By now most of you know how unpredictable the road I live on can be. I have regaled you (either in this blog or over the phone or via email) with stories of trudging on foot for kilometers through the mud and rain, pushing busses through that same mud and rain, hitching rides with anything and anyone who will pick up a poor looking gringo and his overpriced North Face backpack and many other tragic tales. A select few have actually participated in some of those stories. Well, about three weeks ago (January 18th for those of you keeping score at home) I left my site with every intention of returning that very same day. My host brother was driving my host-parents into the city for the day to run some errands and I wanted to take advantage of the non-bus transportation to get to the city. Carlos had called me the night before to see if I could make it in to help him on a well…he had designed and built a machine that pulled the rope and was going to give it a trial run. All these factors contributed to my wanting to go to the city, but just for the day. Well, my commitment to staying just for the day was about as steadfast as my commitment to getting up to do my homework after a “10 minute nap” at 11pm when I was in college. Just ask any of my roommates…that never ever worked but I kept trying it, thinking that it would.
We ended up not finishing the well with Carlos because of a huge rock we couldn’t pass…and that coupled with a big volunteer farewell party that night gave me reason to stay the night in the city. But I had every intention of returning the next day. This is the point when it got out of my hands. The next morning I woke up to a rainstorm. And thus it continued like that for two weeks…I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day…the rain was relentless. Thus rendering the road back to Hárdeman passable only with scuba gear. The sun came out for a little while every day just enough to tease me into thinking that I may be able to make it back the following day. After the first week of water, I got word from people in my site that the only way to make it to or from Hárdeman was riding in the back of a trailer towed behind a tractor…and even that wasn’t guaranteed. I knew carnival was coming up and going back to my site only to leave again a day or two later is not appealing at all when getting there in the first place was probably going to be a two day affair. So I hung around Carlos’ house (about a half hour outside Santa Cruz), heading into the city every now and again to try and get some things done.
It was fun staying with Carlos and living the bachelor life. We ate meagerly and enjoyed each other’s company. It was a pretty lazy time in general, but the wheels are always turning when I’m with Carlos…we are constantly bouncing ideas off of one another about work as well as talking about the days in the future when we get to visit each other’s home countries. My friendship with Carlos has truly been on of the saving graces of my service. One of those things that keeps me sane when the whole world seems to be crumbling down around me. He’s that person I can always count on and who can always count on me, regardless of the situation. He loved meeting my family when they came and was sorry he couldn’t communicate more directly with them…I am always telling him stories about my dad’s sayings at work and what some might consider unique habits and we laugh together because Carlos has a lot of similarly unique habits (saving dirt samples because “someday we might need them” or instead of killing the baby tarantula or scorpion running around his house, he put a cup over it because “he has a friend who runs a zoo and would want them”) and has even started using some Joe phrases translated in Spanish like “crooked-er than a ram’s ass” or “if it was a snake it woulda bit ya” which I find hilarious. While it was a pretty big hassle being stuck out of my site, I was thankful I got to spend some quality time with my Colombian friend.
After a week and a half of being gone from Hárdeman, fellow volunteers began arriving into Santa Cruz to begin traveling for the carnival holidays. For those of you unfamiliar with carnival is, I will do my best to explain it. Although I will be the first person to tell you that mine is a biased viewpoint and I will probably glaze over the positive parts of it. Alas, I continue. From what I have learned from listening to other people talk, Carnival has its roots as far back as anything, at least here in Bolivia. I could almost liken it to Halloween in that people dress up in costumes (the elaborate pretty kind as opposed to the vampire and werewolf kind) and back in the day used to pay respects to the gods or spirits or demons in the mountains before they entered to mine there. My understanding is that when Catholicism arrived to Bolivia (and most of South America), they wanted to accommodate carnival but make it less pagan-esque I suppose and stuck it right before lent. I am not sure when Carnival was traditionally celebrated, but these days as far back as anyone can remember, it was around this time. A good comparison is Mardi Gras, which I suppose is essentially American carnival. Wherever people are celebrating carnival (at least in Bolivia) there is always dancing involved. Or at least they call it dancing. The dancing takes place in groups called “conjuntos” or “comparzas.” The groups have similar outfits and depending on the stage, they can be fairly simple or quite elaborate. For example, last year in Hárdeman I participated in a comparza and they gave us all yellow shirts with the group name on them and we just hopped around in circles. Pretty basic. Where carnival is a bigger deal (in the big cities), the groups are bigger and the costumes are extremely involved…usually with feathers and sequence and bells and masks and bright colors. There is usually a parade of all the groups and usually a competition judging on the dancing and the costumes.
The other big part of carnival is water. Usually in balloon form but also in buckets. You see, this is the hottest time of the year and so getting drenched with water is usually refreshing. And last year in Hárdeman as we were dancing around town, there were always kids following us throwing the occasional balloon or someone chasing someone down with a bucket of water. And it was fun for a day to partake in the silliness. But, in true Bolivian style, it gets overdone to the point of really pissing you off. In the cities, in addition to balloons and water, people are endlessly chasing each other with paint, motor oil and cans of pressurized “foam” which looks like shaving cream but is under more pressure and stings when it gets in your eyes. It is also sold in aerosol cans containing heaps of CFCs. It can be fired a pretty good distance (6-8 feet so) but the preferred Bolivian method is to find a gringo (usually, but not limited to, cute blonde girls) and to empty the entire can at point blank range, normally directly into the eyes and face area, causing stinging pain and temporary blindness. This is also a tactic often used to rob people. Seriously. After all, if your face is completely covered in foam, you’re not going to be able to identify the punk who just lifted your camera from your jacket pocket.
I should point out that these are not people who know each other who are battling it out. It is every person for themselves and these people are completely ruthless. Random human beings running up and breaking balloons over your head, drenching all of your clothes and then running away. And not just children or even teen-agers. Grown men and women throwing water on and foaming complete strangers under the guise of the phrase “well, it’s carnival” and thus making this type of behavior acceptable. And other Bolivians do not get upset when they get drenched, they simply accept it and move on…some even relish it as flirting. This craziness is not simply limited to the two designated carnival days (the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday)…again in true Bolivian style, it is drug out for entirely too long. Sometimes for the entire month beforehand you can expect to be bombarded with water balloons flung from passing cars and trucks or buckets of water dumped off of balconies. Let me repeat that none of this behavior is considered unacceptable or even rude. After all…”it’s carnival.”
Now most of you know me well enough to know that water balloon battles are something I relish and enjoy participating in, especially if I can attack from above. But, like most normal human beings, a few minutes or even as much as an hour is plenty to satisfy my needs. Walking around a city for a month under the constant threat of getting hit with an anonymous water balloon punctuated by a weeklong onslaught of balloons and foam is ENTIRELY too much. Throw in about a zillion gallons of beer and liquor and you have downright mayhem. That is the word I kept repeating throughout carnival weekend. Pure, unharnessed, unchecked and actually encouraged MAYHEM.
The biggest party as far as Bolivian Carnival is concerned always happens in a city called Oruro. Oruro is located on the other side of the country in the “altiplano” or “high planes” area of the country. Due to the altitude (something like 13,000 feet), it’s always chillier up there regardless of the season. I think carnival is biggest up there because back in the day it was a big mining town and it goes back to what I was saying about miners asking for blessings. Oruro is not a very big town by any means and it is definitely not set up to accept the onslaught of onlookers that come to check out carnival each year. There is really no other reason to ever go to Oruro any other time of the year, so there are actually clubs and hotels that are only open for carnival. Regardless of who you are, all the prices are through the roof. All that being said, I had no real desire to go to Oruro for carnival. I had already seen the city (not that great) and the thought of returning for a huge drunken festival with hundreds of thousands of other people did not appeal to me in the least. So I tried to organize a group of people to go to a city in southern Bolivia called Tarija for carnival. Tarija has beautiful mountain views all around, a nice climate, is a nice size and is very close to Argentina…all things that made it extremely appealing in my book. Also, I have never been there and wanted a chance to see what all the hype was about. Carnival was supposed to be cool there as well, and little lower-key than the craziness of Oruro. We had a nice small group of good folks all ready to go to Tarija and enjoy the fruits of Argentine wine and steak as well as the carnival partay. But, due to various uncontrollable variables, plans for Tarija fell through. We thought hard about options and despite a lack of enthusiasm for Oruro, we decided that would be our destination.
A few perks to the trip were that we would get to see a whole bunch of our friends we hadn’t seen in a while, we would get to pass through Cochabamba and eat at some delicious restaurants and that after Oruro we would be close enough to La Paz (an extremely awesome city) to spend a few days there as well. And so we went.
We arrived Friday afternoon and promptly paid too much for a cab ride to our hostel. We found it, checked in and once we got to our rooms realized we were paying way too much for them as well. But it was ok…”it’s carnival.” We headed up to a fellow volunteer’s house (one of the Oruro city volunteers) for a little cookout and fiesta. On the way there we walked up through part of the parade route, which was scheduled to start the following morning. People were still constructing and painting bleachers, frantically trying to be ready for the big she-bang the next day. It vaguely reminded me of Cheviot residents chaining lawn chairs to parking signs in order to reserve spots for the Harvest Home parade, only times about 27,000. Things seemed fairly calm, but there was a feeling in the air that the whole city was a raw egg wavering on a pinhead, poised to fall and crack open any second…getting egg yolk all over the gringos. The cookout was a good time…it gave us all an opportunity to catch up with the volunteers that live far far away. Around midnight we made our way back to the hostel, waiting for the egg to fall.
The plan for Saturday morning was to make it back over to the house for a quick breakfast and then head to the plaza to find our seats to watch the dancers in the parade. Much easier said than done. As soon as we walked out of the hostel it was evident that we needed to buy ponchos if we wanted to stay dry. We promptly paid too much for them and put them on and bought some water balloons in order to deter any major offensives. My plan was never to pick a fight, but to use the balloons like Tae-Kwan-Do…simply to defend myself. The majority of attackers were younger kids and teen-agers and we found that they only know to fight dirty. Hit people from behind without them knowing it…that’s their philosophy. So by far the best defense is simply staring them down. They would never throw a balloon or fire foam at someone who is looking at them…it would give them away as the culprit. We managed to stay out of any huge skirmishes most of the day with this method as we walked the streets. My friend Tom (from Nebraska) and I took to being vigilantes, in fact…waiting for little punk kids to wail on some defenseless and unknowing passerby (almost always a woman) and then promptly nail the kid from all sides with balloons. One thing we as Americans had on our side was a lifetime of baseball. You see, most South Americans grow up playing nothing but soccer. As a matter of fact, the words “soccer” and “sports” are pretty much interchangeable here in my site. People ask me if I play sports, and I come to learn that what they really mean is do I play soccer. My host sister says she is going to watch sports tonight, but she is simply going to watch soccer. They are definitely a little heavy on soccer. And baseball is virtually non-existent here. Hence, NOBODY is any good at throwing. More than once I let groups of people throw balloons at me from about 20 or 30 feet away without moving…just daring them on…and I never got hit. These people couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. Which is another reason they resort to the “sucker punch” approach…running up behind you and breaking a balloon over your neck, so the water runs down your back and soaks your underwear and makes you really pissed off for the rest of the day. The sucker punch approach is the only way they would ever hit anyone. It’s even worse with the foam…you are walking down the street minding your own business when a hand sticks out of a car window or shop door and douses your face with foam. I don’t think I have ever come closer to punching people I didn’t know (mostly children) than I did during carnival weekend.
Once we finally made it to the plaza and to our seats, we got to seem some pretty cool stuff. Huge groups of dancers one followed by the other came gallivanting through the streets, all dressed in immensely elaborate outfits. Some had masks that were supposed to demons, some had noisemakers, others had gigantic headpieces. Here are a few pics of some of the groups with their costumes:
This is a picture of the foam battle taking place across from where we are sitting:
Here I am with a couple of friends (Emily from Indiana and Naya from California) in our ponchos sitting with our gringo friends:
And here's me at the beginning of the foam fight...before I had my fill:
Each group came with its own marching band as well, playing their specific type of traditional music to go with their dancing. It’s a four or five hour parade route up and down the hilly streets of Oruro, so it can be quite a workout. Now I need to take a moment to talk about this “dancing.” That’s what everyone says it is…no one calls it by any other name. But in all honesty, I think it’s quite a stretch to call it dancing. There are no actual “steps” or real “moves.” If you ask me, they are really just doing a glorified movement that to me looks far less challenging than the hokey-pokey. I think the main focus for the groups is making sure their costumes look good. And they certainly do. But calling what they do “dancing” is simply a misnomer in my book. However, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the group our Oruro-volunteer friends were participating in did not fit that description. Our friends did not pass by our seats until about 4am that night, but when they did, it was awesome. They were all members of a conjunto dancing to a style called “Tinku” which is a traditional dance that comes from a part of the country called Potosí that has its history in basically a huge fight that occurred between two neighboring towns. Yeah I don’t really understand it either, but the point is, their group was sweet. They actually did cool moves in-sync and it looked really freaking awesome. It was really great to watch them…we could all tell they had worked hard preparing and that they were pretty worn out by the time they got to us. We hopped out of our seats and followed them up to the final presentation area, where we squeezed into more bleacher seats along with thousands of other people. It was about 5am by then but the party was still going strong (including way too many people falling over drunk and passing out and almost falling out of the bleachers). The Tinkus came up, cleared the presentation area, shot off some fireworks to announce their arrival, and then did their thing. It was really incredible to watch and definitely made putting up with all the drunken idiots and foam-sucker punches and crappy hostel way worth it. We weaved our way through the drunken mass back to our hostel and snuck in a few hours of sleep before escaping on a bus up to La Paz on Sunday afternoon.
The La Paz leg of the trip was superb. It’s a much bigger city than Oruro, so avoiding the ridiculous mayhem of carnival was much easier. We stayed in a nice hostel, ate yummy delicious La Paz food (including a “would-have-sworn-I-was-in-America” cheeseburger from Mongo’s), and even got to spend a day ice climbing. That’s right, ice climbing. You see, La Paz city is at about 14,000 feet, which is higher than the summits of most of the mountains in America. That’s just the city. It lies in the shadow of some enormous peaks that are really not that far away. We stumbled into a trekking company and found out they had a one day trip available and promptly signed up for it. They drove us up to this beautiful lodge in the middle of the snowy mountains and we spent the rest of the day climbing all over a glacier. It was an awesome day, despite a few headaches due to altitude and dehydration by the end. They prepared some yummy dinner for us and we spent the evening chatting in front of a not-so-roaring fire with our new Canadian friends Nat and Phil, who were also along for the trip. I felt like it was just what I needed and realized that I don’t do things like that enough anymore. It made me miss the climbing gym with Jed back home. Hopefully I will get a chance to do some more before I ship out of here.
We made it safely out of the mountains and eventually back to Santa Cruz. The rain had let up for a while by then, so getting back to my site wasn’t too much of an issue. It was a really great vacation…nice to get out of Santa Cruz for a little while, despite having a limited wardrobe since I had only planned on being there for a day when I first came in so long ago. I have mixed feelings about Oruro…I was glad I went to see the parade and the costumes and the dancers and especially our friends dancing; I can see why it is such a point of pride for Bolivians, but at the same time there are some really ugly parts of the whole thing that I really think they should be ashamed of. I think it’s ridiculous that it is considered tradition to soak strangers with water and foam…it seems to be simply an excuse to be completely obliterated on alcohol for a few days and that is not something to be proud of at all. I don’t want to seem like a self-righteous soap-boxer, but I truly was abhorred by the behavior I saw by everyone. And nowhere did you see anyone condemning it. That may be the most upsetting part of it. Living in Bolivia is definitely a challenge, if only because I see things that are purely a part of Bolivian culture that just seem ridiculous. And I know they only seem that way to me because my culture is a certain way and theirs is a certain way. While I still maintain that there are certainly parts of Bolivian culture that are ludicrous, there are just as many (actually undoubtedly more) parts of American culture that are equally ludicrous. And that’s alright…the differences are what make this an enriching experience. I just hope I don’t get back to America and feel constantly in threat of dogs, use way too many plastic bags or force any household kids into servitude simply because they are younger. Those are examples of things I hope stay here…along with carnival.
1. "Wake me up in 10 minutes..."
ReplyDelete2. Nice use of misnomer.
- Coleman