Greetings from Cochabamba!

I am still marvelling at the difference in my travel here as opposed to my travel from Santa Cruz to Sucre. That was a 23 hour bus ride over much of the same dirt road I would have had to take to go from Sucre to Cochabamba. Instead, the flight on AeroSur took 50 minutes. Que maravilloso! I sat next to another lawyer! I was actually sad to have to land so soon, we were having such a great conversation.

About 50 per cent of the passengers were gringos. Most of them, like me, had experienced the bus ride, and were now quite willing to fly instead. Going through the Sucre airport, there was no security at all. How refreshing! You could walk straight on to the airplane.

Cochabamba is bigger than Sucre. Unfortunately, unlike Sucre, it does not offer the marvelous colonial architecture and white-washed buildings. It has some wide avenues with busy traffic and lots of pedestrians on the streets at all hours. Like everywhere in Bolivia, the majority of the people are overwhelmingly friendly.

I had a strange experience here. As I was walking down the crowded street, I felt a hand groping the wallet in my back pocket. This wallet is actually my "dummy wallet." It contains a $1 bill and a long-ago cancelled credit card. The theory is, if I ever get robbed, I pull that out, drop it to the ground, and run like heck. At any rate, this hand was definitely squeezing my wallet. I reached around with my left hand and grabbed the hand firmly. I turned around and it was a little boy, about 4 or 5. He looked very guilty. I looked at all the people around us (this was a very crowded street), and everyone was ignoring us. I said "No!" to the boy very loudly, still grabbing his hand. Of all the people milling around, nobody made a move, nobody protested, nobody appeared to be a parent. I let the kid´s hand go and walked away. I assume it was a training exercise by mom or dad on pickpocketing. This theory has been confirmed by two locals I´ve talked to since.

This is an example of the downside of Bolivia, the overwhelming poverty. In Argentina and Uruguay, I could pass as a local. Not so, here. As a gringo, I stick out like a sore thumb. I can´t sit down on a park bench for two minutes without a little old lady standing right on top of me with her hand in my face, whining away as pitifully as she can muster. Frequently, I buy chiclets from dirty little kids and later give the chiclets away to other dirty little kids. I´d rather they sell something to me, anything, than they try to pickpocket me, or beg.

One noticeable difference between Cochabamba and Sucre. In Sucre, or Santa Cruz, or any city in Argentina, I could get up in the morning and walk to the first street corner and buy a newspaper at a corner stand. In the morning men read the newspaper while getting their shoes shined, old men sit in the park reading the newspaper. In Cochabamba I had to walk about a dozen block before I finally found a newspaper stand. One possible explanation for this might be that the overwhelming majority of people on the street are young, as in teenagers or in their 20´s. This distinguishes Cochabamba from other Bolivian cities. Young people notoriously don´t read. They play video games or get their news off the internet. Could this be the reason why a newspaper is so difficult to get in Cochabamba??

I met a fascinating Swiss couple in Sucre. They were also on the same flight with me to Cochabamba. We went out for dinner last night. They are in their 40´s, carrying backpacks, and are on their second or third trip to South America. When not traveling down here, they work as tour guides to German-speaking tourists in the American southwest! Fascinating!

Well, I´m off to do all the tourist things in Cochabamba. Hasta luego.