Día de la Memoria

Yesterday was a national holiday in Argentina. It was the 38th anniversary of the military coup in 1976 which created a six-year dictatorship. The holiday is in memoriam of the 30,000 men and women who were disappeared, tortured, and killed by the right-wing military junta during this time. They were largely students, trade unionists, artists and intellectuals. Many were targeted for their politics; others were murdered indiscriminately, often implicated in the confession of someone under torture. These unspeakable attocities were committed in the name of defending capitalism.

This dictatorship was supported by the United States. Declassified documents show that as early as 1976, State Department officials (such as Henry Kissinger) were aware of the gruesome extent of the junta's abuses yet explicitly condoned them in meetings with Argentine diplomates. Tacit support for the junta continued in various forms over the course of three presidential administrations.

Yesterday we went to a massive remembrance rally in the Plaza de Mayo. It was a beautiful day, families out together, the smell of roasting meat everywhere. Countless people carried photos of their disappeared loved ones. They held their heads high, stoically, occasionally laughing among themselves, applauding the legacy of their fallen comrades.

The air was dominated by the sound of drum corps, as large left-wing youth organizations marched around the plaza for hours. The mood was reverent, militant, resolute. On a stage, an MC read off names of the disappeared. Signs and banners called for Justicia y Castigo for the members of military who still have not been prosecuted for what they did. There were reminders that the dictatorship was arm-in-arm with banks and corporations. And of course there were political campaigns attempting to capitalize on the emotion of the event.

In the middle of the plaza was a wall where messages and art were posted, addressed to the disappeared. These messages of love and hope were the most devastating part of the whole experience. So much love. So much hope.

I would like to congratulate my Argentine brothers and sisters on 30 years of democracy and human rights, and for not allowing the horror to take away their love of life.

Nunca más. Never again.

Uyuni Carnaval

(Photo credit: Khanh Gia)

One night we had to spend several hours in Uyuni, just waiting for a train. Nowhere to go and nothing to do, yet the spirits of the night came together and intervened, plucked ripe fruit off the vine of Carnaval and handed it to us, juice dripping down their wrist.

***

We'd long-since resigned ourselves to being completely at Grover's mercy. After three days on the road with our driver, we knew he was not the accommodating type. So no one put up much of a fight when he ditched us outside the tour company's office, all of our luggage locked inside, as the sun went down--with no explanation of when we'd get our things. Grover drove away in that Landcruiser that was the color of the dusty road, and we stood there in silence. Me, Ginny, Brendan, a French couple whose names we could never remember, and Khanh. Khanh was a Danish guy our age who'd been traveling through Latin America by himself for months. We had meshed well during our three-day trip together. Now we were all tired and dirty and nervous about being stranded in Uyuni, a small dusty town on the edge of nowhere.

At the time I was hellbent on us getting to the next leg of our trip: Oruro. We needed to be there the next day, the final Friday of Carnaval, said to be unmissable. We had planned to take a train that night.

Our three-day trip through the Salar involved cramming seven people in one mid-sized SUV, so we'd all had to leave luggage behind, to make room. Now we were wondering if we'd get it back in time to make the train.

Finally someone finally came by to let us get our things. We said goodbye to the French couple and to Khanh, and then went to an American-owned restaurant on the edge of town called Minuteman Pizza. It was our most satisfying meal in days.  There were hardly any other patrons and they were all tourists. The owners had no problem with us just being there until closing time and let us use the facilities to freshen. We drank beer and played several games of Gao, a Chinese card game that Khanh had taught us.

At around 8, I heard music coming from street. I took my recorder and went out by myself and meandered for a few blocks looking for some Carnaval festivities. The street was full of kiosks, vendors packing up their wares for the night. The music I'd heard was just a TV in a kiosk playing a DVD.

I looked up from the recorder and there was Khanh. He'd ended up buying a ticket for the same train we were on. Then he'd used one of the public showers farther up the road, which you have to pay for. "Oh man. Was that disgusting?" I asked. "No," he said. "It was actually amazing."

I brought Khanh back with me to Minuteman Pizza. The other two amigos cheered upon his entrance. We played more rounds of Gao, with Khanh dominating of course. At ten, the restaurant closed. We said goodbye to the sweet old lady running the kitchen, put on our packs and jackets, and went out. We walked back up the main street toward the train station. We still had several hours to kill, so  looked for somewhere to get a drink.

We got to the plaza (basically a park) right across the street from the train station. We put our bags down on a bench. There were a lot of people out. The loudest were the hordes of Chilean and Argentine backpackers, drinking on benches, on the ground, and in a gazebo. There were little clusters of them revolving around dudes with instruments.

There were young Bolivians out, too; a total contrast to the backpackers. They had gleaming hair and clean-shaven faces. Their outfits were sleeker, darker, and tighter-fitting. They stood aloof from the backpackers and did not smile, even as they talked to one another.

There were a few bars on the edges of the plaza but we opted to stay out in the plaza. Everyone was feeling pretty mellow and open to whatever.

Khanh and I went to a little liquor store nearby and bought a small bottle of rum called Abuelo. He  paid for it and I was going to pay him back, which, while writing this, I realize I never did. And he never brought it up. So Khanh, if you're out there, I owe you a drink.

We returned to the park bench. The rum was sweet and good. After a long silence, Khanh said four beautiful words: "I have some weed." We did not feel as brave as the Chileans and the Argentines around us smoking spliffs out in the open. So Khanh and I walked to the empty parking lot of the train station. Then we realized it wasn't that empty, s we walked a few blocks further down the main street, away from the plaza, where soon the road was almost totally dead. We sat down on some stairs at the entrance of a darkened office building. Khanh didn't have much, just enough to pack my little stone pipe from Copacabana two times. We smoked quickly, passing it back and forth. We could barely see what we were doing in the dark.

We heard drum beats echo from behind the buildings across the street.

"It sounds like someone's having a party over there," I said. "Maybe we should check it out."

Then the music got closer. After a minute or so, I got up and looked down the street and saw a crowd of people marching toward us, appearing under the street-lights then disappearing into shadows. It was a carnaval parade. We watched the crowd get closer, trying to finish smoking before they reached us. Then we packed up the pipe with green still in it.

The parade was led by two columns of young men and women doing traditional dances. Andean folk dancing, I think, is really fun to watch. There's a lot of swaggering and sashaying, hopping and stomping. The moves have this very light-hearted, jolly feel. The dancers were also singing at the top of their lungs, loud enough to be heard over the drums and pipes. On the margins were other folks doing sloppier, drunken versions of this dance. Following that was a small band of flutes and percussion. Bringing up the rear were the staggering town drunks.

It was a moment I'll never forget, watching that first parade go by right after we smoked. The melody was joyful-- cascading and infectious and repeated over and over again. I  started making recordings. Khanh took hundreds of pictures with his massive camera. We would walk ahead, let the whole procession pass, then walk ahead of them again, and record them again. Some old guy came out of the parade, shook my hand, and yelled "Welcome to Uyuni!" in English. 

The parade circled back to the plaza, where Ginny and Brendan were waiting with our packs. They handed them off to us and we agreed to meet up later at the train station.

Khanh and I kept following the parade for probably 10 blocks. Soon we lagged behind the procession until it was quiet enough to hear each other talk. We took some swigs from the bottle. Then we heard another parade, coming from the other side of town. It sounded different. It had a similar drumline, a brass section and they were playing a different tune.

We followed these shifting far-off sounds down deserted streets. We made a jagged diagonal line through the town. As we made a zig-zagging diagonal line to the other side of town, Khanh told me  he used to run a hip-hop blog in Denmark.

What?

It had a strange name that no one could pronounce. They interviewed Naz, Wif Kalifa, Drake, and so on. It was like Nardwar: extremely well-researched interview questions that no one else had asked these rappers before. What a fascinating guy Khanh was. A Danish-Vietnamese hipster, traveling through Bolivia alone, not speaking a word of Spanish, with a woman's black and gold-laced handkerchief wrapped around his head. When I wrote this in 2014, I said that I never would have imagined he a heavily-trafficked hip-hop blog.

Finally we found the other parad. It was bigger. It had a massive brass section and a huge entourage of people. The melody they played over and over again was even more addictive. There were wasted old ladies twirling through the crowd with bottles of liquor in hand, pouring cups for people at random. We followed that one for a long time. I lost track of time. We wound through the streets with a vague sense of heading back towards the plaza and the train station. I made half a dozen recordings.

Eventually we found ourselves back at the plaza, where we met up with Brendan and Ginny. "Do you realize," Khanh said, "that we've been chasing these people for an hour, carrying all of our shit on our backs the entire time?" We were suddenly very tired. Brendan and Ginny led us to a spot in the plaza where we threw our bags down and sat in a circle of several dozen Chileans.

People immediately offered us swigs wine and beer, drags on cigarettes. More than one guy was strumming the guitar and people were singing along softly. A handsome Chilean with a Babylonian-style beard started talking to us; I wish I could have understood more of what he said. We should have soaked up more of that mellow vibe... but then another parade came by the plaza, the largest one yet, so thick with people that it choked up the entire boulevard. I don't know which of us led the way, but we all pulled on our packs and moved out. There were a ton people dancing.

The spirit of Carnaval is very free and spontaneous. At the same time, the parades are about culture that has been preserved, learned, and rehearsed for this occasion. There were these two white guys (they had to be Americans) who decided not only to dance in the street, but to get front and center of the parade, where everyone could see them. So alongside Bolivians performing traditional dances were two clean-cut gringos, freakishly tall, with absurd, clownish smiles, doing those horrible self-deprecating dance moves that white people should save for their own private parties, where they can only make themselves feel ashamed. Nevertheless, people were gracious to them. I thought it was pretty embarrassing.

The four of us continued to follow the parade around the town. Khanh and I passed the rum bottle back and forth until it was empty. I was so happy to be right where I was. It was amazing to see young people working hard to keep traditions alive, and hilarious to see old people getting shit-faced.

We kept following this raucous spectacle. We rounded a corner, heading back once more to the station.

And that was when I realized that I'd lost my ATM card.

I had not thought about that ATM card for four days. And yet, in that moment, right as I reached pinnacle of my drunken euphoria, all at once I saw the entirety of the event that had led to the loss of the card. I had gotten off the overnight bus from La Paz. I was in a daze of sleep deprivation. We'd been arguing. I went to get money from the ATM and left it in the machine.

I told Ginny what happened. She stood there quietly while I searched my bag, my moneybelt, all of the plastic bags and envelopes in my bag. It was almost midnight. The train was leaving soon. The parade music drifted away.

"It'll be alright," I said to her. She nodded. If she was panicking, it didn't show. I thought I saw her choke up for a split-second. She impressed me with how fast she put the setback behind her, this knowledge that I had introduced a serious complication into our trip.

Brendan found us standing there. "Is it possible that you're just really high right now, and don't remember where you put your card?" He said. Sure, I said. Why not? I didn't really believe this, and it turned out not be true, but it was a good effortt on Brendan's end to curb our impending panic. We resolved to not jump to any conclusions. When we got to Uyuni, we would search my bag. It would probably show up. And if it didn't, my brother and girlfriend would loan me money until my bank mailed me a new one. I also had a back-up credit card for just such an occasion.

Idiot. Another crucial item lost.

You know what? I told myself. It was worth it. If I had to come to Uyuni and lose my debit card in order to experience what I've experienced, then it was worth it. And I'm pretty sure I believed that. I know I do now.

We met up with Khanh and walked to the station to catch our train. "I don't know what I would do if I lost my debit card on this trip," he said, which did not comfort me. The station was full of people, most whom were sleeping on the floor. Everyone found a place to wait in the crowded station. 

I couldn't wait until Oruro. I had to know now if my card was truly lost. Under the fluorescent lights of the front entrance, I sat down on the curb and rummaged through my entire bag.

As I did, a woman in a black sweatsuit with rhinestones on it stood near the curb with her hands in the pockets. She was a little over 5', with a nice figure and pretty face. She could have been 17 or 35, there was no telling. In the corner of my eye I saw her pace back and forth.

She kept glancing in my direction. I did not look up from my bag. Slowly, casually, she moved toward me. She was trying hard to be inconspicuous. What was going on?

Now I couldn't help but look up at her as she approached me. I expected her to say something. She didn't. She walked past me and over to the brick wall directly behind me. Then she squatted and took a piss. She was an arms-length away and I heard it trickle on to the cement. Then she pulled up her pants and went back to the spot where she'd been standing. A man exited the station and put his arm around her, and they walked into town together. That was the most Bolivian thing I have ever seen, I thought.

I never found my debit card. I went into the station and found my people waiting on the platform. There were multiple tracks, but a freight train stood alongside the platform. For half an hour, we watched this decrepit old beast lumber back and forth.

As 2am approached, men, women, and children stood up at the edge of the platform with their bags in hand. Finally the freight train cleared out, revealing the passenger train on the far end of the station. As a mass, we all jumped down and walked over the tracks to board the train.

I swear the conductors wore uniforms that said, in Spanish, "We can do better! We need to do better! We have to do better!"

I thought Carnaval in Uyuni had been pretty wild. I had no idea what was coming my way.

Khanh's (former?) hip-hop blog: http://drozdailysteezin.dk

Night Bus from La Paz to Uyuni

If there's one thing worth doing in Bolivia, it's going to the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. It's an incredible place, surrounded by a wide array of desert landscapes and wildlife.

All bus rides from La Paz to Uyuni are overnight. If you ever go, do yourself a favor: fly to Uyuni. Otherwise, it's a 16-hour bus ride on an unpaved road. We did this. It was a major mistake. Flying down a rocky desert lane, the entire cabin lurching right and left, registering every bump and every pot-hole, for 16 hours. You will not sleep, and it will be pitch-black, so you won't see any scenery. If you're the kind of person who thinks that sounds romantic, you deserve what happens to you.

Other aspects of Andean bus travel: both Bolivians and Peruvians have a completely different understanding of the purpose of the car-horn. To them, the car-horn exists to alert all other drivers and pedestrians of one's presence, at all times. Like, if you think that there's anyone neaby who doesn't see you--even if there's no chance of danger--you beep your horn. To let them know you exist. So cities like Lima and La Paz drone with horns, to the point where governments have launched psa campaigns ("No Tocas La Vocina!") to try to curb this behavior. No one is heeding their call.

Also, whenever possible, drivers in this part of the world will straddle both lanes of any road or highway.

What does all this amount to? You're on a bus, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night. If you're foolish enough to look out the front windshield, you see the headlights of an oncoming bus or semi on the horizon. Both drivers continue to straddle both lanes until the very last possible second, when they will swerve into their respective lanes and lay on their horns. It's like one driver is saying "Marco!", the other is saying "Polo!", and your unconscious is screaming "ARE WE DEAD?"

I tried to have a good attitude early on in the night. I managed to get some reading done, until they turned the lights off at 8pm. There were inexplicable stops along the way when people would have to start complaining for the driver to get moving again. I listened to some Mark Maron podcasts and did an inventory of all the recordings I'd made. A few times in the night I dozed off, until our bus inevitably hit a bump and went airborne, and my bobbing head would come down hard on some hard plastic surface.

On a bus ride like that, there is no sleep and no rest for a person like me. I arrived to Uyuni in a foul humor. I wasted much of the day being pissed off and arguing Ginny and Brendan. In addition to being exhausted, I was freaking out because I realized we had doomed ourselves to at least 2 more bus rides just like that.

But we ended up having an amazing odyssey in the Salt Flats. I can't believe we almost did a one-day tour. The three-day tour is a must. There are so many strange, otherworldy things to be seen in that desert. It's like being on another planet. Visiting from Chile and coming through the Atacama desert may be the ideal way to see the Salar.

We did have several more miserable overnight bus rides in Bolivia. Some were even worse than the one I've described above. They pushed me, showed me how delicate and particular I am. And they made me a little better at staying positive despite discomfort and inconvenience. You're in situations where humanity is right in your face, with its dirty diapers, its snoring, its drunkenness, its obnoxious shouting into a cell phone at 3am... You're probably in danger, but there's nothing you can do about it at this point. You just have to sit back and think about how life is suffering, and how every human is just suffering all around you, and how your boredom and sleeplessness and anxiety are just the forms that your human suffering if going to take on for the next few hours...

So in a way it's good for you. But I wouldn't recommend it.

Run-in with Wayra

Four years ago, I drank ayahuasca with a shaman named Wayra, in an apartment in Arequipa. I'd had a very positive experience with ayahuasca just a week earlier in Iquitos, so I was overconfident. I wasn't adequately prepared. I hadn't followed the prescribed diet. On the contrary, I was coming off a week of debauchery. Also, earlier that night I'd witnessed a woman get robbed and chased the thief on foot for several blocks before I lost him. It was a dark apartment full of strangers. I was on edge.

No surprise that it turned out to be one of the most terrifying nights of my life. Ayahuasca is kind of a garbage-in, garbage-out experience. I was reduced to a sobbing, whimpering, vomitting mess. Through the night, Wayra chanted tuneless, aboriginal sounds that disturbed me deeply. I begged him to shut the fuck up (fortunately he spoke no English). He blew smoke and fanned it over me with a condor feather and tried to bring me down from the emotional extremes I was reaching.

With the rising of the sun, my horror gave way to peace. I stared out the window and wiped tears from my eyes and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Wayra continued to sing, and by now my body seemed to sway uncontrollably to his sweet, light-hearted melodies. My Spanish came back to me. Wayra and I both concluded that "the earth was full of beauty." I spent the following day getting to know the family who had loaned out the apartment for the session. I found out that we were across the street from a mental hospital.

Important detail: Wayra was the brother of a woman whom I had dated. Things became complicated between me and her family. For this and for my experience with him, I never intended to see Wayra ever again.

***

Four years later, on my ninth night back in Perú, I walked into a restaurant in Cuzco, hundreds of miles from Arequipa. There were only two customers--a couple having dinner in the corner. One of them was Wayra.

Ginny, Brendan and I sat at a booth on the other side of the restaurant. They  perused the menu; I sat transfixed in my seat, staring at the menu and seeing nothing. They asked me what was wrong. I told them Wayra was here. They stole glances over their shoulders. They were doubtful. The man had severe Andean features, a prototypical Native American handsomeness. They were right; he looked like a lot of people. No, that's him, I told them. I'm positive.

I walked over to their table. "Excuse me," I said in Spanish. They turned to me. I addressed the man. "Do we know each other?"

He looked at me calmly, quizzically.

"Are you Wayra?" I said. The man and the woman looked at each other. He confirmed that that was his name. I told him my name. I told him we had taken ayahuasca together in Arequipa. Finally a spark of recognition came into his eyes.

"El amigo de Livia!" he said. That's the name of his sister, my ex-girlfriend, and that's how I know for sure that this was the same man that I'd spent one evening with, four years ago.

I told him about the trip we were on, through South America. He smiled warmly and said "Que bueno." I introduced myself to his companion, a European who did not speak a word of Spanish. Wayra greeted my brother and girlfriend from across the room. I told Wayra how good and how strange it was to see him here, and then I quickly let him get back to his dinner. I returned to my seat and ordered at random from the menu, still not able to focus on food.

It was a long hour before either party in the restaurant finished their meal. I kept Wayra in my peripheral vision. I couldn't let him leave without saying one last thing.  

Finally they stood up from their table. Wayra graciously came over and shook our hands, told us mucho gusto with a tranquil smile on his face. As the couple moved toward the door, still looking in our direction, I asked Wayra to please say hello to his family for me. To his parents, to Tony, to Livia. To please tell them I said thank you for everything. He nodded, said adios, and walked out the door.

Maybe that was why I got to see him again, so I could send this message to his family. They were so generous to me when I was here, and in return, I was kind of a disgrace, a wreckless child. I've always assumed that they never wanted to see me again. 

I guess the strangeness of the coincidence is mitigated by the fact that the encounter happened in a vegetarian restaurant. Ayahuasceros are urged to eat vegetarian in the days preceding and following use of ayahuasca.

But I can't get over the fact that I ran into Wayra almost immediately after I returned to Perú. And stranger still: I encountered my ayahuasca shaman the day after my first experience with the other grand Andean psychadelic: San Pedro.

Notes on Crossing the Bolivian Border

Somehow I always manage to screw this up.

2010

I get to a town called Desaguadero and learn that the $135 fee for the Bolivian visa would only be accepted in cash. I'll find an ATM. Nope. No ATMs in Desaguadero. The nearest ATM? Puno, a five-hour cab ride up the Peruvian shoreline of Lake Titicaca.

It's getting dark. I find a driver and wait an hour for him to fill his car with emough passengers to merit the trip to Puno. It's bitterly cold and the cab driver refuses to roll up the windows or turn down his blasting chicha music the entire way there. We get to Puno, which is a shit-hole, and the driver just drops me off at some random corner, refusing to show me where the hotels were. I haul my bags around until I found the Plaza de Armas. I correctly assume would that here I will find the most luxurious, prestigious hotel within a hundred square miles. I bargain my way down to an incredible deal for this prestigious place - something like $50 for the night. Not in my budget but not going to to break the bank either. It was a room I would never be able to afford anywhere else.

I dine alone in hotel's large, fancy restaurant, eating a llama steak with a pisco sour on the house (part of the deal). I take the hot shower of a lifetime, and on my massive bed, wearing a warm, fresh hotel bathrobe, I watch a John Lennon documentary. What played out  as a terrible day turns out to be one of the most delicious memories of my trip.

The next morning is bright and warm. I withdraw the cash I need and check out of the hotel. I find a bus heading back to the border. Waiting to leave, I pull out a pocket copy of the Dhammapata. "Your brother is like you. He wants to be happy." I realize how much frustration I have built up inside, how much ridiculous anger I have towards South Americans for their differences, for the difficulties of my trip (most of which were self-inflicted.) Still sitting there in the sun, the Buddha's words bring me to tears. The bus ride around Lake Titicaca is nice. Near Yunguyo, I get off and board a smaller bus, which will make random stops in the middle of nowhere. I look around and see campesino women bounding down hills to catch the minibus. In the bus, they chatter in Quechua.

2014

Before we left, I had to renew my passport. I made sure to bring the old, expired passport with me, as it contained my Bolivian Visa, that vise I'd purchased with the cash from Puno, which would be valid for another year and a half.

Ginny, Brendan, and I took an all-night bus from Cusco to Puno, where we transferred to a bus that would cross the border and arrive in Copacabana. Ginny and I were drifting off to sleep by the window, looking out at the lush pastureland that rolls down the hills and reaches right up to the blue waters of Lake Titicaca. It was a beautiful blue-grey morning. It felt kind of like Ireland.

Then a man came and asked us to either have our visa in hand or the money to buy a new one. I searched my bag. I searched it again. Couldn't find my old passport. I begged the driver to prematurely open the luggage doors so I could check my main bag. Still nothing. So I'd have to buy a new visa. But...I didn't have cash. Again. And there's no ATM at the border.

I have no idea what happened to that old passport. I know that I packed it and had it in Perú. I lost it somewhere. I have lost several important things on this trip. It's one of my biggest shortcomings, this absentmindedness. I've inconvenieced us in many ways. I feel like maybe by sharing this fault of mine with you all, I get some kind of redemption for it.

In the bus, we were silently panicking. What if I couldn't enter? The three of us would be forced to split up, in two different countries, in the middle of nowhere. I managed to barely scrape together $135 from Ginny, Brenny, and my leftover Peruvian money. It literally came down to dollar bills that the Bolivians were trying to reject because they had creases in them. But eventually they relented. Then they even brought it to my attention that I had overpaid them by a small amount.

In Copacabana, we flopped down in a dingy hotel room, heaved sighs of reliefe, and I searched my pack one more time for the passport that was still gone. Not being able to find it was relieving in a way. It sucks to pay $135 for something you've already purchased, at such an effort, then and now.

I felt pretty shitty about the stress I'd put everyone through, but we ended up having a pretty amazing time in Copacabana. It's almost like a rough-shod New England fishing village, populated mosty by backpackers and a small amount of campesinos. .

We took a nap and woke up to a gorgeous sunset over the lake. Outside our window I heard music and followed it. I found an old man just playing a mandolin for a group of children by the docks. He allowed me record four songs, dedicating them to the whole world. I'll be posting those recordings soon.

In Copacabana, it only made sense to eat lake trout at every meal. We went to a bar called Nemo's run by some chaps who had it on point with the drinks, the ambience, and the music, and doing it obviously on a shoestring. Awesome Chilean guitar-and-cajón duo,  playing renditions of Django Rinehart, Lou Reed, and old numbers from all over South America. We drank chuflays, the national drink of Bolivia (white brandy called Singani, with ginger ale). I had an amazing high-gravity beer called Judas, from La Paz. I also bought some overpriced weed from a girl whose kid started wrestling with me in the street.

Ginny and Brenny went to sleep and I went down to the docks. Imagine this: a mob of young Chileans and Argentines, with a few guitars, cajóns, an accordion, and a guira. A raucus group sing-along that flowed seamlessly from folk to pop to oldies to communist anthems (all in Spanish).

There was distant lightning out on the lake. I was offered a guitar and made an aborted attempt to play a song. Mostly I just made chit-chat, recorded songs, and traded weed for swigs of wine and cigarrettes. It was pretty awful weed, full of seeds and not very potent. After a few hours I got tired a listening to songs I'd never heard of and couldn't follow, and I headed to bed.

The cool spontaneous things that happen when you're backpacking. Bolivia is always a hassle, but I do believe it's worth crossing that fucking border.