Instead of antiquing, which the barrio is also known for, we spent a nice afternoon drinking wine in the park, one of my favorite fair weather activities. Ended up having dinner at La Cabrera - the third time I have eaten there, but I really think they have the best steaks I have ever consumed. And they gave me free champagne after I finished my malbec!

Today I spent the morning reading classic science fiction in the botanical garden. After that I went to the Museum of Belles Artes, which had a very impressive collection. Then I checked out a shopping gallery full of high-end design shops, but couldn't really afford anything. Tonight I am meeting up with a friend from New York, Zev, for some drinks. It's strange that so soon I won't be able to spend my days reading in parks, checking out museums, strolling around interesting neighborhoods. Reality is about to intrude rather rudely, in the form of work. I need a job! But I am not going to worry too much, not going to think about sending resumes out until I get back to NYC. Which is to say: next week. Wow.

Also, once I return to the states, I will go back through and update this site: post all my pictures and clean up some of the writing, which has been so hastily scribbled and barely edited.

By the way, my head is doing fine. The concussion was mild; I was kind of out of it on Sunday, but I am feeling much better today. Thank you to all those who expressed concern, but you have nothing to worry about! I am a hard-headed person.

I asked her if there was anything I could do if it turned out I had a concussion and she said no, not really, just wait it out. So I went to dinner with Molly anyway, and after about an hour the swelling went down, and the feeling that something was growing out of the side of my head subsided. So I had a nice dinner (though I was glad I wore black so the bloodstains on my shirt weren't as visible), and decided to have a drink with Molly afterwards.

I'd asked the nurse about it, and she said if I wasn't feeling dizzy a glass of wine would be ok, so I had a caipirinha. Hanging out with Molly was a lot of fun; she's lived an interesting life and we got along really well. It can be difficult to meet really cool girls (though I've had a lot of luck with that on this trip), and neither of us wanted to return to our separate hostels because the conversation was so nice.

The people at my hostel were really understanding; checkout time was 10am, but they told me to sleep as late as I felt like I needed to. This morning I definitely feel a little out of it, a little slow, like moving underwater a bit. My head is sore but not painful, and I am slightly dizzy if I walk too much. I'm ok though, there is absolutely no reason to worry, I am taking it easy this afternoon. I plan on having a mild late lunch, and sitting in the 400 acre park in town, and reading a book.

I am glad that I took a wine tour yesterday instead of waiting for today. Mendoza is known for its wines, particularly Malbecs, which I learned when touring a winery, a vineyard, and a boutique olive oil producer. I have been holding off on buying souvenirs because I didn't want to carry them this whole time, but I bought a bottle of Malbec at the vineyard since I am nearing the end of my travels. I have an overnight bus back to Buenos Aires tonight, and look forward to returning to one of my favorite cities tomorrow.

After I got back from lunch in the main plaza with a couple people, there was some drama at the otherwise tranquil hostel: two people, including a girl in my room, had money and other things (iPods, cameras) stolen. I felt really bad for them, and I'm going to make some pisco sours with the girl in my room in a few minutes to cheer her up. It just sucks, though so far my hostel experiences have been much better than I expected.

None of my things were taken, as all of my important stuff was locked up in a locker, but it's been a good reminder to be careful. After a couple months travelling you start to get a little careless, but now I am back on my guard. I guess I am always very aware of where my bag is and who is around it, though now even more so. I just hate to get paranoid. Thusfar the only money I have lost was a hundred dollars when a money changing place short-changed me, and a few dollars here and there on the long way around town in a taxi. I guess I expected some bad things to happen while I was travelling, and I know I am not home yet, but (knock on wood) so far so good.

I realized that ever since I spent two weeks per summer visiting my grandmother at the grand canyon as a child, I have been a big fan of erosion. Thus, I really enjoyed the intense canyons and rock formations of the Valle de la Luna. There were also giant sand dunes, upon which people were sandboarding (like snowboarding, but on sand), which was cool to watch but looked absolutely horrible to do, personally. I got to be in the Valley for sunset too, which was lovely. The rocks kind of glowed, and it reminded me of the color Uluru (Ayer's Rock) in Australia glowed at sunrise, though not as red.

After sunset I came back to my hostel and hung out with some other people staying there. So far all of the Chileans I have met have been incredibly friendly and helpful. If they see I am alone, they invite me to dinner or drinks with them, which is really nice. Four different groups invited me to go out last night, but I was feeling a bit tired and ended up just going to bed by midnight. That decision was based a lot on the fact that I have a 24-hour bus ride in front of me, beginning this afternoon, and I can't sleep that well on overnight buses.

I am looking forward to the ride though; the landscape in the Atacama desert is so beautiful, I love just staring out the window. I got a window seat for this ride, and my mp3 player is fully charged. I am almost done with one of my books, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, but I love it so much I don't think I'll trade it for another at a book exchange. It's been really interesting to read about his early development as a writer, kind of inspiring to me.

So I am prepared for my long bus ride; more than anything I think I am just ready to be back in a big city. I have really enjoyed the desert and the small towns, but I am kind of an urban person, and am craving cities again. There are a lot of other interesting, cheap daytrips from here in San Pedro that I could stay here and take, but they're all to geysers, desert lagoons, and salt flats, which I saw plenty of in Bolivia. Plus I am really almost out of money, so I am starting to think about heading back to Buenos Aires to catch a flight to New York, and Santiago is right in that direction.

Unfortunately, I am feeling a little burned out on the tour options, and am forgoing the salt lake trip that I considered last week. I will probably rent a bike this afternoon and ride out into the Valley de la Luna, but that may be the extent of my desert exploration. I'm back in some altitude (2700 meters), and it's getting to me a little; plus I think after the last few weeks I am ready for a big city. So I have a 20-hour bus ride that leaves Monday evening for Santiago. As this town is aimed for tourists, everything is rather expensive, though there are some lovely restaurants.

Speaking of food, I am staying at a hostel that doesn't include breakfast. I don't mind though; most South American breakfasts I have experienced are instant coffee and white bread with butter, jam and dulce de leche. I am so tired of white bread. This morning I slept through breakfast though, I was a bit sleepy from last night, when I met some people from my hostel and we went to sit in a field and look at stars while drinking cerveza and pisco under an old tree. Conversation as entirely in Spanish, and Chileans talk very quickly and swallow their words, so I didn't get everything that was said but it was still a lot of fun.

For a minute I wasn't sure if I would make it out of La Paz as scheduled. When I got back from Lake Titicaca, the city was swarming with soldiers, and the air had a crazy energy to it. The night before I left there was a massive demonstration in the Plaza de San Fernando. Some miners were protesting a government tax hike on their wages, from five percent to forty. They were setting off dynamite in the streets, and people were everywhere, it was intense. Because I was staying a block from where the president works, the street my hostel was on was totally blocked off by the military. The next morning I wondered if I would get to the airport at all; sometimes when Bolivians protest they just close down roads in and out of town, to and from the airport. However, everything was clear, and I caught my flight on time into Iquique, Chile.

I'm not really a beach person, but immediately after checking into my hostel, which is right across the street from the beach, I headed over to lay in the sand and play in the waves. Unfortunately I didn't apply sunblock evenly, and though I was only out for 90 minutes, I got burned pretty badly in random patches.

I lucked out on the hostel situation: this is a good one, where everyone is eager to meet people. Plus, there are three girls in my room that are really fun, I have been hanging out with them for the last two or three days: two Chilean sisters from Santiago, and an Ethiopian girl who grew up in Germany. It's been fun talking to her, makes me miss Berlin quite a bit. We are travelling together to San Pedro de Atacama on Saturday morning, so that will be nice.

One of the Chilean sisters, Dani, has been surfing for five years; Iquique is a bit of a surf mecca, and the hostel is run by and populated with surfers. Yesterday evening before sunset she took me out and tried to teach me how to surf, something I have never done before. It was fun, difficult, mostly just paddling around. I almost caught a decent wave (not really, I never stood up), and got knocked around a bit. After a while one of the surfers who works at the hostel came out and gave us a a nice basic lesson, for which I bought him some beer later. I had fun trying to surf, and maybe if I put a lot of time and energy into it I could become decent someday, but I don't really care enough to make the effort, I think I prefer to just play in the waves, sans board.

After the ocean session we celebrated the birthday of another girl in my room with a feast of guacamole that I made (with amazing avocados), bread, cheese, and chicken spread, lots of wine. Chilean wine so far is pretty cheap and not too bad, though I enjoyed Argentinian wine a little more. Then post-digestion we piled in a van and went out dancing at a club, raggaetone for hours until I was ready for sleep.

Today I might go see some cave drawings outside of town, but I will probably just continue to relax, maybe hit the beach again once the sun is less strong, and then a BBQ tonight. Iquique is in a desert, so it's really hot. The city of about a hundred thousand has the ocean on one side and a mountain that looks like a giant sand dune on the other. I spent most of this morning sitting on a rooftop deck, watching a single wave break across the entire distance of the beach. It really is a wonderful place to catch my breath.

- One thing Bolivia is known for is its weaving, all sorts of beautiful colors into patterns. After travelling around, I understood a little more where the inspiration might come from: the intense magenta mountains, sea green phosphorous rocks, red lakes, blinding white and beige salt flats, the bluest skies ever. It´s like the landscape morphs into one of the vibrant blankets.

- Most of the roads in Bolivia are unpaved, which makes for some pretty rough rides, sometimes fording small rivers. However, most drivers seems to be fast, expert mechanics, and if they´re not the bus will usually have a mechanic ride with the driver. On the road from Uyuni to Potosi, we had to keep stopping every hour for someone to jump out and tighten the bolts on the wheel so it wouldn´t fall off.

- The food, of course I have to write about it. I love Bolivian soups, and can´t wait to start cooking with quinoa when I get back to the states. I also ate some llama, which is a red meat, and a little tough but not bad. The only cheese widely available was llama cheese, which was kind of good at first (though rather salty), but I tired of it rather quickly; oh what I would give for some good Stilton, or Brie. I loved the bars of pressed nuts that were sold on the street, and usually had a few in my bag in case I couldn´t have a real meal. My favorite drink was a submarino: a bar of chocolate melted into hot milk. Ridiculously rich, not something to drink every day, but so good.

- English isn´t widely spoken in Bolivia, and it was nice to practice my Spanish a little more. However, I noticed that most of the Bolivians I had random conversations with on the street, in restaurants, etc, were old men. The women basically ignored me.

- There are many stores in La Paz, but the easiest and cheapest way to buy stuff is from one of the thousands of small street stalls, or from people selling things spread out on a blanket on the ground. You can buy almost anything this way, which is kind of cool.

- The exchange rate in Bolivia is much better than any place else I have been so far. Most lunches can be had for under a dollar, and a really nice meal with lots of drinks might be five or six.

- Coca leaves are everywhere: at the hostal breakfast spreads to make tea in the morning, for sale in the street, in the cheeks of most men. The practice of chewing coca leaves is very traditional to the Bolivian people, and there is a big distinction between them and cocaine; I saw a lot of graffiti that said "Coca no es la cocaina" and t-shirts that said "Coca no es un droga." (Actually, they said more grammatically correct versions of those two statements, my SPanish isn´t good.) I tried chewing the leaves a few times, but didn´t really like it. I rather enjoyed the tea though, and might pick up a box of mate de coca as a more relaxed alternative to coffee.

- Most small towns didn´t seem to have garbage collection, or if they did, there wasn´t one specific place it was taken. Instead, the roads just outside of town were strewn with all kinds of garbage in various states of decomposition, which made me sad to see, especially when the land is so beautiful otherwise.

- I loved the little rock piles (cairns?) that were all over the countryside. I could never figure out if they were property markers (I suspect the painted ones were), or just a simple statement that in such a lonely desert, someone was here.

- There seems to be a set delineation between acceptable jobs for men (driving) and women (selling things). For example, I was told that if a woman were to take a job as a driver, people would assume she was a lesbian. This is when I have mixed feelings about cultural change. On one hand, I am sad when the women of La Paz start to lose their traditional dress, wearing jeans and tank tops instead. On the other hand, I am against homophobia and misoginy, and am happy to hear that set perceptions of gender roles are changing. But then I feel bad that the culture is losing its traditions...Part of me likes the way the world is getting smaller, and part of me laments it. What it comes down to though is that I´m not from Bolivia, so it´s not really my place to comment on how things should be.

- Overall, Bolivia seemed to me to be a very magical place. It´s the South America I dreamed about as a kid, and I am so happy that I had a chance to explore it now, because it is starting to change due to developing influences. Once I got over altitude adjustments (and sickness), it became one of my most favorite places I have ever been.

The next morning I headed out for Lake Titicaca. And yes, the inner six year old giggles every time I say that. Anyway, I was really excited to see it; the lake was half the reason I changed my flight to stay in Bolivia longer. I will sound like a hippie for a minute and say that all the books I have read describe the place as having a tangible energy..and really, it does.

It was so cool being there; Inca civilizations lived along the lake, and every mountain is full of terraces. I remember seeing pictures of terraced hills in National Geographic as a child, and the yesterday, I was walking along one. Pretty amazing.

I started out in Copacabana, a small sleepy hippie beach town, from which I caught a two hour boat ride to the Isle del Sol, Island of the Sun. When I was there, I visited some really old ruins; no one else was there, I had them all to myself, which was amazing. I sat in a stone seat that the old Inca kings used to sit in to receive the energy from the rising sun. Wow.

I went to bed pretty early, since the generator shut off at 10, and I was exhausted from walking up a mountain twice. However, I was woken up around 2am by the most intense thunderstorm I have ever experienced. Torrential rain on the corrugated roof, lightning purpling the curtains every minute. The storm got closer and closer until lightning and thunder were simultaneous, right out my window. Funny thing is, I never got out of bed; normally I would get up and at least look out the window, but something kept me in place, and it was not just the stream of water pouring in from under the door. I was frozen, something inside me saying do not move, as if getting up would carry me away on the storm. Sounds silly to say now, but Lake Titicaca is so intense, it made sense.

The next morning, this morning, the lake was almost eerily calm, flat and gray (Titicaca means something like puma gray, there were pumas on the island until about ten years ago). It changes colors depending on the light and time of day, and there are idols and more ruins at the bottom of the lake.

I left the island this morning and took a very long bus ride back to La Paz. It is good to be back in an amazing, beginning to be familiar but still esoteric city. On the bus I sat next to a cool Norwegian girl, and ended up giving tips to some Brits about hostels, markets, and other stuff about the city. Almost felt like a tour guide for a minute. I will miss this place, I was just starting to get comfortable here. Tomorrow I fly to Iquique, Chile, for the next section of my trip.

I was originally supposed to fly to Iquique, Chile tomorrow (Chicago Bears in the Superbowl! I must find a place to watch), but I love Bolivia so much that I decided to change my ticket to Wednesday. Bonus: no change fee. LAN Chile is a great airline. And now I have time to check out Lake Titicaca and Isle del Sol.

One of the reasons why I am glad to be back in La Paz is because of Carnival. In Potosi and Sucre, Catholicism is a lot more common, and young boys use Carnival as an excuse to bombard women with water balloons and water guns on an hourly basis. I got blasted at least once a day in those towns, which is ok when it´s hot, but it´s not always fun to be soaking wet at night at a high altitude. At least I never got hit with one that had the fabled food coloring or bleach in it. However, I haven´t seen a single water balloon attack in La Paz. I think it´s because the indigenous religions are stronger here, Catholicism has less of an influence.

It´s nice to be back in this enigmatic city, and nice to be travelling alone again. I´ll miss the group I was with, but it was time for me to head off anyway. Back to solo dinners spent reading and writing...at least I´ll get another book finished. I will miss having someone to watch my back, and my stuff.

I had the strangest dream the other morning: I was getting ready to fly to Iquique, and going through the contents of my bag. Everything that was in my bag in real life was in it in my dream. I don´t have that much stuff with me, so I know the contents by heart, and in dreams I guess. I remember being especially concerned for my passport, though in the end it was there and I got on the plane safely.

Yesterday after getting to town, I went to see what Sucre is famous for: dinosaur tracks. There´s a large quarry where they found a ton of footprints from the Cretaceous period. It wasn´t terribly exciting, but I am glad I saw them. Later last night I went out with a big group of people from the tour for a nice dinner, followed by way too many rounds of shots, followed by dancing at a club a vaguely remember being called Mitos, or something like that.

The music here - by here I don´t just mean Bolivia, but Argentina and Uruguay as well - is extremely retro. I have heard more hits from my childhood in the last month than I have in the last five years. Eighties hits and raggaeton, pretty ubiquitous. I miss proper techno a little, but I got so much of it in Berlin last year (and truthfully, over the last twelve years) that I don´t mind the break.

This morning I got to sleep in a little, a rare treat. Most travelling days involve waking up before 8am, which I haven´t had to do in years. I was going to go paragliding today, but that meant getting up at 6am and I was out till 3 so...nope. Sucre is also the chocolate center of Bolivia, so I tried to take a tour of a couple chocolate factories, but they were both closed. So, it´s a chill day for me: strolling around the shady squares, relaxing at cafes, being mellow. I love all the lovely public plazashere, though the altitude makes for a very intense temperature difference between sun and shade.

Tonight is my last night with the tour group. The rest of them are travelling on together on another tour to Brazil; as much as I was dreading taking a tour, I have really enjoyed it, and will kind of miss the people I have been travelling with. Mostly that´s because I lucked out and got a really cool group of people, and a great tour leader.

Tomorrow morning I fly back to La Paz, back to travelling on my own and staying in hostels instead of hotels. I don´t mind though, I enjoy being independent; it´s an important part of travelling for me. I just hope I can change my plane ticket to Chile so I can stay in Bolivia a little longer.

Potosi, Bolivia, used to be a very wealthy town because of all the silver mines and old mints that were here. These days it is less prosperous, but more than eighty percent of the population still works in the mines.

This morning I took a tour of a silver mine, which turned out to be a lot more intense than I expected it to be. I felt a little strange, suiting up for education and entertainment alongside miners who do this their whole lives - most start around age 12. The tour was a lot more physical than I expected, lots of climbing up tiny shafts and crawling on hands and knees through miniature tunnels. Most Bolivians are just over four feet tall, and the mines were created by them. I barely fit, and I´m not very big.

Over the course of the mine tour we set off some dynamite, gave miners crackers and coca leaves, drilled holes, and spoke with the oldest miner there, age 64. He´d been working in the mines since he was 12, and said he would work there until he died. I´m not at all claustrophobic, but there were several points during the tour that I was ready to bolt, except the exit was really far away, through a series of tunnels I had no idea how to find my way through.

By the time we left the mine, I felt relieved. It was a very cool tour, kind of neat to crawl and climb around the guts of a mountain. But I couldn´t help but think of all the people that die there regularly, and that I am a very privileged person to be able to take a tour of a silver mine instead of work in one my whole life. It wasn´t exactly fun, but I am really glad I did it.

In the afternoon, after a quick lunch (yay for finally getting a bit of an appetite back) I went for a tour of the old mint with Christian, another American. It was a long tour, all in Spanish, with way too much Middle Ages religious art. Once we finally saw the old minting machines (and took silly pictures of ourselves using them) we left the tour; there was still an hour to go, and our guide, a Bolivian Rosie O´Donnell, talked way too much.

After that I wandered around some markets but didn´t buy anything. Potosi is an OK place; it is definitely nice to be in a bigger city again after tiny desert villages of no more than a dozen buildings. However, I wouldn´t want to spend more than a day or two here, which is fine: tomorrow I am heading to Sucre.

I just came back from three days in the salt flats and Atacama desert near Uyuni. The salt flats were absolutely surreal...white white white as far as you could see, but in the sections that retained some rain water, it was a giant mirror. And when you looked closer, all kinds of shades of blue and beige and pink. All the brochures for the place describe it as "hallucinogenic" and I can see why. It just doesn´t look like any place on earth. My eyes and camera had difficulty adjusting to just how bright everything was, but wow, I can´t wait to post pictures...in probably a month. I did a pretty good job of not getting sunburned, except for my lips; the next day they were so swollen I looked like I had a bad collagen lip job.

The day after the salt flats was basically spent driving around the desert in a 4x4, stopping every hour or two to look at a volcano, a lagoon, a rock formation, etc. Lots more pictures, definitely a fun day. I´m enjoying the tour a lot; everyone is pretty cool and under 35, which is nice. It´s also a nice change of pace to let someone else make all the arrangements about how and when to get where and where to sleep, though the way the tour is structured it gives you a lot of free time, so you don´t have to always be around people.

Yesterday, though, I was really glad I was on the tour; I would not have wanted to deal with how sick I was from the altitude by myself. I got out of bed at 5am feeling very sick, almost like food poisoning. After seeing some geysers and swimming in a hot springs at 4900 meters altitude, I started vomiting, a lot. I spent the rest of the day laying in the back of a jeep that traversed the bumpiest roads ever, feeling so dehydrated but not able to keep down water until sometime in the late afternoon. I also had a fever, excruciating headache, and the runs. My tour guide helped me get through the day, and then brought me and a few other people who were reacting badly to the altitude back to Uyuni, the town we started from three days ago. There I got a good night´s sleep, some pills for altitude sickness, and am now feeling better, ready to catch a train to Potosi.

I wanted to see the Valley of the Moon yesterday, and it was very cheap to take a half day city tour and a ride out to the valley, so I did. Turns out it was a private tour, just the driver, the guide, and me. I saw the highest point of La Paz, which is very working class, and the lowest point, which is very rich. The temperature can differ between the two by ten degrees celcius, with the better weather being lower.

My guide explained a lot of things, such as the dress of the women here: they only wear multiple skirts and petticoats, as well as their hats, once they get married. He was very concerned though that the younger women are dressing western, losing their traditions, his sadness about it weighed on me a little.

Eduardo,the guide, also told me a lot about the socioeconomic situation here, which being my father´s daughter, I found fascinating, as well as stuff about gender roles and history. I learned more about the festival of Alasita that began yesterday, and his quote "We believe that you have to pay for your dreams" still rings in my head.

After seeing several museums and markets, we drove out to the Valley of the Moon, which is a beautiful canyon of erosion, and hiked around a bit. It was also a spectacular view of the mountains, I have always enjoyed watching mountains. Someday, when I return to reality, I will get pictures posted.