Relaxing in Quijarro - Oct 20, 2009 - Puerto Quijarro, Bolivia

The rest of the bus journey from Santa Cruz to Quijarro was relatively smooth and we arrived at the border town at 10 am. It’s probably too much to call it even a border town. It was more a collection of run-down houses and a few shops. Pigs and chicken were walking along the streets together with the locals. There wasn’t anything to see in the town and it had probably just popped up as an afterthought to the border post to Brazil. The infamous death-train also terminates here for people who want to go from Santa Cruz to Brazil by train.

We ended up looking out the window somewhat on the trip here. The nature wasn’t too inspiring and there were loads of litter along the road. A few people had tried building some haciendas along the road but most of them seemed to be failing. Most of them were in bad state of repair and probably needed fertilizers, machinery and other supplies urgently. But as Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South america, these things are probably very difficult to get by and most enterprises are doomed to fail.

As we approached Quijarro - probably one or two hours before getting there - there was an asphalt road. It was certainly welcome after our night bus shaking and rocking on Bolivia’s many dirt roads. As we traveled to Quijarro we actually realized that we have hardly traveled on any paved roads since entering Bolivia. The trip between Lake Titicaca and La Paz was asphalt but in a bad state. The trips La Paz - Uyuni, the Salt Flats, Uyuni - Potosi, Potosi - Sucre, Sucre - Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz to Quijarro have all been partly paved and partly unpaved. It’s probably 75 percent unpaved…

Marcus was also happy to be off the Andes now. Although there have been amazing views etc, he has really struggled with motion sickness in the sharp twists and turns on the mountains. He has braved it really well but sometimes been feeling a bit unwell.

Given that today is my birthday we have decided not to carry on traveling to Brazil. Instead, we checked into a relatively nice resort - Tamengo - where our double room even had its own air conditioning! There was also two pools, a few hammocks and a nice looking (but not well stock) bar… The views from the hotel were very nice too. We were overlooking the border river or estuary. It was very nice and had some interesting looking birds flying over it.

We spent the rest of the day just chilling next to the pool reading with the occasional dip into the water. Marcus also tried braving a few somersaults into the water but the results were mixed. He mostly ended up on his back… The place also feature wifi and that means we can freely catch up with the surfing (not that we haven’t been surfing regularly in the past few days…)

There were very few people in the hotel but it was after all a Monday. The hotel is probably trying to attract visitors from Brazil to come over for a short weekend break or similar. To our surprise, the two other guests in the hotel were also travellers - a young couple from Sweden. Their names were Alicia and Jesper and they were from Lund and were traveling for six months around South America. Given that they were also planning to go to the Pantanal in Brazil we decided to share a taxi to the border to save a few measly bolivians.

As dawn draw, the mosquitoes were kick started into action and we spent the rest of the evening hiding in a special mosquitoes free building (the windows have mosquitoes nets). The room was pretty romantic with lit candles and I had my lovely steak dinner there and we shared a bottle of wine. As it turn out, and to my surprise, my request for a candle lit birthday dinner was satisfied! I didn’t quite expect that in the middle of nowhere next to the Brazilian border!

Right before we were going to leave the restaurant one of the waiters rushed in and looked very excited. They had apparently managed to catch a tarantula spider and were very keen to show it to the guests. It was pretty big and scary. Marcus didn’t like it and was surprised that they didn’t try and kill it…

Iris