but this time the contrast is so sharp it’s a reality check. Bolivia is night and day, heartbreaking and hopeful in ways I’m only beginning to comprehend.
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.
A Year of Escapist Reading
I made it on another best reads list — and this one by the woman whose book advice is always brilliant
When reality becomes too much like (bad) fiction and (poorly-written) alternate history, maybe the best way to cope is to escape – to a different historical time or a different dimension all-together. Looking back at my reading list of 2017, I did exactly that. Should I be embarrassed that it was a year of reading books about magic – what’s more, that I enjoyed it? Well, if it helps me get through the day, week or year, then why not!
Six of Crows duology – I just finished this, so it’s fresh in my mind. A gang of six minor criminals in a 17th century version of Amsterdam set out on an impossible heist. In this multi-ethnic crew, each has their own skill and motivation, sometimes putting them at odds with each other. Much like the Fast & Furious movie franchise. Good plot twists, with our crew always trying to…
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Roads meant for studier beasts (Drive Day 188: Jan 3, 2004)
Funny, my dictionary didn’t tell me that secondary roads mean cobblestone. Not that we have an alternative. The rains have washed out all but a questionable passage through remote, rugged central Bolivia and quickly the secondary road becomes a “carriage route.”
Which means cows, not campers, should be using it. We pass only one other truck, careening madly through the dust which becomes mud a few minutes after the rain starts again.
Some tourists actually come to Bolivia to test their driving skills against its legendary “roads.”
We did not and one particular hairpin turn, under a waterfall, while the camper fishtails dangerously close to a 300-foot drop off, nearly shatters our faith in surviving this journey. We pull off to sleep on the side of what someone, somewhere calls a road – lost and unnerved.
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.
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.
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