Saturday, June 26th: Apolobamba Trek Day 4

Sickness and health
Okidoki, yesterday things weren´t looking very good for me: I was wearing all the clothes I had, had all the blankets of the whole dorm room on top of me and my teeth were still chattering. The Chacarapi host was a little annoyed that we weren´t interested in hiking up an hour from Chacarapi alongside a packed lama, to go deliver some goods to a neighbour. As a side activity, for fun. Erhm, no thanks, not even while in good health, mister!

In the middle of the night I started feeling really hot, a sign of my fever breaking, and during the (cold) night the layers of blankets have come off, one by one. By the morning I´m feeling great. Miracle recovery? Only if you believe in health blessings.

Tourist breakfast
Breakfast is about the only constant in our trip. Every day we each get:

- 1 bread roll

- 1 portion of preserves/jam

- 1 portion of butter

- 1 cup of coffee or tea

- optionally an egg

This breakfast is served throughout Bolivia, and we pretty much had the same kind of breakfast last year, during our trip to Madagascar. This formula may very well be universal! Without fail Blandine gets tea, I drink "cafe con leche".

Tea? Leaf it up to me!
Today I don´t want to push things, my stomach is still feeling a bit wussy, so I want to drink an infusion. There are no tea bags on the table, so I run into the adjacent kitchen and ask for "maté". To my great surprise, the indigenous woman points to the bunch of wilting flowers and plants in the middle of the table. OMG, they´re to be used for infusions, they´re NOT a lame attempt to smurk up the surroundings! How come nobody told us??? How come our silly city minds didn´t figure it out before?? Duh! Anyway, I grab some F-R-E-S-H camomille, stuff it in my cup, pour hot water and a bit of sugar over it and VOILA, the best camomille infusion I ever had is ready!

Down to Charazani
After breakfast, we go up to the corral that holds all the lamas and take a group picture. I tried to pet the lamas, but they´re not so happy about Belgians. The lama-leader walks up to me and gives me an intense stare. He´s about to spit at me for trying to pet his girlies, so I stop trying to pet him. Blandine keeps encouraging me from outside the corral, but I´m sure she just wants a picture of my face covered in lala-spit. And I´m not interested in getting my ass kicked by a cross between a sheep and a wild giraffe, so I give up.

Chacarapi is known for it´s medecine lab, where natural medecine is produced from the plants found in the surrounding hills. Normally we get to see how the lb works, but the medecine-maker (pharmacist?) is out and the lab is closed. No luck, so we´ll have to do with a look at the local museum, which explains the relationship between the Quechua and the plants found in this area. I buy some herbal tiger balm (made from local herbs, not made from local tigers), who knows when that could come in handy during the trip =P

The hike to Charazani, our end destination, is supposed to take 4 hours. It´s almost 8:30 AM and we want to eat before we´re supposed to hop on the 2PM bus back to La Paz. That´s the ONLY bus back, we can´t miss it, so we start making tracks right away. 8:30AM is a late start for mountain people anyways, they´re usually drinking their first coffee at 4:30AM already. Blandine´s a bit nervous, but we turn out to be a better-than-average couple of hikers: we walk into Doña Sofia´s restaurant, the end point of the trek, after no more than 3.5 hours. After a pleasant lunch we walk to the bus stop and get on the bus. The nights were cold, the days hot, the people more than friendly, this trip was fantastic!

Drinking on Dutch Defeat
In the evening we check back into hotel Fuentes and have dinner in Sol y Luna, the best Dutch WI-FI spot in La Paz. Blandine heads to the hotel right after dinner (the altitude makes her seriously sleepy), I stay for drinks with the cook, Luc Ceuppens, who´s from a town near Antwerp. He´s bet with the Dutch owner for a serious amount of money that Holland will NOT win the worldcup. Sounds like money in the bag, baby, Holland haven´t convinced me that much, and they´ll play Brazil next. We´ll HAVE to drink to that. After a few "Cuba Libres", Luc receives a visit from a beautiful Ecuadorian who seems only interested in talking to him, so I head back to the hotel.