I don't know what to call this post, so I'm going to call it... Gus

I finally made it out of La Paz, although I didn't make it to Cochabamba as planned. I found that Oruro is a pleasant enough place, and I didn't really fancy an extra 9 hours on the bus. Plus, I know I'll be back in Oruro for La Diablada carnival, and I plan on heading to Cochabomba after that. By then the film school there might be back from break, which is the main reason I'm going there anyways.

The La Paz bus terminal has perhaps a dozen companies providing service to Oruro; they all say they charge the same price, most run every hour or so, and they all have the same exterior shots of their buses that look pretty much the same. So I picked one at random, which I'm going to say is in the bottom quartile of the providers (although if I save 10 ticket stubs, my next ride is free!). The interior of the bus looked as if if hadn't been cleaned for weeks, with a plethora of various-colored crumbs and mysterious, dried white crusty spots on the seats. If the person in front of you leans back, you are either going spread-eagled or having your knees crushed. Fortunately, the music was played on low volume(!); I believe this is the first time I've seen this in South America.

It was a beautiful ride though: for the first part of the ride, dusty green hills rose like walls a ways back from the road; occasionally there would be a small break, revealing the snow-covered caps of the Andes. After a while the hills became less uniform on the land, which reminded me of the American West, like southern Idaho and northern Utah. The ground looked as if it hadn't seen water in a long time, even though this is rainy season - except in a few low spots, like the half-submerged playground I saw. Crabgrass and scrub brush dominated the vegetative landscape. Occasionally I saw state road workers in yellow vests on old, rusty bikes, heading to or working on a job. I wonder if the bikes are provided, or if owning a bike is a great asset in securing that job?

The hills looked as if they were the legs of a sleeping giant with vericose veins - something was causing distinct lines along virtually all of them, although I'm not sure what. It didn't seem to be from agriculture or any human interference. There was farming going on though, it what looked like some of the poorest soil in the world (generally the Altiplano is known for its mineral wealth, not its agricultural wealth). Occasionally we passed small pueblos; you could tell which way the wind blew by following the trail of plastic bags running from the mounds of garbage surrounding the towns. Generally speaking the life looked... bleak. So much bleaker than anything I've experienced in places like India or Cambodia, places that have their own share of poverty. The farther south we got, the more other-worldly and bleak the landscape became; the vegetation grew even more sparse, dust-devils swirled across the horizon, the soil grew redder, and the salt began to appear. By the time we were on the outskirts of Oruro, I felt like I was closer to the moon than the earth - the ground was white and rumpled-looking, and the wreckage of unidentifiable machinery was cast about.

Once you get into Oruro though, you get the sense that the town is one with some money. There are carefully kept public spaces in the center; many of the sidewalks are being renovated; and scores of new traffic lights are going in. In fact, the huge number of private vehicles is a dead giveaway that the town is not the poorest in Bolivia, although you don't need to stray far from the center to begin to get a sense of the poverty that does exist (I am in the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere).

At first I tried to find a hostel from my Footprint guide that was supposed to be about midway between the bus station and the center of town, but all I found was an old abandoned building. I wound up in the first place I saw: the owner spoke English, which is a rare nicety here; he had a collection of maybe 10,000 key rings on the walls of the main office; and I thought the naked lady bent over the pool table next to the picture of Mary and baby Jesus was a nice touch. My room has a lot of space and good light (two things I look for in a room when traveling), although the pillows are so big and firm I can't even sleep on them. Pillows are a perpetual nuisance traveling anywhere outside the rich world: straw is a common filler; in South America they tend to use something that feels like big mothballs or rolled up socks.

My hospedaje has a shared bathroom, and everything is taffy-pink: pink toilet, pink tub, pink tile, even pink toilet paper. The plumbing looks like it was installed as an after-thought; the shower head comes out from the side of the shower, instead of at the end. It's hot though, which is always nice (a tip: my experience in South America is that point-of-use hot water guarantees a crappy shower, central hot water guarantees a good shower. It's worth remembering if you're ever here).

I had stopped here to book a room for the carnival, but once I got here and started asking around I found out that the government sets a price ceiling and floor, and they don't do that for a couple more weeks. I don't know why they would need to set a price floor, since the prices of rooms triple or quadruple for carnival time. But I guess to make sure they wouldn't undercut the floor, the places that would quote me prices quoted me at grossly inflated levels: "this dingy, windowless room is US$20 per person, per night." I talked to one place that said to give a call in a couple of weeks, and that the price would probably be about $8 pp/pn. That was the closest I came to an actual reservation, though.

So I'm kind of just kicking it here until Tuesday, which is when the next train runs to Uyuni. There are two train companies: one runs Friday and Tuesday, and arrives in Uyuni at 10pm; the other runs Wednesday and Sunday, but arrives at 2:30am. I don't fancy a 2:30am arrival in a strange town. But the train cuts out almost 4 hours of travel time, plus trains are way more fun than buses. So I decided to wait a few days.