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Showing 1-25 of 35 results
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Why Me?: A Post about Bolivian Women
Blog: Kiva Stories from the Field - 10 November 2009
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF8 Peru & KF9 Bolivia Twisted twining vining metal unrhythmic untamed unkempt and in comes the dust sweat and sticking to me tires thumping each rock unsettled plastic bag squeezed empty tossed out the window just a drop of papaya juice leaps back clings to the dirty car door parting from the white [...]
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Pompous in the Pampas
Blog: Documentariously Challenged - 8 November 2009
So… as I said at the end of the last post, we make plans so that we can abandom them later. Which is exactly what happened. After a surprising easy 18 hr bus ride to Rurrenabaque, we found out that the boats no longer run to Riberalta. Apparently since the road was improved, it didn´t [...]
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Welcome to Bolivia!
Blog: Documentariously Challenged - 1 November 2009
We passed our last night in Peru over a great dinner of cuy (guinea pig), alpaca steaks and a pretty bad litre of red wine. Guinea pig is actually quite tasty, but then again most anything that is fried tastes nice. My entree was accompanied with nice little quinoa croquettes and huacaina sauce. It [...]
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Highlights of Latin America
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 1 November 2009
I had such an awesome time in Latin America it’s pretty hard to pick out favourite moments. But I’m going to give it a go anyway. Here are the best things I’ve seen and done over the past six and a half months, along with links to what I originally wrote about them. Favourite City: Valparaiso, [...]
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Bolivia Round-up & Budget
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 21 October 2009
I could have sworn when I was planning my trip that I’d left myself enough time for a month in Bolivia. But somehow I screwed up and that month turned into two weeks, which really isn’t enough time to get to know a place properly But, having said that, the two weeks I had were great [...]
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Photo silliness on the Salar de Uyuni
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 19 October 2009
Let’s face it, spectacular as its landscapes are, one of the main reason every backapcker wants to go to the Salar de Uyuni is to take lots of silly photos and videos. I had thought that all those trick shots would be tiresome to set up and take, but it turned out to be some [...]
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The Salar de Uyuni
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 18 October 2009
If there was one place more than any other that I was excited about visiting in South America, it was the Salar de Uyuni. Before I traveled, I read countless blog posts and saw hundreds of amazing photos about the place, and I couldn’t wait to see it for myself. After a slightly frustrating evening in [...]
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Going down the mines
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 17 October 2009
If the Death Road turned out to be nowhere near as scary as I’d been expecting, my next big excursion turned out to far more. Potosi was once the biggest and richest city in the whole of the Americas – and at one point even bigger than Madrid, the imperial capital, and all because of one [...]
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Failing to die on the Death Road
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 16 October 2009
There are certain things one does when traveling that it’s probably best my mum doesn’t know I’m doing them til afterwards. Cycling down the World’s Most Dangerous Road (© the Inter-American Development Bank), aka the Death Road, is one of them. The road gets its reputation from the days when it used to be the main [...]
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Wrestling – Bolivian Style
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 15 October 2009
As I noted in my second ever post, well before my trip started, I have a strange obsession with Mexican Wrestling. And so I was gutted when swine flu put paid to my chances of getting to see some while I was there. So of course I was over the moon when I found out [...]
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The Hottest Spot North of La Paz
Blog: Itinerant Londoner - 14 October 2009
Arriving in Bolivia turned out to be the easiest border crossing I’ve ever done. No queues, no border guards asking for unofficial ‘fees’, no aggressive money changers, no stringent customs checks, no chaos whatsoever. In and out in a couple of minutes, we arrived in Copacabana five minutes later, and checked into the lovely Hotel [...]
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No Time For Romance
Blog: Kiva Stories from the Field - 7 October 2009
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9 “Gender-based violence … is ubiquitous in much of the developing world, inflicting far more casualties than any war. Surveys suggest that about one third of all women world-wide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, [...]
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'At the Copa, Copacabana....'
Blog: Felicity Sees... - 23 September 2009
Yeah well not the same one, but whatever, I had that song stuck in my head pretty much the whole time I was there! And I was glad to actually get there really because my original bus (yep another bus story...) I´d booked crashed in the morning and so didn´t pick me up, and then apparently there were road blocks that meant no other buses were leaving until the afternoon.
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Women in Hats
Blog: Kiva Stories from the Field - 22 September 2009
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9 Bolivia We can’t get enough of them. We love them so much that they even have their own lending team of fans and a discussion on KivaFriends. Whether they are made of straw or soft fabric, bowler, flat-brimmed, or a tiny saucer looking thing on our borrower’s heads – we just love [...]
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La la lovely La Paz
Blog: Felicity Sees... - 21 September 2009
I was a bit wary about going to La Paz, despite the white flag the name of this city appeared to be waving at me. It seemed that I was setting myself up for an extra concentrated shot of all the usual Bolivian concerns-food, altitude, theft and dodgy taxi drivers. But it is Bolivia´s capital, and it is a necassary stop-over on the way to Peru, and hence I knew that I couldn´t leave Bolivia without giving it a shot, so one more overnight bus ride later I found myself emerging from my cosy sleeping bag at dawn to a see thousands of lights twinkling up the mountains around me.
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Sweet as Sucre
Blog: Felicity Sees... - 18 September 2009
After Salta and the Salares it was time to sweeten things up a bit and hit Bolivia´s ex-capital city Sucre. Not in fact named after another favourite Bolivian white powder, the city´s name actually honours the revolutionary leader Antonio José de Sucre, and was Bolivia´s capital until the seat of government was moved to La Paz in 1898. Although it doesn´t have many major ¨attractions¨ as such, the city itelf has a lovely setting and its Spanish style white-washed colonial buildings make it an attractive place to wander about and relax.
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Cochabamgringa en el Hospital
Blog: Kiva Stories from the Field - 18 September 2009
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9 My husband walked in to the CIDRE office this Tuesday around 5pm, smiling big but smelling awful. Everyone crowded around and asked, “Mateo! Como le ha ido?” – “How was your [first] day?” I could tell they were worried all day when they had asked me if I heard from [...]
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The Altiplano, Tupiza to Uyuni
Blog: Felicity Sees... - 15 September 2009
You know that feeling of dread you get before an exam you fear might go horribly wrong? Well that was pretty much how I felt as I signed on to a 4 day jeep tour to the remote altiplano in South West Bolivia: Travelling to freezing altitudes of 5000m into remote desert expanses crammed into a worn looking jeep with six strangers and a Spanish-speaking Bolivian driver with no means of bailing out? This, could go horribly wrong.
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Bienvenidos a Bolivia
Blog: Felicity Sees... - 11 September 2009
Buenas tardes chicos!Sorry for my absence over the past few days, but I have been gallavanting around the Bolivian altiplano sin electricity and so have not had a chance to update the blog!
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Bolivian Sojourn: Potosi, By the Numbers
Blog: AlpacaSuitcase - 7 September 2009
The story of the town of Potosi and its Cerro Rico ("Rich Hill"), the mountain of silver that bankrolled the Spanish Empire for two-and-a-half centuries, is one that can be told with numbers:13,420 = The elevation (in feet) of Potosi, the highest city in the world, almost two and a half miles high.
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Bolivian Sojourn: Amazon Basin
Blog: AlpacaSuitcase - 3 September 2009
Our 45-minute flight from La Paz to Rurenabaque was a short but perception-altering experience. Had we not decided at the last minute to visit Bolivia’s Amazon basin, we would still be associating Bolivia with bowler hats, shortness of breath, llamas, woven alpaca textiles and extreme temperatures swings on the altiplano. Our 19-seat, twin-engine propjet “bumped” down on Rurrenabaque’s dirt runway amid clear jungle skies -- according to Lonely Planet’s web site this was one of Bolivia's 1,068 airports with unpaved landing strips.
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Bolivian Sojourn: Navigating a Coral Reef at 12,000 feet Above Sea Level
Blog: AlpacaSuitcase - 31 August 2009
The area around the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat in southwestern Bolivia, is an other-worldly landscape of hallucinogenic visions and poses some difficult questions. For example: How did 10 billion tons of salt get here? Why is that lake green? Why are there thousands of pink flamingos living more than two miles above sea level? Why am I looking at steaming geysers and bubbling mudpots while freezing my butt off? Why is that lake red?
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Bolivian Sojourn: El Choro Trek
Blog: AlpacaSuitcase - 27 August 2009
Even when you take a year off, you need a vacation; we are currently touring Bolivia and everywhere we go we are impressed by its biodiversity. Bolivia has about 736,000 square miles (roughly the size of the U.S. states of Alaska and Washington combined), one-third of which is Andean altiplano and two-thirds is Amazon basin. Were it not for losing its Pacific War with Chile (1879-1884), it would have a coastline as well. (In fact, from 1825 to 1935, Bolivia lost half of its territory to neighboring Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Paraguay.)
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Funny linguistic joke falls flat. I'm sure the Bolivians would have liked it.
Blog: Bearshapedsphere - 24 August 2009
Even I, amateur linguist, translator and pun maker extraordinaire can have a joke fall flat. Apropos of nothing, except I was baby wrangling for the sweetest mama and baby pair today, and so I had some time to think when I wasn't swirling from side to side or doing a little dance to make the baby stop crying.
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12: "Dinners with Élo: Part 2"
Blog: Dispatches from the Provinces of Argentina - 14 August 2009
I sent an e-mail to Élo after I got back from my trip north, just before the new semester was starting.I asked if she was staying in Paraná.A few days went by. No word. I told Daniel I thought, maybe, she’d split and gone away with her boyfriend.She wrote back, saying she was still in town, and that her friend was visiting, and that we should go canoeing on the river sometime soon. I said we should make dinner and make plans.
