Heartbreaking goodbye, check.

So its finally here, my last day in La Paz, and true to form I have slept through most of it. Last nights celebrations were a little exhuberant and I was very grateful to have cancelled my last morning spanish class. This last month has gone by way to fast and I when I was wondering how I wanted to spend my last days, the first thing I considered was making a list of all the things I wanted to do and making sure they got done. But then I realized my experience here hasn´t really been the kind that you can check off as you go. Saw Monkeys, Check. Froze in Uyuni, Check. Played alot of peekaboo, check. Ate Salchipapas, Check. just doesn´t really cover it.

So I said screw the list and decided to bask in living in La Paz  just as I have, for all its bizarre transportation rules, affection for organs as food, sliced hotdogs on fries, and breathtaking altitude. The last two weeks I have been on rotation at an orphanage outside the city and have been having so much fun. Gone is the pretense of work as a serious medical student, now I can just play like I have been wanting to for six weeks in the hospital. I am actually headed back there now, to get in a few short hours of fun before I jet off at 3:45 am tomorrow morning.

I didn´t expect the lessons that Bolivia has taught me, and while its hard to say how this will affect my decision to go into medicine, my time here has definitely been some of the most challenging, exciting and entertaining of my life. Thanks for listening and I hope I get to hear about some of your adventures to new worlds like Bolivia.  Beso y buen suerte.

THE FINAL COUTNDOWN

With only ten days left in beautiful Bolivia, its time to make a TOP Ten list, of ´

the very best reasons why everyone needs to come visit this incredible country:

10. 1:7. 1 USD: 7 Bolivianos. Street food: 1$; 1L Beer: 3.50$; Fancy dinner; 20$. Potentially saving money when traveling, priceless. Then deciding to spend more because everything is so cheap, typical.


9. Tuffis and minibuses. A way more fun, cheap and incredibly inefficent form of public transportation


8. Un beso por la doctora, cutest tradition ever. Hospital des Niños is such a great place to work.


7. This country has so many different climates, terrains and incredible sites. Salar de Uyuni is pretty incredible in an arid wasteland sort of way, like Mars I imagine. Ilsa del Sol is definitely beautiful enough to have been the birthplace of a few dieties. And the amazon has its own sort of magic thats pretty indescribable.


6. Small children speaking a foriegn language is the cutest thing I have ever seen. And it also makes me feel a little stupid because a two year old can speak better spanish than I can.


5. Latin Music is just more fun to dance to. Sorry, pop and hiphop, its not you, its me.


4. La Paz. Sitting in a valley surrounded by mountains and city lights, while the altitude has you breathing hard, the city takes your breath away.


3. Street food. Salteñas, Empanadas, fritas, salchipapas, Lomito, kebabs, pizza cones, api and these weird funnel cakes. All delicious, all for less than bus fair in Calgary. 


2. Getting to experience both the tourist circut and local life of La Paz with my fellow do-gooders has allowed me to meet some incredibly unique and interesting folks. Thanks for all the foody nights, salsa nights, starry nights, movie nights, bike rides, boat rides, bus rides, car rides, and plane rides that brought us here.


1. Everything sounds sexier in spanish. especially diseases.

Perspectives on Piraña fishing

Most of Bolivia´s terrain that I saw before this weekend had the same kind of beauty Alberta has. It is  dominated by wide dramatic landscapes where you can see for miles, with steep snowcapped mountains in the backdrop and the high arid climate keeps the sky blue and clear almost all of the time. But Bolivia, like a true beauty, has many faces, and this weekend we saw her mysterious side. By air, by car and by boat we journeyed deep into the wetlands of the Pampas, part of Bolivia's portion of the amazon rainforest.

As the small plane left La Paz and skirted over the moutains, only one song came to mind. The Adventure had officially begun.

   We decended from the clouds into a different world. A humid, cloudy, very green world. After fishtailing the landing, we disembarked onto the lawn adjacent to a farm that served as the terminal and a school bus that served as our shuttle into town. The 'NO ATM' disclaimer from our tour group was starting to sound symbolic.

With only a few minor delays we were soon headed out in our 4x4 to the Pampas. A long, muddy and bumpy car ride followed by a wet boat ride later, we reached our campsite on the Rio late on Sunday night. While the accomodations were spartan, the food would prove to be some of the best we've had in Bolivia, due to the unusually high proportion of vegetables and salads, which are pretty hard to find in La Paz.

But what seemed so different about this trip was setting of the jungle. With its lush greenery that extends into high canopy, it is hard to see much past a few boat lengths up the river, or past the nearest trees and reeds on our mud walk. While the wetlands are much more open than the Amazon itself (and this allows for some great animal sightings) the difference in terrain from the wide open desert of Uyuni last weekend could not have been more marked.

We saw an exciting laundry list of exotic animals and birds, such as a tarantula, an anaconda, capabera, many many turtles, pink dolphins, some south american eagles and many types of herins and pelicans (i think). We went swimming only a short ways from where we fished for piraña the night befor (delicious by the way). We had a aligator hanging out just outside our room for the day, whose cool stillness was rather unnerving. But my favorite by far were the monkeys! We saw three different kinds over our weekend, Capuchins, howlers and Amarillo (Chinchilla in the local spanish) and they were all adorable.

After a few weeks of being able to see everything on the horizon, it was remarkably refreshing to get a change of perspective for a few days. Sometimes a wide view can help you see the furthest into your future but you can also be crippled by the need to know exactly where you're headed. But the closed silence of the jungle helped remind me that it can be just as important to take steps forward, keep moving and experience whats around you, and let the big picture take shape with motion. Cliche as it is, it can be easy to forget. Maybe, Hamlet just needed to spend a little less time in flat barren Denmark and a little more time hunting crocs or fishing for piranhas in the Pampas.