We stopped by Angelica’s office (she is a lawyer) and then continued to our hotel, a very pretty 4-star hotel near downtown, where Ana and I had a few hours to get re-acquainted before lunchtime. We then took a taxi to the house of one of Ana’s aunts (actually a cousin of Ana’s father) named Mamina. One of her sons lives near Sacramento California with his family, with whom we are good friends. Her family in Santa Cruz is large and wealthy, with two more sons and three daughters. Her house is beautiful and of the traditional style: a single level, surrounded by walls, with all rooms opening onto an interior courtyard (or in this case onto two separate but connected courtyards). Some of the sons and daughters and grandchildren met us there for lunch. They were very friendly, but I was pretty lost trying to keep track of who everybody was, and I couldn’t follow much of the conversation.

After lunch we took a taxi to a boarding house where Ana used to live, and I met the woman, Mama Chuplina, who was like a mother to Ana at one time and who still runs the place. In the evening, until after midnight, we all went to a birthday party of a Brazilian woman married to Mamina's son Fito, held at a restaurant, where they had a large buffet (served after 11pm) and two bands that took turns, one a traditional band outdoors, and the other a very loud salsa band that played indoors. The food, which included an entire roast pig, was excellent, and between that and the earlier lunch I ate rather too much food and drank too many of the excellent Bolivian beers. I’m lucky that my family taught me to enjoy all kinds of food because I’ve found that one of the best ways to ingratiate oneself with people from a different culture is to try and enjoy all of their food. They were very pleased to see a gringo eating all of their dishes, and in fact I do like almost all of the Bolivian food, which I was already familiar with from living with Ana.

Saturday, July 12:

Ana and I had breakfast at the hotel and then went for a walk. We ended up at the lovely central plaza of Santa Cruz and visited the cathedral situated at one end of the plaza. The center of the plaza is nicely landscaped and very green. We also visited a shop that sells traditional articles to tourists, and Ana and I each purchased a shirt with motifs from the Chiquitania region that she comes from. Her relatives were all tickled to see me, a gringo, wearing that shirt.

For lunch Ana, Delma, and I took a taxi to an area on the outskirts of the city called Rio Piraí, where a long dirt street is lined with restaurants serving traditional foods. Each restaurant has outdoor dining covered by bamboo structures with thatched roofs. We chose a restaurant that had a little band playing outside. I had soup and some fried fish, Delma had a dish made from cow tongue, and Ana had half of a duck. With all of the side dishes it was a lot of food, and we couldn’t finish all of it.

We recalled our taxi, and he drove us down the rest of the road to the river (Rio Piraí). We saw places renting all-terrain vehicles and horses, and people, mostly children, were fishing and swimming in the broad, shallow river. The taxi then took us on a tour of some of the outlying parts of the metropolitan area, places where Ana said she used to work on political campaigns. But they had changed and grown over the last decade and a half, such that she hardly recognized them. The taxi then continued to a pilgrimage town called Cotoca, a 20 or 30 minute drive from the city, where we visited the grounds and shrines of the large church, and also the surrounding street market.

By coincidence, the taxi driver was from Ana’s home town, San Ignacio de Velasco. He was very nice and reliable, so we continued to use his services the rest of the weekend (and also during later visits to Santa Cruz). He drove us back to the hotel and then back to Ana’s aunt’s house, after first picking up Mama Chuplina. We ended up paying him only about $30 for spending much of the day with us as our private chauffeur!

We spent most of the rest of the day at a party at Mamina's house organized in our honor. There was a traditional band, with a bass drum, a smaller drum, two violins, and a flute. The bass drum plays a loud, steady beat with two notes (the player’s elbow is pushed against the drum to change the pitch), the small drum plays a constant roll, and the violins and flute play a melody. There was a lot of traditional food, including grilled steak and sausages, soup, yucca and salsa, chicha (a sweet drink made from corn), plátano (plantain banana) bread, beer, and rice. The principal starches of the region appear to be rice and yucca, but bread and potatoes are also common. Ana taught me to dance to the traditional music that evening, which provided some amusement for everybody. Ana’s cousins were all very good natured and sociable. The second son Fito, in particular, is quite a clown, always joking with everybody and dancing, sometimes in silly ways, with all of the women.

After dinner, Manito, the oldest son and head of the family (since the father passed away long ago), took us for a tour of one of the wealthier sections of town in his brand new top-of-the-line Jaguar. We saw some very fancy luxury hotels, including the hotel where the daughter of Mom and Dad’s friend was married only about a week before. Then he took us to his house. From where we stopped on the road I could only see a non-descript wall, but he opened an automatic garage door in the wall and we passed through to see an immense mansion, with a garden complete with swimming pool and Jacuzzi. The house was not quite finished inside, but he gave us a complete tour. Everything was made of the highest quality materials, with a lot of beautiful tropical hardwood. Inside the immense kitchen a lone housekeeper or cook sat reading a cookbook. We met his wife and saw their bedroom, which had an enormous bathroom with Jacuzzi and an even larger closet, with space for all of the shoes of Imelda Marcos. Manito joked that all of the storage in the closet was for his wife while all he had for himself was a nail on the wall! We also met two sons, one who spoke English fairly well, as he had studied in Florida. Overall the house would fit in perfectly in Beverly Hills, but in my opinion it lacked the traditional charm of his mother’s villa.

Ana wanted to go to a club afterwards, but we were all too tired by the time we returned to the hotel around midnight, and I was thankful to get a good night’s sleep.

Sunday, July 13:

On Sunday after breakfast we took a taxi to the supermarket and loaded up on provisions to take with us to San Ignacio (where everything is more expensive, if available at all). I was rather concerned about how in the world we would manage to get the stuff there. We bought some household items for Ana’s mother, including a microwave oven. The stores were kind enough to pack everything in boxes, and Ana called our favorite taxi to come and get us. The taxi driver waited quite a while for us to finish shopping and raid the ATM for as much cash as possible to take to San Ignacio (where ATMs don’t exist). He then drove us to the bus station, where we arranged for all the stuff to get shipped that evening to San Ignacio.

An old friend of Ana then met us at the hotel and took us to lunch at a fancy restaurant/cabana outside of town, along with his family. On the way we passed some new luxury housing developments. We wanted to go inside one of them and look at the houses, but the security guard wouldn’t allow it, at first, until Ana greased his palm with I don’t know how much. He then took the friend’s ID and let us pass. The houses were big and very nice, and rather similar to what you would see in an upscale American suburb. Ana wanted to purchase one right away! A mansion could be purchased for a price that wouldn't buy even the smallest house in Santa Cruz, CA.

The restaurant (Casa del Camba, not to be confused with two other restaurants of the same name to be encountered later) was a very large bamboo structure with thatched roof, on the other side of the river from where we had been the previous day. They had a very nice buffet and a couple of bands, one traditional and the other with vocalist.

After lunch we went to the nearby Mariposario (butterfly park) to pass the rest of the afternoon. Inside the park was a huge aviary that we could pass through, a smaller structure full of butterflies, a camping area, playground, swimming pool complex, a lake for boating and fishing, and a restaurant and bar. I climbed up to the tower above the aviary with Delma and took photos of the surrounding area and the distant Santa Cruz skyline.

Finally, Ana’s friend took us back to the hotel to get our stuff and then to the bus station. The station, which also serves trains, was packed with travelers. It was late evening, but apparently much travel in Bolivia is done at night, which I’m sure is quite a blessing in the hot summers. While we waited for our bus we visited the street market across the road and bought some fruit to take with us. The bus departed at about 8:00 pm and headed out of town. It was a modern coach, but not as nice as the one Ana and the kids took a few weeks earlier, she said, as the better bus has seats that turn into beds (sort of). Not far outside of town the pavement ended and we were on a dirt highway the rest of the way to San Ignacio, a distance of 454 km! Before too long the bus came to a halt in a long line of truck and bus traffic. Children immediately surrounded us hawking sodas and other refreshments. When we began to move again I soon saw the reason for the delay. We began crossing a very wide river and its flood plain (we were in the dry season, so not much water was flowing). There was only a single traffic lane, which was slow and bumpy. We were in a narrow trestle, but a hundred meters or so to the right I could see a modern concrete bridge under construction. After we left the trestle the bus veered to the left and I could then see that we had been on a railroad trestle!

Some time later the bus stopped again, in the middle of a town named San Javier (site of an original Jesuit mission), and all of the passengers piled off. The road was lined with busses and trucks. I don’t think I saw a single car, although there were some motorcycles buzzing around the town. Little shops opening onto the street lined the road, selling refreshments. We went into a restaurant of sorts that charged a peso to use the restroom facilities. They also had food and drinks for sale. I had an empanada and some chicha.

We passed through another mission town, Concepcion, after which the landscape became hilly and less populated, with more and more forestation. The road also became bumpier, with washboards most of the way. The driver moved left and right on the road trying to pick out the better parts. When we were stopped earlier I had noted that the tires were kept at a rather low pressure, to better handle the rough road. I didn’t really sleep but dozed in and out over the hours. Sometimes I looked down the isle and through the windshield at the road. It really seemed eerie, as though we were traveling down a dark, earthen road through a dense jungle, very different from the impression one gets in daylight.

Monday, July 14:

Very suddenly, it seemed, we emerged into civilization, and Ana told me that we had arrived in San Ignacio, still very much a frontier town nearly 300 years after its founding. It was still fairly dark, but sunrise was immanent. The bus traveled down several broad dirt boulevards before coming to a halt, whereupon everybody piled out and crowded around the baggage doors, anxious to identify their bags. We piled ours into a taxi, and off we went to Ana’s mother’s house. (I later noted that the bus driver would climb into an open baggage compartment to sleep during the day, with traffic bustling by, before making the return trip the following night.)

By that time there was daylight, and I got my first real look at the town and the countryside. To the south I could see some nearby forested hills, but the town was flat and quite spread out, with wide unpaved streets of fine dirt of a reddish tint.

The houses generally were of brick or adobe with tiled roofs, and with yards surrounded by brick walls. About halfway there we passed a large shed filled with noisy diesel engines turning generators that run 24/7 to supply the town’s electrical power (and that of the surrounding towns as well). Next to it was a concrete water tower, shaped like a gigantic golf tee. Ana’s mother’s house was several blocks further, near the southern edge of town, with open fields across the street.

We entered through a wooden gate on the corner of the lot. The gate was covered by a decorative tiled roof. Inside, the main house sat a couple of meters back from the wall, with a small garden and a porch. In back of the house was a beautiful courtyard, with a smaller (new) house built on the far side, at the back of the lot. Over the past year they had been doing extensive remodeling. I could see from the neighborhood what the original house looked like: just a couple of rooms with the roof sloping only toward the street and a very large back yard, generally filled up with chickens, outdoor wood-burning oven, outhouse, etc. Ana’s mother had doubled the size of the house, with the roof sloping both ways, and had recently built the second house at the back of the lot. She had also paved most of the courtyard and, unfortunately, eliminated the large outdoor oven. A couple of hired workers were busy finishing up some work on the new bathroom that opens onto the courtyard. Ana and I had helped to pay for some of the renovations, and it was gratifying to see what a beautiful house it had become.

I was quickly overwhelmed by introductions. For the first time, I met my suegra (mother-in-law), another cuñada (sister-in-law) named Mariela, her husband Miguel, her 3 young daughters, Valeria, Negra, and Carla, Delma’s 6-year-old daughter Ibana, and Rodrigo, the teenage son of Ana’s sister who lives in Cochabamba (he was raised by his maternal grandmother and is very close to her).

At the same time I was reunited with our 3 young children, Clayton, Ciriaco, and Mateo, after almost a month of being apart. You can imagine what a lively house it was with 7 young children present!

Shortly afterwards we hailed two motorcycle taxis to take the five of us across town to the house of Ana’s grandmother (Abuelita). Motorcycle is the most common mode of transportation in the town, besides walking (automobile traffic is light, and carts pulled by burrows or oxen are not uncommon). The motorcycles don’t go extremely fast, because at each unmarked intersection they have to slow to look for cross traffic. Also, they (and the autos) weave back and forth across the roads trying to avoid the worst potholes and bumps. One has to take care when making a right turn at a corner, because there is no telling what side the oncoming traffic will be on. Women tend to ride side-saddle on the moto-taxi, especially if wearing a skirt. I often saw families of 2 adults and 2 children riding through town on a single motorcycle (something that we also did). The streets were also typically filled with pedestrians, bicyclists, a huge population of dogs (almost none with collars or tags), and the occasional wandering donkey or chicken.

Abuelita lives with her son, my mother in law's brother, in a small old adobe house with a large back yard. The place hasn’t changed much since Ana grew up there and is rather primitive compared with Ana's mother's house. I also met there three little boys, great grandchildren and second cousins to our kids, who live with their mother, a cousin of Ana, in a room attached to the back of the house. The boys were great playmates for our children. A dog, a majestic rooster, and some chickens wandered around the back yard. Ana went next door to a restaurant for some food for her grandmother, who then insisted that I eat with her. It was good, but I was worried that I was also going to be expected to eat another lunch at Ana's mother's house.

Back at Ana's mother’s house I did, indeed, eat a second lunch. Everybody was impressed that I enjoyed the traditional fare. Afterwards I walked a few blocks away with Miguel to a business that manufactures wooden articles, particularly curtain rods. Miguel told me that they ship their product all over Bolivia. We bought a couple of curtain rods for the two bedrooms in the newly finished second house, where Ana and I were to be staying.

My mother in law’s motorcycle had been stolen a few months before, so to avoid having to pay the moto-taxis every day, Miguel went and rented a motorcycle that cost us only about $6 per day. I went with him to fill it up at the sole gas station, located near the town entrance (which turned out to be pointless, as the motorcycle owner sold it the following day and gave us a different one), and he also showed me some more of the town, particularly the main plaza. The streets around the town center are paved, and a crew was busy paving yet another street with concrete. The large central plaza is impressive and beautiful. The entire center of the plaza is a green park, with lots of plants and some statues. The old mission church sits on the north side, but all of the buildings surrounding the plaza are in the mission style. The mission originally was one of several Jesuit missions in this region, before the king of Spain banished the Jesuits from all of his realm (after which they were replaced by Franciscans, who remain to this day).

In the afternoon Ana had a young woman come by to do a complete manicure and pedicure on the front porch. She also had her do the same for me (without the colored polish), and eventually several of the other girls there had their nails done. She did beautiful work, at a tiny fraction of the cost in the USA.

We took the moto downtown to purchase dinner from a vendor in the open-air market. We filled up several food boxes (that Ana and I had purchased in Santa Cruz) with various items, including soup, and took it all home. I was surprised that for less than $6 we fed the entire extended family and had some left over.

After dinner Ana’s father, my suegro (father in law), came by with his chihuahua (Nicky) in his nice Mitsubishi diesel SUV. He took Ana and me for a ride across town. He’s a very charming man, and on the way he and others were joking about him treating Nicky like a child, or Ana’s sister. He asked me something about it, and I replied that Nicky must be my cuñada (sister-in-law). He got such a kick out of that, that for the rest of our visit he referred to Nicky as my cuñada. We went past the plaza and across the dam of a pretty reservoir. On the other side he showed us where a big agri-business is being built, I think to process beef for export. If I understood correctly, it will include an air-strip for the export operation.

I learned from him that his grandfather had come from Germany to San Ignacio around 1890 to represent a German company in some sort of import-export business. To this day the region has closer ties to Germany and Austria than any other western countries. Locals would often assume me to be German until I informed them of my origin.

Late in the evening Ana and I started watching a video in bed on the kids’ portable player. She fell asleep. I continued but started feeling a bit feverish. During the night I definitely had a fever.

Tuesday, July 15:

I awoke feeling sick and weak and soon came down with diarrhea. Maybe it was the food from the previous night (I had avoided thus far drinking any tap water). Ana said it was bound to happen, so it was good to get it over with (wishful thinking). Ana went out with her sister and ended up buying me a hat and boots. The boots were too small, so around mid-day I went with her on the moto to exchange them, and we also stopped by a pharmacy and got some pills for my condition. In Bolivia the pharmacist doesn’t hesitate to give medical advice and dispense drugs that would require a doctor’s prescription in the USA. We also stopped by the house of Ana’s favorite aunt and uncle, who live right on the plaza. Ana’s first job as a teenager was working in their business. They gave me a beer and a piece of cake, which I probably would have been wiser not to have consumed.

I loved my Brazilian-style boots and hat. Everybody laughed and called me a vaquero.

By afternoon I felt somewhat better. Ana's mother was preparing for a big religious party for that evening at her house, with something like 60 guests. Ana had promised her that I would make a cake. I didn’t want to let her down, so I mustered up some energy and tried to start. We had purchased two 10-inch round cake pans, a spatula, and an electric mixer in Santa Cruz, so I found those and began looking for ingredients. It turned out that butter was impossible to get unless you made it yourself from the plentiful raw milk that was delivered almost daily in plastic bags, so I had to do with margarine (I worried needlessly that it would be too salty). Other basic ingredients for vanilla yellow cake were either at the house or in the little markets in town. What I didn’t realize beforehand was that Ana wanted not one cake but three! I had to make 5 times the Bettye Crocker recipe, and the oven was small with only a single rack such that I had to cook 6 layers separately. I had mixed up three large batches of “butter” cream icing by the time I finished. It was pretty simple cake, but everybody loved it. Only two of the large cakes were consumed at the party, and we put the third aside for my niece Valeria’s 11^th birthday the following day.

My mother in law, Ana's sisters, and the nieces were busy all day cooking. They made a huge quantity of bread buns and cheese empanadas, which were all cooked in the neighbor’s outdoor wood-burning oven. In the courtyard they built a fire under a huge aluminum pot, in which they stewed patasca (a soup based on corn and meat) for hours. The party started late in the evening with the guests observing religious rites in front of my mother in law’s Catholic shrine, which was dressed up beautifully with flowers for the occasion. They then had the breads and cake, but the soup was not consumed until just after midnight, at which time the partying really began. There was a sound system with loud music and even a discothèque-like multi-colored light hanging from the tree and turning. They had punch based on some jugs of cheap, rather sweet wine, as well as some large bottles of beer. I missed the party, however, as I was dead tired and fast asleep.

Before the party started, the padre had sat with me and Ana to talk about our wedding plans. The process was problematic because I was not Catholic, but he had talked to the bishop already, and it would be okay as long as I made an official statement that I would not interfere with Ana bringing the boys up as Catholics. We nevertheless had to go through some education by the padre, so he invited us to stop by his church on Thursday morning.

Wednesday, July 16:

The house got off to a late start because of the party, which had continued into the wee hours of the morning. Abuelita had come the previous evening for the party, and she was still there. Ana's father also showed up around noon, and we all had lunch together and looked at some of our photos on my computer. Afterwards, I took Ciriaco and Mateo on the moto to an internet café on the plaza. It was very frustrating to check my email, as every click of the mouse consumed about 5 minutes, but I finally managed to find a mail from René and reply to him, and I also was able to check up on how well my recently launched NASA project was doing (very well, in fact).

In the afternoon we had tea (yerba mate and pastries) with Ana’s friend Lenny. She showed us lots of photos of her daughters wedding and offered to do the wedding decorations for us. She is a professional artist, runs some shops selling local crafts, and in particular designs clothing and the art on the clothing. Her husband likes to hunt and fish, and she invited us back for lunch the following day to try some of the local fish. We also decided that she would decorate the church for our wedding.

Fortunately we had one cake left over from the previous night, for it was Valeria's 11th birthday. We all celebrated her birthday and enjoyed some more cake.

In the evening Ana and I got away by ourselves and rode the moto to the Mission Hotel on the plaza, a rather fancy hotel with a bar and restaurant. As soon as we walked in we ran into a second-cousin of Ana, who was waiting for her dinner party. Then we ordered drinks and had barely started on them when some friends whom Ana had not seen in years or decades came in, including her friend Beidy, who we were to see again several times in San Ignacio and Cochabamba. We ended up sitting with them, and our romantic evening together became something rather different, with me making a futile struggle to follow the conversation and Ana translating for me some of the jokes, which I think must have suffered a lot in translation, as I didn’t laugh nearly as much as they did. When we tried to leave the moto wouldn’t start. Some young women came across the street to help us out and eventually got the thing to start up.

Thursday, July 17:

Our meeting with the padre began at 9am, at his church, a beautiful church named San Francisco, which was designed, as Ana informed me, by the husband of her youngest sister, Rosita. He came from Spain to San Ignacio to design the church and ended up going home with a Bolivian bride. The church was active with a lot of young people, many of them practicing musical instruments or choir. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me, and then I neglected to return and photograph the church for the rest of our stay in San Ignacio.

The padre took all of our papers to make copies, asked us a number of questions, such as why we wanted the religious wedding, and made notes of the answers, and he lectured us at length about the Catholic concepts and expectations of marriage. He went through the ceremony with us and gave us the lines that we needed to memorize (in Spanish, of course!). He warned me to be ready to reply without hesitation, as the priest could interpret hesitation to be uncertainty and call off the wedding at the last minute! He also made a big point about how the marriage must be consummated on the wedding night or else it could be nullified, which I found to be kind of amusing in our case, given that we already had children between us. Our situation was hardly unique. In at least that half of Bolivia it was common for the religious wedding to be held years after the family was started, if at all. I guess that maybe even a majority of couples were not married by the church, and many (including Mariela and Miguel) had not even had a civil ceremony.

We then went for lunch at Ana’s friend’s house. The fish was delicious and fresh, and she also served pickled vegetables, spaghetti, and rice. Before lunch we had stopped by her gift shop on the plaza to buy some nice things to take home to family in the USA. She also agreed to embroider some dragon designs on shirts for the boys.

In the afternoon I helped Miguel and Mariela repair the washing machine. It was a very new machine, and the first one ever for the household, but it had sprung a big leak in the bottom of the plastic wash basin. What Miguel found when he took it apart was that a couple of the thin Bolivian coins had manage to work their way through a crack and into a region at the bottom where they got wedged in the works and cracked a hole through the molded plastic. Miguel had to run all over town to find a wrench big enough to take off a big nut on the tub so that we could get to the damage. He found the plastic piece that had broken out, and I stuck it back in place with a bunch of epoxy. I wasn’t too convinced that it would hold in the long run. I would have liked to put a piece of fiberglass cloth soaked in epoxy over the damaged area.

We also visited Abuelita’s house again and had some meat cooked over coals in a stove of sorts in a shed-like room with one side entirely open to the yard. Chickens roosted next to the stove. I assume that that was where she generally did her cooking before putting a small propane stove in her room. I saw many such outdoor stoves in Bolivia (see for example the photos of our visit to Porongo on August 17).

Around 9:00 pm I took all of the kids on the motorcycle to a small circus. Rodrigo supervised them there, so I returned home, where the rest of the family was playing poker around the dining table (a beautiful hardwood table with 8 chairs that Ana had hand-made in town as a gift from us to her mother).

Friday, July 18:

In the morning we returned to the church and sat through a lengthy video about various aspects of Catholicism, marriage in particular. It was in Spanish, so I didn’t follow too much of it. Ana struggled to stay awake. I think the Padre was mostly just going through the motions with the pre-marital training, and that was the end of it. However, he informed us that no weddings are done in August in the church in Cochabamba, where Ana was planning to wed me on August 9. Ana was surprised, because her sister Katrina (on her father’s side) lived in Cochabamba until recently and had told her that everything was arranged.

We then visited another of Ana’s aunts, across the street from my father in law's house, who happened to live on the street that was in the process of being paved in concrete. We also visited his house, which he had divided in half some years ago when he separated from his wife (with her taking the bigger half). He had out back a tree full of orange-colored lemons, and Ana loaded up a bag of them (leaving her purse nearby, thereby laying the groundwork for a crisis purse search later in the day—many of our important papers were in it!). He also had a backyard kitchen, open to the elements on 3 sides. In general, the climate is so mild that walls are not necessary. Only bedrooms and bathrooms are consistently walled in on all sides.

I went on the moto with Delma to put some gas in it. When we got to the station there was no line, which meant only one thing: the station was out of gas, something I later found to be common. So we turned around, but she quickly noticed a sign across the street advertising gasoline. We stopped there and bought 6 liters of gasoline, delivered to us in 3 plastic soda bottles! It turns out that there are several resellers of gas in town. When the station has gas, they send a flock of kids there with the soda bottles and some larger containers and fill them up. Later, when the station is empty, which they can count on, they resell it at a higher price. I didn’t complain. It was still quite a bit cheaper than the current price of gasoline in California.

For lunch we walked from Ana's mother’s house about one block to a restaurant named Casa del Camba and bought food to take home. The restaurant looked like a house from the front, but half of the back-yard was filled with the seating and the kitchen, the other half being a beautiful garden marred only by the presence in its center of a large satellite dish. The seating was covered by a thatched roof but open on the sides, an arrangement that I had experienced twice already in Santa Cruz and found to be very comfortable in the subtropical climate (as long as one can make peace with the inevitable flies).

I began to notice that the entire barrio, which was at first glance residential, was filled with restaurants, bars, pool halls, small shops of all sorts, and ateliers such as the one where we had purchased the curtain rods. It is more the rule than the exception for the family business to be located right at the house.

In the afternoon Ana was away somewhere when the Padre showed up with two young men and began to play music in the living room. He played guitar, another played violin, and the third played a cello by plucking it guitar-style across his knee. I was obliged to serve as audience and try to talk with them, something that was rather uncomfortable with my poor command of the language. I did manage to learn that both the violin and guitar were hand made in the region.[1]

My father in law came by and picked me up to drive to a meat vendor, a small shop with a refrigerator chest, a band saw, lots of meat hanging around on hooks, and a calendar on the wall with a half-naked blond woman. He looked over the meat and selected a large 6.5 kg piece for me to purchase and take home, where I set to work carving it up into steaks and seasoning it. We set up a grill in the paved courtyard by stacking 4 sets of bricks to support a round wire grill that I had found lying around in Ana's father’s back yard. I did the grilling, assisted by Miguel, and everybody, including the band members, ate lots of steak, as well as the other side dishes and quite a lot of beer. Once well satiated, the band played for us, and there was a lot of dancing. I was very impressed by the band, especially the young violinist. I wish I had a good recording. I enjoyed dancing with Ana's mother and Mariela, who tried with at least some minor success to teach me the local style. There was also a lot of talking and joking, particularly on the part of the Padre, who is a man of very good humor.

Saturday, July 19:

We had decided to hold the wedding in San Ignacio, in a church associated somehow with the one in Cochabamba, as suggested by the Padre. Ana’s friend stopped by to make arrangements to decorate the church. We sat on the porch and decided on everything, and then gave her money to go and purchase the materials. Ana visited the church and was very happy with it. In the end the change of plans was for the better, as it allowed her grandmother to attend. Manito agreed to be godfather for the wedding (and sign the official papers as a witness), a task that should only be carried out by somebody married by the church, according to the Padre. It later turned out that Manito couldn't make it to the wedding, because his airplane pilot was suddenly unavailable, and Mariela and Miguel became the "padrinos" (the Padre bent the rules that he had explained to us).

We walked a few blocks down the road to a house just across the street from the roaring diesel generators, where Ana had commissioned a seamstress to make a set of traditional clothes for the eventual wedding party to be held in Santa Cruz. She also altered Ana’s wedding dress (originally purchased on E-Bay) and changed the design of the upper part of the dress. In the workroom were two sewing machines, one electric and the other powered by a rocker operated by the foot. The woman’s assistant was operating the latter, seemingly effortlessly, such that I had a hard time seeing the advantage brought about by electricity. Also, in the corner were one or two electric embroidering machines, odd looking contraptions to my eye. Ana discussed the progress with the woman, and when we ended up picking up all of the clothes much later, pants and shirts for all 5 of us, plus a dress for Ana, all custom made and embroidered, we paid a total of $178, including the alteration. Furthermore, the entire transaction was carried out without any sort of written contract, and with zero money down! The work that she did was exceptionally good.

Of course, when we paid, we had to pay in cash, as the entire town is a cash economy. No checks or credit cards are accepted anywhere in town, as far as I could tell, and I never once saw even a cash register or an ATM. You pay cash on the spot (with no sales tax) to somebody who then digs around for some change (once at the market a woman claimed not to have 1 Boliviano change and gave me a green pepper instead, although I suspected it was just a ploy to sell an extra pepper). For larger purchases dollars are often accepted, as well as the Boliviano. I think the dollar has fallen rather out of favor, however, due to its recent downward spiral.

In the evening Manito stopped by in a dark red Toyota pickup with front and back seats and a sturdy roll bar. He invited me to go with him and his assistant Gonzolo to a cattle auction, and of course I jumped at the opportunity. We stopped at a house in town, and a couple of young men jumped in the pickup bed and an extraordinarily pretty young woman climbed into the back seat. I was wondering who they were when finally Gonzolo introduced them as his children. We drove to just outside the western entrance to town, which is marked by a large monument, and turned into a large parking lot. The auction was indoors in a large building outfitted on one side with a circular, fenced stage onto which the cattle are paraded. On a high platform in one corner the auctioneer stood with a microphone and a sound system that played loud music ranging from the patriotic to 1970s American pop. Several times they played what must be the theme song for the city, as the name San Ignacio de Velasco was prominent in the lyrics. Ground level was outfitted with tables covered with cloths and surrounded by folding chairs. On one end was an electronic billboard to display the auction status, including the current bid, in dollars per head.

We put together some more tables with a group that was already there. Manito sat between me and a Brazilian rancher friend (apparently Manito speaks Portuguese as well as Spanish). On the other side of me sat another local rancher, a large man of European extraction and blue eyes, and his wife. It was clear that Manito knew practically everybody there, and vice-versa. Waiters brought plates of beef, sausage, and fried yucca, as well as unlimited supplies of beer and Scotch whisky (Johnny Walker Black Label, the most widely distributed brand of Scotch whisky in the world and seemingly quite a staple in Bolivia). Most of the ranchers, including Manito, preferred the whisky, which they drank over ice.

Eventually they brought out the first group of cattle. I was going to take a photo, but Manito stopped me, saying that those were ugly and I should wait for some good bulls. The auction process itself was fascinating. Two pretty young women stood on the floor scanning the audience for bids. When they spotted one they would jump and dance about and scream loudly, pointing toward the bidder. Another woman would eventually bring the contractual papers over to winning bidder. Ordinary cattle seemed to go for around 2 to 3 hundred dollars per head, while a large bull could bring in 7 hundred or more. The vast majority of the cattle in the region were white, but occasionally I saw a black or brown animal.

I eventually noticed that the blue eyed rancher next to me was signing a large fraction or even a majority of the contracts. I had not noticed him bidding, so I watched more closely. He communicated with the young woman watching our area through fairly subtle sign language, and they clearly understood each other very well, although once or twice she walked over to him to ask a direct question. I don’t think Manito purchased anything, although he was the seller of several lots.

The auction of one particularly large bull was especially interesting, and I’m not at all sure that I understood it. Manito suddenly bumped the bid up from around 7 hundred to a thousand dollars, to great applause, and then afterwards they auctioned the same bull again. I think that the proceeds were going to a local charity (church or school), and essentially Manito gave $1000 to the charity without taking the bull.

In the evening we went out with Manito, Gonzalo, Delma, and Mariela to karaoke, which is extraordinarily popular in Bolivia. We first went to a new 5-star hotel near the lake, where there is a bar named “Far West” with a clear American western theme, kind of appropriate to the frontier town that San Ignacio is to this day. In our party, only Delma and Mariela sang, but we all danced a few times. Before long we left, because we couldn’t tolerate the awful singing of one guy who got on stage over and over. We went to another karaoke bar, owned by one of Ana’s cousin’s (San Ignacio is full of her cousins, first, second, third, etc., such that I could not begin to keep track of them). Delma and Mariela sang some more, and I danced for a while with Mariela (who loves to dance more than anybody else I met in San Ignacio). Manito insisted on paying for all the drinks, but I had already had too much beer at the auction and didn’t want more. The only alternative to alcohol, however, was Coca Cola, which to me is unpleasant after the first glass. I was tired and very grateful to leave and go home finally, around 2:00 am.

Sunday July 20:

Gonzalo came by in the morning with the red Toyota truck, which was labeled on all sides “Hacienda Jenecheru,” the name of Manito’s largest ranch, located near the Brazilian border (Gonzalo seemed to be Manito’s #1 man in San Ignacio, responsible for managing the ranches). In the front seat with him was a pretty woman, 20 years younger than him. It took a little while before I understood that she was his girlfriend, his wife having left him and the children several years before. Manito had instructed Gonzalo to take us on a tour of the Jesuit missions of the region. We spent the day driving around what is called the Mission Triangle, with the missions San Ignacio, San Miguel, and San Rafael at the three vertices, and the mission Santa Ana about halfway between San Rafael and San Ignacio.

I was excited to see the countryside for the first time. We left town driving eastward, and encountered quite a few pedestrians, bicyclists, and various animals on the dirt road. After several kilometers the road was mostly empty. Only rarely did a car, truck, or bus pass going the opposite direction (at which point we would roll up all the windows to keep the truck from filling up with dust). The vegetation along the road was brown with dust, but looking further away the countryside was beautiful, covered with forests of all shades of green and occasional colorful flowering trees, except where ranchers had cleared away pastures. The ranch fields were pocked with large termite mounds. Occasionally we would pass a swampy region full of reeds and, according to Ana, anaconda snakes (I don’t think I would go wading through). The ranchers have built many ponds and small lakes for the cattle. We stopped next to one such lake. On the other side was the hacienda. Such ranch dwellings were often very pretty, with lots of papaya trees planted around traditional style houses.

Each leg of the triangle took more-or-less an hour to traverse. We first went to San Miguel. The church was locked up, unfortunately, but we had a good view of its façade and the pretty plaza in front of it. We found a restaurant in town in which to have a good, and very economical, lunch, and the children bought some candy from a street vendor. San Miguel was reminiscent of San Ignacio, only smaller. The next town, San Rafael, was even smaller but had a similar plaza at its center and a similar church. It its case the church was open, and we were able to go in and see the ornate interior, where the children ran around and climbed on everything. Afterwards we talked with a nun who came out to see what all the children chatter was about.

Next we went to Santa Ana, where first we stopped at the town reservoir and went for a swim in a very picturesque setting. The town again had a large square plaza in front of the mission church, which was older than the others, and somewhat smaller. All of the churches were beautiful, and it was frustrating not being able to capture their interiors adequately with the camera, due to poor lighting. After visiting the church, we stopped by a house on the plaza where we had coffee and pastries. Ana liked the fare so much that she bought a couple of extra bags to take home. We picked up a rider for the journey back to San Ignacio. I’m not sure whether Gonzalo already knew him, but he sat in the bed of the truck, or he stood facing forward holding onto the roll bar and looking over the top of the cab, which I later noticed to be a popular way to ride in such trucks in the region.

Back in San Ignacio we stopped briefly at Manito’s San Ignacio house, a large fancy house only one block from the plaza. I never saw a more elegant house in town, but it sits empty, except for the housekeeper, most of the time. The woodwork inside was incredibly beautiful. I talked to him briefly about it, and clearly he was a man who appreciated beautiful hardwood. Even the most modest dwellings in town used heavy beams of hardwood that were not only beautiful but also rot resistant (and I guessed would sell for a fortune in the USA). Logging, lumber and woodworking made up some of the most important local industries.

Monday, July 21:

I got up early, at 6:30, because winter vacation was over and everybody had to go back to school. I took my mother in law on the motorcycle to the town entrance, where she could catch a bus to her work, some 20 km or more outside of town, in the Indian village San Rafaelito. I also gave the 3 schoolgirls a lift to their school, which was within easy walking distance, but they got a kick out of arriving at school on the motorcycle.

Ana and I later went to visit Abuelita, where we left the kids to play while we visited the hotel where we planned to hold the wedding party. We also stopped by an old house on the square to visit Ana’s cousin Ursula, a woman who looked 100% European and who still held a German passport. Ana was very close to her as a child and spent a lot of time playing at that house. Ursula had two children, a young girl and younger boy, and throughout our stay in San Ignacio our children loved to go to that house to play.

I visited the interior of the main church, or cathedral, that day. The interior was very impressive, being significantly larger (and newer) than the churches we had seen the previous day. Of course, it was not the original church of the mission, but it was nevertheless quite old.

Later in the day I went with Mariela to pick up our wedding rings. Ana had brought from the USA a bunch of old gold jewelry that she didn’t care for too much and had given them to the atelier to melt and turn into matching rings. The rings were beautiful, and while we were there, he quickly etched my name into the interior of Ana’s rings and her name into mine. For all of that, we paid about $22.

In the evening Ana and I went on a date with Gonzalo and his girlfriend. We sat outside at the plaza and drank beer, and later we went for a drive. All drives in San Ignacio pass through the plaza at least once, and generally at least a couple of circuits are made around the plaza before moving on. Once while sitting around there I saw the same truck pass by a dozen times within an hour. So we did a few tours of the plaza but eventually ended up on the western edge of town, where Gonzalo showed us his personal property that he was developing. It was very dark out and quite romantic with the brilliant stars above. We heard something moving and soon several ghostly head of cattle casually passed by.

On the way to the property we had passed the lone gas station, which was closed at that hour. Nevertheless, a double line of empty trucks and busses trailed from the diesel pump and down the road a block or so. Gonzalo had seen a vacancy near the front of the line, apparently left by somebody who had second thoughts about buying fuel, and he had telephoned his son. So, on the way back into town we stopped at the station and picked up his son, who had left his diesel powered SUV in the vacancy. The line sits like that all night, every night, waiting to be repopulated with drivers in the morning, when the fuel is sold.

Tuesday, July 22:

In the afternoon I took a trip with my father in law (and my kids plus a couple of cousins) to the ranch property of his oldest son Carlos (Ana’s brother who lives in San Jose, CA.). It was about a 45 minute drive down the dirt highway before we reached the small sign announcing “Rancho California” which encompassed no less than 1200 hectares of mostly forested land. On the property was a pond, made only a year previous with a bulldozer, and a one-room house (not counting the outhouse). A lean-to separate from the house contained a wood burning stove, and nearby was a small water tower (a plastic tank on a wooden support) and a few papaya trees. An Indian man lived at least part time in the house and took care of the property. He apparently planted corn in the land surrounding the house, as there was a big pile of unhusked corn sitting next to the house. The kids were excited to find a bunch of cats, dogs, and chickens running around, and there were also ducks swimming in the pond and a donkey grazing nearby. My father in law’s objective was to check up on the ongoing work, particularly the water tower. I believe that Carlos plans to retire to the property one day. He has done well for himself in San Jose, through hard work (by his wife as well as himself) running a cleaning business. They have a large house in a nice part of San Jose that I guess would sell for close to a million dollars. They also have three daughters, who are probably as much American as Bolivian.

Wednesday, July 23:

Gonzalo stopped by in his truck to pick up me and the three little boys for a visit to one of Manito’s ranch properties, Hacienda La Esperanza, about an hour drive due east of San Ignacio. We first stopped at a smaller ranch owned by one of the women in the family, where Gonzalo dropped off a drum of diesel fuel for a bulldozer that was being used to clear some land. He then stopped briefly at a ranched owned by some Brazilian friends of his. There were a couple of ostriches running around the yard, which amused me and the boys, and we went away with a bag of some of the most delicious oranges I had ever tasted.

Finally we arrived at La Esperanza, passed through the fancy gate, and stopped at a busy farm house, where kids, dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and even a parrot were running everywhere, much to the delight of the boys. They served us some refreshments, and then we proceeded to the corral that had just been constructed, which Gonzalo wanted me to photograph. It was an elaborate wooden structure with several separate pens, and a narrow run that a line of cattle could pass through, at the end of which was a series of gates that could be rapidly opened and closed to sort them into the appropriate pens. Also, there was a ramp for loading the cattle onto trucks. The entire central part of the structure was roofed with ceramic tiles. Clearly no expense had been spared on that structure.

There was a week-old calf there, which Gonzalo released into a pen and then roped for the amusement of the boys (I don’t think the calf was amused, however). Presently we saw a herd of cattle coming toward us, driven by three men on horseback. Well in front was one cow, who was clearly anxious to get to the corral. Gonzalo said that she was the mother of the calf. It was interesting to watch the cattle being driven into the structure and the sorting mechanism, with which they sorted out all of the youngsters. The boys also got to take a short ride on one of the horses.

Afterwards we returned to the house for lunch. I helped draw water from the well, using a bucket, rope, and hand-cranked windlass. The well was deep and frightening to look down into. Lunch was fried chicken, rice, fried plátano, yucca, and green salad. It was delicious and plentiful. Invariably I found in Bolivia that the main meal of the day was lunch, and families managed to gather together then (most people lived close to work, and the schools let out before lunch, with a second shift starting in mid afternoon). The siesta was also traditional, so Gonzalo went to take a nap in his truck, while I tried to keep the wild boys from disturbing him.

We filled the truck with people for the ride home, as the women and children and some of the men needed a ride into town. The women with babies squeezed into the back of the cab, but a bunch of people piled into the pickup bed. We made a short visit to another part of the vast ranch, where another elaborate wooden corral was under construction (the ranch at the time had about 5000 head of cattle). We also stopped again at the Brazilian ranch, where one of the young women took us down to the pond to fish. In the space of about ten minutes the twins caught half a dozen small fish, which was quite a thrill for them. We threw all but one back. The largest, still not much more than a mouthful, we took home and fried (delicious!).

Thursday, July 24:

Miguel and Rodrigo returned from Santa Cruz with the car he had purchased, a 1990 Toyota SUV with automatic transmission and registration stickers indicating that it had once been used in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Miguel and his wife Mariela recently returned from Spain, where they had worked hard for a year or so to save up money to start a business in Bolivia (their 3 girls stayed in San Ignacio). The car was supposed to be somehow part of the business, but for the moment it was a novelty, and during the rest of our stay everybody enjoyed going for rides around town in it.

We immediately used it to go shopping in the downtown market, which lines a broad, divided paved street. The market consisted of innumerable individual vendors. I could never tell where one vendor’s territory began and another’s ended. Produce of every imaginable sort was piled on tables. One would make a selection and then pay the vendor in cash on the spot. Shopping consisted of a dozen or more such small transaction (there was no supermarket in the town, or anywhere within 450 km).

Later, Ana and I took the motorcycle to the Western Union office. I had had to ask my parents to wire money to us, because there was no way to access my bank account or credit in San Ignacio. The change in our wedding plans meant that we would stay longer in San Ignacio and spend a lot more money there, and we had not come with enough cash. It took quite a bit of paperwork and time to get the money, but at least the system was quite secure.

We also stopped by the wedding chapel, which I saw for the first time. It was a beautiful small church decorated throughout in paint with local traditional motifs. Perched on top of a hill, it also afforded a nice view of the town and surrounding countryside. We learned that ours would be the very first wedding ever held in this church!

Friday, July 25:

Rodrigo showed me some of his schoolwork. The kids keep their work in bound notebooks, and it was clear that a strong emphasis was put on neatness (something I wished my children had learned more of). He was learning quite a bit of chemistry and a little bit of physics. The physics part consisted of a lot of definitions concerning simple machines that he apparently had copied down, but I didn’t see any sort of physics concepts, and he didn’t have a textbook. The chemistry, however, involved a lot of work with reactions and acids and bases. He also showed me his English notebook, and I was going to help him correct some errors, but he had to run.

In the afternoon the whole extended family piled into the Toyota and went for an excursion on the other side of the reservoir. We explored a small cavern and hiked around a bit. Afterwards we stopped by the small fair that was set up in town, and the kids had a blast jumping on a set of trampolines.

In the evening Ana, Delma, and I had to go to the church (San Francisco) for baptism training, as we were to become godparents to our niece Ibana. The room held quite a crowd of parents and godparents, several of the women nursing infants. We started with a film, of which I understood very little, and then the young man leading the session began asking some questions and prodding the audience for answers. Delma was the most vocal of anybody besides the leader and had some amusing responses. The leader was really quite full of himself and seemed determined to impress us with religious minutia. He explained how in theory baptism could even be done without water, and later when he inquired what were the different classes of baptism, Delma answered “wet and dry,” for which everybody had a good laugh. It turned out that their were three classes, which I no longer remember, but in any case, only one class applied to everybody who was there. He also explained some of the ancient history of baptism, how in the early church only adults who understood everything could be baptized. But in the middle ages so many children were dying from disease that it became customary to baptize them young, under the assumption that they had little chance of making it to adulthood. He finished with a talk about his pet peeve: members of the church were lazy in how they crossed themselves. After touching the forehead, the hand should go down nearly to the navel, and following that they should touch all the way to the shoulders. Otherwise the cross looks upside down, which to him could even be sacrilegious. However, I carefully observed in the following weeks how the Padres themselves crossed themselves, and I never saw one follow his example.

Before the training Ana and I attended the mass, and she had to go to confession, as required by the Padre before he would marry her in the church. She had not been for many years, as she said, so I joked that this was going to be a very long confession for me to wait through. But apparently it turned out okay and was not such a long wait.

Saturday, July 26:

This was our wedding day. I spent most of the day making three cakes again. This time there was quite a bit of real butter in the fridge, which I used for the icing. I also added natural orange flavor to one of the cakes. Otherwise the main change was to color the icing pink. Valeria bought me something akin to Cool-Aid from the store, and we mixed it in for the color, which also gave the icing a bit of citrus flavor.

Of course, Ana was very busy. First they had to clean up the church before it could be decorated. Then all the girls had to have their hair and nails done and get dressed. The four nieces all had their long hair curled into cute spirals. They were all dressed in custom white dresses trimmed in red, and they had crowns of natural flowers. They all looked adorable.

We did not have a large attendance, as it was last minute and Ana tried to keep it small. She was afraid that if she started inviting all aunts and cousins there would be no end to it, so she kept it to the immediate family and those closest to her. Afterwards, however, when we went in town we had to hear her aunts complaining about not being invited!

The decoration of the church, by Ana’s friend Lenny, was beautiful and far beyond my expectations. A young church orchestra sat in the front row on the right and played beautifully throughout the service. Early on I, and then Ana, had to repeat after the Padre some passages dictated by the bishop. We had not seen them in advance, but I just concentrated on pronouncing the words without worrying about what I was saying (in general it was my promise not to interfere in the Catholic upbringing of the kids). Later we gave the traditional vows. Ana had complained that she couldn’t memorize it, so the Padre held out the text for us to read. I had memorized it, however, and didn’t want to be distracted by trying to find the text in the book, so I said it from memory, which of course led to a lot of teasing later of Ana. Her father complemented me numerous times afterward on my Spanish pronunciation, so I guess I did okay.

In the middle of the service we shifted gears and did the baptism of Ibana. It really was beautiful having that together with the wedding, and also completely appropriate, as we became her godparents (padrinos), a role that is not figurative but carries real responsibilities in the Catholic world.

Before the wedding I had handed my camera to Miguel to take photos, and he did a great job. We also had hired a man to videotape everything, including the party afterwards, which cost us about $90. He also did a great job not only taking the video but also editing it. Several days later he presented us with a DVD, complete with custom label, the only problem being that he misspelled my middle and last names.

After the wedding we had the party at the hotel Santa Ana, which was nicely decorated for the occasion. The Padre played guitar along with his violinist and cellist, and there was some dancing, although unfortunately not until after the video guy left at 11:00 pm. The hotel served an elegant dinner, along with beer, wine, and soda. Afterwards they also served my cake, which again was a big hit. Two of the three were consumed, and we kept the orange one for later. Ana and I had a room reserved at the hotel, which was convenient, as the kids could go in there and watch TV, where they eventually all fell asleep.

Sunday, July 27:

Ana and I enjoyed our brief honeymoon at the hotel. In the morning the hotel served us an elaborate breakfast in the courtyard, including slices of the wedding cake. At noon some of the family came by, including Ana’s mother, and we had lunch together at the hotel.

In the evening Miguel and I went out to play pool, but the place was closed. So we stopped at a restaurant and had a couple of beers together. I did my best to converse with him, and he was very patient. I learned a bit about his time in Spain, where he did construction work in a town at the French border in the mountains.

Monday, July 28:

We all decided to pay a surprise visit to Ana's mother at her work, but we got a rather late start. First, we visited two gasoline resellers to get enough to be sure not to run out in the middle of nowhere. Second, we stopped at the school to get some of the kids out early. Finally we were on our way, with some food to cook for lunch and the last of the wedding cakes. It was a bumpy drive out of town in the direction of Santa Cruz, but the countryside was beautiful. After about 25 or 30 km we arrived at the Indian village San Javierito and pulled up to the school, only to find it already empty and Ana’s mother gone. She must have passed us on the bus going the other way.

So we looked around the town a bit and visited her little house, where except during our visit she often would stay instead of going back into San Ignacio every day. The village was quiet and neatly kept, with a few kids running around, and a donkey or two wandering in the streets. The houses generally were adobe with thatched roofs. On the way home we also stopped in another similar village where she used to work.

Since we didn’t have lunch in San Javierito, we stopped downtown in San Ignacio in a warehouse-like building that was filled with small eateries. Each one was a kitchen about 10 feet square surrounded by a narrow bar with stools. We ate at one operated by another of Ana’s cousins.

In the afternoon I went with Mateo to visit Abuelita. We had a nice visit, and I was able to converse with her a little bit. Mateo loved to play in her back yard, with the little cousins, dogs, chickens, etc.

I also spent some time on the internet and from a special web site I noted the time that day that my satellite GLAST would pass over. I didn’t know the coordinates of San Ignacio, and the web site picked up some coordinates, based on the IP address, that appeared to be much further north and west in Bolivia. Therefore, the information was not very accurate. A bunch of us walked down the road away from the lights around 7 pm to try to see it. I had my astronomical binoculars, but we didn’t see it. I did see a couple of satellites, but they were in polar orbits.

In the middle of the night I got up and walked across the courtyard to the restroom. On the way I looked up at the beautiful starry sky and noticed two clouds a bit to the south. At first I thought they really were clouds, and then I realized that they must be the large and small Magellanic Clouds, the two largest dwarf galaxies in orbit around our Milky Way. So I went back for my binoculars and gazed at them for a while. Indeed they were galaxies. I had never seen them with my own eyes and never appreciated just how large they are. Close to them I could also see some bright globular clusters. It was a beautiful view. Earlier in the night the center of the Milky Way was directly overhead, and I spent some time during my stay gazing at it with the binoculars. The view was much better than I could ever get in California.

Tuesday, July 29:

The car awoke with a dead battery. Poor Miguel had to go buy a new one, but that’s typical for used cars. The throttle cable on the motorcycle also broke while I was riding it with Ana. I had to ride the rest of the way pulling the cable with my hand, which was kind of painful.

At home Ana cut a coconut from the tree in the courtyard and we hacked it open. Up to then I had only seen coconuts in the grocery store, where the outer husk was removed, so I had been curious why the coconuts didn’t look like coconuts. Finally I saw how everything looked inside.

Clayton was sick since lunch the previous day, and I started feeling sick, too. Before the end of the day I threw up, and eventually I felt better.

Wednesday, July 30:

In the morning Ana and I took Miguel’s car to the gas station and waited quite a while in line. There were two lines of cars at the pump, and interior to each line of cars was a line of motorcycles. And then there was the cluster of kids around the pump with soda bottles, wanting to get them filled up. The guy running the pump tried his best to keep everybody happy and to keep the pump running. He would collect payment from one customer while pumping gas for the next. Finally our turn came, and I had them fill the car up completely, which cost around $30.

July 31 is the anniversary festival for the town of San Ignacio, and the parties started on the 30^th. We went to the plaza at about 10:30 pm. There were some speeches and a band, and then an introduction of the beauty queens from the previous year and the new year, and that was followed by fireworks.

We then went into the Club Social Oriente Velasco on the western edge of the plaza, which had a large courtyard for dancing surrounded by many tables. There was a large band playing, and people generally were drinking beer, whisky, and Coca Cola. Mariela, Miguel, and Delma were with us, and we sat at a table with several others, including Delma’s father. She danced a lot with her father. I danced some with Ana and Mariela, but I grew very tired before long, and by the time we finally went home at 4:30 am I was exhausted and irritated.

Thursday, July 31:

In the morning we went to the plaza, where there was a very large crowd of people. Presently a procession emerged from the church, and we joined in and followed it all the way around the plaza and back to the church. We saw the Padre who married us in the procession. Afterwards we went into the church. It was the 260^th birthday of San Ignacio de Velasco, and there were festivities all day and into the night. We also took the kids to the carnival to go on a few rides.

Miguel and Ana's father went out in the afternoon and drank far too much beer. About the time they came home in the evening the Padre pulled up in front of the house with his Toyota pickup, a bottle of beer in his hand. We had seen him earlier in the plaza and had asked him what he was doing, whereupon he replied that he was looking for a place to drink. I invited him in, and Miguel heated up some leftovers for him, which he clearly enjoyed. He told us that the next day he would drive to his ancestral village quite far northwest, a good 8 hour drive away, where there would soon be the anniversary celebration for that village.

We went to bed, but all night music was playing from various locations all around town.

Friday, August 1:

I took all the kids down the street to the park, where they had a great time and I was able to take lots of photos of them. I also photographed a tree full of brilliant yellow blossoms, only a block from Ana's mother's house. I was fascinated by the flowering trees in the region. One week there would be trees with purple blossoms, another week trees with yellow blossoms, or orange or red.

Sunday, August 3:

There had been a heavy rain overnight, and the morning was refreshingly cool. We all went out to lunch at a nearby restaurant, which was quite good, the only problem being too much loud music. In the afternoon I went with Ciriaco to the internet café, where he enjoyed playing games on the computer while I checked my email and paid bills online. Afterwards we explored the eastern part of the town on the motorcycle. In the evening we went to church with Ana’s father. It was a large modern building that was attractive but had horrible acoustics, with every sound reflecting multiple times from the hard walls in the cavernous interior. I preferred the San Francisco church.

Monday, August 4:

It was the birthday of Ana’s mother, so I prepared to make yet another cake. We were almost out of propane, so Delma and I set out on the motorcycle, with her on the back holding a big empty propane bottle. We checked half a dozen places, and all of them were out. Finally we gave up and went home, but then she called her aunt, who offered to loan us a bottle. Off we went again with the empty bottle, but then her aunt didn’t want the empty. So poor Delma had to carry two propane bottles on the back of the motorcycle while I drove home!

I also needed some supplies for the cake, and I went alone to the main market to purchase them. That was my first experience trying to negotiate the market alone, and Ana was surprised when I returned with everything. I made a single cake that time, but with 3 layers, so it was still quite a bit of cake.

Ana and I took her mother to lunch as Casa del Camba, just down the street from her house. We had barbecue beef and quail, along with a variety of traditional side dishes. It was very good.

In the afternoon we were driving around and stopped by the San Francisco church to invite the Padre to the party. He had just returned from the visit to his village and had some stories about the drive there and back. He told a joke about a priest and a chauffer who arrive at the pearly gates, where the chauffer is admitted into heaven but the priest is turned away. Of course the priest is incensed and wants to know why, so the good Lord explains that over the years the priest gave many sermons, through which all of the flock slept soundly, but whenever the chauffer drove people around they always prayed fervently!

Just before sunset, Gonzalo showed up in the Jenecheru truck, with a huge dead snake in the bed. It was more than 2 m in length, and the boys went crazy when they saw it. He told them that it was a cobra, but it was really just some non-venemous snake that would probably have been better left alive to catch rats. Anyway, I took a lot of photos of the boys with the snake.

Around the same time I grabbed my binoculars and walked away from the lights to look for GLAST again. This time I had told the computer that I was in Santa Cruz (it didn’t know about San Ignacio), so I had a better time and location for the passage. It would be flying by south of us, just south of the Bolivian border, in Argentina and Paraguay, so it was at about 30 degrees elevation. I finally spotted it with the binoculars (it was not visible to the naked eye), and I followed it for about 5 minutes until it vanished into the shadow of the Earth.

Ana's father brought a huge amount of beef for the party, and I set about cutting it up and getting the barbecue going. Ana’s mother had a fairly large group of her friends and colleagues over, and we served all of them steak, rice, salad, yucca, etc. and then the cake. The padre arrived with his little orchestra and played for us. It was a nice party, and when it was over, Ana's mother and others went out to karaoke, but Ana and I went to bed.

Tuesday, August 5:

Tuesday and Wednesday were national holidays, in celebration of Bolivia's independence from Spain. The kids were out of school, but they were obliged to march in the town parade. Therefore, they were all up early getting dressed in their school uniforms. We drove down to the plaza to watch the parade. There was quite a crowd there, so it was difficult to find a good view and position from which to take photographs. Every school from the area came marching past, all in uniform, including adult schools and every other imaginable group of people, old and young, such as the tennis club. All of the nieces and nephews marched, as did Delma (who was finishing her high school education at an adult school). Afterwards, the military marched past, all kicking their legs waste high with each step. We then milled around the plaza, buying some goodies for the kids and taking photographs, while the boys climbed all over the town monument.

Wednesday, August 6:

This was the actual independence day, so again nobody was at school or working. Our kids spend much of the day playing at Ana's cousin Ursula's house on the plaza. They had a great time with their cousins and all of their toys. They even played with firecrackers in front of the house right on the plaza, and nobody seemed to care.

We went for a drive around town with Ana's father. At one point we stopped at a house that had been remodeled by the young couple living there. They invited us in, and we were very impressed by how beautiful the remodeling had been done. The woman, who was pregnant with their first child, was an architect, which explained a lot. We also stopped and looked at some animals in a pen across the street from Delma's aunt's house. One was a capybara, the largest species of rodent.

Eventually we stopped at Ursula's house, and I sat out front for a while watching traffic going around and around. Sometimes a pickup would pass by with a bunch of kids standing up in the bed, something I frequently saw. In general Bolivia had very little in the way of safety standards. Nobody used seat belts, and I never saw a motorcycle rider wearing a helmet. Cars were not required to have air bags. In Santa Cruz I often saw light trucks with around 20 people packed into the truck bed behind the cab. Similarly, there didn't seem to be any electrical wiring standards, which was kind of scary considering that the household wiring was 220 V. Ground wires were practically non-existent, as were ground fault interrupters. I was concerned that there was no place to ground Ana's mother's washing machine. It had a 3-wire plug, but it was plugged into a 2-wire socket, and the plumbing was plastic, so it couldn't be used as a ground. Electrical wires were often exposed, with connections often made by twisting wires and wrapping with tape. A typical light fixture was hanging by the electrical wires from the ceiling. Almost nobody had hot running water in the house, and the typical shower (whether in households, hotels, or hospitals) had an electrical heater built into the shower head, with 2 or 3 wires running out of the wall and to the shower head. It worked well and was probably quite efficient, but it seemed a bit scary to me!

We went out for pizza for dinner, and then we walked home. On the way we passed by a public dance party held at an outdoor basketball court, with lots of people milling around and sitting in the bleachers. On the court several teenage couples were dancing to the Latin music while a bunch of children played kick-the-can in between them and underfoot.

By the time we returned home both Clayton and I were starting to feel ill. By bedtime I was running a substantial fever.

Thursday, August 7:

I was ill all day, with fever and diarrhea. At lunch time my father in law asked if I would like to go to the hospital, and I declined. Later in the afternoon I became very chilled and started shivering violently, and I threw up. At the same time my father in law came by again, and this time he insisted on taking me to the hospital. We went to Hospital Santa Isabel, about two blocks from the town square and right next to another hospital. It was a single-level complex of buildings with interior courtyards planted with grass, and it was very clean and comfortable. Ana said that it originally was built by Austrian or German charity and initially operated without any charge to patients. We paid a minimal entry fee and then waited just a few minutes to see the doctor on duty, a very nice young man with German ancestry who happened to be related somehow to Ursula and Ana. I was still shivering and had very bad color due to dehydration. The doctor looked me over quickly and then said that I was staying, something I had not expected.

They set me up in a private room with its own lavatory and shower and then connected an IV. Very quickly they filled me with about a liter of water, and then they connected a slower drip of a mixture that included vitamins and dextrose. They also took a blood sample to analyze. The doctor didn't want to give me antibiotics at first, but late at night when the fever kept returning he put me on penicillin.

Ana stayed with me all night. We got a surprise call on her cell phone from my son René, who said that a notice to pay rent had been posted on the front door of our house. I had thought that I mailed the rent check in advance before leaving for Bolivia, so I was surprised. After some thought, we decided that the best solution would be for him to write a check on his account and give it to his older brother Kent to drop off at the rental agency. Then I would transfer money to his account the following day.

Friday, August 8:

I wanted to leave the hospital, but the doctor wouldn't hear of it. When Ana explained that I urgently needed to get to the internet, they offered to let me use the computer in their office. So I went there with my IV, logged into my bank, and transferred the money to René's account. The rest of the day and the night were pretty boring, being stuck in that little room. It was my first time since birth to be hospitalized, but I couldn't complain too much, as the hospital and service were excellent.

Ana went to buy tickets for the bus to Santa Cruz for Sunday night but found that everything would be shut down on Sunday. It was to be a day of national elections, so she purchased tickets for Monday night instead.

Saturday, August 9:

Finally they removed the IV, and I was able to take a shower and go home. They had taken stool and urine samples the day before, and while the latter was fine, they informed me that they found amoebas in the former. The doctor prescribed some pills for that condition, which we purchased in the hospital pharmacy. In general Ana had to go to the pharmacy on site during my stay to purchase all of the drugs and the IV bags. Then, when we checked out we had just to pay for the hospital service. The entire affair cost me around $200, including all the drugs and the two nights in the hospital (which included meals).

It is interesting that my 21 year old son René had gone to a hospital in Stockton California July 5 for very much the same condition. (I worry now that he may have picked up parasites in Costa Rica in February.) He was connected to an IV to rehydrate him, but he didn't even stay overnight, they didn't do enough lab work to trace down the source of the problem, and the only drugs that they administered were to treat only the symptoms. The hospital billed $2367, the insurance company forced them to reduce it by $1010, the doctor billed another $396 (reduced to $297 by the insurance company), and I ended up paying $50 in addition to the $1603 paid by the insurance. I think that the comparison with my experience in Bolivia is a good example of how horribly screwed up the medical system is in the USA. René is fortunate to be still on my insurance, but in less than 2 years he will be on his own. I don't worry about myself, since I'm one of the fortunate minority in this country to have reasonably good insurance paid mostly by my employer, but I worry a lot about my children if this country continues to have arguably the worst medical system in the entire developed world.

Sunday, August 10:

This was a quiet, slow day, due to the national elections. The election was a referendum on the current government, and on the desire of some of the departments, particularly Santa Cruz, to become autonomous. Since my arrival I had seen all around Santa Cruz and San Ignacio posters and banners declaring "Autonomía, Sí!" and quite a bit of graffiti denouncing Evo, the indigenous president. Bolivia is divided politically and racially between the predominantly Camba people in the east ("orient") and the predominantly Colla people in the mountainous west ("occident"). Of course, that is a gross oversimplification, as Bolivia contains many different indigenous groups and immigrants, and plenty of mixtures of all. But historically there has been a lot of tension between the wealthier, land-owning, ruling class, usually with a lot of European blood, concentrated in the Santa Cruz area, and the poorer indigenous people throughout Bolivia. In the mountainous areas the majority of people are pure Indian, and most speak their native Quechua or Aymará language (as well as Spanish). When Bolivia became truly democratic, probably for the first time in the recent past, it shouldn't have been a surprise that the majority would elect one of their own. It is also not surprising that he would quickly alienate the minority with his leftist policies that are generally designed to try to help out the indigenous people. So there exists a volatile political climate, with the economically powerful minority opposed to the disadvantaged majority. Ana's mother, who spent much of her life working with indigenous people, supported Evo, but she was in the minority in the department of Santa Cruz.

It was rather disturbing to me during my visit to hear so much racist talk between Camba and Colla. It was reminiscent of the black vs. white relations in the USA. Nothing good ever comes of that.

The country as a whole ended up supporting Evo, but the eastern and southern provinces just as clearly opposed him and supported autonomy. Therefore, the election probably didn't really resolve anything. In the evening we stopped by the plaza, where politicians were still giving enthusiastic speeches while young people set off noisy roman candles in front of the stage. Unfortunately I couldn't understand much of what was being said.

Monday, August 11:

Ana's father had a Kodak digital camera and photo printer set given to him by his daughter who lives in San Jose, CA (Ana Maria). He was intimidated by its complications and had not used it, so I wanted to take a look at it. He had brought it by the previous day, and we had found that the printer needed a power converter to work on the 220 V. So by Monday he had purchased a 50 W transformer, and we were able to try it out the printer as well as the camera. It turned out to be very easy to do the basic tasks of shooting photos in automatic mode and then printing them, so he was quite pleased. We took a few photos and printed lots of copies for everybody.

In the evening we had to get on the bus to Santa Cruz. We used a better and somewhat more expensive company than in the previous trip, and the bus was quite comfortable, with air conditioning, the only problem being that we were right under the air conditioner, so we got blasted with the cold air when it was on. So I spent the night pulling a blanket over me when the cold air was blowing and removing it when it wasn't.

It was sad saying goodbye to everybody in San Ignacio. Our nieces were crying. I wished that all of them could come to our party in Santa Cruz the following Saturday, but in the end only Ibana was able to go, with her mother Delma and her grandmother.

Tuesday, August 12:

We rolled into Santa Cruz at sunrise and then took a cab to Mamina’s house. Not long afterwards Ana noticed that a backpack was missing. She took a cab back to the bus station and found the backpack and our blankets still sitting on the sidewalk.

After resting a bit we went to Mama Chuplina’s house, where we left the kids while Ana and I visited the restaurant Casa del Camba to finalize arrangements for our wedding party. We also went to the bus station to buy tickets to Cochabamba.

In the late afternoon a sister of Ana on her father's side visited. It was interesting because Ana had never met her before and until recently had not even been aware that she existed. Unfortunately I neglected to take any photographs.

Our bus left about 8:00 pm. It was an even better bus, with only 3 rows of seats, each similar to a business-class seat in an airliner, with lots of legroom, leg supports, and a good amount of reclining. Therefore, the ride was comfortable, and I managed to get some sleep.

August 13:

When I awoke, it was still dark, but the bus was rolling through the streets of a large city, which I assumed could only be Cochabamba or its suburbs. The sun was just beginning to rise as we disembarked and located our baggage. We took a cab to the house of Ana’s school friend, Beidy, who I had first met July 16 at the Mission Hotel in San Ignacio (she also came to our wedding). She is married to a colonel in the military, and they live in a nice apartment in a compound reserved for families of military officers.

It was already daylight as the cab traversed the city. In the west an imposing ridge towered above the city, which sprawls across a large valley and several lower hills, although still at a high altitude of 2558 m (8,400 ft) downtown. On top of a singular hill rising near downtown stands an enormous statue of Jesus, “Cristo de la Concordia,” with a line of lights leading straight up to it (marking the route of a cable car). Except around the bus terminal, the streets of the city seemed rather quiet at 6:30 am. Unlike in Santa Cruz, most of the intersections of the downtown were guarded by stop lights, which the cab driver and other cars that I saw treated more like stop signs at the early hour. They would stop at the red light, take a good gander to the left and right, and then proceed through it. The taxi driver still beeped the horn when passing through a green light, I assume to warn those on the orthogonal street who might be intent on running their red light. The city, at least in the downtown area that we saw, looked exceptionally clean, especially after being in San Ignacio and Santa Cruz, where the inhabitants frequently toss their trash on the ground. The streets were equipped with large green enclosed trash bins, and I couldn’t see a single scrap of trash lying around.

While in the cab, Ana explained to me that Cochabamba was known for flowers, and roses in particular. The driver said that by September the city would be beautifully decked out in flowers. He spoke Spanish, but the ancestral language of the region was Quechua, which was still prevalent, although much of the population was bilingual. A bit further west, in the Tapacari province of the Department of Cochabamba, the people tended to be trilingual, adding Aymará to the list of languages!

When we arrived at the house, our gracious host was concerned that we might have headaches from the altitude, but we were fine, and the cool mountain air felt wonderful. Overnight we had passed from a tropical climate to a temperate climate, simply by going up about 2000 m in altitude. My only problem was that I felt tired after spending two consecutive nights on busses, on which I don’t sleep well.

Later in the morning we went out in Beidy’s car, a diesel powered Mitsubishi wagon. She didn’t like to drive and prevailed upon me to do it. It felt a bit like driving a truck at first, but eventually I got accustomed to it and also learned to go with the flow of the traffic, which by then had increased greatly. We drove down a broad boulevard leading southward to the nearby town of Quillacollo, to visit the church of the Virgin of Urkupiña. That was the church where Ana originally wanted to hold our wedding, according to a promise that she had made many years ago when she lived for a year in Cochabamba with her mother’s sister. It is also the church where Mateo was baptized three years previous. Ana’s personal shrine where she prays at home is also associated with this church. The town was busy, and one of the main roads was blocked off by barricades, with small bleachers being set up along the way. That was in preparation for the yearly celebration of the Virgin of Urkupiña, which was to be held the following two days and would include a long parade and huge crowds of people.

We made our way toward the church through the narrow streets filled with vendors selling all sorts of food, trinkets, flowers, etc. We stopped for some fresh orange juice, squeezed from oranges on the spot, and a bag of sugar cane to chew on. Ana then purchased a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a bunch of candles. The church sat at one end of a small nicely landscaped plaza. The interior was spectacularly beautiful, especially with all the decorations added in anticipation of the upcoming festival. I think the church serves as a pilgrimage, especially at that time of year, and a lot of visitors were there. Ana added our flowers and candles to the thousands already there and said some prayers. The little boys seemed more interested in the melted wax than anything else. Presently, after some explanations, Ana found a clergyman who invited us into a small room on the side and gave us a blessing for our marriage, thus satisfactorily fulfilling her promise to the church.

After purchasing a map of Cochabamba, we set about trying to find the house of Ana’s aunt. We eventually were successful; the house was quite close to the airport. The aunt was not home, but her young teenage daughter was there and was excited to see us. We then discussed how to find the house of Ana’s sister (on her mother’s side), named Antonieta, but it apparently was off the map. So Ana’s cousin volunteered to go with us to direct us. We passed all the way back through town and out the northern side and eventually found the house. Antonieta was there with her 15 year old daughter, who was beautifully dressed and made up, as though she were going to a dance, and her two younger sons. We didn’t stay long, as Ana’s cousin had to be somewhere, so we drove her back into downtown.

We then walked through the outdoor market across the street from the bus terminal and bought a few food items. We also bought from a street vendor some ears of corn that had gigantic yellow kernels, and some cheese that complimented it nicely, and ate it there in the street. Afterwards we drove to an area with some touristic shops and bought gifts of traditional Andean crafts and garments to bring home to the USA. On the way home we took a tour by car of the pretty central plaza, which was a square park surrounded by two-story colonial style buildings.

August 14:

In the morning we passed by Ana’s aunt’s house and that time found her at home. She was delighted to see Ana and the boys. She was like a mother to Ana for a year when Ana was in high school. We showed her photos of the wedding and of the family in San Ignacio, and Ana gave her some clothing that we brought from the USA.

Then we drove back to Antonieta’s house, where I met her husband, who was very amiable and chatted with me for a while despite my poor Spanish. Ana gave them a whole case of clothes, some of which looked very nice on Antonieta and her daughter. She also gave her niece a nice watch for her 15^th year, a very special year for girls in Latin America.

I wanted to see the big statue on the hill, but they were worried that it might be dangerous for us to go there alone. So Antonieta’s whole family of 5 piled in the car with the 5 of us, and we drove up there, following a bumpy cobblestone road the last 12 km. We had to walk up the last bit from the parking lot, and at that point the high altitude became abundantly obvious. We were out of breath by the time we reached the top, but it was worth it, as the view of the city and surrounding country was spectacular around all 360 degrees. It was a beautiful city of about a million inhabitants, surrounded by mountains. Within the city were many green parks, with lots of amusements for children. Some of the neighborhoods high on the hills looked rather stark and probably poor, as it is typical in Latin American countries that the wealthy stay in the central city while the poor settle in surrounding hills, just the opposite of what one finds in the USA.

Afterwards we drove into the downtown area and ate dinner at a restaurant, where they served beef pounded very thin and fried. It was served over rice and potatoes and topped by a fried egg. It was simple but very good. Back at Beidy’s house we met her husband, a colonel in the military, who was very friendly and took me to the pharmacy to buy some drugs for my continuing digestive problems. He said that he has only four more years of service before he can retire, at which time he and Beidy will probably return to San Ignacio. He also had the strangest affliction, namely a 3 cm long steel needle embedded in his brain. Nobody knew where it came from. It was discovered only fairly recently when he suffered from convulsions. Apparently they thought it is safest to leave it there, and he was doing fine with the help of some medication, as long as he stayed away from strong magnetic fields (such as in an MRI machine). It must have got in there when he was a baby, because a needle cannot go through an adult skull without being noticed.

August 15:

We loafed around Beidy’s house all morning while she and Ana chatted. Then we drove through heavy traffic to the bus station to buy tickets to Santa Cruz. Afterwards Ana wanted to take her cousin to lunch, so we headed that way but quickly got mired in traffic. She telephoned, and her cousin warned us not to try, as the festival traffic was getting to be impossible. I later thought we could have made it in retrospect, by avoiding the main road, but we gave up and drove back to the touristy section of town closer to Beidy’s house and had lunch in a nice restaurant. I had fried river fish fillets with fried potatoes, fried yucca, rice, and green vegetables, plus some good beer. Ana ordered a la carte, getting a plate of fried plátano, a bowl of rice, a plate of slices of cow udder, and a plate of some sort of tripe. The latter two I suppose were delicacies, and I tasted them but didn’t care much for either. Of course, she couldn’t eat it all. Neither could I eat all of my fish, as the servings were very large. So we got a doggy bag, which we ended up giving to some old women begging nearby.

We then went to Antonieta’s house for the afternoon. Just before getting there, the connection between the shift lever and the transmission broke, and I lost second gear. Antonieta’s husband took a look at it and estimated that a mechanic could fix it for about 150 pesos, or something like $25. Ana and her sister had a good talk, and the children had a good time playing there, but soon we had to say goodbye, something that was difficult knowing that we wouldn't see each other again for at least 3 years. As we left the shifter broke more and I was left with nothing but 3^rd gear. I managed to slip the clutch enough to get us moving, and fortunately the route home was mostly downhill. The boys had to get out and push us backwards into the parking spot. I was relieved to get the car home, at least. We offered Beidy 150 pesos to help with the repair. She refused, but Ana in the end sneaked it into her notebook.

Ana found out that a general strike (somehow connected to the election result) was planned in Santa Cruz for the coming Tuesday, so we immediately began to worry about our flight out on Wednesday. Antonieta's husband (who by the way was Colla and knew Quechua) tried to assure us that the first strike would be strictly limited to 24 hours, so we should be okay.

At 7:30 pm we had to take a cab back across town to the bus terminal. I was worried that we might miss our bus, as the cab wound up in the thick of a traffic near-gridlock close to the terminal. The driver said that the problem again was so many visitors going to the festival in Quillacollo.

Our bus had two levels, each with three rows of seats, manufactured in Brazil. We were near the front, so I had a forward view. I wondered if we would ever get out of the station, there were so many busses milling around from at least a dozen transit companies in some sort of managed chaos. It finally got on the road and took a different route through the city than I was familiar with, passing by a big lake and avoiding the bad traffic. We eventually passed close by both Beidy’s house and Antonieta’s house. Then the bus began slowly winding up a mountain road, occasionally passing a slowly moving truck. The moon was almost full, so I could see some of the landscape in black and white. We must have climbed almost a thousand meters above the city before we reached the summit. There was a fair amount of forestation, even at that high altitude, and we regularly passed through small pueblos, including one at the summit.

We descended into the Chapare province of the Department of Cochabamba, following the road downward along the side of a deep valley. There was a long delay at a highway checkpoint, and another further down due to an accident, I assume, since I saw a smashed and burned truck being attached to a tow truck. The forestation grew thicker and thicker as we descended, until eventually all I could see on both sides was incredibly dense growths of forests and shrubs, including lots of very large leaves, like banana leaves. I was told that this region was known for cultivation of coca, of which the leaves are sacred to the indigenous people, who chew them, make tea from them, and use them in religious ceremonies. The leaves can also be used to make cocaine, which is a perennial problem between Bolivia and the USA.

August 16:

We rolled into the Santa Cruz terminal a bit late, around 8:00 am. The day was already warm and very humid. I was tired, as the bus had been too uncomfortable to me to sleep much. There was not enough legroom, and it was hot and stuffy at my seat, where the windows could not be opened. We went to Mamina’s house, where I tried to get some rest, but we also had to go out and do some preparations for the evening party, held in celebration of our wedding. First we visited Ana's mother at a hotel near the bus terminal. Then we dropped Clayton and Ciriaco off at Mama Chuplina’s house, while Ana, Mateo and I went shopping in the traditional open-air market. I bought some traditional simple sandals to go with my party outfit. We couldn’t find the same for Mateo but ended up buying him some shoes.

Back at Mamina’s house we had our nails done and went down the street for hair cuts. Then we donned our matching custom-make Chiquitano-styled outfits and finally made it to our party about 50 minutes late, at 8:20 pm, at the Casa del Camba (the one in the city center, not the one out in the country where we had had lunch several weeks before). About ¼ of the guests were already there, and they gave us a round of applause when we all showed up in our costumes. Everybody drank beer, whisky, Coca-Cola, or chicha for quite a while, until about 80 guests were there, at which point they brought out the buffet of regional food. Eventually over 100 guests came, but there was plenty of food for all. Ana and I went around and had our picture taken with each table of guests. A number of guests also wanted pictures taken standing with all 5 of us, so there was a lot of photography, both with my camera and by a professional who successfully sold quite a few prints to the guests. After a while the kids began to complain about their play being interrupted by so much photography. I sat next to the only brother of Ana’s father, who I met there for the first time, and I managed to chat a fair amount with him and a few others with my limited Spanish. Ana never sat down to eat. She spent the whole time fluttering from one table to the next, to talk to all of the guests and make sure that everything was perfect. She is always too nervous to eat at her own parties, she says, but she is a wonderful hostess.

The guests included Ana’s mother, her sister Delma and little Ibana, Delma’s tall sister, who I had not met before, many members of Ana’s father’s family, many of Ana’s friends from when she lived in Santa Cruz, and some of Ana’s childhood friends who now live in Santa Cruz.

The guests ordered deserts a la carte. Originally Ana had planned to buy a special wedding cake for the party, but we lost interest in that, and I think the guests probably enjoyed more being able to choose their desert from the restaurant’s delicious selection. The party wound down around midnight, and then we spent quite a while trying to pay the bill, in particular trying to straighten out an error that resulted in a double charge to my credit card of about $150. The whole party ended up costing me about $900, which included unlimited drinks for the guests (who fortunately were not inclined to stay all night and get drunk on my tab). In retrospect, $9 per guest seems incredibly cheap!

Sunday August 17:

Manito stopped by about 10:00 am in a big, new Toyota SUV to take us out for an excursion. He first stopped by his house, so I was able to see the mansion in daylight and take some photographs. The party increased in size with more of his family, and we continued on with 3 cars. We crossed the river Piraí at the same bridge that leads to the Mariposario, and then continued for quite a while down an unpaved road. At one point we had to detour around a sand dune, where a bus was busy trying to pull out of the sand a car that had tried to go straight through. Finally we came to a quaint pueblo named Porongo. Manito explained to me that it was special to him, because it was the only pueblo in the close vicinity of Santa Cruz that still stuck to its old traditions and appearance.

We first stopped by the church while the kids played in the plaza across the street. Then we went to the house of a friend of Manito. The women were busy in the courtyard cutting corn off of cobs, while we sat down and had some beer. I then went with Manito’s sons to take the little kids, our 3 and a nephew is his, down to the river to swim. The Toyota had to traverse a lot of sand to get to the river bank, where a number of people were playing in the water and some cars were trying to ford the river from the other side. It was at most knee deep. I was able to wade across it without getting my shorts wet, and the kids had a blast swimming in the current and playing in the wet sand. Meanwhile, one of the cars trying to ford the river got stuck in the middle. It had only 2-wheel rear drive, so they were not smart to try it. It took almost every man in the vicinity, at least a dozen, to get the car unstuck and moving again, after about 20 minutes of effort.

Back at the house we had a lunch of delicious sweet corn soup, served with boiled yucca. For desert we had homemade popsicles flavored with cinnamon and coconut. Later they prepared lots of corn tamales and masaco, everything cooked over an outdoor wood fire. The masaco aw a mash made from yuca, some meat, and I don’t know what else, prepared in a large mortar and pestle called a tacu.

The man of the house showed us an enormous seed pod, about 2 feet long with a round cross section of about half a foot diameter. Manito peeled off the husk, and what was left had the appearance of a sponge, but was not as soft. I recognized it as the weird thing that Ana had bought at a natural foods store in California for about $6 to keep in the bath to wash my back. Apparently it is also popular for washing dishes, as they called it a lava plato!

[1] A bit of history: the Jesuits cultivated the arts and crafts to such an extent that more than 300 years ago in this region, far more remote then than it is now, one could find in the indigenous population full orchestras performing entire Baroque operas using locally made instruments!

Thursday, July 10:

Friday, July 11: