Sprint For the Border

SALTA, Argentina -- We arrived here, exhausted, last night after nine hours on a bus we almost didn´t make. Had we not found inner reserves of strength for a 1,500-meter sprint through the desert while carrying luggage, we would still be in Chile.

Will: Meghan and I had planned to leave for Salta on Friday, but when we arrived at the San Pedro municipal parking lot (aka the city bus terminal) we found snow in the Andes had closed the Bolivian and Argentine borders. Don´t worry, the Pullman bus company told us, your ticket is still good for the 11 a.m. Sunday bus. So we bided our time in the most expensive country in South America for two more days, then trudged to the parking lot Sunday with our luggage.

We had plenty of time, we thought. In the main square, we paused to let a parade pass -- on the Dia de San Pedro, the feast day for the city´s patron saint. A man dressed as a cross between an ostrich-like bird and the devil took a liking to us, and put out his claws to shake our hands. He held out the dead bird´s talon, which Meghan and I shook with auspiciousness. He then pushed the bird´s beak in my face and I gave it a few tender pats. He happily danced away with the rest of his crew.

We reached the parking lot a few meters away just in time to see the word ¨Pullman¨ on the back of a bus going at breakneck speed the wrong way -- out of the lot. As I was carrying about 50 pounds of bags, I said ¨Meghan, that´s our bus, run after it!¨ Meghan wasn´t worried. She said it couldn´t have been our bus because it wasn´t scheduled to leave until 11 a.m., and it was only 10:20. I had my doubts as there were not other folks in the parking area waiting for a bus to Salta and San Pedro de Atacama did not strike me as a giant hub for Pullman buses.

Then, Meghan went over to ask another bus driver about the Salta bus, while I stood loaded down with all our bags. The following sequence is a study in pantomime, as I did not speak to Meghan for a good 20 minutes, but watched her from afar:

Meghan walks up to another bus driver and then there is an exchange of Spanish.

(Meghan: I asked the bus driver where the Salta bus was, and she pointed to the end of the road, saying it just left for customs. I asked her if that was the 11 a.m. bus to Salta, and she said yes.)

Will: Meghan abruptly ends the conversation with would-be bus driver and then sprints to a cop directing traffic. She makes wild gestures with her arms as she talks to him.

(Meghan: OK, first I stopped and yelled to Will that it was indeed our bus that had left. We needed a taxi to get our bags to customs. I yelled to a taxi driver watching the parade, and he said good luck. Then I asked the cop and he said, hmmm, a taxi will be difficult. He suggests I haul it to customs on foot at the end of the road.).

Will: After talking with him, she turns and looks in all directions. Then she puts the palms of her hands to her head in exasperation. At this this point I know things are not good. Meghan, who does not usually run, immediately takes off down a dusty road at a sprint that would make Carl Lewis proud. I begin to follow, but quickly realize that I have no earthy idea where she is going and if I did, it would take me an hour to get there with all my bags. So I wait as she disappears behind a gathering crowd preparing for their own parade.

(Meghan:I looked at the sign that said Aduana, 500 meters, and knew I would only make it sprinting, which I had not done since the Journalism and Women Symposium last year, when my friend Karen and I were caught in a lightning storm atop Bald Mountain.
This is where things got really weird. The Dia de San Pedro parade had started up again on the road between the parking lot and Customs. Parents were taking photos of their baton-twirling children. Men were dressed as oxen and ostriches. I sprinted through, wheezing and gasping ^Perdon¨, but people cleared out quickly after one look at the crazy gringa (who, to be fair, was carrying Will´s day pack). I looked behind me and saw Will, and continued, confident he would catch up if only I could stall the bus long enough.

Then, out of nowhere, a man on a bicycle appeared. It was Christian, the night manager at our hotel, coming to our rescue like a knight on a shiny Schwinn. ``I will chase the bus for you!`` he yelled in Spanish, pedaling toward Customs. Will must have met him in the parking lot, I thought. How fortunate. ´Thank you!´I yelled. It later turned out Will had not seen Christian at all.

Still running, I shed my scarf and sweatshirt, having dressed that morning for a high-altitude winter bus ride, and wished I had not worn the wool leg warmers. Wheezing, I saw in the distance the Pullman bus still at Customs -- Christian was talking to the bus driver. ´It´s OK, he said. ¨The bus left me there once too!´´ He had seen the commotion in the parking lot, recognized what was happening, and acted fast. The bus driver told me to hurry up and find my boyfriend so we could all clear immigration and get on the road. I looked back, expecting to see Will rounding the corner at any minute. He didn´t appear. I walked back toward the parade and parking lot, then, as I still didn´t see Will around the bend, I broke into a run. Again. Running total: 1,000 meters.)

Will: I wait about ten minutes not sure when I will see Meghan again. Then, all of a sudden she appears -- running at top speed toward me. She waves me to follow her with a ¨hurry, they´ll leave without us¨ and grabs two of our five bags. As Meghan is carrying far less baggage then I, she quickly disappears into the oncoming parade.

(Meghan: to be fair, I was carrying about 10 pounds of dirty laundry, plus Will´s day pack. And sprinting, again. That´s 1,500 meters now.)

Will: I had a heavy bag on my back and a humongous bag in my hands as I plowed through the parade -- past cheerleaders, dancers, costumed revellers. I was running against the tide. As part of the parade, several men carried a wooden platform with a statue of Jesus. This figure was clearly the center point of the religious festival and I nearly caused its downfall. Wheezing and coughing my way up the incline I accidentally clipped one of the men, causing Jesus to nearly tilt and overturn. (I can only guess what my Jesuit teachers would have said at this.) I was too mortified to look back, but I think Jesus made his triumphant appearance. Meanwhile, I ran as fast as I could, guessing which road Meghan had turned down. After a good ten minutes running as fast as I could, I made to the customs station, where the bus had apparently stopped so all passengers could get their exit stamps. Meghan was there, smiling, as everyone else looked on with disgust at my disheveled, sweaty self. I didn´t care. We had made it!

(Meghan: Just thank your lucky stars you did not have to smell us for the next nine hours on that bus. The ride was beautiful, by the way -- up to 5,000 meters in altitude across snow fields, salt flats, past volcanoes and through a green river valley).
And thanks again to Christian, without whom we would still be in San Pedro de Atacama. The next bus would have left Tuesday.)

Riding ¨Tornado¨ in the Chilean desert and Seeing Stars

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, Chile -- I admit I wasn´t keen on the idea at first. Riding horses in the Chilean desert outside this pueblo just didn´t sound that interesting. It was not that I was afraid. I spent five years riding horses as a teen, but I just thought that chapter of my life was best left to the past. But Meghan wanted to give it a try, so I relented. Our cowboy guide gave me a dusty brown horse named Tornado and I jumped aboard.

Our first bit of business was transversing the dusty roads of San Pedro de Atacama to get to the desert - a simple enough proposition if your horse is sane. My first inkling of trouble was when a bicyclist came riding by at normal speed. Tornado gave a little jump, his head popping up with a jolt. I took up my reins and eased him down, but this was not a good sign. Next came a truck and he jumped again, this time with a greater jerk, requiring me to pull back on the reins with greater force. However, the ¨the perfect storm¨ for Tornado came as we were nearly out of the pueblo when a loud garbage truck and a bicyclist came down the dusty road in tandem. Tornado gave a kick and started to break, then jumped up and headed for a clay brick wall. He was just about ready to go hog wild. I tightened the reins and my legs around the beast and ordered him to slow as I pulled back on the reins. Eventually, he relaxed and all was well.

My guide said in Spanish that Tornado wasn´t used to truck noise. The obvious question, which remained unasked, is why Tornado was allowed on the streets if this was the case. I mean, I was fine. As a teen, I was bucked off horses at least three times, including an incident in which I broke my left hand. Those situations were my fault, of course. I was young, nervous and inexperienced then. When a horse is in trouble, scared, you must use a firm hand and a strong voice--there is no time to be afraid. So, that´s what I did with Tornado. But I just wonder about the tourist who gets Tornado next, the rider who has been on a horse once or twice before. Look out! (By the way, Meghan´s horse was about as tranquil as the Red Sea.)

Despite all that, the horse ride through the desert was just amazing. It also rekindled my love of horseback riding. So thanks Meghan for urging me back on that horse!

Also, Meghan and I went to an observatory outside the pueblo at night for a star tour. The desert outside San Pedro de Atacama is one of the world´s clearest places to see the southern hemisphere of stars. We could see the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, the closest star to the Earth - Alpha Centauri, the constellation Leo, and the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Our guide was Alain Maury, a astrological engineer from France. He said looking up into the sky, the naked eye can see about 3,000 stars, but of course we all know there are many more. Maury´s love of the night sky was infectious and despite the bitter cold we spent an hour outside jumping from telescope to telescope looking at celestial bodies and nebulae. (He even used our cameras to take pictures of Saturn through a telescope, see below) This area is so good for star gazing that multiple countries, including the United States, are heavily funding research here into far-flung galaxies, to the edge of the universe. Pretty cool!

Photos: Me and Tornado; Saturn from a desert telescope

A Thin Line Between Wealth and Poverty

** BREAKING NEWS UPDATE ***
Looks like I jinxed us with the detail about our impending departure to Argentina. The borders have closed due to snow, so we´re stuck here til at least Sunday. The Disneyesque atmosphere and warm days look more appealing now ... and maybe now we´ll get to go on the famous Star Tour (celestial, not celebrity). Violent dust storms cancelled the tour on our previous two attempts ... figures we´d hit the 27 days per year that clear San Pedro has partially cloudy skies.

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, Chile -- When we crossed the frontier from Bolivia, I didn´t expect major changes in our surroundings. Three days into a trip over the desolate salt flats, we had gone from the middle of nowhere in one country to the middle of nowhere in another country. We would trade the high-altitude salt flats and Salvador Dali desert for the lower, warmer Atacama desert of northern Chile. We would enjoy the trip, but with no major difference in accomodations or infrastructure, I assumed.

But we were about to leave the poorest nation on the continent for the richest, and the difference became starkly apparent the minute we crossed the border.

Our intrepid tour guides dropped us off in the Land Cruiser at Bolivian border control, a concrete box with the national flag and a yellow and black gate over the dirt road. A rusted-out school bus, sans wheels or windows, lay a few yards away. We got our stamps, hopped on a new-looking bus that resembled the Park-n-Ride shuttle at the Fort Lauderdale airport, and passed through the gate. The driver handed us Chilean customs declarations (something else Bolivia never asked us for).

¨If you have any fruit, vegetables, animal items, coca leaves or other drugs, you have an hour to consume them,¨ he said. ¨Otherwise you have to pay a fine if they find them at customs.¨

He had put us on notice: we were about to reenter the First World.

We passed a sign with the Chilean flag, and the dirt road turned to asphalt. We had not seen asphalt on a highway since La Paz. It was new asphalt too, smooth stuff, apparently the result of the Mercosur agreement among South American nations. Then we saw signs next to the highway, telling us that this was the way to San Pedro, and that we shouldn´t drive faster than 60 km/h. I don`t know what was more distracting -- the reintroduction to traffic laws or the stunning scenery as we rapidly descended more than 2000 meters from the altiplano to the vast brown and red desert below, volcanoes looming on the horizon and salt glistening all around.

In San Pedro, customs searched our bags as promised. We left the highway for the dirt roads of the town -- but they were different from the rocky roads we had become accustomed to in Bolivia. They were like roads in a manufactured, high-class resort in Arizona or Utah. Someone took care of these smooth roads, which saw little traffic, and someone made sure that all the buildings conformed to a desert-town adobe code, with desert-style signage (I hate that bureaucratic word). And, to our incredible luck, the hotels, restaurants and stores all took Visa. The one problem -- a malfunctioning Visa ATM, was quickly solved. The people of San Pedro expected it to be solved, and it was. This transition gave us a bit of a culture shock. Still used to things never, ever getting done according to plan in Bolivia, we were prepared to do what we had to in order to get money. We had nearly reached the bus station to buy tickets to the next bigger town over when the ATM technician appeared.

It was nice, but a bit expensive, and a bit unsettling in a Disney kind of way. We head to Argentina today, hoping for a happy medium.

The Salt Flats and the Chilean Peso

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, Chile - Only an hour before Meghan and I had planned a crazy hour-and-half bus ride to a bigger pueblo just to use a working ATM, a technician fixed the one Visa ATM in this desert town. For the first time in nearly five days we have cash, in this case Chilean pesos. We immediately walked to the swanky hotel of the American couple who had lent us money on our tour of the desert salt flats and paid them back in pesos with a grateful handshake.

Despite the money troubles, our three-day tour of the Salar de Uyuni, the world´s largest salt lake desert, and the humongous Reserva de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa, an absolutely stunning wildlife reserve straddling the Bolivan-Chilean border, was definitely one of the highlights of our journey. During the day we rode over in a four-wheel drive, walked on and generally admired the salt flats, which gleamed in the sunlight for miles in every direction, with small islands of land barely visible in the distance. From afar it looks like you are walking or driving on ice or snow, but this inhospitable environment is made entirely of salt. One taste confirms it. The first night, we bunked in a hotel built entirely of salt just off the desert floor. The Salar de Uyuni received a number of votes a few years ago as one of the wonders of the modern world. I can see why. Despite the rustic nature of the tour, the LandCruiser came equipped with a plug for an iPod -- which we appreciated even more once it turned out the driver had brought only a few CDs of Spanish techno and 1970s disco hits

Reserva de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa has just about everything you could want in a natural park. Towering peaks, ice covered rivers, giant mountain outcroppings, sand covered desert, and glacial salt lakes with algae that cause the water at times to turn green and red, making it a perfect habitat for all three species of flamingo. Seeing flamingos wading in multi-colored lakes is like looking through neon glasses. We stayed that night in the block lodges near the main lake. This was very basic stuff, no heat, no protection from the elements but a block wall and a sleeping bag. When I woke up at 5 a.m. the next morning to visit the natural volcanic steam geysers my alarm clock registered the temperature as 34.7 F. Only later, did we realize we slumbered in this harsh but beautiful place on Noche de San Juan, the coldest night of the year.

Thawing Out in Chile

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, Chile -- Close followers of the blog may wonder, what happened? Chile was not on the itinerary. We have in the past deviated slightly from the route, but never before had we spontaneously added an entire country. Well, nearly eight weeks into the trip, after experiencing the, er, spontaniety of Bolivia, we have thrown planning out the window. We have started doing things like hopping into a Toyota LandCruiser with six total strangers and driving through the frozen desert to the Chilean border, with nary a centavo to our name, not a guidebook in sight and without any idea as to the entry requirements of said country.

But it all worked out, mostly.

We last saw the blog on Friday in Potosì, where the miners` protests had escalated into using hard dynamite and burning the local tax office down to the ground. We were sure things would only get worse -- or, at the very least, that they would take a few days to cool off. So when we awoke at 7:30 a.m. Saturday, well-rested for the first time in weeks, we realized the dynamiting had stopped, and we knew we had to act fast. I ran to the front desk, where the hotel manager told me the miners and government had reached an agreement just two hours earlier. That is how negotiations work in Bolivia. Protesters threaten to escalate violence, the government calls their bluff, it turns out not to be a bluff at all, and after valuable infrastructure is destroyed, everyone sits down at the negotiating table again. With news that the roads had opened for the first time in six days, I hopped in a cab -- still in my pajamas -- and made for the bus station. There, I found hordes of people desperate to leave, including a woman with a herd of about a dozen donkeys. My haste paid off as I grabbed the last two tickets on the morning bus to Uyuni. Afraid the miners might change their minds if we dawdled, Will and I skipped a trip to the ATM and snack store, instead hauling our luggage to the terminal early.

Over the next six hours, we gawked at the sheer drop off the rocky, unpaved road and admired the starkly beautiful mountain scenery. We arrived in Uyuni, ready to sign up for a four-day, four-wheel-drive tour through the Salar de Uyuni and Reserva Edoard Avaroa. After a week cooped up in small-town Potosì, we looked forward to going off-road to see Bolivia`s natural wonders, even if it meant climbing still higher to altitudes of more than 5,000 meters, forgoing showers and sleeping in unheated huts. We had another concern -- Bolivia was bracing for a transport strike on the 25th, the day after we would return to Uyuni. We could find ourselves stranded in Bolivia another week or two (not a bad prospect, except our return flight leaves from Buenos Aires). So we decided to sign up for the tour ending at the Chilean border, with a bus transfer to San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis in a vast, high-altitude desert. We put down a deposit for the next day at a tour agency, then set about restocking bolivianos.

But when we reached the only ATM in town, we discovered it had run out of cash -- two days earlier, according to other tourists. No, we had not learned our lesson from the virtually identical incident at Machu Picchu. We couldn`t pay our hotel. We couldn`t buy food. We couldn`t pay the remainder of the cost of our tour, which left at 10:30 a.m. the next day, Sunday.

Don`t worry, everyone told us. They restock the ATM at 9 a.m. every morning. We awoke at 8 to stalk the ATM. By 10:30, the money truck still had not appeared. It might come today, or it might not, the security guard told us (wearing a Wackenhut uniform -- their reach extends even to the frozen desert of southwestern Bolivia). We were sure we would have to forfeit our tour deposit and hang out in Uyuni until the money arrived. But instead, the tour operator, desperate to send us on our way in a full SUV, talked the four other tourists into loaning us $40 to pay our hotel bill (we sprung for the only hotel that advertised heat) and said we could pay the rest at the end of the tour.

We spent 20 of our remaining 100 bolivianos on four liters of water, and hopped in the LandCruiser.


TO BE CONTINUED ...

Stranded for Six Days

POTOSÍ -- We arrived in this ancient colonial city just in time for the roadblocks to start up again, and though rumors abounded that they would end ´today or tomorrow,´ we´re still stuck here six days later. Protests, illness and other delays have stranded us in cities before. The difference here: the protesters in the central plaza have the really good dynamite. On our mine tour, we got to see them set off ammonium nitrate (I will try to upload the video later), and we can hear the same earth-shaking boom now. We´re used to the firecracker variety the students use in Sucre. In Potos í, they´ve been setting it off in the wee hours too, which makes for a lousy night´s sleep. But aside from damage to delicate nerves, no one´s been hurt. It serves mainly as an attention-getter. Most of the 15,000 miners who work on Cerro Rico, overlooking Potosí, are protesting high taxes. After 350 years of excavation, the hill that gave Spain its colonial wealth resembles Swiss cheese, but they´re still hauling tin and silver out of it. It comes back to Bolivia at inflated prices -- in $300 electronics equipment that would cost $150 in the U.S. Such is the Bolivian economy. The miners make twice the national average salary, but they have to pay ridiculous taxes --one miner told me 50 percent -- and the job usually ends in a nasty early death by silicosis. Business owners -- particularly those who cater to tourists -- have lost patience with the protests because no one can get in or out of the city, so no one is reserving hotel rooms, or buying alpaca gloves and antique textiles. Well, no one but us. We´re running a little behind schedule now, but Potosí beats other cities where we could be stranded. We´re staying in a fantastic restored colonial mansion with free Internet, TV, hot water and actual central heating. We´ve seen more of the city than we would have. We learned about every step of the silver process, from mining to smelting to minting coins, a fascinating look at the true price of money and precious metals. We have seen most of the city´s dozen or so colonial churches, including the cloistered St. Theresa convent where aristocratic families sent their second-born daughters in the 1600s and 1700s, never to see them again. And, if the protesters take the weekend off like they usually do, we´re hoping to see the bus terminal and get on with our journey.

A Journey into the Mines of Potosi

POTOSÍ -- Cerro Rico (meaning Rich Mountain in Spanish) towers over the highest city in the world like a goliath. It is here that at the height of the colonial era, the Spanish forced the people of the area to mine silver for shipment back across the Atlantic. At its peak in the early seventeenth century, Potosí´s population of 160,000, exceeded that of London, Paris and Madrid. Spain made its silver coins here for nearly 400 years (You can see the ones that did not make it back to Spain at the Mel Fischer wreck museum in Key West).

Needless to say, the mountain has been raped of nearly all its silver, but more 15,000 locals still enter the dangerous mines to hunt for tin and other metals. With arsenic and asbesto dust clouding the air, the average miner lives only to about age 44. Still, they come for the money, 1,500 bolivianos a month, twice the national average.

Meghan and I journeyed into the mines to see just what it was like to work there. We started as a group of six, but three people quickly dropped out as the passageways began to narrow and the ceiling began to drop. With only the light on our helmets and scarves wrapped around our faces to keep the dust out, we crawled, climbed and slid through three stories of a 350-year-old mine, which although rather depleted, still contained hopeful miners. (When we crawled past a miner, we gave them gifts of coca leaves, soda and dynamite.) The conditions in a mine like this are what you would expect: horrid. About 90 percent of miners here say they only do it for the money. Nearly 8 percent polled said they did it for fun -- mostly, the pollsters say, teenagers who like the thrill of a dangerous job.

At the end of our visit, our guide gave me a green mushy substance, and I began rubbing my hands with it to get the grime off my hands. I thought it was some kind of weird soap. Meghan looked at me like I was crazy and said the guide wanted me to shape it into a little ball -- it was not soap, it was dynamite! After I did this, he put a three-minute fuse into it and set it alight. Then he handed it to me before I had a chance to react. After a quick picture, he ran over a small bluff and dropped the package. A minute or so later... Kaboom!!!





Pictures: Entering the mine; our groupmate Malay from England before crawling through a scary section of mine; the two of us enjoying the rare chance to stand up in the mine.

Hasta Luego, Sucre (Maybe)

In a few hours, we move on from lovely Sucre, city of many names: the White City (for the colonial buildings always freshly painted), the Capital Plena (a slogan on signs around town, in the wake of conflict with the federal government, declaring its status as the official capital and seat of the judicial branch), Chuquisaca (the Spanish spelling of its original name, and still the name of the state), La Plata (for the silver processed here during the colonial era).

You get the picture.

It´s a stunning town, a pleasant place to stroll around for days or, as we did, weeks. In the mornings, we ate salteñas. In the afternoons, we took four hours of intensive one-on-one Spanish classes. In the evenings, we took in a folkloric dancing show or had a local Potosina beer on the plaza. Each weekend brought a new festival or citywide event: the chocolate festival, independence day, the university´s homecoming parade, the street-racing championship.

We hate to leave. But, at the same time, we´ll feel lucky to get out of here before the roadblocks start up again. In a university town with an independent streak, at a critical point in Bolivia´s political history, there´s always a demonstration. This time, the truckers are protesting taxes. Lucky for us, protesters take the weekends off.

So, if the traffic gods stay with us, we´ll post next from Potosí, the highest city in the world and source of Spain´s colonial wealth.

In Memoriam

There are only two television shows that I know of that are truly worth the commercials. The first is CBS Sunday Morning and the other is Meet the Press on NBC. The CBS program, which began with legendary newsman Charles Kuralt, is about as close to poetry as television will ever get, reminding us in quiet, probing segments of the stunning diversity of our nation and the amazing people in it. And then there is Meet the Press with Tim Russert, where the important issues of the day were discussed and toady government officials and their henchmen had to face real questions. I spent many a Sunday morning, beginning as a teen, in front of the television waiting for Tim to grill the pompous or to simply press someone for an answer we all wanted to know. It was riveting and informative. Often, my dad and I would boisterously cheer Tim on as he made his guests answer every question. He was doing it for us, i.e. those of us dwindling Americans who still care about getting at the truth. But, the fact that Tim was a superb newsman is not the only reason why I was such a big fan. He was, at heart, just a regular guy. I loved seeing him sitting beside the coiffed and pampered NBC anchors talking about an election. His hair was usually askew, like mine, and he always seemed to have a down-to-earth approach that differed from just about every other television journalist I have ever seen. He could also poke fun at himself, appearing on an episode of the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Streets. It was those qualities that made you feel like Tim was representing us on Meet the Press. He represented something slowly disappearing in many newsrooms- integrity and class. Every broadcast, after giving us a peek at the truth, Tim would remind us “If it's Sunday morning, it's Meet the Press.” I know it was just a corny catch phrase to remind us to tune in again, but somehow I felt reassured that despite all the troubles in our world, Tim would be back and we would get to the truth. This from James Carville on a special edition of Meet the Press: "The question I'm most often asked about Tim is, 'Is he really as good a guy as he looks like?' " said Carville. "And the truth is, he was a better guy."

Why the Apatosaurus will never do

SUCRE -- Who doesn´t like dinosaurs? You´d have to be on heavy medication or just plain blue-nosed not to get excited about the world´s largest collection of dinosaur tracks (5,000 in all) here in Sucre. The Cretaceous Park and Cal Orko Dinosaur Tracks is just a 10- minute cab ride from the main plaza. A variety of big-footed dinosaurs rambled through a muddy lake in Sucre millions of years ago, and thanks to a few serendipitous volcano eruptions these footprints are preserved for all time. Scientists at the site, discovered in 1998, believe 294 different dinosaur species made these tracks during the second half of the Cretaceous period, including sauropods -- the largest animals ever to have lived on land. The lake bottom is now a vertical wall thanks to the sparring of two tectonic plates, which have pushed it up over eons. The tracks are amazing, but the real fun is in the life-size dinosaur models in the park, especially the Brontosaurus! Sure, there was a replica of a T-Rex and Stegosaurus too, but the Brontosaurus is tops in my book. Yes, I know the scientists long ago renamed the Brontosaurus ¨Apatosaurus¨, but I refuse to bend to such an injustice. To an 8-year-old (which I was once) on his first visit to the Museum of Natural History that lumbering plant-eating goliath was the best thing ever! I know most heroes tend to be of the human variety, but those types never live up to the title. With an average length of 75 feet and a mass of at least 25 short tons, the Brontosaurus is most certainly worthy of hero worship. Anyway, to make a long story short I made Meghan take about 50 pictures of me and the towering Brontosaurus model. I kept asking myself what it would have been like to chomp down on some plants in the tops of trees with these mostly gentle giants, unfortunately I was born a few million years too late!

Meghan and I had a visitor for about four days this week. It was our old friend Andrew from our time as reporters together at the Palm Beach Post. Back in the old days, Andrew and I used to drown our worries after a long day of work with a ¨birch beer¨at the Frank ´n´Steins hot dog joint in Stuart, Florida. Fast forward a few years and Andrew is living it up and working in Buenos Aires. It was good to see the man. We hope to meet up again in a few weeks. Incidentally, Andrew will be the subject of our first Globe Gators Poll. Just scroll down this blog tomorrow afternoon to make your vote count!

The Perfect Snack

SUCRE -- Two foods have long competed for status as my favorite snack: the empanada, and soup in a bread bowl. The empanada combines pastry and meat in compact form, tasty and handy for lunch on the go or as the main entree in a balanced sit-down meal. While providing a substantial meal at low cost, the delicious and hearty soup in a bread bowl eliminates the need to wash a dish or add to landfill trash, as you can actually eat the container.

Bolivia, it seems, has managed to do the impossible, combining the best parts of soup in a bread bowl and the empanada. The tasty treat is called a salteña, a special kind of empanada full of a kind of stew, with either chicken or beef. It´s like soup in a bread bowl that you can actually carry down the street, eating on the run without utensils. Restaurants all over Bolivia serve them as a morning snack from about 10 a.m. to noon, and Sucre prides itself as having the best salteñas in the nation. In late morning here, people crowd around street vendors and salteñerias, eating them with little spoons to scoop out the stew, or, as the real locals do (or at least they say they do) without the benefit of a spoon. Only attempt this feat very carefully unless you want to end up with salteña all over yourself, as happened to me on my first try.

The name salteña comes from the city in Argentina, Salta. Legend has it that a woman from Salta (hence, she was a salteña) started making the special kind of empanada after she was exiled to Bolivia and fell on hard times in the early 1900s. So now they´re called salteñas, even though Sucre is the center of the salteña universe. Apparently in Salta, they serve a different kind of empanada altogether.

Another Day, Another Tire on Fire

SUCRE -- So I´m sitting in Spanish class yesterday, trying to get a handle on the subjunctive, when the explosions started again; loud this time, like they were right outside the window. And that´s exactly where they were: A small crowd of protesters, mostly women, had gathered outside the district attorney´s office next door. My teacher as usual didn´t even flinch (such is life in Sucre these days) and eventually got up to close the window. Then the chanting started: ¨¿Dónde esta Roberto? ¿Dónde esta Roberto?¨ The crowd grew larger, large enough that even our jaded teachers and journalists at the newspaper office on the other side of the school gathered to watch. It turns out Roberto is an official with the campaign of a candidate for governor, in opposition to the current government. He was thrown into a car early yesterday morning while walking down the street and hasn´t been seen since. People suspect the government did it, so that´s why they were protesting outside the government building. Despite the explosions and raging bonfire, the protest stayed peaceful, and the police left quickly after checking things out. It was just another day in Sucre, with an abnormal occurence that´s becoming all too common for the people who live here.