Truffi Wars

I was frustrated when I left home and could not find my usual truffi-taxi. I walked over a couple of blocks to a road that Sarah had recommended. Not a truffi in sight. "Good one Sarah, thanks for the advice," I thought. As I hiked across town I noticed that there were no buses or truffi's anywhere. Then I recalled that my new boss at Performing Life had said that there were truffi drivers smashing out windows on El Prado yesterday. My sharp intellect then put it together that there must be a strike on.

I eventually made it up to El Prado (part of the route I was taking) and I saw the inevitable gaggle of men blocking the road. As they walked along I started to hear wolf-whistling and thought to myself "what kind of protest march is this." Subsequently, I ran up the road a bit to get a better view of proceedings. At this point the march seemed even stranger. What were these bits of wood they were carrying, what could they possibly symbolize; perhaps something Andean?

Well, I say to you, in the moment these are the things you think.

A minute later a mini-van with its truffi line number on its roof then appeared on El Prado. The men swarmed the vehicle and battered it with the sticks, some of which were five feet long. An argument then ensued and then the mob smashed out all the windows of the mini-van.The man circled in red below punctured a hole through the back window with a long staff. He seemed to be the ring leader.

As you can see the photo I took is very undramatic. A minute after it was taken a Police car arrived on the street but did not seem to stop to manage the situation. I got on my way and then realized I was in a mild shock. What the heck was I doing chasing after a group of angry unionists with bludgeoning instruments? What was I doing taking photos of them? This can only be described as bad decision making. What an idiot.

Since witnessing this protest I have checked the back story. Basically what has happened that the truffi line-110 is being challenged by other truffi drivers. Agreements on legal and illegal lines have come to an impasse in Cochabamba and as such cars (almost 100 of them) were attacked yesterday by anti line-110 group. In response to those attacks the pro line-110 people have responded with their own attacks.

Even though nothing happened to me today I have to say that this incident really brought home how quickly curiosity can bring you needlessly into harms way.

¡¡¡Yo soy materialista!!! (#3)

In Cochabamba there are a lot of street vendors. They sell salteña, snacks, sugar cane (out of wheel barrows), cigarettes as well as non-edible items too innumerable to list here. Probably the nicest thing in terms of street venders in Bolivia is the grapefruit/orange juice carts. These carts are on every other corner and dotted around plazas.

In terms of self-gratification there are few things as simple or as pleasurable as finishing up on a warm Cochabamba afternoon and walking through a dappled plaza to a juice lady and watching the world go by as you suck back a freshly squeezed juego de pomelo. The produce is local, you don’t have to drink out of a disposable plastic cup if you don’t want to and if it is quiet the vendor will chat to you even though your Spanish is weak.

I should note that if you ask how much for a glass you will pay BS$03.50 (NZ$00.70) or even BS$04.00 (NZ$00.80) if you are shy and unlucky. When you figure out what is going on BS$03.00 (NZ$00.60) is the price. I recommend you never ask for cost on this one, just hand over the money*.

* Prices in Bolivia for everything are negotiable most of the time (though not in the severe entrepreneurial spirit found in Asia). For example with a taxi the time of the day, how many people and the quality of the taxi will all effect the price of the ride. There are no meters in taxis and “time spent” is not often a variable a driver will consider. Before you get in a taxi you always discuss price through the window. The same thing goes when you are buying fruit and veg in a mercado. This seems to be a distinct difference when dealing with juice carts.

Did I mention I was a middle-manager?

It would be a lie if I tried to give you a sound reason for this exercise. I cannot really answer it. All I can say, for context, was that three months ago I began tracking the top six activities that I thought I should complete everyday. If I did anyone of these activities for more than one hour on a given day (excluding making a diary entry) I would get an ´X´ for completed on my daily tracker.

You could argue that the Rule of One Hour is a weak measure. How does doing any of these things for at least one hour actually add up to or even produce a desired result? Well, feel free to reflect on that one yourself. When I started to question the validity in the Rule of One Hour the only conclusion I could make was that this has gone far enough, I am incapable of refining this process and its feeble methodology any further.

Now three months deep I have got some data and I have got graphs.

Graph One

The first graph I made was a bust. Or as Sarah said, "A waste of time." I wanted to see if there was a general pattern to my month; was I doing more/less/the same thing during the first/second/third/forth week of a month?

The below information reflects all activities completed every day over the course of April, May and June. There appears to be little or no trend. The only thing I could establish from this information was that May and June started well and trended down while April started low and finished more productively.

Graph Two

The second thing I wanted to establish was which activity was favoured over others. Below we can see that reading has taken the lead by a country mile. Not surprisingly the next highest activity was completing a diary entry (i.e. is not subject to the Rule of One Hour and therefore is a less onerous task).

All other activities have been completed consistently though with less frequency. It should be noted that volunteering started half way through April and D.W.E. did not begin until June. It is also notable that May was conspicuously less productive though the trend is generally the same. The lack of productivity in May relates to the time taken out to travel to La Paz to see Hester off.


Graph Three

My favourite discovery so far is through the Overall Productivity Per Day of the week graph. With the exception of May which (as explained above) has been an irregular month April and June clearly show us that there may be some truth in that myth about the middle of the week. As far as Executives are concerned the best day is Tuesday.

I must say that while I am not working nine-to-five I am happily amused with the approximate correlation. The other thing this graph reflects is that there are no "dead" days. When it comes to picking my own schedule and choice of daily activities it appears that any-day and every-day is a good time to being "working" on something; TGIF does not exist in this current lifestyle.

Graph Four

The fourth graph is nice and simple. May is shown clearly as a weak month while April and June reflect that I am consistant with struggling to obtain a perfect score of 186/186 (April/May) and 217/217 (June; +31 for actovoty of D.W.E.) with April being my first - and by far - best month overall.

In terms of percentages that means that in April I completed 158/170 (92.94%), May 106/170 (62.35%) and 170/217 (78.34%) in June.


Conlcusion

It is clear that I have found it diffcult to stay motivated to complete all acitivites everyday. If you were my boss, and given that I have choosen all these activites myself, I think it would be fair to challenge me on this. Why should I be kept on if I am not completing jobs as agreed? Has an agreement not been made here?

Motivationally it should be said that there has been "good", clear, performance in some areas (reading and writing my diary). To develop in the next quarter there is much improvement needed in the areas of studying spanish, volunteering, exercising, D.W.E. and writing.

More generally it appears that - despite having an alternative lifestlye currently - there is still a trend through the middle-days of the week where my performce peaks like any other middleclass person. Contrary to this is the fact that I will still produce on Saturdays and Sundays when Monday-Friday type activities are usually in hiatus in a standard nine-to-five type lifestyle.

Weekend trip to Villa Tunari: Day Two

On our second day we made our way to La Jungla which is a rope swing park in a jungle setting. As Stephanie pointed out it was not unlike the world created in Hook. The only difference being that those Hollywood sets would have had building standards to adhere to. But this is Bolivia after all. There were nails jutting out of boards, ladders on awkward (read: dangerous) angles, platforms three levels up in the trees with questionable integrity and railings that seemed to be there for aesthetic purpose rather than function. The whole time I couldn’t help think of the Cave Creek Disaster.

I probably would not use this facility again but while I was there was no way I could chicken-out. We went around the sky walks, observed all the chicks with their mothers scratching around in the dirt, tried a small swing and a flying-fox that splattered Stephanie with dirty grease then made our way over to their biggest adventure-swing that is about eighteen metres high.

Sarah had no qualms about doing this meaning that my masculinity would be on the line if I did not go myself. After watching half a dozen Bolivians successfully go Sarah and I got our turn. Four stories up on the worst possible platform construction we stoically threw ourselves off the side and had a great time. But there is no way that this thing will not be responsible for a fatality one day. The harness looks about thirty years old and is perishing in places, the carabiner screw-lock was missing, the wire was tied to a branch that could only be about a foot and a half wide and the ties on the wire appeared fastened in an ad-hoc manner rather than with industrial clamping and auxiliary attachments.

The best part for me was the “loading dock” which required you to have the swing lifted over your body. This process turned you, essentially, into a human slingshot. The only thing stopping you from going over the side while the guide fastened you in was a piece of wood that your thighs pressed against. Getting the swing over my head was especially awkward as they are not used to having people of my height on this ride. The design was so poor I almost wished the platform was twenty-eight metres high so that when I went tumbling to my death the fall would be fatal instead of merely crippling.

All in all a fun day. But with an unnecessary air of danger that I do not care to repeat. You can watch me screaming like a little girl below.

Weekend trip to Villa Tunari: Day One

Sarah, Stephanie and I headed to Villa Tunari last weekend past. As per usual we had the Bolivian charm of travelling over a relatively short distance to find ourselves in a completely new climate. Villa Tunari is a classically hot, humid and sticky unlike Cochabamba which is generally warm and dry. My Spanish tutor expressed sadness about this place as it “used to be a paradise” but is now (besides being a tourist town) a major site for narco-trafficking and deforestation. And indeed, we saw a lot of logging trucks and we had to wait narco-screening checkpoints to get in and out of the town centre.

We arrived at about 21:00 on Friday night and stayed at The Mirador Hostel which greeted us with a dark loose-metal driveway (though only about thirty metres long) and dog that bolted out of the shadows to bark at us and proceeded to bite Sarah’s bag which was hanging from her side. Have I mentioned the dogs in Bolivia?

On the first day we changed hostels then, conceding defeat, spent the morning watching the Germany-Argentina match instead of getting out and about. Once we got that out of the way we headed to Parque Machia which is an animal refuge. Overall its facilities were not outstanding (e.g. viewing platforms were shoddily put together and monkeys were able to chew on or eat rubbish that was still discarded by patrons). Besides this the park was pretty cool.

There about 400 monkeys in the park (Capuchins, Spiders) as well as pumas and coati. On our way back from the emasculated El Ensueno waterfall we got to see one of the refuges pumas on the track being taken for a walk by an Australian and French volunteer. The puma was actually sleeping in the middle of the path so we had to stop and wait before we were able to pass. This worked in to our benefit because we got to chat with the volunteers and observe the cat which had its legs damaged ten years earlier by the previous owner (so that it could not run [away]).

Before we headed to the waterfall we spent time observing the monkeys. While the viewing lacked the drama of our Samaipata experience it was still a thrill to walk around and be able to see something going on in every other tree. There must have been about three-dozen monkeys in the first group we saw. The whole time they were throwing themselves around wrestling with each other on the ground and flying around from branch to branch only a meter or two away from us.

I may return here. To volunteer you have to stay a minimum of fifteen days at a cost of US$150 per fortnight. It would be great to hang in the jungle with some animals for a couple for weeks.

Mystery: Can you Google this one?

I was walking home from the orphanage this week and I passed a ute with a surprising sticker on the back window. I have never seen this before and cannot imagine what it specifically represents. The koru design in the middle suggests that this brand originates from New Zealand but besides that insignia there is no other salient information therein.

What the heck is this thing? The best result I could get out of Google was a PDF about leaf morphology and Bolivian gift ideas from Zazzle.

Jogging

I am a creature of habit. With the exception of last week - when Sarah and I were sick (again) - I have managed to go for a run almost every day. This is, among other things, an experiment in trying to get addicted to exercising; with the view that I like I like the idea of having all those endorphins in perpetuity. Sarah and Hester have not enjoyed running here in Cruce Taquiña. I believe that relates to their experience of running on the main road. For me it has been more interesting, and due to the reduced traffic, unproblematic running on the back streets.


Over the last week a couple people have said that Cruce Taquiña is a dangerous neighbourhood. I have to say that I have never felt any kind of threat - while running or commuting - from passersby, cars or any other human related traffic. But there is no doubt that this is a poorer neighbourhood so there is obviously going to be some truth in what people have said. Actually, in the last two weeks two Bolivian style Neighbourhood Support signs (hand crafted of course) have turned up all over the back streets where I run (below). Translated they say “If you are caught stealing here your will be eliminated” and “The thief operating in this area will be burned.”



The worst part of running for me is the “dog problem.” Not dissimilar to my K’ara K’ara experience. Well the dogs here* are not all like those in K’ara K’ara but they are a pest. For instance yesterday when I went for a run one dog just joined me and trotted along the road for bit then departed. Kind of cute really. Then on the way back a dog, about the size of a couple of tennis balls, started yapping at me which led to a larger dog emerging from a front lawn and chasing after me and barking followed by several other dogs. Luckily for me most of the especially aggressive dogs are behind security fences.


The most frightening experience in recent times was when I was running down a sealed road. I had run past a dozen dogs already. No problem, nothing to report. Then out of nowhere three dogs sitting placidly on the side of the road launched into attack position, bared their teeth menacingly and then chased after me. Instinct took over and I stopped and feinted toward them which slowed them for a second before they doubled back at me. I had to stop running and do it again. They retreated but continued to terrorise me with barking and snarling. Once I passed I felt some mild shock then started screaming expletives at them in English. A few people on the side of the road turned and cast me a glance. Yeah I’m just fine thanks.


These gringo-type grievances aside I have been running for enough months now to be wary of the environment but feel experienced enough to feel confident about running around Cruce Tequina. With the recent appearance of the Neighbourhood Support signs it is now obvious that the dogs are trained to molest and intimidate people passing by. In this context I accept them as a signifier of protection against a known danger (that I don’t know that much about). These guys are home security systems.

I look forward to not having any insight into this known-unknown danger.


* As a side note I must say I am amazed by all the different breeds of dogs here. It makes me wonder where they all come from and how interbreeding and owner preference has not led to a less types of them about the place. Yesterday I saw a dog that was half dirty dreads and half shaved (I assume the owner ran out of steam hand sheering the little guy). Clearly he was not intended for this environment.

You can view some of these dogs here.