The Waiting is the Easy Part! (Easy Part I)

Cody's note: I haven't found much time to write blog entries the past several days, we've been so busy collecting plants! So here is half of the story I promised in my last entry. I'll follow up with the other half soon.

Even before we left La Paz two weeks ago, our misadventures had already taken a turn toward the unfortunate. We stopped for lunch in one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the entire city, and parked our brand new 2007 Land Cruiser rental parked on the street just a couple of hundred feet from the cafe. The agent who rented us the vehicle warned us to never leave the car parked on the street in the city, because thieves love Land Cruisers, especially new ones. But since we are gringos tontos, we figured that one little time parking on the street would be ok. We only had to walk about a block from the car to get to our restaurant, and the street was clean with plenty of pedestrians. But in the thirty minutes that it took us to eat lunch, someone thieved three hubcaps (one from the spare tire!), the glass from both of our side mirrors, and the Toyota logo from the front of the vehicle. We drove around the city with no mirrors for a couple of hours until we finally located a black market dealer who sold us replacement mirrors of questionable history for a tenth of the cost of buying them new. We're still cruising around with two hubcaps and the Toyota symbol.

The next couple of days were pleasantly uneventful. We arrived in Sajama National Park in the afternoon and awoke in the morning to wander among the bunchgrasses with the llamas, exploring hot springs and enjoying the view of the colossal volcano Sajama, Bolivia's highest mountain, looming over the landscape. We left Sajama in the afternoon and arrived in the city of Oruro late in the evening, after collecting some Eleocharis in a pasture along the way. In Oruro we met our next challenge. No money. Wayne's ATM card had mysteriously ceased functioning just before we left La Paz, but we thought nothing of it since the Bolivian ATMs were giving us regular problems up until that point. Unfortunately, when we arrived in Oruro and Wayne's card still didn't work, we began to worry. I'd lost my debit card in a taxi just a week into the trip, so by the time we arrived in Oruro, our access to money relied entirely on Wayne's now apparently unusable card. We went to the bank to try taking out a cash advance, but the bank politely informed us that every single POS system in the entire city was out of commission, and there would be no cash advances for several days. I called my exceptionally helpful parents in the states to see if the PIN for my new debit card had arrived in the mail, but it had not. We tried the ATMs again. No luck. We were down to our last $25, and getting hungry. Something must be done.

Almost as a last resort, Wayne called his bank, and discovered that they (Bank of America) had placed a hold on his account for suspicious activity. Presumably they thought our numerous ATM withdrawls from Bolivia were suspicious, which seemed odd since Wayne had been using his card in Bolivia for over a month before the bank decided that any suspicious activity had occured. Go figure. Wayne spent the next few hours on the phone with Bank of America trying to reactivate his card—a phonecall which cost more than food for two days, or a night's stay in a pricey hotel. We found out after the fact that Bank of America has a collect number for international emergencies. Apparently this information is secret until you actually have an emergency.

That afternoon after preparing to leave the city, we stopped into a trendy coffee shop for a caffeine jolt and a short stint on the computer. I wanted to download some of my photos to the laptop so I could take more. I booted up the laptop and started organizing files and downloading photos from the camera. From somewhere nearby, something croaked like a metallic frog being electrocuted, or the sound of a rototiller hitting concrete, as heard from a distance. The first couple of times I heard it, I thought it was a noise from outside the coffee shop. When it started happenning more frequently and lasting longer, I became more curious about what it was. When Wayne noticed it too, and gave me a quizzical look, I decided something inside the coffee shop was making the noise. I only realized that the noise was coming from the laptop about thirty seconds before the laptop's screen went completely blue and it shut itself down. The rototiller sound was coming from the laptop's hard disk. I tried to boot it up again with no luck. It had flatlined. Our laptop had officially died.

At this point the humor of the situation was beginning to settle in. First we got robbed in La Paz, then Wayne's bank froze our funding for days, and now the laptop had melted down! We joked about what was next. Maybe someone would kidnap us and sell us into white slavery? Maybe the car would spontaneously combust? Each day a new adventure, that was for sure!

The laptop seemed like an easy fix. Back home in Washington, I could have picked up all the supplies I needed in less than an hour. Not so in Oruro. We scoured the city for an external hard disk. We hunted down every computer store in the entire city to ask about external hard disks. No luck. We asked people on the street. We asked our hotel. We asked vendors at the market. No luck. After hours of searching, we found one tiny computer store with a box in the window advertising the exact item we were looking for, but that store was closed. We checked back at least five times throughout the day, but to no avail. We left Oruro feeling defeated, but decided to come back in a few days when the store should be open again.

After two days spent in the near-wilderness watching flocks of feather-boa pink flamingos fly over our heads, we returned to Oruro. The store was still closed. We spent another night in the city hoping that our luck would improve in the morning and the store would open for us, but it didn't. We finally found a phone number for the store owner and called him, hoping that all our waiting around would finally pay off. The owner even answered the phone, but the news didn't cause any excitement. The box we'd been staring at for four days through the store's glass front, the box that said it contained the item we needed, was empty! We had wasted our time hoping on an empty box! We left Oruro late that afternoon, laughing about our bad luck as we headed south toward the Salar de Uyuni—the largest expanse of salty wasteland anywhere in the world—and even more exciting misadventures.