Life on the Road: Reflections on La Paz

Shit in a cup again today.

Life on the road has become a little more stationary in the past few weeks. There is no rooster waking me up up at 4am, but my little friend ´pete the parasite´ has taken over in its place. However, sometimes even the ´shittiest´ of situations can turn out to be ok in the long run. Being stuck here over the past ten days, the City of La Paz has grown on me. Though I only planned on staying here a couple days, my problems down below have forced me to stay put for much longer than initially intended. What i´ve come to realize is that La Paz is a very dynamic place, probably one of my favorite cities i have ever stepped foot in. About the size of Vancouver, it lacks the excess pollution, traffic, and poverty of most third world megacities. While it does posess some these negative qualities, the positives combine to far outweigh the downsides. The entire city is essentially one giant street market. I´ve spent days just wandering around the streets in amazement of the sheer complexity and size of the informal economy, and the fact that you can buy anything your heart desires without stepping foot inside an actual store. We don´t need Wal-mart. The people here in Boliva are something to admire, not taking shit from anybody. A country that has been through 190 governments in 160 years, they stand up and do something about it when they get fucked around. While this can lead to zero progress in many cases, I can´t help but think how we in Canada could learn a lesson or two from them about standing up to our government.

I decided to take some spanish lessons while here, which gave me a chance to slow my pace down for a while and get into a routine. Though it only lasted 5 days, I came to enjoy my routine half hour walk to school each day, taking a different route each time and stumbling upon some of the treasures La Paz has to offer. Whether it was sampling different types of street food for breakfast each day, buying usless shit like kareokee DVDs, or testing my luck on the public transportation system, every day was a new adventure. There´s just something about this place that seems real, so much more so than back home. I can´t figure out what it is, but its here.

The unnamed few of you who made my short list to recieve a dried Llama fetus in the mail can be thankful that the Canadian embassy informed me that Customs Canada would not let such an item accross the border. Damn.

Only in La Paz can you spend an entire day trying to get into a state prison. Though unsuccessful, we did learn a lot about life behind the walls of one of the most entriguing prisons existing. Essentially a Co-op, the inmates have to earn their own way inside the prison without any state funding or they simply starve. Entire families live behind the walls with their convicted relatives, paying their own way for food and accomodation. If you can afford it, you can live in luxury, and if not, you battle it out in the basement for whatever you can get. Tourists used to be allowed in the prison to observe it first hand, but are no longer allowed due to legal dispositions. The word on the street however, suggests that it is still possible to bribe your way in. we came close many times, but ended up getting conned by an ex inmate, and threatened at gunpoint to leave the premesis. Nuts.

So, as I await my second fecal results, which will determine whether or not ´pete´ is dead, I will enjoy my last few moments in this city before taking off tonight to southern boliva. though my time here has been good, spending 12 days out of a 30 day visa in one place really limits one´s ability to see the rest of the country.

So, ciao from La Paz

I got worms

Yesterday, I took a shit in a cup.

let me explain. So the posting a little while ago about life on the road was made up entirely of true events that have happened to me so far on this trip, all compiled into one complete, entertaining story. The part about the bad chicken happened to be the most recent, and has since morphed into something a little more irritating than a couple bad shits. Worms. Parasites. Bacteria. You name it, I got it. The little buggers have been causeing me a lot of grief and pain the last few days, so i finally decided to go get checked out by a doctor. To my suprise, i have more bacteria in me than they could identify, and i specific parasite that i have yet to ´google´and find out more about. So, a shitload of medication, a shot in the ass, and a fun adventure giving a stool sample later, i have about a week to chill out here in La Paz, Bolivia and recouperate. I appologize for the graphic details as to my bowel movements as of late, but since this blog is intended to keep everyone up to date on my travels, its only fitting. It has been, after all, the focus of much of my time the past little while. I hope you all enjoy reading about this as much as I enjoy experiencing it first hand.

Life on the Road: An average day in Peru

4am. The roosters begin their wake up call. You try and go back to sleep, but it´s no use. You´re in the Andes and the temperature in your room is barely above freezing. You curl up in a ball, attempting to maximixe any degree of warmth remaining in your sleeping bag. You manage to fall asleep for another couple of hours, but only untill the thunderous noises of god knows what begin rattling your hotel walls. You´ve managed to retain enough heat in your bed to stop the shivering, but the bowels begin to move and you need to get up. You climb out of bad, throw on your flip flops, and dart your way to the bathroom. You realize that you have no more toilet paper because you used it all on the 3 shits the night before. Must have been that chicken you ate for lunch yesterday that cost you 30 cents. You quickly get dressed and dash out to the street to buy some TP from a local street vendor. You ask how much in your broken Spanglish and she tells you double what you know it´s worth. Obviously judging by your state of panic, she she knows she can get away with it. You pay your 1.50 soles and rush back into your hotel. You enter your bathroom that smells exactly the same as the sewer 15 feet below. As your ass touches the rim of the bowl, you swear that someone just shoved icicles in your ass. As you sit there, you rack your brain trying to think where the toilet seat could have gone. It´s been three weeks now in Peru and you´ve noticed that 95% of the toilets are seatless. Where do they go? Were they always missing? Were the toilets sold seatless? Is there a big profit to be made from seats on the black market? After a few minutes of contemplating this issue, your focus switches to the numbing in your ass. You finish your business, and scurry back to bed to attempt to get a few more hours of sleep to help the hangover wear off. Last night was a gong show. You got smashed on free liquor, swear you got drugged, and passed out on a sofa in a discotheque. Luckily an english guy was there to watch your back, but you lost your bandana and that really pisses you off. Anyway, you get your couple hours of sleep, and then get up to go get your free breakfast from the hostel restaurant. It is then time to risk electrocution in a shower that heats itself by means of shotty wiring and duct taped electrical cords. it doesn´t really matter though cause the heat doesn´t work and the shower is as cold as the toilet seat. as you dry yourself off and almost stop your teeth from chattering, its time to smell-test your clothes. you haven´t done laundry in a while, so its time to search for the lesser of the evils. You decide that wearing your boxers inside out is the best option, and your best shirt, well, who cares, you´re in peru. You´re pants have melted chocolate in your pockets from the candy bars you forgot about the other day as you sunbathed on the roof of a boat. meh. As you eat your breakfast, you spend 20 minutes practicing a phrase in spanish to recite to the hotel guy. You want to ask him if you can check out and leave your bags there for the day. Today is a travel day. You´ve seen all you wish to see in this town, and its time to move on to the next tonight. You´re 100% confident that you have memorized the 3 sentences you need, and go for it. You suck at spanish. Your phrases come out in a sort of half assed spanglish mix mash, and somehow you substitued the word backpack for chicken. The hotel guy rambles off a bunch of spanish to you, none of which makes any sense to you. A little bit of sign language and moving around like a moron later, you get the point across and set out for the day to kill time until your bus leaves that night. But you need a ticket first. You´re too lazy to walk all the way down to the bus terminal like you usually do where you know you can get the best price. The chicken from the day before is still taking its toll on your body, and your back is fucked up from your river rafting expodition the day before. You go to a package tour offfice and decide to treat yourself to a nice luxurious bus for your 13 hour ride that night. You knowingly pay more than you know you should, but you´ll thank yourself that night. From there, its off to wander around the markets for the day, resisting to buy huge quantities of useless shit just because its cheep. Need a llama fetus to ward off bad spirits? no problem. You kill time there for a while, maybe check out an old cathedral or something, and then decide you want some more food because the free breakfast wasn´t exactly all it was cracked up to be. Should you go with the tried and tested ¨carne¨ burger from a street vendor again? 30 cents for a ¨meat¨ burger. Yes, you´ve come to love that mystery meat burger. But today you crave change. You wander out of the touist district and find yourself a little local establishment. the special today: pork. You order the deep fried pork and corn, and then wander into the back to use the bathroom. Damn yesterday´s chicken. Along the way you see something you wish you didn´t. There really is no good way to accept the fact that the dismembered pig carcass lying our in the sun and butchered to hell is gonna be your lunch. You use the bathroom, squating indonesia style on the rim of the toilet cause there´s no way you are letting your ass touch this rim. damn that chicken. You go back and eat your meal, which tastes suprisingly good. You then decide to hit up an internet place and check your blog to see how many people responded to your story about the scariest trek of your life. To your suprize, a whopping 6 people cared enough to respond to the fact that you almost died. You then wonder if anyone even reads the blog at all because they are to lazy to click on a link. From here you kill a few more hours wandering around seeing the sites, bump into a few dozen Israilies throughout the day cause there´s 30,000 of them in peru. Eventually its time to make your way down to the bus terminal and get on that nice comfy first class bus you booked. Yeah right. In reality, you board the ´rust-o-matic express´ and curse yourself for getting scammed at the ticket office. You go to you assigned seat, only to find that its broken and doesn´t recline. its ok though, cause the seat in front of you evens everything out, reclining further than any other seat on the bus. As you remove your knees from your abdomen, you let out a few expletives. Could this bus ride get any worse? of course. tonight´s on board entertainment: One cheezy latin music CD played on repeat over and over again for 13 hours throught the night. its not too bad though, cause sometimes its hard to hear the music over the guy next to you snoring (his seat reclines). You try and sleep through the potholes, horn honks, swearving, snoring, and music, but its no use. Halfway through the ride that chicken peaks its little head again, and you need to go to the bathroom. Quick. What, the bathroom is broken? cool. you pinch it for another 7 hours, something you´ve gotten good at on the road. Eventually you get to your destination and the floodgates open at the bus terminal Baño. You haggle with toot after toot at the bus station before finally just agreeig to go to one of their hotels cause you feel like shit and haven´t slept all night. The hotel is a shithole but you don´t care. You take the room, roll out your sleeping bag, and curl up in a ball in an attempt to get warm. the cycle continues again.

So Ryan, you ask, What the hell are you doing in Peru? That sounds like absolute hell. Well, Its not. You see, there´s just something about being on the road that i find really hard to explain. Every shitty thing that happens somehow adds to the experience and i wouldn´t have it any other way. Living off a budget of like $20 a day, seeing awesome scenery, meeting amazing people, going on crazy treks, and just plain living life has a magical feeling to it. Something that you can never understand unless you get your ass down here.

What did YOU do yesterday?

So I just got back from a three day rafting adventure in the Andes Mountains. The river was nuts, and as cool as the photos look, they don´t do justice as to how insane it was. Definitely worth the money, and though i could have died in parts if I fell out or we flipped, i was willing to take that chance. These are some of the best photos, and you can find me by the sunglasses in the front right position, or the dumb air guitar poses. As i was floating down the river in a calm part after being thrown out of the raft by my loco guide, i couldn´t help but think that I am a lucky son of a bitch. I don´t think the adventure could have been any more fun.

A slight case of bed head

So yeah, Dreadlocks are overrated. If i was a CIA agent held capture and being tortured by means of dreadlocks, i would have confessed everything i knew after the 5th dread. No joke, this was by far the most painful experience of my life. 10 hours of having my hair pulled and yanked on, all for a hairstyle that isn´t even low maintenence. I thought they´d be all easy to maintain and take no work at all. But no, its tough work looking like a hippie who doesn´t give a rats ass what his hair looks like. they tangle together, they flatten out, they come undone, and they itch like hell. I think i might have fleas. So yeah, they do look really cool, but we´ll just see how long my patience holds up.

Cheating Death.....again

The point of no return is long gone. Five hundred meters above the river below, I cling to the cliff face, struggling to find stable ground to position my feet. The rock I am holding comes loose, shattering any sense of confidence I have in preventing my own death. As the loose sand and ash beneath me begins to give way, my feet begin to slide, faster and faster towards impending doom. I have no choice but to begin leaping, one foot after another across the collapsing mountainside, with no time to stop and consider the consequence of each individual step. I come to a stop on a patch of semi-solid ground, frozen in fear, cursing myself for coming this far. Why have I resisted the voice inside my head telling me this is a bad idea? Above and below me I can see and hear the sounds of small stones and soil tumbling down the mountainside. My limbs begin to shake, trembling with a fear I have never once experienced in my entire life. The only thing between me and death is a one foot wide path, covered with sand and ash, sloping on a 45 degree angle towards the valley, collapsing under its own weight. The forest fire that swept up the slope only days before, and the resulting vegetation loss has led to a fragile mountainside of crumbling rocks and dirt. The 900 year old Inca support walls made of stacked rocks have been rendered completely inept, and are no longer capable of supporting the excess weight. I have no choice but to continue on, step by step, praying I don´t become food for the Condors deep below.

To understand how I got myself in this situation, I have to go back a few days. I was close to the Bolivian Border, about to cross, when i decided to do a bit of backtracking. Originally, I was going to skip the city of Cuzco, out of pure spite for the thousands of package tourists that have taken it over. The reason for all the tourists: Maccu Piccu, the lost city of the Incas. At the last moment, I decided that I would regret being so close and not experiencing Maccu Piccu, so off I went, minus a couple of american hillbillies. I got to Cuzco, booked a four day excursion to the lost city, and took off the next morning on an adventure I´ll never forget. four days of the funnest/craziest/scariest/terrifying/exhausting/gratifying time of my life. A motto I´ve learned down here: you get what you pay for.
So the cheapest way to maccu piccu begins like this. I never planned ahead and booked a spot on the actual Inca trail, so I had to take a different route. Day one started off with a 4 hour bus ride high up into the Andes Mountains. After getting off the bus in the middle of nowhere, I, along with a couple english guys, began our five hour descent on mountain bikes. Five hours of downhill, dirt road, white knuckle, rez-dog speed mountain biking. Around corners, dodging oncoming traffic, through puddles and swerving to avoid goats and chickens. This ride had it all - probably one of the funnest experiences of my life. I thought the bumpy ride would help my non-existent bowel movements, but it didn´t.
Day two: Not so fun. 12 straight hours of trekking. Uphill, downhill, Uphill, downhill. Apparently, the incas never heard of just building a flat path. I swear, they were just plain masochistic. By far the most exhausting experience of my life. Oh yeah, and I almost died to, which kinda left me in a bad mood. Basically, as described above, a forest fire swept across the mountainside days before I got there. The nice lade who fed us bananas in the middle of the jungle warned us that the path ahead was not safe, and that the day before a goup of trekkers turned around and came back because the path was not passable. But our guide ignored the warning and lead us into a death trap. The fire killed all the vegetation, which caused the dirt and rocks to all slowly, over the course of a couple days, fall down the slope and settle on the path. this left the path incredibly dangerous, and not safe to pass by any means. I´m all for adventure stuff, and don´t get scared easily, but this was different. My life was not in my hands. All the dirt, sand, and ash had covered the entire path in many parts, leaving nothing but a 45 degree angle of loose scree sloping down off the cliff. the stones stacked to support the trail could not handle the excess weight, and were slowly giving out. there was no solid ground to walk on, every step i took slid off toward the cliff. I couldn´t hang on to the cliff face with any strength because it would give way in my hand and just make things worse. in some parts, there simply was no path. I had to hang on to watever i could with my hands and do leaps of faith to the next point of solid ground. And i´ll just throw in in here that there was nothing beneath me but a long, long way down. What scared me about this was that i had no control over my own fate. I can handle balancing on a narrow path high in the air when i have control, but this was bad. the ground was giving way at my feet and one unlucky step and lights out. I´m mad at myself for even attempting the path and not turning around, against the wishes of the guide who wanted to keep going. The two english guys were yelling at the guide for getting us into this mess, and were just as terrified as me. At one point, i litterally began sliding off the cliff, and had it not been for the guide reaching out his hand, i probably would not have stopped sliding. I´m getting chills just writing this, and i only hope i get the image accross just how crazy this was.
so yeah, after almost falling to my death, the trek continued. up, down, up, down. Burn the thighs, kill the knees, burn the thighs, kill the knees. I drank 4 litres of water that day and took one ten second piss, thats how much i sweat. By the end of the 12 hour jouney my body shut down. I had absolutely nothing left.

and now, a poem.

Useless
By Ryan Harrington

I am Useless
I have no purpose on this planet.
I am born, and then I die
There are trillions of us on this planet
all with the same goal:
To piss off as many humans as we can
Hovering, landing, sucking.
I have no purpose
I have no purpose
I have no purpose
I am a Mosquito
and I am uselss

Day three began at 4am when the roosters began waking up the neighborhood. Almost as useless as mosquitos, but at least we can eat them. only 6 hours of trekking that day, but given the previous day´s events, i could hardly move. But really, not an eventful day, just a bunch of trekking through the jungle. I still haven´t shit in three days at this point.

Day 4, things finally pay off. Beginning at 5 am, we begin the one our climb to Maccu Piccu, the famous lost city of the incas, hidden deep in the jungle. Not far enough away however, for the shitloads of package toursists who bus in somehow, making my death-taunting excursion seem somewhat all for nothing. But despite the three thousand other tourists, the rain, the fog, and the exhaustion, absolutely nothing could take away from the mystical sight of Maccu Piccu. I placed my hands on the positive energy rock, and climbed to the top of wiannu piccu, the high mountain peak overlooking the city. then i hiked down and up the other side to the sun gate. then i just spent hours exploring the city, marvelling in sheer amazement at the monumental task that would have been creating the city. Words simply can´t explain it.

So now I am back in Cuzco, trying to find a spanish language center where i can spend a week learning a bit of spanish so i can pick up the ladies. Its pissing out rain right now, which has given me plenty of time to compose this story and create a new blog. Words of advice: When all the text on the computer is in spanish and you are trying to change settings on your blog, be carefull. You might just delete the whole thing.

Adios amigos