Tortuga Travels: Week Three: Sucre, Bolivia
Sucre, Bolivia

We’ve found a good rhythm here in Sucre: buttered rolls at 8 a.m. with mate de coca and cafe con leche, morning’s reading, practicing guitar, drawing. Spanish classes with Consuelo and Lenny. Carrie deciphering the newspaper at Kafe Kulture. The smoke of singley sold cigarettes hanging over our table at Tertulio where we discuss what it means when you date someone with a child, or why someone doesn’t email anymore, accompanied by songs we haven’t heard since junior high dances. Baby I can’t fight this feeling
anymore…

Our luxury accommodations have removed us from the backpacker circuit but we’ve managed to meet a few good folks – the dot com casualty fleeing the Bay Area, three German guys who all suffered break-ups and decided to hit the road. For the most part though our neighbors tend to be older package tourists who flood the courtyard and then disappear en masse. I’ve never been one to tread lightly in my appraisal of Americans abroad, but I have learned of late that in the absence of a loud ignorant ego-centric American, more than one German, English or French tourist is eager to fill the role. Most seem to have lost their sense of volume and personal space somewhere en route and are left longing for the kind of fun that comes only from sitting directly next to the girls quietly sketching in the empty garden and shouting stories about those kooky campesinos to their friends on the balcony.

Among the wacky escapades the campesinos have been up to lately is the regional roadblock, halting all traffic on major export routes. “Yeah, like what’s that all about?” you may ask, as did our Californian compatriot. U.S. tax dollars are hard at work helping kids just say no by destroying the small plots of land on which the local subsistence farmers grow coca. Coca for tea, coca for traditional medicines, coca for your CEO’s parties. Alas, because of this last use – or, more accurately, because of how the U.S. government chooses to deal with it – the campesinos are left to eke out a living without coca, and with the delightful presence of drug enforcement agents, a merry band of sporadically violent, military types.

To garner attention to their pressing need for just about everything, the campesinos regularly stage mass blockades, sending Bolivia’s GNP – approximately .09% of what Bloomberg spent on campaign ads – plummeting even further.

With travel troubles and our fondness for Sucre, Carrie and I have decided to stay put another week. We’ve finished up our classes, since our Spanish proficiency seems to have plateaued: Carrie with the comprehension of a semi-literate schoolchild and me with the communication skills of your typical Bolivian deaf mute. Luckily, we’ve each found appropriate reading materials… Carrie is winding her way through the esoteric treatises of Ernesto Sabato (“How am I supposed to keep my optimism when his sentences go on for 18 lines?”) and I stick to Newsweek and Cosmo (William Gaddis has been displaced by “Reese Witherspoon: Rubia de Ley”).

Spanish TV is a bit more challenging, although we can follow dubbed movies of the Chevy Chase genre. The hotel has HBO but the selections range from thinly veiled porn to porn. Classics we’ve caught so far include:

• Miscellaneous bank robbery story, in which the ex-addict Norwegian model finds refuge with the solitary security guard. Also porn.
• Slow Burn, in which Minnie Driver and two escaped convicts search the desert to recover lost diamonds, ignoring hunger, thirst and a series of increasingly blatant plot inconsistencies.
• Miscellaneous historical blasphemy movie, in which Joan of Arc is reduced to a teary eyed, pouty, hyperventilating, delusional girl because we can’t have a woman in history kicking ass now can we?

• Baldwin brother turns the lesbian straight movie, in which a Baldwin brother… well we all see where this is going.

Anyway. In an attempt to free ourselves from the reins of B-movie bondage we made a brief trip to the tourist information office. They didn’t have any actual information, but they were able to tell us that the nearest travel agency was in the city of Cochabamba, an understandable mistake since the actual nearest travel agency was not one but in fact two entire store fronts to the left of the information center itself. Perhaps they were directing us to the nearest agency prepared to offer any sort of services, as the Sucre agency employee met our request for regional excursions by assuring us perkily, “Oh, no, nothing now, but lots in July!”