In the last couple of weeks, we have seen many wondrous
things, and learned some too! First, if your windshield is fogging up and your
defroster isn’t working, put shampoo on a damp cloth and wipe down the window.
A spot the size of a quarter will do the trick, and it lasts more than 3 hours!
We learned this when we were heading to La Paz to go see Tiwanaku, the
pre-Incan temple site on the Altiplano. These ruins are not as old as were
originally thought when Susan and Jeff saw it the first time. We were told 13
years ago that they were maybe 20,000 years old. Recent theory now puts them at
around 5,000 years old. The excavation at this site has now exposed more of the
pyramid, and even more artifacts. We took a BUNCH of pictures, so be sure and look at the picture album!
(Click on this link or copy and paste into your browser’s address bar: http://tinyurl.com/p2pvjhl Double-click on the first photo on the top left to see a click-through slideshow. Captions will be to the right.) One photo
that sticks in my mind is the one that shows a dirt altar in the middle of the
raised temple. The reason this is memorable that I didn’t know that the Aymara
people still use the site for their holy days. The picture shows ashes on the
altar from their Summer Solstice ceremony held in December. We also learned
that Delaney enjoys mocking 5,000 year old stone faces! Really don’t know where
she gets her sense of humor…
Our trip to the Bolivian Amazon earlier this month was
definitely a QBE. Let us start by thanking the people of St. Andrew’s Episcopal
Church in Waverly, Iowa, for sending us on the trip of a lifetime. The three of
us started our journey in a cab to Yolosita. Yolosita is the town that sprung
up at the intersection of the existing valley floor road and the new road from
La Paz. This is where you can catch the bus that continues onto Caranavi, and
beyond. We were informed that the trip was around 16 hours. If the trip had
gone according to plan, it would have been right on the money. Unfortunately, first,
the bus was over an hour late, then we experienced an two-hour traffic delay 10
minutes into the trip, an hour delay for a flat tire 6 hours into the trip, and
an over 3 hour delay due to a bad detour onto a one lane road that resulted in
getting stuck twice. When we finally pulled into Rurrenabaque, we were more
than 6 hours later than planned and had missed our tour departure. Luckily,
they allowed us to go the next day (they didn’t have to!) The next morning, we
were on time and saw us arriving on the banks of the Beni River to begin our
Amazon adventure! We met the crew and loaded onto the 30 foot canoe to head up
river to the camp. Along the way we saw towns and villages near the river and
children playing along the banks. Canoes similar to ours were pulled up in
front of thatched huts or trailheads, just like we would park our car in our
driveway. We also saw families headed to town in their boats, presumably for
market day. Some boats were heavily loaded with freshly cut bananas and/or
plantains.
An hour into our trip upstream, we entered Madidi National
Park, the largest protected area in the Amazon.
We saw a stow away lizard, several macaws (red parrots), a caiman
(alligator), a capybara (a type of rodent similar in looks to a small furry
hippo), and some truly awesome scenery. Please check out our photos here: http://tinyurl.com/p2pvjhl
Two hours farther upstream, after following a smaller
tributary river for a while, our canoe pulled up to a half-submerged sandbar,
we jumped out into shallow (piranha-infested!) water, grabbed our gear, and
followed our boatman on a 30-minute hike into the jungle to our camp. Our feet
received a lovely spa treatment courtesy of the warm, knee-deep mud that greeted
us at every low spot on the trail. Suddenly our guide’s bare feet made sense,
and after the first mudhole, we followed suit, slopping through the goop in bare
feet, covered in slippery red mud. It was DEFINITELY an experience to remember!
Once we arrived at our camp, we cleaned up while the camp
cook fixed a totally excellent lunch, then we all rested for a while. Later
that afternoon, we went on a 45-minute hike across the jungle to a nice deep
fishing hole, where Jeff caught the first, and largest, red piranha of the day!
Many fairly large sardines were caught by members of the group, plus a few smaller
yellow piranhas. Our guide tossed them all in his pack and hauled them home for
supper. They were delicious, gutted with the heads and skins still on and
gently fried. YUM! Our cook was no slacker, all the food she prepared us was
absolutely delicious. On the way home, we stopped and watched the troop of
capuchin monkeys that was following us through the canopy. It was dusk, so none
of our pictures came out very well, sadly, but there were at least a dozen of
them, and we could clearly see and hear them, even if the cameras could not!
That night, it rained all night, but we were snug as a bug
in a rug in our thatched, stilted hut. J
In the morning, it was still raining. We all decided to go
shoeless, as the camp was now a muddy, puddly swamp. It was warm, so this wasn’t
as unpleasant as it sounds! At breakfast, we decided, with our guide, that it
was too muddy to go out into the jungle, so we would take a break and just hang
out for the morning. This was nice, as we all sat and chatted in the dining
cabin for awhile, then napped or read in our sleeping cabin until lunch. After
lunch, it was still raining. So, we all went over to the cabin with a front
porch, and made jungle-based jewelry from nuts, dried berries, some cotton string
and some nifty weaving and knots that our guide showed us. His name was Sinom,
by the way, and we really got to know him much better during our
jewelry-making. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and took great delight in
Delaney, giving her a hard time and spoiling her rotten. She bought right into
it and was a good sport, and it was obvious she liked Sinom, too. She kept
bugging him about wanting to go swimming, and it finally stopped raining while
we were working away on necklaces, so he caved in and we all changed into
swimsuits and hiked off to the swimming hole. (Or, actually, just the wide area
in the stream under the log bridge of the trail out to the river. Whatever. It
was fun! There were sardines and tiny piranhas swimming too, and they kept
nibbling on us as we swam. It tickled, but they weren’t big enough to actually
bite us!) Then we had supper, and decided not to go on a night hike because it
was still too wet and dangerously slippery to go out in the dark. On the way
back to our cabins, Sinom showed us the tarantula that lives in the tree in the
middle of camp (he’s nocturnal, so we had to wait till after dark to see him
hanging out, looking for his breakfast), and then he stopped stock-still in
surprise as we passed an old stump, also in the middle of camp, and he saw a
snake wriggling in there. It turned out to be a poisonous one, and so he sent
us skittering off to our cabin with unhappy thoughts about the fact that we
were barefoot! LOL! Jeff got some good pictures after he slipped his shoes on
and he and Sinom went back over to take a better look.
The morning of our third day was sunny and hot and we took
off after breakfast for a three-hour hike. It turned into four hours, though no
one minded because we got onto the trail of a herd of wild boar after only
about 15 minutes, and we followed them into the jungle for a couple of hours
before they circled back around to within only about 200 yards of our camp! A
few times, we were so close we were able to see them clearly, although their
stench carried for probably a quarter mile through even the thickest
vegetation. Ugh! Seeing them up close, and then spotting the troop of howler
monkeys on the way back in, three hours of slogging through the mud, water,
bugs, and another poisonous snake (we were wearing shoes this time!!), plus
Sinom having to hack his way into the bush with a machete, made for a
completely authentic and satisfying trip to the Amazon jungle. It was awesome!
We had lunch, slogged back out to the river landing barefoot
(having learned by now to carry our shoes over the knee-deep mudholes), loaded
up, and zoomed down the now rain-swollen river back to Rurrenabaque, where our
hostal had not reserved our room, but the tour operator , who could not have
been more helpful, got us great rooms in another hostal and free passes to the swimming
pool at the first one (it’s the only one in town during the rainy season, and
they have a tame parrot named Polly and a tame toucan named Tuki), so we
relaxed poolside. We had a nice dinner, played some pool, and collapsed in our
beds for the night.
Our bus trip home was uneventful, and 8 hours shorter. It
did NOT include the detour, and it didn’t really rain most of the way, which
helped a lot.
We have more to share with you all about things that have
happened since we returned. All of us got back sick, of course. Summer colds
suck in the jungle, too! Jeff went to La Paz, and got stuck there. He spent the
entire night vomiting, then had to wait on a street corner with a shoe-shine
boy for company, while we figured how to get him home. Thanks to the angel who
rescued him!! Good times!
This coming week is the last week of break before
registration on Saturday, February 1. Those of you who feel moved to donate for
school supplies, they will be needed again soon. Susan has a faculty meeting in
La Paz this Tuesday, so she could do some shopping then. Jeff will be along as
well, doing some research for his design to remodel the upper campus library.
Needs for students/classes include notebook paper, poster-making supplies like
colored paper and markers, white-board markers, Post-it pages, and a new CD/USB
music player for the upper campus, plus at least one flash drive. Total funds
needed should be about $25. Since the English department does not have funds
now, Susan will also need to pay for copies, so if anyone is interested in
starting a copier fund, it cost roughly $30 last semester to make all the
copies needed (many of the activities in the textbook are reproducible activity
sheets).
Finally, we have begun exploring our trip home. As many of
you know, when we purchased our round-trip tickets last May, we could only
purchase them out through mid-April, even though we need to stay until at least
June 17. So, we will have to pay a $230 fee per ticket to change them, plus
whatever the difference in airfare is. Right now, the total for the three of us
is around $1400, although we will be working to find the same sort of great
deal that got us here, so it may be less when the time comes. We have about
three months to get that organized, but we thought it might be good to let everyone
know that now, in case anyone has any ability to help with that. Much as we
love it here, we do want to come home, so getting our tickets changed will be
an important focus in the coming weeks.
For now, we love you all, we miss you all, and we will be
praying for you all. Please pray for us, too! J
Blessings,
The Cornforths
