6 feet away…not under

September 24th 2010: A typically case of some major summarizing is about to happen. The past week I was in Torotoro which is a town of 2,124 people – give or take a few people that were not standing in line that day when they were doing a body count. It is south of Cochabamba, taking about 7 looooooooooooong hours on a local bus filled with some really stinky bodies. Torotoro is ironically home to Torotoro National Park that is not a heavily visited park due to it not being very accessible. This place is known for its canyons and dinosaur foot prints.

Getting to the bus company that transported me and the stinky bodies to Torotoro was an adventure in itself. I was dropped off in what the locals call the call “Red Zone” which was the wrong spot, resulting in me roaming the dark, dirty not so safe streets with everything I have at 5:40am in the morning. After bumping into several people that fit the profile of a thief, murderer and a male rapist…I eventually retreated to the confines of a taxi figuring it was safer to be with one criminal instead of many.

To locate the bus company, it took: a series of questions dispersed to random people roaming the streets who gave me all but the right answer, banging on a window of a bus that contained one drugged up bus driver that could barley sit up and finally the right answer came from a boy that I woke up out of his comatose state of sleep who was making an empty bus his temporary apartment.

Finally I arrived to the bus company I was riding with in which I was about 10 minutes late – this was a time that I am glad the bus was leaving at 6:00am “South American Time” not “Western Time”…meaning about 6:45am. Normally it wouldn’t have been a big issue if I missed the bus but, it was Sunday and the next bus that left for Torotoro was on Thursday. Once getting to Torotoro, the first bus out of town was Monday and the next one…Friday. Needing some good quality time to explore…I decided to stay till Friday.

Being that Torotoro is a town that just had electricity installed about 2 years ago and cell phone service as of 4 days ago…I didn’t expect much. What I really didn’t expect was to see Hugu Chavez’s puppet, Evo - who is known to the Bolivian people as their President – and the Puppet of Hugo Chavez. He came to pay a visit to inaugurate some stuff around the town. I was about 6 feet away from him as he left the market and got into the SUV.

This was the second president that I have ever seen in person - the first one being from the US. It really doesn’t matter as from what county a president is from…a president is a president and I could feel his power as he passed me. I should have tried to give him a hug to show him that us folk from the North aren’t all that bad since he is not so fond of the US…but I thought it would not make the man containing an undercover earpiece and the concealed handgun not too happy – even though getting around him would have been extremely easy to do.

Avoiding the “rapists” (Reminder: Rapist =Travel Agency) this week, I managed to find my own tour guides and arranged my own accommodations, meals and transportation costing me around $40USD for the same version of the trip where the travel agency wanted to charge me $380USD for 3 days/2 nights. Staying a few days longer, I saw everything you could see here in Torotoro and still saved hundreds. When you organize things yourself, you don’t have to be rich to travel for an extended period if you have the time, patience and are willing to flexible - not a contortionist, just flexible.

This trip to Torotoro was a 99.8% success. I met amazing people/animals, did some wonderful hikes, crawled around a cave, crawled around my room from exhaustion, saw some beautiful deep canyons and was even able to see some boring mud prints and even more boring marine fossil scraps (the ruminants of whatever fossils that were not stolen). In the middle of all of this, I unexpectantly experienced a somewhat painful tailbone skinning – originally blaming an extended adrenaline filled motorcycle ride to visit some nicely arranged rocks…but the more I think about it, the only logical explanation is that I was unknowingly abducted the other night by some dinosaur ghosts.

Tomorrow I am off to another small microtown, trying to get myself closer to Carrasco National Park. This park should be much more easier to get to, and into…I hope.

Please remember to open up the photo albums on the right hand column and read some of the captions. This keeps me from having to write 1000s upon 1000’s of unnecessary words since as that one saying sort of goes, “a picture can say a 1000 words.”