Back in Bolivia (diary: 25 January 2017)

I have been a very lazy girl blog-wise. However, a New Year’s resolution to write every day and a friend actively asking where she could read my travel updates has prompted me to start posting things again. These will probably be mostly in the form of edited diary entries, because my personal paper diary is a great place to be a horrible person and nobody needs to see that.

As of yesterday, I have a home. All indicators suggest that it is a pretty awesome home. I can walk to my favourite part of the market, the town centre, and several friends’ houses. So far, there appear to be 100% fewer Manchildren, which is a definite plus.

For anyone reading this who didn’t follow my Facebook rants, the manchild was one of the sons in the family I lived with last year. Highlights included the following conversations:

MC: Your boyfriend is making some kind of soup. Aren’t you going to help him?

Me: Why would I help him?

MC: Because… you’re a woman, and women can cook?

and:

I am sitting at the table, crocheting and obviously not even slightly cooking

Me: Andy’s making brownies.

MC: Are you sure you don’t mean, you’re making brownies?

MC, later: These brownies are really good. And made by a man!

and:

We are watching a music video by a fourteen-year-old girl with an incredible voice

MC: It needs more ass.

Me: She’s 14!

MC: Yeah, but it needs more ass. Sex sells. Look at this video by Singani Bolivia. It’s got more ass and has had loads more hits.

You know, just to name a few off the top of my head.

Returning to Cochabamba was a 31-hour mission that involved flying Gatwick-Madrid, Madrid-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz-Cochabamba. That didn’t sound stressful enough, so I decided to travel while the train company that runs the Gatwick line was striking, on a flight that would be delayed by two and a half hours because it was so foggy outside it might as well have been a cloud.

Fortunately, I had booked a very long layover in Madrid.

Boliviana de Aviación thought that was all sounding too easy, so the night before, they sent me an e-mail telling me I had been shunted onto a later flight from Santa Cruz. In a slightly surreal touch, this e-mail came from an actual human, putting a line highlighted in green at the bottom begging me to let them know I had received the message.

Viru Viru sounds like a cocktail or a party dance, or perhaps a drug that cures typhoid. Typhoid is all the rage in Cochabamba. Viru Viru is a large airport in Santa Cruz where black coffee is more expensive than in Madrid airport (priorities, people) despite Bolivia growing coffee. It was there that I bumped into the first Bolivian I knew: serendipitously, it was one of the owners of the hostel where Andy and I stayed when we first arrived in Bolivia in 2015.

This was particularly amusing because it was in the exact same spot where we had to wait in Santa Cruz that first journey. That time, we were meant to be going straight to Cochabamba, but the aircraft ran out of fuel in strong headwinds and deposited us in Santa Cruz, instructing us to simply take the next Boliviana flight to Cochabamba.

The people on our flight formed an impromptu mob, shouted a lot about how there were women and children waiting, and then stormed off to try to strongarm Boliviana into running an earlier flight. It didn’t work.

Bumping into a friend and the absence of any angry mobs made Viru Viru seem far more homely this time.

Arriving at the flat of a friend, who had been looking after our stuff, he said that for breakfast there was water or whisky. I had breakfast whisky (the most important whisky of the day) to celebrate having got to Cochabamba without having my residence visa invalidated on spurious grounds (something I had heard of), or getting dropped off in Caracas or Suriname or somewhere because of fuel shortages.

I am now installed in a  beautiful flat with some Bolivian friends. My rule of thumb for moving is that you will have to compromise on space, location, or price, but here we got a better deal on all three.

The shower here is heated by a boiler, which you have to light with a match. This means the water is actually hot. In the old place, the shower head was electronic and could either deliver a voluble stream of cold water, or a dribble of hot water. It was as if the shower knew this and tried to deliver a happy medium, because the water pressure would fluctuate constantly without you ever having to touch the dial. At least it made us have short showers.

Andy is joining me on Bolivia in mid-February, subject to angry mobs, wrong airports, visa wrangles and assorted other Fun Things.

Ciao for now!