What you will not find in the US

I have 4 days left in Bolivia before I return to the United States. While I have gotten accustomed to a lot of things here, I am writing this blog to remind myself of what I won´t see when I return:

· A ten year old kid waiting on me at a restaurant: This has happened a half a dozen times by now—I tell the kid what I want and then he runs back to the kitchen to tell his parents who are cooking. The even weirder part is giving him money.

· Almost no airport security on a domestic flight: I splurged a couple of days ago and chose a 45 minute flight over a 16 hour bus ride. When I went to board the plane, I did not walk through any metal detectors or security. A security person looked through one of the two pockets in my bag, and no one checked what was in my pants or coat pockets.

· A fifty year old woman shoveling a pile of rocks wearing a long skirt and dress shoes: I have no idea why she was shoveling these rocks into a wheel barrel, but this would have been backbreaking labor for a fit twenty year old guy.

· No change, period: I tried to buy 3 mandarins the other day at a market, which cost about 15 cents. All I had was a 75 cent piece (5 bolivianos), and no one would sell me mandarins because they did not have enough change. After being rejected from five different ladies, I gave up.

· A 13,000 foot mountain bike descent in a single day: I rode from 15,500 feet, and below freezing, to 2,500 feet and 80 degree weather, where we spent the latter half of the day enjoying the warm weather by the pool.

· A seven dollar filet mignon wrapped in bacon

The Evils of Silver

Potosi, a Bolivian town colonized by Spain, has one of the most depressing histories that I have heard of. The town´s 120,000 inhabitants live at over 13,000 feet in constantly cold weather, strong winds, and an overcast sky. The only reason why the town exists is because there happens to be a huge mountain filled with silver, zinc, and other precious elements close by.

When the Spanish discovered silver in 1546, the city swelled to a population of over 200,000 and became the largest city in the southern hemisphere. The Spanish, eager to collect as much silver as possible, enslaved the indigenous people. The locals were forced to work in the mines for up to four months without ever seeing fresh air. They were dying by the thousands from a combination of dangerous labor conditions, mercury poisoning in the silver processing, and asbestos and silicon poisoning in the mines. To replace the dying workforce, the Spanish began importing up to 2,000 African slaves annually in 1608. The method proved effective, and after 200 years of forced labor in the mines, the Spanish had extracted over 45,000 tones of pure silver.

Now, the local people have formed cooperatives to work together to extract valuable minerals from their mountain. Fortunately, they all work voluntarily and are no longer enslaved. However, the working conditions have barely changed in 500 years. Men start working as young as 13 or 14 years old, and they work for less than $180 a month. They work in temperatures up to 105 degrees and breathe asbestos and silicon dust. To filter the dust and supply energy, the miners stuff over 100 coca leaves (the plant that makes cocaine) into their mouth at a time. They also smoke a special type of cigarette to get the bad air out of their lungs. Apparently, neither of these methods is very effective, as few miners live to see their 50^th birthday.

Hiking the Inca Trail

The Inca Trail is the famous trail that weaves through the Sacred Valley in Peru and ends in Machu Picchu. It takes four days of backpacking to complete the trail, and along the way are ruins of smaller Incan towns that supported the trekkers over five hundred years ago. My family arrived in Peru two weeks ago to do the trek with me.

I don’t want to mislead anyone when I say backpacking, so let me be more explicit. We had eight porters and a guide to help carry all of our stuff. We ate three course hot lunches every day with a table, chairs, and dining room tent. The porters woke us up in the morning with hot tea in our tents and hot pans of water to wash our hands and face. They rolled up our sleeping bags, packed up our tents, and ran to our lunch and dinner spots with their 55 pound packs in order to have everything ready before we arrived. “Backpacking” the Inca Trail was by far the most luxurious part of my time in South America.

However, the trail was no walk in the park. We were hiking 10 miles a day and climbed up to almost 14,000 feet, which is not a light day for a family activity. In addition, I persuaded my parents that we did not need to hire extra porters to carry our stuff, so I ended up carrying two sleeping bags, two pads, all of my mom’s clothes, and half of our snacks on my back. On day two, one of the porters was curiouos and lifted up my backpack during a break. He came over, shook my hand, and congratulated me on making it so far.

The Incas were a civilization that performed technological feats that we still cannot do today. They built homes and temples without using mortar—instead they carved each rock into the perfect shape so it stacked neatly on top of the next. In addition, some stones were so big that today, with all of our technology, we have to break the stones into smaller bits to move them. They built models of cities, experiented with farming different crops in different altitudes, and constructed fountains, drainage, and irrigation systems. Their buildings could withstand earthquakes and the ground sinking underneath. And they did all of this without a written language. 500 years later, with no maintenance, their buildings are still standing.

The Incas were only a couple hundred years behind the Europeans, which in the sceme of human evolution is nothing. The Spaniards wiped out most of their culture when they came to conquer South America. Fortunately, for the Incas and for us, Machu Picchu was never found. To this day, it remains 75% intact and remains one of the best insights on earth of an extinct civilization. Hiking the Inca Trail and ending in Machu Picchu was like going back and experiencing their civilization, and it is a trip that no one should miss.