The Year We Roamed: A Father-and-Son Trip Around the World

By Pete KJ

For fourth grade, Pete and Baraka decided to homeschool...

except they didn't stay home. 

 

Thirteen months later, father and son completed their circumnavigation of the globe. Along the way they learned many great lessons about the world, themselves, and each other.

 

Join them as they set out from home in Puerto Rico and voyage through Florida, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, London, Denmark, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, India, the Philippines, China, Japan, and Northwest America. Photos included!

 

Finalist, Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Travel Guide

 

"Adventure never gets old!" —Toni Burton

 

"Engaging, funny, thoughtful." —Cynthia Burns

 

"Thanks to Pete and Baraka for providing us (vicariously) with such a great adventure. So many things I never knew." —Vic Webbeking

 

"Fun for the viewers because we get to learn so many things about the beautiful unexplored mesmerizing world around us." —Preena Rajoria

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pete KJ
• Release date: Aug 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781386311591

Book preview

The Year We Roamed

A Father-and-Son Trip Around the World

Pete KJ

with help from

Baraka KJ

Copyright © 2013, 2018 by Pete KJ

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

Unless otherwise noted, all maps were prepared using a source file courtesy of Natural Resources Canada.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos and images are by Pete KJ or Baraka KJ.

Cover design by Pete KJ and Sue Campbell Book Design

Cover Photo: Outside Chamundeswari Temple near Mysore, India, March 2009

Author website: www.petekj.com

Author’s Note

The following narrative originally appeared on my website, in serial form, while the journey was in progress. Typically we posted each chapter within a few days of departure from the subject country.

To prepare this volume, I made minor changes to the text. I tried to fix grammar and spelling errors and improve the flow of the words. I deleted very little. I also added verbiage here and there which I felt would improve the clarity of what we were trying to say at the time.

Overriding these concerns was my goal to retain the spirit of spontaneity, digression, adventure, randomness, and rawness with which this document was created. Like the tag says on your made-in-Indonesia shirt, Imperfections are part of the character of this garment. What follows is an authentic record of how we traveled and what we reported, real-time, from the field.

_

Prologue

May, 2008

We are going to travel and talk about it!

Prologue portrait

Eating cake before the journey

Who are we?

We are Pete and Baraka, a father-and-son traveling team.

Where in the world are we going?

It will be interesting to see. We haven't figured it all out yet, and we may change our minds as we go along. But we have a few places we know we're going for sure, and you'll find them out when we get there.

How long will we be traveling?

Hmmm. That's a good question.

And why are we going?

We have a few goals.

We are going to learn about the world first-hand. We will explore, and check out diversity and possibilities. We'll examine how the world is changing, where it has been, where it is heading. Maybe we’ll get some ideas about what we do next.

And we'll just have some fun getting to some of the places we haven't been, and checking up on some of the places we have been.

Yee-ha!

Also, we'll do Fourth Grade.

Chapter 1

Puerto Rico, Part 1

Departed June 3, 2008

Puerto Rico

Here’s where this journey begins, but not where it ends. We're not sure where it ends.

We’ve lived in Puerto Rico for the past six years; lived it and loved it. But now it’s time to go.

When Joni Mitchell wrote, They paved paradise and put up a parking lot in 1969, she was referring to Honolulu. But she could just as easily have been singing about Puerto Rico.

Regardless, for me this island has always been a paradise, with the added bonus of being a place where I could make a living. During the six years we’ve lived in the San Juan metro area I’ve constantly felt gentleness and happiness here. It’s busy, but busy in a tropical green. Just a little way away from the traffic the noise dies down and other sounds come out. In the evenings, the sky is puffy with low scattered clouds that light up in pink and purple.

Somewhere Between America and Africa

When you look at a map of the world, you see how far out in the ocean Puerto Rico actually is. It’s about halfway between Africa and much of America. Living here can also feel that way: like you are living somewhere in between.

You carry USA dollars in your pocket but you know you are not in the USA. The cars and fast food restaurants certainly look familiar, but the culture in work and life is something different; that is, it’s Puerto Rican. In it we’ve constantly felt glimmers of something familiar. Not so much to our experiences in the USA, but rather to other places such as Africa. Except here it’s in Spanish.

Where Have all the Horses Gone?

Just a few years ago we’d often see twenty or more people on horseback in the evenings, galloping down the street outside our urbanization in Guaynabo for fun. I haven’t seen them in a long time. I don’t know where they are now.

In her memoir When I Was Puerto Rican, Esmeralda Santiago describes in vivid detail how it used to be. I found this book to be particularly moving to read having lived these years in a modernized Puerto Rico. I could really feel the poignancy of the author’s use of the past tense in her title: "When I was Puerto Rican."

In this book a rural barrio named Macún is immortalized. I was surprised to discover that Macún was only a few miles away from where we’d lived all these years. But even if it wasn’t I would have still made the pilgrimage.

To get to Macún, drive on Highway 2 through Bayamón. At a certain point pull over and park. Walk a little ways in and you’ll find a quiet lane which curves through the bottom of a little valley between two green hills.

If you walk down this lane, past the houses and trees and roosters, and you’ve read the book, you might begin to feel the pull of emotion. It feels as if you are walking back through the decades. There it is, there it still is: the place where all those things in the book happened. This was the path that Negi walked along to get to school. Over there could have been where Doña Ana's house was, where everyone hunkered down during the hurricane of 1956. And that slope over there, well, it could have been where Raymond unfortunately got his foot stuck in the gear of that bicycle.

When you reach the end of the lane and come out of your reverie, you might be surprised by what you find. But it’s fitting. Here it is:

Autopista 22

At the end of the lane in Macún: Autopista 22!

Some of the Things that I Loved

La Casita Blanca restaurant in Santurce: from the handshake (on entering) to the shot of licorice liquor containing three coffee beans (on leaving), for health, money, and love.

Medalla beer in ten-ounce cans, especially served in any little bar by the side of the road, with ice congealed to the top. The bartender holds it by the lid, thwacks the side of it with her index finger, and senses its sound and vibration to make sure you get a beer and not a beer Slurpee.

The Coconut Palms Inn and the beach town of Rincón, The Town of Beautiful Sunsets, on the island’s west end. The Tropical Fish room is a peaceful apartment tucked next to a garden behind the main house. It was our home for at least two dozen visits. The bedroom can be made cool, silent, and very dark at any time of the day. It’s a great place to go into a coma (telephone [phone]).

Flying kites at El Moro fort in Old San Juan, and skateboarding in the nearby plaza. Then walking down the blue cobblestone street to the Children’s Museum. On the way back, get Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Curvy mountain road trips, with the houses and towns appearing out of the forests in the sunshine.

Café d’Aquí. It’s one of the cheaper bags of Puerto Rican coffee and it can sometimes be inconsistent, but damn is it good! You can get it at Amigo and Grande supermarkets, but not at Pueblo.

Coquí frogs chirping in the night, of course. And friendly geckos running beneath the couch. And the occasional huge, ferocious-looking but harmless iguana crossing your path, or deciding to hang out in your garage for a few days.

Running on the beach.

There is a dove here that coos four times. It can coo in the morning or in the afternoon. It is the most soothing sound that I know. Someone told me it is the Eurasian Collared Dove, but I don’t believe that is correct.

¿Quién Somos, y a Dónde Vamos?

Who are we, and where are we going?

A few years ago my Spanish teacher explained to me why she believes this to be the perennial Puerto Rican question.

But it is also a question I continue to ask myself. And I hope I always will. It sure feels like an honest question to pose right about now.

Thank you, Puerto Rico, for teeing us up for this journey! Thank you for everything.

Chapter 2

Florida

June 3-10, 2008

Florida

What were we doing in Florida? Well, it was a great place to start out for several reasons. One reason was that Baraka is finally over 51 inches tall, which meant he was allowed to go on almost any extreme ride in any theme park.

Also it was great to experience some of the true Americana that we hadn’t seen for so long while living in Puerto Rico, before we took off to other regions.

Starting Out Where You Could Start Over

Our first stop was Pompano Beach, just north of Miami, to visit my old friend Mauricio.

One of the things I love about the USA is that it is the land of second and third and even fourth chances. In the USA you can change your name, your face, move three thousand miles away, and take another crack at life. Not so true in most other countries.

Pompano Beach felt like it could be a great place to start all over again, if you needed or wanted to. Get some kind of a job, and get some kind of a room close to that sparkling water and endless beach. Make everything within biking distance and get some kind of a bike. Shop at Dollar Tree; get a gym with a good rate. It could be okay. There is a wide diversity of people and ages here and many of them appear happy, healthy and sun-shiny.

Orlando and the Nick Hotel

Wikipedia says that Orlando is one of the main tourist destinations of the world. Over fifty million people arrive here each year to stay in over 100,000 hotel rooms and visit seven major theme parks and dozens of other attractions.

We drove three hours on the Florida Turnpike to reach Orlando, where we checked into the Nick Hotel. The full name of this hotel is Nickelodeon Family Suites by Holiday Inn. It’s located close to Disney but the characters watching over you here are Sponge Bob, Jimmy Neutron, Dora the Explorer, and the Fairly OddParents. The place has two waterslide parks and they say you can get dumped on with Nick slime there each afternoon at 4:45, from a massive bucket positioned over one of the water parks. We didn’t get slimed because, like many people, we were always out and about.

What are the Best Rides in Orlando?

You’d have to spend a lot more time here than we did to figure that out. Mission to Mars, the space simulator at Epcot, is up there. Here you are loaded into an enclosed cab on a big centrifuge with a video display in front of you and spun around at maybe 500 rpm when you blast off. It makes you realize how elastic your cheeks are.

We also really liked the 4-D experiences, which seem to be the up-and-coming thing. This is 3-D with better technology and slightly less corny glasses to wear. The fourth dimension is water being sprayed on your face when you encounter river rapids or when a dog sneezes, air being blown on your face and feet, something getting poked into your back, et cetera. Some examples are Magic Kingdom’s Mickey’s Philharmagic and Epcot’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. When they combine this with the virtual reality helmets and the centrifuge cabs, they won’t need to build actual rides anymore.

Magic Kingdom is compact, had a classic sentimental feel to it, and was flooded with an ocean of humanity. Epcot Center in contrast had wide open spaces and a totalitarian state type of architecture. So the people-watching was better at Magic Kingdom. There we witnessed a very large man wearing pink Minnie Mouse ears and a huge grin, pushing a stroller and herding his family. A group of Buddhist monks in maroon robes was also having a good time. Observing the employees was interesting as well. I felt intrigued by the Asian woman who piloted the raft out to Tom Sawyer’s Island. She was so energetic and confident. What was her story?

Here’s a joke we learned at Monster’s Inc. Laugh Floor: What do you call cheese that isn’t yours? (Answer: Nacho Cheese.)

In the middle of all these sensory stimuli, it was interesting to watch children latch onto the timeless pleasures of Tom Sawyer’s Island. Baraka and a bunch of other kids had a blast playing on the fort, shooting toy guns towards the Thunder Mountain roller coaster across the water, and playing tag in the playground area. Down by the raft dock there was a table fitted with a set of checkers and it was surrounded by a crowd of kids. We were on that island for a long time.

Video Arcade on Steroids

One of the minor attractions at Downtown Disney is called DisneyQuest and it is worth way, way more than the price of admission. We strolled in nonchalantly at about 7:00 pm. We staggered out after 1:00 am, needing to remind ourselves that we weren’t going to fight any more aliens or pirates; rather we were going to climb into a rental car and drive calmly to Waffle House for pie. This five floor video game and virtual reality arcade is a total blast!

We spent the first three hours playing human pinball, fighting pirates, rafting rivers, et cetera, and that only sort-of got us through the first two floors. Then we went upstairs to Cyberspace Mountain. There you use a computer to design your own 10,000-foot long roller coaster. Then you give them the computer card and climb into a cab on one of those centrifuge machines and ride your creation! By your second try you can figure out how to achieve the Code Red (i.e. scariest) rating for your roller coaster.

Other Americana

I’m really worried about Waffle House. I love Waffle House, and come to think of it, I’ve been worried about Waffle House for about ten years. The restaurant chain always seems to be on its last legs. They always have plenty of employees, but usually not many customers and sometimes not much food. Is it a front for something else? I cherish every Waffle House visit, expecting it to be my last. "

We just had to hit Waffle House for dessert one night while we were in America. But when we got there they told us they didn’t have any pie, so we were forced to go next door to a McDonald’s drive-through for ice cream cones. There we were warmly greeted by a lady's voice and she thought we said we wanted Cokes. "Oh, cones! she exclaimed. Well you be wanting the good stuff! Ahma sorry, baby, that'll be $2.97."

Speaking of McDonald’s, the one located at the intersection of Sand Road and International Drive has, in addition to a very large play place including air hockey, a Happy Meal toy museum! It is interesting to see how the Charlie Brown and Garfield toys from the 1980s do indeed look like they came from a different century. That was back when China still did hand painting, I think.

Down the street from this McDonald’s is a Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not Museum. There I learned that Robert Ripley possessed a kindred traveling spirit. When Ripley’s newspaper cartoon business began to take off in the 1920s, he ramped up his travel. His first trip around the world was in 1922. Ripley went on to visit about two hundred countries, always on the lookout for something interesting. His favorite country was China.

One of the reasons Ripley was able to do all this traveling was that he hired linguist Norbert Pearlroth to be his researcher. While Ripley roamed the world, Norbert worked long hours in the New York City Public Library, finding and corroborating curious facts for Ripley to put into his cartoon panels. Norbert ended up working on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not cartoons much longer than Ripley himself, logging 52 years in the library.

I sure wish Norbert could’ve had a laptop and wireless internet!

On The Road Again

One hot afternoon we parked on a lazy street in the outskirts of Orlando’s center, and stood on the sidewalk outside 1418 Clouser Avenue, a.k.a. The Jack Kerouac House.

Although Jack usually didn’t live anywhere for very long, he did live in this house for about a year during the time On The Road was finally published and became a sensation in 1957. I think this was his mom’s house. This was also where he wrote The Dharma Bums during a twelve day stint, taping the sheets of paper end-to-end to feed his typewriter so he wouldn’t have to stop typing. The house became a museum for a while but now it is used as a writers’ retreat. Known as The Jack Kerouac Writer-In-Residence Project, different authors move in to work in three-month stints.

The current writer-in-residence had moved in a few days before we got there, but he didn’t appear to be home. Maybe he was out at a big box store buying a new laptop.

The Equalizing Power of Water

For our last Orlando day, Baraka and I spent a relaxing afternoon at a Disney water park called Blizzard Beach. This is a water park set up to look like a ski resort, complete with a chairlift that takes you up a fake mountainside to the Summit Plummet waterslide. As Baraka spilled over the edge and disappeared on his way to achieving 63 miles per hour and a wedgie, I spied the artificial river orbiting the grounds below. What a marvelous concept (you can probably tell I hadn’t done this before)! This is a never-ending river where you can laze on an inner tube and drift around all day without ever getting out.

There is something about being in water together that, to me, removes our divisions as human beings. It washes the facades off of people and shows their true selves. The crowd floating on the river that day looked so happy and relaxed; so at peace. Everyone was beautiful.

Chapter 3

Chile, Part 1

June 11-27, 2008

Chile

Chile is one of our been there places. However when a country is 4,300 kilometers long, that’s kind of like saying we’ve been to the USA after spending a couple of weeks in Connecticut and Utah.

I became intrigued by Chile at age seven while studying the world map. I pronounced it Ch-eye-l, and I was absorbed by the sight of the unique, long skinny country with the cool name. And I wondered what it was like to be there, on the flip-side of the earth from where I was sitting (I grew up in Seattle).

I followed up on this urge in the 1990s, one dark and rainy Seattle winter while in serious need of mood rehab. Maxing out a credit card, I flew a day and a night and wandered through the summer streets of Santiago. I took the funicular to the top of San Cristobal Hill in the center of the city and slept all afternoon in the sunshine. Then I began to feel a certain energy kick in. I ended up staying a month and a half, phoning my job to tell them I needed more time. Human Resources had to establish procedures for taking unpaid leave when I finally got back! Chile is good like that. There is a mystery and a spirit here. And a linearity. The country feels like it’s a long up-and-down meandering length of ribbon, placed on a sideways tilt from the enormous Andes down to the sea.

Much later Baraka and I began coming to Chile to ski. When it is summertime in Puerto Rico, Chile is a reasonable overnight trip to get into some snow! We did this a couple of times, but were always short on time and stayed close to Santiago and the ski areas nearby. We were glad to return again, except with more time to explore longer reaches.

Heavy Blankets

The Hotel Foresta in Santiago looks out to the northern tip of Cerro Santa Lucía, a hill-park rising across the street. In past lives this hill has been a hermitage, a convent, and a military facility. For the past 135 years it has been a wonderful public place to walk and climb. It has a little castle on top where you can take in the view of the whole city with the towering jaw-dropping Andes as a backdrop. On the hill’s side ledges perch snack bars where you can buy a coffee and a completo, the Chilean hot dog piled high with tomatoes, mayonnaise, and guacamole.

We got Room 604 which overlooks Cerro Santa Lucia’s northern entrance. From this room you look right down to the path leading up from the park’s main iron gate. This is the kind of place where you can imagine star-crossed lovers meeting on rainy nights beneath leafy autumn branches, or something equally dramatic. It was indeed autumn when we arrived, a season we hadn’t experienced in a long time since we had lived so many years in the Caribbean.

After flying all night it is always wonderful to check into the funky old Hotel Foresta first thing in the morning. Prices were a little higher than last time and the hotel seemed a little spiffier, but it was still the same beloved and quirky place with a knight’s shining armor standing in the lobby. And it was still an excellent value at about fifty dollars per night. The rooms are actually little suites, with a TV-and-sitting room leading to a bedroom fitted with two little beds, all matched in cozy and dated décor.

Per our established protocol for Hotel Foresta arrival, Baraka switched on his Spanish cartoons while I unpacked. Then, per protocol, I closed the bedroom door, drew the curtains, crawled beneath those delicious heavy blankets, and promptly slept for three hours. Those Hotel Foresta bedrooms have a certain power.

Hotel Foresta

From Room 604, Hotel Foresta

Neruda House #1

It is easy to learn almost nothing about the poet and Nobel Prize laureate Pablo Neruda when you grow up in the United States. This is largely due to the fact that he was an active member of Chile’s Communist Party during the Cold War. Neruda died in 1973 but he lives on as one of Chile’s national heroes. If you are curious to know more about him, you might check out his autobiography, Memoirs.

Neruda built La Chascona, his Santiago house, for his third wife Matilde. The first section of the house was built while he was still married to someone else and looks appropriately clandestine with no windows facing the street. This contrasts with the other parts of the compound which were built after the relationship went public and which are more open. The entire house is delightful and unusual, filled with items and humor and stories, and with narrow passageways and low openings where the six-foot-tall and bulky Neruda would barely fit and could easily bump his head.

A secret movable panel behind the bar near the entrance leads to a spiral staircase. In an upstairs bedroom, Matilde’s makeup seat and table swivel shut to appear as a 1950s washing machine. There is a gigantic pair of shoes hanging on the wall in a sitting room which look like they’d fit the world’s tallest man we’d recently learned about at the Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not Museum in Florida. These are fake shoes that had hung outside a cobbler’s shop in southern Chile in the early 1900s, to identify the shop to people who could not read.

In Neruda’s study, on the wall behind his chair, hangs a large and somber old oil painting of some stern-looking lady. Who was this important person to occupy such an eminent place in Neruda’s life and home? Oh, nobody he knew. Neruda just thought she was incredibly ugly. He put her there so that whenever he tired of working and began to daydream and look around, he would see her morose mug and prefer to get back to work.

Mediterranean? Southern Cal?

We went back to Limache, to visit my old friend Luisa.

Limache and its neighboring town Quillota are set beneath the coastal peaks of the La Campana Range, close to the ocean ports of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. Charles Darwin climbed La Campana during his voyage on The Beagle when it docked in Valparaíso in 1835.

Limache for me contains a peculiar energy, and a bittersweet vibe. It is a lovely place and it feels like one where centuries of happenings went down which were not always wonderful. There is a quiet-ness in the bustle on the main street at night. I feel ghosts in the central plaza, of townspeople all gathered for some reason, or for New Year’s Eve.

I fondly remember being in Limache with Luisa and her family and friends for New Year’s Eve 1994. At midnight we toasted with glasses of champagne, each glass containing twelve grapes, one for good luck in each of the coming months of the New Year. We also ate a mouthful of boiled lentils for good health. Then we sat down to a feast of barbecued meat. Then, at about 1:30 am, we got dressed up and walked into town and to the night clubs where we danced until dawn.

Limache and Quillota have a Mediterranean feel, and when you get closer to the Pacific Ocean, a Southern Californian ambiance begins to seep in…but not quite. This is the flip-side; this is Chile.

The region is agricultural and famous for its orchards of avocado as well as the lesser-known cherimoya and lúcuma. Cherimoya fruits look kind of like fused artichokes, and Quillota boasts the only trees in Chile that give a sweet fruit. Many trees elsewhere give no fruit at all. When you spy a cherimoya in the grocery store in Chile, it’s bound to be from Quillota. Also abundant are the lúcuma trees which give a soft, sweet creamy fruit ideal for use in desserts.

In addition to explaining the fruits, Luisa gave me lessons in the medicinal properties of hipericum, hierba de San Juan (St. John’s wort), thuja, dandelion, passiflora, laurel, and artemisia, all of which grow easily here. It is interesting how overlooked the common and versatile dandelion is. We don’t get its name right in English either: it’s not a dandy lion but rather diente-de-león, or teeth of the lion.

Colored Hillsides

We visited Chile’s oldest city, Valparaíso. This place rocked before the Panama Canal took away most of its business in the early 1900s. But the city is still boisterous and full of character.

We rode one of the old ascensores up the steep hill from the port. These lifts were built in Valparaíso’s heyday between the 1880s and 1916. As I entered the wooden turnstile room and climbed into the cabin I was struck by an aroma and ambiance reminiscent of my beloved and long-gone elementary school which had been built in the same time period.

From the top of the lift we walked a bit and then hailed a cab to La Sebastiana, Pablo Neruda’s Valparaíso house. Like the house in Santiago it is lovely and funny, and it also has wonderful views out to the harbor. On the table in the dining room you see colored water glasses, of course. Neruda insisted that water tasted better when you drank it from colored glasses.

Heading North on I-5

Clouds gathered as Baraka and I continued north on Chile’s deluxe and cost-effective bus system. We rode beneath a pink nimbus along the Pacific coast and observed the vegetation thin out. A rain storm caught us that night in the city of La Serena, where we hurried from the bus station to a hotel through an uncommon downpour. The next morning while jogging on the dark sand beach, I spied two snorkelers in swim fins walking backwards into the cold surf.

We headed onward, north on the Pan-American Highway, which incidentally is called Highway Five in Chile just like it is in the United States. In fact you could drive this road all the way from Chile to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska if it weren’t for the Darien Gap between Columbia and Panama, which is an 80-kilometer stretch of unpaved rainforest.

A further sixteen hour trip got us to Calama, in the heart of Chile’s world-dominating copper mining region. The Chiquicamata mine near Calama is one of the world’s largest open pit mines. Unfortunately their public tours had been suspended when we were there.

En route we passed by sixteen-wheeled trucks loaded with sodium nitrate. This is another important export of Chile, though not as important as it was before the Germans began manufacturing synthetic nitrates to make fertilizers in the 1930s. The nitrate mines here were important enough to motivate Chile to annex this region from Bolivia in 1879, which prompted the War of the Pacific.

It is often said that the journey is the road in South America. You can readily feel this while you travel the Pan-Am Highway north through Chile. In the early mornings you pass by lines of semi trucks parked by the side of the road in the cold desert. You see the drivers leaning against their rigs drinking warm beverages. Many of the trucks have metal boxes affixed to the driver's side of the cabs which contain propane burners and tea kettles.

Desert and Oasis

From Calama it is a further hour to the Atacama Desert oasis town of San Pedro de Atacama, on the edge of a salt basin at 2,400 meters in elevation.

During the past decade or so this adobe village has added tourist mecca to its eons-old identity as a simple desert oasis. The quiet lanes are now filled with rest houses, bike rental kiosks, and tourist restaurants which burn nighttime courtyard fires. To keep the flames roaring they occasionally sprinkle a powder onto the new wood to get it to flare up. I wondered if they were using some of the sodium nitrate we’d seen loaded onto the semi trucks, and I was a little bit concerned. But we found out it was only sugar.

Though it can feel a bit over-hyped, San Pedro is a friendly and interesting place. Here you can comfortably experience the desert and oasis ambiance. We enjoyed tooling around on bicycles. Baraka also had fun kicking ball in the dusty lanes with local children.

Outside the village of San Pedro is the Atacama Desert for real, the world’s driest desert. Perhaps it might rain once or twice per year, for a minute or two each time. Some weather stations in the region have never recorded any rainfall at all.

The town is located at the edge of a basin set between the coastal mountains and the Andes, which was once part of the ocean floor. The land rose up, evaporated, and left a plain and intermediate mountain range comprised significantly of salts and crystallized gypsum. In the Cordillera de la Sal, or Salt Mountains, you can walk up to walls comprised largely of these substances. If you stand near to a rock wall in the evening and you are quiet, you will hear the surface cracking and groaning in response to the changes in temperature.

Commanding the Andes skyline to the east of San Pedro is the 5,916-meter volcano Licancabur, The Protector of the Town. It felt weird to know that this relatively minor peak is taller than Mount Kilimanjaro.

The whole region is in fact teeming with volcanoes. Visible to the southeast is the flat-topped Lascar, the most active Chilean volcano prior to Chaiten rearing up in southern Chile this past May. Relatively minor eruptions of Lascar occur on an average of once to twice per year. Its latest big blow-up occurred in 1993 and caused ash to fall as far away as Buenos Aires.

You can rent a mountain bike plus a sand board for ten dollars in San Pedro, and then pedal four kilometers up a salt canyon to arrive at Valle de Los Muertos, or Death Valley. There you’ll find the local sand boarding hill.

It is surreal and lovely to carry what appears to be a snowboard and hike up through this dry landscape to arrive on top of a dune. The sand at this time of the year is warm on the surface, as long as it is in the sunshine, and comfortably cool beneath.

We went barefoot.

Sandboarding

Sandboarding in Valle de los Muertos

The Ancients

Hunter-gatherers began living in the San Pedro area about 11,000 years ago, when it rained a whopping twice as much as it does now i.e. not much. Unlike the Sahara, the Atacama Desert has a long history of hyper-aridity: one that has lasted fifteen million years or so. Naturally the oasis we were staying at had been used as such by indigenous people for quite a long time.

About four thousand years ago these people evolved into a more agricultural society. They also developed sophisticated methods for mummifying the dead, presumably to ensure eternal existence of the body and soul. Also about this time they began to sniff hallucinogenic powders.

From about 500 AD onward the people here were significantly impacted by and involved with the Andean empires to the north. It seems that the latter-day Incas get most of the glory in popular conscience, but it was the earlier empire of the Tiahuanaco that exerted a more significant influence on the people of the Atacama. The Tiahuanaco culture began at around 1500 BC, long presaging the relatively short-lived Incas. By 500 AD the Tiahuanaco began expanding into one of the first great American empire-states. This lasted about 500 more years (until about 1000 AD) before it went into an unexplained decline. The Inca Empire rose a couple of hundred years later, and the first Incas arrived in this part of the Atacama Desert a mere ninety years before the Spanish came in 1540.

I did not sleep well in San Pedro. The nights were restless and full of unsettling dreams. The more I learned about the area and the ground on which I was sleeping, the more this made sense. Who knew what bones lay at rest beneath me, or all that had occurred over the eons on the exact same little patch of earth I was resting on? As we climbed on a night bus to head onward to Arica, this eerie feeling dissipated.

We reached the northern border port/resort/casino city of Arica and checked into the Sunny Days Hostel, a friendly hangout run by a New Zealand guy named Ross and his Chilean wife, Beatriz. But it was not a sunny day, if you can believe it. In fact it was rather cloudy.

All of our clothes were laden with Atacama dust so I loaded them into the washing machine and then hung them out to dry. Can you believe they did not get dry? This was incredibly unusual seeing as Arica gets about the same amount of moisture as does San Pedro de Atacama.

I swear I felt a raindrop fall on my face in Arica. I felt blessed!

Chapter 4

Bolivia

June 27-July 17, 2008

Bolivia

There’s an initiation to Bolivia when you enter by road from Chile and it is called altitude. And you better get used to it if you are on a one-way trip like us.

Our morning began at sea level in Arica. Three hours later we stood at the Bolivian border offices at 4,600 meters in elevation (15,100 feet). Everyone else from our bus looked like they felt very normal, like this was no big deal. Meanwhile Baraka and I felt decidedly silly. It was as if we were in some kind of bizarre dream as we tried to behave respectably and get through the immigration procedures.

The scenery added to the otherworldliness. This cross-border highway passes through a trove of ice-laden volcanoes towering above scrublands. On the Chilean side you see the twin volcanoes of Parinacota and Pomerape at 6,342 and 6,420 meters in height respectively. On the Bolivian side Nevado Sajama dazzles by the side of the road. It’s the eighth-tallest volcano in the world at 6,542 meters (21,463 feet).

Nevado Sajama

Nevado Sajama

Our route across Bolivia meandered through the Altiplano, then the Cordillera Oriental, and then down, down and through the eastern lowlands. In four of the eastern provinces (called departments), referendums had recently been passed by large margins for autonomy from the central Bolivian government. The government in turn declared these votes to be illegal. We were interested to see how this political turmoil impacted daily life across the country.

La Paz Style

La Paz is a good place to cut yourself a break while your body adjusts to the altitude. Even after a few days here, when you think you’ve mastered it, you might giggle at yourself if you attempt to go up some stairs quickly right after eating. But if you can manage it, it is fun to walk up the steep city-valley hillsides in the late afternoons and sit up high somewhere and watch the sun disappear. Then go back down, down through teeming streets along narrow sidewalks in the evening rush hour where commuters line up in single file to board their minivans.

The metropolis of La Paz is alive with people dressed in standard clothing, but there are also plenty of Aymará women who choose to wear more traditional dress. But to call it traditional dress can be misleading unless you are more specific about the tradition. A better term might be fashion.

The current traditional look evolved from the colonial era, when Spain imposed its culture and customs on Andean people. By decree, Spain instructed women to use characteristic dress, which meant they had to wear woolen tops, full skirts (called polleras), and head coverings. Even the parting of hair down the center was a requirement for women, decreed by Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo, the governor of Peru in the 1570s. However the Viceroy of Toledo certainly did not decree that Bolivian women shall wear bowler hats.

Bowler hats weren’t even invented until about 1850, in London, and they were designed to be worn by men.

The tradition of Aymará women wearing bowler hats goes back to the 1920s. Rumor has it that some expatriate merchant in La Paz ordered too many, too-small bowler hats for the European expatriates, and the surplus hats were adopted by local women. Another rumor is that bowler hats enhance fertility (and it's true that Charlie Chaplin had more than ten kids, eight of them after he turned 53).

Two facts appear to be certain, however: (1) The bowler hats really caught on with women of Bolivia, and (2) they are more about fashion than utility. One element of the style is the size: The hats must be too small to fit around the person’s head. Rather they are balanced on top, not held on with pins.

Most of the women in bowler hats appear to be approaching middle age or are older. However the traditional Aymará clothing ensemble is making something of a comeback these days among younger women here, if you can believe it. I saw one pretty girl on the sidewalk holding hands with her boyfriend. She wore a tiny bowler hat over centrally-parted hair that was made into long braids. She also wore a tight woolen blouse, high heels, and a form-fitting pollera skirt which would have made the Viceroy of Toledo blush.

Another style we observed in the streets of La Paz was that of the shoeshine men and boys, who wore ski masks pulled down over their faces which made them look like hoodlums. Some say they do this to avoid being recognized while performing a low-level profession, but I sensed it was just part of the uniform. We also saw a small film crew in the streets working on what appeared to be a drama about these shoeshine workers. Perhaps the director Hector Ferriero’s film Camino Luminoso will be coming to your local art house sometime soon.

In addition to the masked shoe shiners there was a subset of traffic policemen who wore full-body zebra costumes while they directed pedestrians. And for some reason a lot of student groups were performing synchronized dances in open spaces on June 27 and 28. And one night we walked out of a movie theater and straight into the Gay Pride parade!

Coca

A good way to cope with the chill and the altitude in La Paz is to have yourself a nice hot cup of coca leaf tea. You can get one just about anywhere. Coca tea provides you with a slight numbness in your mouth as well as a gentle boost.

Coca leaves and highland Andean culture are part and parcel to one another, deeply intertwined, and have been so for thousands of years. There is evidence that Andean people chewed coca leaves as early as 2500 BC, which makes coca one of the oldest domesticated plants in the New World, up there with potatoes and peanuts. Telling highland Bolivians to stop chewing coca leaves is kind of like, say, telling Puerto Ricans to stop speaking Spanish.

The Coca Museum on Linares Street in La Paz does a good job of presenting the many facets of the coca topic. You might be surprised to know that as recently as the 1990s the Coca-Cola Company still bought coca leaves from Bolivia to use in the drink as a flavoring. However Coke ceased to contain outright cocaine in 1912.

The Spanish conquistadores initially considered coca to be a threat to the advent Catholicism in their colonies, and banned it. But they soon noticed how coca usage improved the productivity of indigenous laborers, and lifted the ban. In fact the chewing of coca leaves became mandatory for slaves working in the notorious mines at Potosí.

Afro-Bolivians: Doing the Math

Many people here were intrigued by Baraka’s looks and just couldn’t resist rubbing his head affectionately. He got pretty tired of this. Walking through La Paz, you might see one or two people of African descent, and you might not. In a total of five days I spied two young black women working in a pizza restaurant near our hotel, and one black guy walking in the street. This is similar to what I’ve seen in the cities of Chile and Argentina.

Few people of African descent are Bolivian, probably less than 40,000 out of a population of about nine million. Many of these Afro-Bolivians live as farmers in certain regions of the Yunga Mountains north of La Paz, where the massif drops down to the Amazon basin. Many speak Aymará in addition to Spanish, but intermarriage with the rest of the population is uncommon. Afro-Bolivians do have a presence in La Paz and in other urban areas, but not in the center of the cities and not in any defined neighborhoods.

Many historical summaries such as those found in travel literature explain how Spain forced significant numbers of Africans into slavery in Bolivia over the course of centuries, and that most of them were brought to work in the silver mines at Potosí. Given this long history of slavery, why then is the population of African descendants in Bolivia so minute compared to, say, the United States, Brazil, or the Caribbean?

It begins to make more sense when you study the numbers and learn more about the situation. An estimated 9 to 10 million Africans survived ocean transport between 1502 and 1873 to work as slaves in the Americas. Of these, about 4.5 million were sent to South America and about 4 million more went to the Caribbean. Only about half a million were brought to North America in total, a fact which you might find surprising considering the strong black presence in the United States today. In North America, unlike elsewhere, imported Africans reproduced and expanded their population during the slave era despite high death rates. The same cannot be said for South America and the Caribbean, where high death rates combined with low birth rates to make it necessary to continuously import new slaves to replenish the numbers.

In South America, about three quarters of the Africans went to Brazil, under control of the Portuguese. The Spanish imported significant numbers to what is now Colombia and Venezuela, and also brought about 100,000 Africans to the region called Peru which also included Bolivia. In addition they brought roughly the same number to Argentina-Uruguay-Paraguay.

Of the 100,000 or so African slaves brought to Peru, less than half arrived in what is now Bolivia, and almost all of them went to Potosí.

There is little doubt that the Africans in Potosí needed to be continuously replenished in order to maintain any significant number. It is documented that Spain began to bring Africans to Potosí in 1608 to supplement the rapidly-dying indigenous slaves, that they brought up to 1,500 per year, and that the total number of Africans living in Potosí at any one time topped out at about 6,000 people. Many of them did not actually work in the mines because the Spanish found Africans to be less effective there than the indigenous slaves. By the late 1700s Africans were also put to work in the basement of