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Showing 1-25 of 42 results
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Climate Change hits Kiva Borrowers in Bolivia
Blog: Kiva Stories from the Field - 23 December 2009
By Suzy Price Marinkovich, KF9 Bolivia “In a world that is hot—a world that is more and more affected by global warming—guess who is going to suffer the most? It will be the people who caused it the least—the poorest people in the world, who have no electricity, no cars, no power plants, and virtually no factories [...]
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Cocaine and Microfinance
Blog: Kiva Stories from the Field - 10 December 2009
By Suzy Marinkovich, KF9 “Coca is green, not white like cocaine.” – Evo Morales The Chapare, the Yungas, the DEA, USAID, cocaine, drug trafficking, alternative crops, forced eradication, Evo Morales. These are the buzz words constantly attached to Bolivian articles on the both domestic and foreign-aided drug war against cocaine production. While tough to get the [...]
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28 Things That Are Funny
Blog: REID ON TRAVEL - 3 December 2009
1. Sandwiches2. Pants3. Spirals4. Large beaked animals5. Calgary6. Falling down7. Gerbil attacks8. Fig bars
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Salt Flats, Lakes and Geysers!
Blog: Documentariously Challenged - 2 December 2009
11/24 Santa Cruz -> San Jose = 6 hrs 11/25 San Jose -> Conception = 9 hrs 11/26 Conception -> Santa Cruz = 6 hrs 11/27 Santa Cruz -> Oruro = 15 hrs 11/28 Oruro -> Uyuni = 9 hrs 11/29 Uyuni -> San Jose = 3 1/2 hrs 11/30 San Jose -> Lago Colorado = 4 1/2 hrs 12/1 Lago C [...]
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In the Jungle, a world apart
Blog: Documentariously Challenged - 28 November 2009
I have been putting off this blog for a couple of reasons. The first of which being so much time has passed it now seems like a chore and two, not quite sure how to describe the whole experience. But here it goes… We decided we wanted to do a long trek into the Amazon, not [...]
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You can´t write fiction this good; The 2 day slog from Rurrenebaque to Santa Cruz
Blog: Documentariously Challenged - 28 November 2009
*** Note: This blog was written a few days ago, but we just got the opportunity to post it. *** I am sitting here in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. I have been successfully procrastinating the writing of this blog. Where to start this one? In the jungle or the trip to Santa Cruz? I will vent about [...]
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Jesuits and Mennonites in Bolivia
Blog: Documentariously Challenged - 26 November 2009
Happy Thanksgiving to all! It´s been a wonderful year for Erin and I. We´re certainly thankful to have this opportunity to travel this year. However, we´re sad that finding turkey day food is next to impossible. We may be eating chicken and rice again. What kind of chicken, you ask? Well, our options include pan [...]
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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.
