December 29, 2005Internet in Bolivia and PeruWhile in Santa Cruz we discovered the abundance of Internet cafes that we have later observed throughout Bolivia and Peru. Unlike US, where Internet cafes are non-existent, or Europe, where they are rare and expensive, in Bolivia and Peru public access to the Internet is both abundant and cheap. And when I say "cheap" I don't mean just cheap for gringos like us - at 2 bolivianos (US$.25) an hour, I seemed reasonably cheap by local standards as well. (Bs.2 is about the price of a bottle of local soda or a 1/4 of the price of a cheap lunch in Bolivia. 2-3 euros - roughly the price of an hour of Internet in Europe - buy you a bit more than that.) The Internet was slightly more expensive in Peru (typically 1.5 soles = US$.40), but so were most of other prices. While Internet cafes tend to be most concentrated in places where you might encounter tourists, you can also find them in places where few tourists would go (which we passed on a bus). You could find them in large and small towns. In addition to the typical sign "Internet" and a nearly ubiquitous
large "@" sign, most places featured "Juegos en red" ("Network games")
as the subtitle. A list of exact services was often includes on a
separate plate, often counting CD-burning, scanning, ICQ and, somewhat
to my surprise, mIRC. Many places also offered IP phone calls to most parts of the world for about Bs 1.5 (later 1 sole in Peru) - the cost of a Skype-out call plus a little bit of markup. As is usually the case with IP phone calls, the cost seemed to depend more on the size of the city where the call ended rather than the distance: Bs 1.00 for Rio de Janeiro and other major cities, but Bs. 1.50 or 2.00 for suburban Petropolis. Unfortunately, I did not get an idea of photographing any of the Internet cafes until we were in Lima, when it was already too late. Filed under: Bolivia and Peru in 2005 , Santa Cruz CommentsDecember 27, 2005The Fruits of Bolivian LowlandsDuring our first morning in Santa Cruz, we went to a market where we picked up a few fruits we haven't seen before. One was spiky yellow "ocoró," with a large seed inside surrounded by some tangy meat. It's supposed to be a relative of cupuaçú (though a much smaller one). Another one was "tumbo" - a miniature passion fruit, used for juices ("jugo de tumbo"). The next day we picked up another fruit in a supermarket - "achachairú," yellow like ocoró and similar inside but without the spikes. The fourth interesting fruit (the name of which I no longer remember) was picked up from the ground and eaten after careful washing and an assurance from a friend that it was edible. Inside, there was a little bit of tangy meat (the whole fruit was about 15 mm in diameter) and a large stone. After cracking the stone I got some white stuff out of it which tasted like coconut, but the amount of it was so small that it hardly made the effort worthwhile. Apart from those new fruits, we saw a grapefruit tree and plenty of mango trees with mangos falling on the ground. This abundance of new and old fruits didn't last beyond Santa Cruz - as we moved on to the Altiplano we ended up just seeing the standard fruits (apples, bananas, peaches) and not even a particularly good selection of it. We did see many many different types of potatoes, though. Filed under: Bolivia and Peru in 2005 , Santa Cruz Comments
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Quoth andrés, on February 29, 2008 at 12:36 p.m.: If anybody knows how to say "achachairú" in English, please let me know. Si alguien supiera la traducción de "achachairú" al inglés, agradecería si me avisaran. Please leave your comments. The comments are moderated against link spam and may not appear on the site immediately. Comentários em português são bem-vindos. Puede escribir en castellano también, pero puedo responder solamente en Portuñol. Mozhno po-russki, no v nastoyaschii moment tol'ko v translite. You can also email me at yuri{at}freewisdom.org. December 27, 2005Rio PiraySanta Cruz is located in the lowlands. Though the Andes start just about an hour away, Santa Cruz is as flat as it gets. To highlight the flatness, the nearby Rio Piray is surprisingly wide for it's 1 meter depth. It's is very sandy and is surrounded by bands of mud at least as wide as the river itself. Supposedly the river tends to move around quite a bit and a dam has been constructed to keep it from moving towards the city as it has done in the past. Filed under: Bolivia and Peru in 2005 , Santa Cruz Please leave your comments. The comments are moderated against link spam and may not appear on the site immediately. Comentários em português são bem-vindos. Puede escribir en castellano también, pero puedo responder solamente en Portuñol. Mozhno po-russki, no v nastoyaschii moment tol'ko v translite. You can also email me at yuri{at}freewisdom.org. December 27, 2005Santa Cruz de la SierraWe started our Andes trip in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a city in the eastern part of Bolivia, where we wanted to visit a college friend of mine. We got there after a short flight from Rio de Janeiro, which would be quite painless if it wasn't for the fact that neither of us got much sleep the night before as we were both trying to finish up conference papers before taking off for a three week vacation. We stayed in Santa Cruz itself for 2 full days (Friday and Monday) and used the weekend to go to Samaipata a few hours away by car. Santa Cruz has a pleasant downtown, surprisingly small for a town of over a million people. As we later learned, the city is very spread out and largely suburban (more like the Palo Alto / San Jose area in CA) and much of the nightlife occurs on a few strips outside downtown. Much more than California, in many ways, Santa Cruz seemed like a libertarian paradise. Traffic police was conspicuously absent from the city, traffic lights we installed on only a few intersections, and even then were typically ignored. Santa Cruz also gave us the first opportunity to try converting our Portuguese into Spanish. During our first afternoon in Santa Cruz (walking around by ourselves, without our hosts), we stopped to get ice-cream (Bs.4 each = US$.50) which was our first interaction with the locals. It was a bit complicated because first we needed to negotiate the fact that we needed to get change for a Bs. 100 bill. (We had a Bs.10, but I was saving it for taxi back.) After the woman said that sure, they can give us change, we asked her for flavor we wanted, but instead of giving us the ice-cream she said our order had to be "canceled." After a moment of feeling utterly lost, I made a wild guess (from the context) that by some strange logic "cancel" might mean "pay" in Spanish and showed her the money. She nodded. My friend later explained that it does mean "pay" in the sense of "cancel the debt" i.e. pay what you owe. Speaking of paying, Santa Cruz surprised us with low prices, despite the fact that we read about it in our guidebook. US$1 was going for 8 "bolivianos" (which most people colloquially call "pesos"), and asking for US$200 from an ATM gave us a thick wad of cash that took us a while to spend. While the exchange rate is 1:8, prices in Bolivianos were typically only 2-3 times higher than dollar prices in US. Taxi cost Bs 6-20 depending on distance; a dinner in a restaurant (with desert, etc) was around Bs.40; a room in a hotel typically cost us US$10 to US$15. When we later crossed into Peru we found the prices noticeably higher, though still lower than in Brazil. Filed under: Bolivia and Peru in 2005 , Santa Cruz Please leave your comments. The comments are moderated against link spam and may not appear on the site immediately. Comentários em português são bem-vindos. Puede escribir en castellano también, pero puedo responder solamente en Portuñol. Mozhno po-russki, no v nastoyaschii moment tol'ko v translite. You can also email me at yuri{at}freewisdom.org. |
The Fruits of Bolivian Lowlands |
Please leave your comments. The comments are moderated against link spam and may not appear on the site immediately. Comentários em português são bem-vindos. Puede escribir en castellano también, pero puedo responder solamente en Portuñol. Mozhno po-russki, no v nastoyaschii moment tol'ko v translite. You can also email me at yuri{at}freewisdom.org.