Sent on Apr. 20, 2003 from La Paz, Bolivia.

Time in Bolivia: 2 hours ahead of EST in USA, as in
Argentina.  Exchange rate: US$ = 7.59 Bolivian Pesos. 

Arica, Chile, 8-hour bus to east. Hello from La Paz
& Lake Titicaca, Bolivia

1. La Paz by Mount Illimani and Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.

At 4,058 meters, La Paz has the highest elevation of any
major city in the world.  It is in the Altiplano, where
soroche (altitude sickness) especially during sleep becomes
a serious problem.  I first experienced this in Cuzco,
Peru.  During the day, things were OK, though you got out
of breath faster.  At night, I could not sleep at all, for
the air that got into my lungs with regular shallow
breathing was not sufficient.  This is not a case of waking
up continuously; it is not sleeping at all.

This is why as soon as we arrived at the outskirts of La
Paz, before the huge drop to the valley below, where the
downtown La Paz is located, I asked the driver to drop me
off at the cemetery, where you catch the bus to Copacabana,
the town on the shore of Lake Titicaca.  The air is even
thinner here than in La Paz, I was told.  Sleep was out
that night, so I read my travel book.  Next day, I took a
catamaran ride in the lake, stopped at one of the 2
islands, and caught the last bus to La Paz.

La Paz occupies the sides of 2 steep cliffs facing each
other, though the entire area is full of mountains and
cliffs.  The white-capped Mt. Illimani crowns the whole
area, and the city.  From the air, the landscape looks
unbelievable. As a city down to earth, however, I thought
La Paz is really just a dump.  Bolivia is a poor country,
which is visible everywhere you look.  There are beggars on
the streets, and, as in Chile, no one I tried to approach
spoke English.  I had my Lama steak--delicious, its taste a
mix of veal and venison--and knowing I would not sleep that
night too, I checked into ways of getting out of there.

The distance on the map from La Paz to Santa Cruz in the
middle looks about the same as the 8-hour Arica to La Paz.
Forget it. It takes 18 hours thru hairpin turns on very
mountainous roads.  So I took the plane instead and landed
an hour later in Santa Cruz.  The airport bus brought me to
the last station, and finally a taxi brought me to the bus
terminal.  To my surprise, I found a bus to Salta,
Argentina that day.  This will be my second night without
sleep . . .

2. Change of plans.

I had mentioned that I will make my way as I go along. 
Well, from Santa Cruz I had intended to take a flight to
Manaus, Brazil and the Amazon.  I was going to get my visa
in Santa Cruz, as direct flights to Manaus originate from
there, not from La Paz.  At the airport I was told that
since I was coming from Bolivia, I would have to have also
a Yellow Fever shot, the same if I continued to Asuncion,
Paraguay, plus a visa--the travel book I have does not
mention either.  I was not about to search, without any
Spanish, for the place where they gave such shots, explain
what I needed, hope that they would understand and give me
the right shot.  Instead, I dropped both Brazil and
Paraguay from my plans and took the only way out: south to
Argentina, where I did not need any of this.  If I want I
can do Manaus in a point-to-point trip (eg., Miami to
Manaus) at a later date, maybe . . .  We often accuse the
French for not wanting to speak English, even if they know
how.  It is much worse here, I came to believe.

I am typing this in Santa Cruz, while waiting for my bus to
Salta, Argentina at 6pm, a ride of 19 hours, for which I
paid $35 US--and probably got ripped off by about $10. 
Well, no Spanish, what can you expect?  I am hoping
Argentinean border patrol will not see my first entry stamp
and give me a new one.  Actually, I am hoping that the bus
WILL wait me thru the formalities, exit stamp from Bolivia,
entry to Argentina . . . We'll see.


Addendum to Bolivia: Bus, Bolivia to Argentina.

Sent on Apr. 23, 2003 from Salta, Argentina.

1. WARNING. Bus lines, Bolivia to another country.  Avoid
the bus connections from Santa Cruz, Bolivia to Argentina
or Paraguay or Brazil AT ALL COSTS.  The international bus
desk at Santa Cruz bus terminal--turn left after the
entrance, the counters all the way at the end, facing
you--are under the control of organized Bolivian Mafia, its
agent Jorge, Nuelvo. The signs over these counters read:

Empressa Trans Rosario International,
on the next counter:
Empressa International de Transporte.

I was not the only one taken; a Chinese professor from Sao
Paulo, Brazil, with fluent Spanish, heading for Asuncion,
Paraguay, and an American, supposedly an expert on travel
in Latin America, also fluent in Spanish, heading for
Brazil were also ripped off.  I will report the details
of this to the Lonely Planet, et al. the Bolivian Embassy,
and the US State Dept. when I return.  Here is how the
scheme works.

First, Bolivia is still a Latin version of the American
Wild West, that is to say, a chaotic place, even for
booking small excursions.  The rural landscape leading to
La Paz was gorgeous, dotted with quaint settlements, Lama,
goat, sheep, cow, horse herds, the villagers busy on their
fields, the colorful costumes, and the beautiful scenery .
. .  The landscape around La Paz is awesome, but the cities
are in sorry state, with lots of beggars, people eking out
a living any which way.  Poverty I have seen before; here
you have also crookedness in some of the most basic things,
like a bus ticket, also to popular destinations in Bolivia,
like Lake Titicaca. If you insist on going to Bolivia, do
it by air, don't take a bus that crosses ANY border, or for
that matter, don't take a bus in Bolivia, period, for the
roads are often decided on the go.

When you come to any one of the 5 counters at Santa Cruz
bus terminal that sell bus tickets to Argentina, Brazil, or
Paraguay, you are shown the poster of a very modern
double-deck bus and told of a direct connection.  The cost
is stated in Dollars; for Salta they started at $45. 
Since, up to this point, with busses in Argentina and Chile
costs were about $1 per hour, say $30 for the 29 hour trip
from Santiago to Arica, I questioned the $45 for a stated
19-hour trip to Salta.  Well, since I was a tourist, they
said, they agreed to reduce the cost to $35, and I assumed
I was still taken by say $10.  (The Chinese and other
American paid the full stated fare for their trips.)

That they reduced my fare so readily already gave me a
signal that something was wrong, BUT I did not have a
choice: these were the only bus desks out of Bolivia to
Argentina.  And I accepted the truth of the 19-hour direct
connection to Salta, Argentina, because busses from
Argentina and Chile to Bolivia indeed cross the border, the
bus staff helping out with border formalities.  I got a bus
ticket with a Nuelvo label, showing a direct connection to
Salta.  I assumed Nuelvo was the ticket agent for that bus
line.

Well, the other American and I watched the Chinese taken to
a beat-up bus to Paraguay.  The poor guy was shaken when he
saw the bus, as were we.  The other American suffered the
same fate.  Then came my turn: in a bus that looked like
stolen from a junkyard, one on which changing to 1st gear
or reverse sounded like the entire transmission would come
apart.  The unshaven driver and his 2 helpers could have
played the part of border-crossing drug smugglers in a
movie of that kind.  The other passengers looked like
pictures of illegal aliens crossing from the Mexican border
to USA, with sacks full of stuff carried on board.

The bus took off at 6:48pm, 48 minutes late. The next 13
hours to the border was a night adventure.  The seats were
tight and very uncomfortable, but the first 100 miles of
the road was paved and we were making good headway.  At
some settlements the residents had put a rope across the
highway, to force the busses to stop so that local peddlers
could enter the bus and sell things.  Then the road just
stopped and we started to ride on the landscape. I thought
"surely this is a small stretch of road under construction;
we will soon join the regular road."  Forget it.  We began
using--I am not making this up--railroad tracks as our
road, crossing a few 100-meter shaky one-way rail bridges
along the way. The road continued like this for the next 9
hours, at times going thru flooded areas, creeks, fields,
thru small ravines, cow paths with potholes large enough to
swallow a car.  We drove mostly in 2nd gear for those 9
hours.

The last 20 miles to the city of Yacuiba, Bolivia--avoid
this road at all costs--were paved and the bus dropped us
off at the Bolivian side of border crossing at about
7:30am, 13 hours later.  The exit stamp was easy enough.  I
was greeted by a young guy who took me to the offices--sign
over the dingy office said so--of Mr. Jorge Nuelvo, who put
me in a car--that turned out to be a taxi for which I was
asked to pay 3 Pesos (30 cents) that brought me to the
Argentinean border crossing a few minutes later.  Sleepless
for 3 nights now, I had to wait for 2 hours in an unmoving
line.  Nuelvo came over to me occasionally to give the
impression he was doing something for me.  At his final
visit, he asked me to give him the ticket I was given in
Santa Cruz, pantomiming that he would now get me my
continuation ticket to Salta.  Telling myself "what can I
lose," I gave it to him.  That was the end of that ticket,
but not Nuelvo.

Eventually the Argentineans must have decided I was dressed
unlike the rest of the people around me and pulled me off
the line, indeed the only Westerner in the middle of hordes
of locals. After seeing that I was from USA, spoke no
Spanish, plus all the stamps and visas in my passport, the
man in charge of immigration himself told his people to
give me an entry stamp for 3 entries, just in case I
crossed borders again.  From then on, I was treated like a
visiting royalty there and at the next 3 check points where
my luggage was searched each time, the police finding
someone who spoke English, to ask me what I intended to do
with the 2 bottles of sand I had with me--from Atacama
desert in Chile.  (Each time, I told them I was a geology
professor at the University of Miami, as I did not think
that I collected sand would sound convincing.  The stamps
in my passport convinced everyone I had to be someone very
important, if not a CIA agent, for they showed them to each
other and mumbled things.)

One last part about the Mafia.  After I had my stamps, and
was away 50 meters or so from the Argentinean border
station, Nuelvo himself and 2 burly associates appeared
again out of nowhere and asked me to pay $25 for helping me
out with the entry stamp.  By then I knew that the bus
ticket that said to Salta had ended there, that the locals
had paid about $4 for the same ticket, I had been taken for
NOT $10 but $31, that I had to find a new bus to Salta . .
. BUT now I was in Argentina.  I smiled and said "no
Spanish," put my arm around Nuelvo's shoulder and started
to guide him to the Argentinean border station, so they
would translate me his request.  After a bit of
arm-wrestling, seeing that I was serious, the 3 guys
disappeared fast and that was the end of my dealing with
Nuelvo and his gang.  Argentina felt like heaven.

I found the last seat in a much neater bus to Salta and
arrived 7 hours later, thru land that looked like eastern
Pennsylvania but with semi-tropical vegetation, the
north-central provinces of Jujuy and Salta.