Frigid Tropics

My energy has been run down a little over the past few days. Bolivia is cold. I can't believe this is the tropics. It resembles a June Morning on Baffin Island. I did a 3 day trip through some remote parts of Southwest bolivia. There is very little life there. I saw the largest and highest salt flat in the world, and lots of mountainous, landscape with wide valleys in between. There was small, sparsae vegitation in about 1/3 of the area, the rest was rock, snow and sand. Where there was vegitation, there were lamas, the odd deer like creature, and the odd sheapard with sheep. The big surprise though was some very shallow, salty lakes with thousands of pink flamingos. The wind was relentless.

I'm sure that it was a bit colder than normal. We couldn't do part of the tour due to too much snow. I think Bolivia would be an amazing country to dirt bike, mountain bike or ride horses. Because most of the eastern part has no trees, you can see and go anywhere. There also seems to be some great places to ski tour if you can handle the altitude. Most towns I have been to are higher than the highest mountains around Banff.

Bolivia should be hailed as one of the worlds greatest societies. The people are friendly and embrace their own unique culture. There is a lot of graffiti, but 99.9% of it is political. I ate lunch in a town that couldn't have held more than 10 people and the resturant had about 50 pages of leftist political propaganda posted on all of the walls that seemed to be put up by miners. The most amazing aspect of Bolivian society is that nobody beggs for money. The majority of people live on about $2 a day, but nobody expects to get anything for nothing. I did see two people begging here in the big city, but they looked to be in their 80's or 90's and unable to funtion. It really makes me look down on my own country for having such an incredible amount of wealth, and all of the problems we don't or only pretend to address. I can see why Che Guvara died for these people. I have nothing but respect.

La Paz is a pretty cool city. It's in a deep valley, and the streets go up the sides of the mountains. Who ever is in the buisness of selling clutches here is probably the richest in town. I'm going to stay here for a couple of days, then it's on to Peru. I haven't heard many good things about Peru from other travelers, so I might make my way to Equador, and then slow down. People whop have traveled latin america seem to like Columbia the most. I wasn't going to go, but now it is high on my list. I think that most of my time will be in Columbia and Venezuela. Chris