I ate cactus for breakfast.

The fun thing about Peace Corps is that you wake up in the morning and if you decide to step foot out the door, you just never know what you are going to get. I’ve been a bit MIA for the last few weeks. Now I’m back, and I will attempt to put in words just exactly what I’ve been up to. Sit back and relax… This is going to take awhile.

Bella Vista is a new community eco-tourism project. I choose these words carefully.

New = Two years into the project. Not yet turning profit. Not yet developed and functioning smoothly.

Community = Run by the community, for the community. In other words, they learn new skills and make more money by taking advantage of the resources available.

Eco-tourism project = Tourism with conservation of the environment in mind. To enjoy what the wilderness has to offer while not destroying it and keeping it as close to its natural state as possible.

The original plan was to have a volunteer living in Samaipata but working in both Samaipata and Bella Vista, located about 40 km away. I am to alternate weeks between the two towns. To live in Bella Vista is to live with nature. The community has a new hostel which is the only place with electricity and running water. It is powered by a solar panel and has two showers and two toilets. It’s got hammocks and beds and a beautiful view. This will be my home away from home. A nice getaway, but with the amenities that I am used to. As for the rest of the area, it is just stark wilderness with 20 families hidden somewhere inside.

So the plan…Well, as many things go here, the plan is not quite a plan, it’s just an idea that somehow should work out. One thing that was a bit overlooked was just exactly how I would get to Bella Vista. It’s 40 km away. To start, I hop some sort of transportation for the first 20 km along the highway. Then I reach the little road to Bella Vista, and from there it’s about another 20 km to get to the community. Because Peace Corps prohibits volunteers from riding motorcycles (the easiest and most logical choice), my options are to bike, walk, taxi, use four-legged transport, or get lucky and find a ride.

I’ve done the bike- it took 4.5 hrs and it was so mountainous that I was either careening out of control downhill and praying for God to spare me my life or pushing my bike up the never-ending uphill sections as I watched the snails crawl past me. I can’t see myself bouncing up and down trying to ride a horse or a donkey for several hours, especially alone. A taxi costs 80 Bs. That’s over $10 to go about 1 hr and 45 min. Too rich for my blood. No one I knew was entering Bella Vista last week, and so, the least ugly of all options, I decided to go on foot.

It took four hours to get there. I waded through a couple streams, saw some beautiful butterflies, got chased by a cow who scared me to death, and found 2 eight-inch tall mushrooms growing out of cow dung. How they got that tall and the mud pie was not even dry is still a mystery to me.

It was a nice walk. I listened to my Ipod, sang out loud to myself and the trees, and for a moment thought I got lucky when I taxi came by. Walking through the Andes, out in the middle of nowhere where not a living soul will cross your path for four hours, when you hear something man-made your senses go on alert. I heard an engine, looked back, and saw a taxi coming towards me. It stopped and the driver generously asked if I’d like a ride. Well of course I would! I had about 2.5 hrs left to walk and this would greatly speed things up. They opened the passenger side door and I saw 4 men crammed in the back. The man in the passenger seat in front slid over with a smile for me to get in. We were riding double shotgun, quite a common occurrence here in Bolivia. I once did it for 3.5 hours and I did not think my spinal column would ever be quite straight again.

At any rate, I get in, we drive a solid 5 seconds, straight into a mudbank. The car gets stuck. The driver guns the engine. We get stuck deeper in the mud. The four men in back get out to push. We go nowhere. The rest of the passengers exit. They switch drivers. Men are up to their knees in mud, pushing as hard as they can. Not one obscenity is uttered; no one is mad at the driver. They push and push as I stand there like a princess waiting for her chariot. Fifteen minutes later, the car has been successfully dislodged from the mud. We reenter, I notice the distinct aroma of six working men who are not in the habit of showering all too often, I smile, we chat, and 5 minutes later, they happily announce that we have arrived at our destination.

I exit the taxi, continue my walk, and arrive at the hostel in a total of 4 hours. Quicker than by bike I noted. I arrive, and true to Bolivian fashion, no one is there. I wait four hours and as the sun is starting to set, I stop a random man on a motorcycle. “Where is the caretaker of the hostel?” I ask him. He’s in Samaipata he tells me. “I’ve just walked 4 hours from Samaipata and you’re telling me the guy I’m looking for at his cousin’s house across the street from my place?? You’ve got to be kidding!”

Well Mr. Motorcycle Man goes to the house of the parents of the caretakers, finds out that the wife of the caretaker is staying there, and comes back to inform me that I will be staying the night with this family. Since I was actually staying three days, the one night turns into a few nights. Then it rains and the little streams become raging rivers and so the nights continue to grow, until I have stayed at the parents place for a week. And what a week it was.

I was out in the middle of nowhere, quite literally. Bella Vista is a picturesque little area where three eco-systems collide- the Chaco, the Andes, and the Amazon. It’s some of the most untouched wilderness I’ve ever seen. The families like the one I was staying with farm the land, live off the land, and give back to the land.

What I’m trying to say is, there was no running water. There was no electricity. I was laughed at when I asked for the bathroom. I learned to wipe with leaves. And let me tell you, that wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part? Where to go. In the entire week that I was there, I saw not one adult go to the bathroom. The one-yr old gleefully peed on the chickens. But the rest? I have no idea. And if you live on a farm, how do you know the rain doesn’t carry your wastes to the same yummy plans and vegetables at you get to eat for lunch?

The food actually was delicious. I have never had corn in so many different forms as I did that week. Corn-on-the-cob, corn tamales from the oven, corn tamales from the pot, corn chower, ground corn, smashed corn, whole corn… I felt like Bubba Gump, but with corn. I watched the mother cook all week. At one point I asked her as I looked into a pot and could not see its contents, since we were in a kitchen filled with smoke, no light, and zero visibility, how she knew when the food was done. She looked at me a little funny and said slowly… “Well I taste it of course.” Duh. She cooks by taste, I cook by sight. No wonder my food sucks.

Living on a farm, I tasted at least 10 kinds of wild fruit. And my stomach must be getting stronger cause I did not get sick from a single one. I was also invited to go eat “tuna.” How wonderful, I thought. The only protein I eat around here is chicken, chicken, chicken. I couldn’t wait to go eat some tuna! So the guy takes me to go get tuna, and we walk up to a cactus, he starts hacking pieces off, skins it while talking about how much the spikes hurt if you don’t do it right, and then hands me a piece of cactus. I ask him what we were doing, and he says, “You wanted some tuna, right?” And I immediately remember that tuna in Spanish is átun, and I’ve learned now that “tuna” is actually cactus. Yum.

I also got to watch as the mom prepared 100% organically raised chicken. You take the legs and head, pull, and then slice the neck to let the blood drain out. Then you dunk the guy in boiling water, remove the feathers, and carefully cut him apart so as to not break the parts in the body that hold all the waste, lest your chicken have a very bitter flavor to it. Some mornings I did not see which chicken was killed and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out if it was the chicken with the Mohawk or the bald little guy who was sitting on my plate. The mom says one day she’ll let me do it.

The guy I was supposed to meet with arrived the second day. I continued to stay with his family and they were very welcoming. They also had a lot of infants around, all from this one guy’s family. He has 4 kids. A year ago he had one. Then he had a baby. Then his wife got pregnant again and he had another baby. And then seconds after that another one came out. The mother had no idea she was pregnant with twins (and neither did the doctor). Pre-natal care is not a requirement here. Thankfully mother and babies were ok, but can you imagine? What a shock!!

I was playing with one of the twins when I first arrived. They are about 6 months old now. I was pinching her cheeks and stroking her hair when the mother announces to me that the baby has been sick and feverish. And she says something I didn’t quite understand and it took me a second to realize that she just told me she had swabbed the baby’s face with urine to get rid of the fever. As I notice the smell emanating from my hands I remember that when living in the campo, there is no soap and water. Minutes later, I sat down to dinner.

For seven days I was eaten alive by fleas in my bed and strange blood-sucking mosquitoes that looked like tiny flies. I went six days without a shower. When I couldn’t take it anymore, we walked half an hour to the hostel only to find that the water had been cut off due to the rains. So being innovative, creative, and 100% flexible, we filled two buckets from a sink full of rainwater, carried these buckets to the shower, and I took a bucket bath.

Rain around here is not like rain in the US. When it rains in the US, we turn on our windshield wipers, walk a little faster from the car to the office, and maybe open an umbrella if we’re not too lazy. Here, rain determines everything. If it rains you can’t wash your clothes cause you’ve got to hang them to dry. Rain washes out the roads, causes landslides, made the bridge between Santa Cruz and Samaipata fall, and turns trickling streams into raging currents. And that’s with just one day of rain. When it rains for consecutive days…watch out.

That was the situation I found myself in while in Bella Vista. I spent days waiting out the rain so I could trek back to the highway. The family kept saying the waters would be high, and since I had to cross at least 10 rivers, I stayed. I didn’t realize how bad it would be but during my quick walk to the hostel for that blessed shower, what used to be a stream I could hop over almost carried me away as I waded through the thigh-high waters. Thankfully I had a friend who acted as my anchor.

So I waited and I waited and finally when I could wait no more, one of the guys in the family and I decide we can make it back. Need I say? It was crazy. CRAZY. The rivers that we so worried about were the least of the problems. They were easily crossed once you got used to it. The craziness was in the landslides. Huge portions of the mountains literally fell and were sitting on the road. A mix of fallen trees, rocks, and mud. MUD! In six and a half hours, we had to cross through about 20 landslides. Each one at least 20 meters long… It was a serious obstacle course. Climbing over, under, around, and through the trees, or balancing on a limb or a twig so as not to sink into the mud. Oh, that MUD! If you have never walked through mud, (as I never had), it is heavy. And when that mud is super wet, it pulls you in so quickly you do not know what happened. I would put my foot down and suddenly I was thigh deep in mud, both legs stuck, and I could feel the panic rise. How do you get out? It’s not like you can plant your arms and get your legs out! That’s where teamwork comes in. The guy I was with would tug and pull until I made it out of the mud, then I would take two steps and turn around and tug and pull him out of the mud. Then each time we made it out of the obstacle course, we had to go clean off in a stream because the mud is slippery and you can’t walk, plus you are carrying a few extra kilos of weight where the mud is stuck to your body. I gave up on my shoes after they had stayed deep within the mud too many times after I had been extricated, and I walked in socks the majority of the time. Your feet really do become numb to pain.

Six and a half hours. Six and a half hours of some of the most tiring and excruciating experiences ever. Somehow though, I had a lot of fun. In the US, life gives you lemons and you’ve gotta make lemonade. In Bolivia, life is constantly flinging lemons at you. It’s better to just use them to take a shot of tequila. Figuratively speaking, of course.