In Spice & Time

An isla, or mound, from the air.

Not far from the center sits a moxos, one of many that give this region it’s nickname, Llano de Los Moxos. Or, land of the mysteriously raised mounds and interconnected pathways. It is debatable as to whether most of these mounds were built up over time though natural processes driven by the continual flooding and drying of the land, or if they were built by a historic civilization. Some archeologists are not at all convinced people constructed these mounds. Some, maybe, but not all. Some archeologists have dedicated their careers to exploring them. But that a mysterious, virtually unknown civilization built at least a portion of these mounds and pathways is irrefutable. Thousands of sherds of pottery have been found in excavations of some of the larger mounds in northeast Beni. They molded these refugia up from the flood waters over time by adding dirt and simultaneously burying their garbage beneath them. Additionally, the symmetry of the mounds and elevated pathways are so straight and uniform that it would indicate human engineering rather than some random process of nature. Whoever these clever, hard working earth-movers were, having probably migrated from the Andes, they clearly brought with them the determination one might attribute to the Incans. The Incans are famous for having built jaw-dropping temples almost beyond belief for that ancient time. Yes, they probably deserve that fame. But if the temples hadn't survived and there was no written evidence of the culture, would we believe an ancient society could organize in such a way that is necessary to build these places? Similarly goes the debate surrounding the Moxos. The people of the Moxos moved so much earth into circular mounds and arrow-straight pathways packed so solidly that they lasted for eons of rainy seasons, yet their dusty moxos are not a tourist destination. Their society's existence still debated. Their constructions were created long enough ago that no spoken or written history of their existence has survived to present day, a great mystery! Yet this history isn't speculated about in documentaries or published on the cover of National Geographic. All told, it could be argued the people of the Moxos are an even greater mystery than the Incans. Regardless of what archeologists think or you or I think, it is a mystery to why these people seemed determined to set up shop in the tropical savanna of the Beni in the first place. The Llanos de Moxos is an interesting choice for settling because the soil here is thin and acidic and so not well suited for agriculture or grazing. Half the year the savanna stands in flood water and the other half it is parched by drought. Perhaps the environment did get the best of them, or perhaps they shared the curse of the Incans, destined for extinction, because they vanished with no clue as to where they went. The vast networks of mounds they left behind are suitable for growth of dry-loving plant species and animals that can’t find root elsewhere in the flooded waste, so they did leave behind some legacy. One that forever altered the ecology of the Beni. Or not. Therefore, I am not altogether positive, looking at this very small but majestic mound, who to give credit to. I see how maybe one family could have lived on it, or grown one small garden. It’s perfectly oval, maybe 50 ft long and 30 ft wide, and surrounded by the moat, then a perfectly proportioned raised walkway rings the moat, which is where I stood. Just to see this concentric ring pattern from the air would convince one of its artificiality. I must say I was convinced seeing it from the ground. Having just happened across it in the jungle alone, unexpectedly, glimpsing it first through a break in the trees, my orientation adjusting from wilderness to ancient civilization in a blink of time, it almost took my breath away. The sudden knowledge that where I stood. Someone. Lived. Here. Built. This. The island I saw all overgrown, with dramatic, giant palms splayed out all directions, bowing gently over the moat, had a history and was someone else’s long ago past. This place had a secret purpose I would never understand. I instantly felt insecure like I was unwelcome and being watched all at once. And I was. A startled capybara shriek-barked like I didn’t know they did and belly-flopped into the pond. I think I was the more startled one. I walked around the circular raised path, amazed at its circular form and how high it elevated me above the surrounding forest floor. I had been walking along a straight portion of the path before reaching the island for the past 10 minutes without realizing it. It was by and away the easiest way to travel through the jungle. High and dry. So to speak. I looked for maybe a walkway leading directly onto the island. Shouldn’t they have wanted a way to get onto the island and stay dry? Maybe boats. Two more capybaras followed the first into the pond. SHRIEK-BARK! SPLOSHK! BARK-SHRIEK! SKLAPSH! I’m not kidding, it’s very startling to startle a capybara. In the quiet of the jungle especially. Why was it so eerily quiet? I looked around for pot shards but I didn’t find anything. Anything like that was probably washed into the very deep moat that surrounds the mound. I tested it’s depth with a stick. Very deep. Caiman deep. No thank you. In the end I would find no walkway, no pot shards, and no evidence an ancient family actually build this place, except for a feeling. It may have been dug by the landowner’s baco in 1983, to drain the area or as an overflow to the small lagoon several hundred feet to the west, but what do I know. It was an incredible place to experience. I have to return there to search the numerous Motacu palms for their fruit, but also I have to return to bask in the ancient hum that vibrates around the place. A museum without museum glass to separate the past from the present. Until my next visit, the island belongs only to the capybara tribe. I counted four, so they’ve got that going for them which is nice.

1) Dulche de Leche on everything 2) this girl Ubers Bolivia and suffers no fools 3-4) Returning to a handmade Italian pizza party from the field is the best kind of returning from the field

Coca leaves (get things done quickly and excitedly) Siestas Smoke buckets (for the mosquitoes) Showering twice (the second with your clothes on to keep cool 👍) Fixed lunch menues (no decisions required) Moto-taxis (hop on. hop off) Giant floor squeegies (for mopping) Horses (all-terrain vehicles that can swim) Dulce de Leche (spread on everything)

We had just spent 2 days in the field, monitoring nearly 80 parrot nest boxes and potential nest sites, then spent the previous 2 hours packing out the 8 km to the nearest place to hitch a ride (an auto, not a horse, as we had already been offered a ride by passers-by on one of these). We staggered into Loreto around 6:30. It was nearing sunset. A nearby soccer field, ringed by smoking fires to keep away mosquitos, was hosting a match. Three women watched from the grand stand. We walked through the otherwise quiet streets to the towns plaza. Edel communicated to me to espere aca, she was going to ask around about a ride back to Sachojere. Our chances were slim. We hadn’t seen anything but motorbikes since we’d met the main road 4 km back. Would I be spending the night in this plaza, I wondered? I decided it wouldn’t be terrible. We had all of our camping stuff and some money for food and water. It might be kind of exciting. Edel, however, was having no such plans. As exhilertaing as it sounded to me, this was not her first field excursion getting stranded afterwards (the Project doesn’t have a reliable vehicle). Because it is quite a normal inconvenience for biologists in areas like this, she’d learned to fend for herself if she wanted anything normal like transportation to and from the field. She wasn’t going to spend another night away from home because the taxi driver left early. Not again. She returned to the where I waited in the plaza after dark and said yes, the last taxi had long gone back to Trinidad but for an exhorbitant sum of €300 pesos, a local taxi driver was willing to give us a private lyft to Sachojere tonight. Surge pricing was clearly in effect. For €300, which is about $43 USD, the fare for 14 mi was roughly equivalent to what we may have paid for this service in the States. Luckily, between us, Edel and I were able to scrounge the cash as there was no app or card reader to be found. I don’t know how Edel managed to find this, to essentially find an Uber in Bolivia without the help of an app, and I wouldn’t know how to repeat it if I tried, but it seemed that we were going to make it happen. We would be sleeping in our own bunks tonight! After the typical 8-10 minute Uber-wait, our own private rust bucket mini-van pulled up squeaking to the plaza just as the soccer game was finishing up. The players were tiredly emptying into the streets. Darkness had fully fallen, and with no moon. I noticed as I loaded our gear into the back that our van only had fog lights. I glanced at our driver, who was cheerfully covering the cargo with a tarp to keep off the dust and cinching the back hatch shut with a strap. He didn’t seemed concerned about this. He was rich now. Edel and I settled into our dusty seats, sans seatbelts obviously, as the driver went around systematically working each door’s individual recipe for proper closure. Push here, jiggle there, tie this one closed. We soon rumbled away from the square and the crowd of onlooking soccer players who had stopped to gawk at our Uber. We made one last stop at the last house in town before the main road. An orange-winged Amazon parrot, filthy, clung to an upturned bicycle wheel hanging from the rafters of the porch. Dogs, pigs, and chickens foraged in the dirt beneath it while the smoke from the soccer field choked the air. I thought about the parrot. Another guy emerged from the house and got into the passenger seat. Our insurance. We rolled onto the bumpy, dusty, unnamed highway. There are no delineator posts on this unnamed highway in the Beni department of Bolivia. It suddenly occurred to me that night driving may be an extremely hazardous undertaking here. I could barely make out the faint beige strip of road in the blackness with those fog lights, and I’m sure the driver couldn’t see any better, but he wasn't adjusting his speed to compensate. We were all silent in the Uber as he drove, each of us straining to see the road. There are never any windows in these taxis, the apparatuses have all long stopped working and its too hot to ever roll them up anyway. So the inside the windshield tends to film over with a layer of dust. It hadn’t rained for several days, so the road was very dusty. For this, the driver kept a giant rag handy and he needed to make use of this often. No need to slow the van during this procedure. Swerve one-handed to avoid giant potholes. Especially at the last second. Always drive in the oncoming lane because it’s smoother, has less standing water. Simply lurch back over into the hardened ruts when another oncoming car is upon you. Hope that the oncoming car sees your dim fog lights as night blindness takes over from the oncoming headlights, especially if the other driver actually has real headlights but is unwillingly to dim them. This is how Uber drivers do their thing in Bolivia. Nothing slows us down. I gripped the door handle tighter for comfort. Then, cow butts. They appeared out of the blackness through the windshield. Left to right, blockading the road. I assumed our elderly driver saw these dark shapes in the dark road on this dark night through his fog lights, but I was mistaken. Despite his double grip on the steering wheel and constant hunch forward to better peer through the dusty windshield, it wasn’t until the sheen of cow sweat was visible on their rumps that he saw them and smashed on the brakes. We stopped just in time, or slowed that is, to honk and meander zig-zags through momentary openings in the herd. The car horn was used as if cows understand a honking car horn. Me clutching the door handle was used as if it would save us all. And perhaps it did. We had somehow managed to stay on the road and no more roadblocks appeared. Fifty harrowing, hazardous minutes later in a vehicle that definitely would not be approved by Uber or for general highway use in America, we pulled in to the twinkle lit drive of the Centro. Probably to celebrate our return from the field, but for which I will consider as a celebration of us successfully Ubering in rural Bolivia, Eugenia and Juan Pablo had hot, hand crafted pizza and ice cold Coca Cola walked from Sachojere awaiting our arrival. Something makes me think this had to do with Edel’s urgency to get back. I was very fine with this. My Uber review for Bolivian Guy in Loreto: would repeat again hazardous ride through darkness on gutted dirt track for handmade Italian pizza. 5 stars. Driver seemed nice.

The way they line your bed net waiting patiently for you to emerge makes you feel like a sort of celebrity. And all I had to do was emit CO2. My arrival to El Beni coincided perfectly with a recent rain and an enormous emergence of mosquitos. They swarmed our clothes and backpacks and cabins in numbers which my new bunk mate hadn’t seen in the four months since she had been here. Fantastic. Fresh mosquitos, hatched into this world full of youthful zeal, optimism, and do-or-die persistence, fearlessly taking on a host of any size no matter how wildly it flails. It’s almost inspiring. It’s also maddening. I always feel one step behind. It’s as if they understand me. Have they evolved to predict human behavior? They settle on screen doors to our cabins as if they know at some point we will walk through. And when you’re in that awkward, defenseless moment between stepping outside, switching your open-door hand position to the close-door hand position, they swarm. Into the room’s now open doorway, trapping themselves in for a later meal, or onto your weak points like exposed ankles, neck, or back of thigh where surveillance is impossible. Every time I find new bites in a place I couldn’t have thought possible, I am reminded that an insect out-witted me. Then paranoia. Where will they strike next? I definitely have Zika. Probably. Or whatever else tropical mosquito-born illness is the new hip trend. After the first several days, I have bites on my bites on my bites. On every square inch of me. You’d think they would take pity on welted, chewed up skin and give that section a break. But no. They have no regard for the fact that you’re tired, or on the toilet, or trying to focus on something else. The only way I’ve found to beat them is with my mind. And a thorough spraying every 2-3 hours. And a good mosquito face net tucked into the collar of your shirt. Tuck it in. Otherwise it will become your personal travelling mosquito aviary. If in your mind you are not covered head to toe in stinging, buzzing, whirring insects, in your ears, nostrils, hair, waistband, then they cannot beat you. Let go of your earthly form, which has become a walking feedbag, a vessel for some other purpose, and transport yourself in your mind to a place when you were once free. Five days later, the mosquitoes were nearly gone. I had won. This time.

1) the sun sets over the Plaza in Loreto 2) Almuerzo at Restaurant Dona Tina

On the last day of 2016, Jose, the director of Conservation Loros Bolivia, myself, and the research coordinator, Edel, spent the morning in the field, installing anti-predator shield and installing a nest-cam at a blue-throated Macaw nest site. After which, we had budgeted time to spend connecting with the locals–-a very important part of endangered species conservation here or anywhere. The closest town to the breeding area is Loreto. Loreto is 14 mi south of Sachojere and slightly bigger. Their plaza is grander, has a statue and an arboretum, and they have a cathedral and a soccer field with a grand stand. The only cantina in town is owned by a friend of Joses and is called Restaurant Dona Tina. You can see it on Google Maps. I’ve left a review. This is where we pulled in around 10:30 am. The cantina is also the Dons house, which is also the cantina. The only difference between house and cantina is a wobbly wooden fence, a sign that says no one under 18 allowed, and loud music blaring from one gap in the plank fence and not the other. It is 89 degrees. It is 10:30. Too early for lunch, but not for what I will call pre-lunch. For pre-lunch, Edel and I are beckoned into the family’s main gathering space, which is a large area under a solid tin roof on tall posts but is mostly open all around. It is bordered on one side by the neighbors similar house and the cantina wall oh the other. The Don is swinging shirtless in a hammock and his wife is a doing at least 3 loads of laundry by hand on a table next to him. Behind the table, which is really a tree stump with a plank on it, and down into the back house is the rest of the family home of another shorter shed full of beds and billowing curtains and hallways through partially built, brick foundations of open air. All was a dirt floor with wooden but mostly plastic lawn furniture about for wherever people felt like sitting. There were several bunk beds in the living area near us as well, fitted with mosquito nets. More beds? Yes, because big families. I soon counted 6 children that I could see, the oldest 27ish, the youngest a few months old, and spanning the years in between. We sat on lawn chairs gathered around to listen to Don in his hammock and Jose ordered a cold liter of Coca Cola for the room. Pre-lunch had begun. Some clock somewhere ticking, maybe imagined, ticking slower and slower in the rising late-morning swelter. A flock of chickens comes marching through the compound. Bantums and tall leggy jungle fowl all living in harmony. These are happy chickens. They pecked and scratched totally at ease with their world around the pile of bricks that looked like some handyman’s project who decided finishing the room was too much trouble, so left it half built and didn’t bother carting away the un-used bricks. A stack of boards stood nearby for similar spontaneous building opportunities, I’m sure. The chickens wandered about under our chairs. A daughter, the son who returned with the Coke and poured us all some, and a random passerby had also pulled up lawn chairs to hear what Jose and the Don discussed. These visitors were there for an education, too, of whatever they could glean from the outside world of cars and fresh news. Eventually the chickens reached a large pile of shady sand and as if they suddenly just remembered the oasis that was the sand pile, rushed to their wallowing spots and nestled in, happily fluttering their scraggly feathers and hucking cool sand on themselves, just behind and to the left of where I sat. Don’t ever tell me chickens do not feel pleasure or pain or any other emotion the same as humans do. It’s approaching 95 degrees and we’re in the tropics in a tin shed on a windless day. And when these chickens nestle into the sand, their eyes practically rolling back in their heads with the feel-good and promptly falling asleep, I am jealous. It had been about an hour and we hadn’t moved. The Coke bottle now empty would be re-used again and again as a water canteen or for a gasoline re-fill. The Don and Jose chatting away non-stop in Spanish about things I don’t know. They speak at length of parabas. It was hot. Finally a hot breeze came through the compound. And a tortoise. Two tortoises. The oldest son fed one a banana. I got to hold it. The son also had a very young puppy, not more than a few weeks old. I wondered what its back story was. It clearly had ring worm, and parvo, maybe. It was starved for affection. It would amble rather pathetically out from under its lawn chair roof toward any human leg that stopped nearby. It didn’t get too far from its chair shelter in this confusing world though, because it had to stop to poo every few minutes and it could barely walk, keeping it restricted to a slow putter should it need to move out of peoples way. But too slowly. At one point it made a move toward the daughter who was handing off the baby to the mother and stepped back onto the puppys front leg. It screamed. No one took notice. Not even the puppy, really, now holding its paw and for the rest of our visit. It hobbled 3-legged back under its chair. Life is about suffering. The mother had disappeared for a while and now re-appeared to suckle the baby. After a time she put the baby down on a bunk bed for a nap, and resume washing laundry. She laughed at me watching the chickens. The loud cantina music continued to thump through the walls and the men continued to talk while the wife and her daughter's various chores involving the laundry and mothering and cleaning and cooking, and Edel and I sat and listened. Her with understanding because she’s Argentinian and I none except for parabas. Jose produced a blue-throated Macaw feather to show the Don, which was greeted with enthusiasm. It’s hot. It’s been 2 hours now. Finally, Jose stands up. So we stand up. Don puts on a shirt. We all go outside and duck into next door and grab a large table in the cantina. It’s even hotter in the cantina because the roof is lower. The radiant heat more intense. Jose turns on the ceiling fan above us that just moves the heat around and orders a pilsner for the table. I had to step outside for a cool breeze. What is “cool” to me now I’m not sure. But I needed a moment alone and gather myself for what was turning into a frustrating afternoon. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I hadn’t been consulted about a 3 hour meeting in a hot tin shack. What learning experience was this. I was too hot to even think about eating, and I had no control of the situation. I zipped off my zip-offs into shorts and deposited them and my overshirt in the Mitsubishi with the rest of my semblence of control and headed back into the devilish heat of the cantina, which was still sporting Feliz Navidad decor, tacked to the ceiling beams and bar. At the table, beer had been poured and it was cold. Even with no appetite this was the best thing I’ve ever drank. Things were instantly looking up. I glanced to the back of the cantina, which seemed to be the kitchen, and spied none other than the Dons wife, stirring a pot on the open fire. That’s where she had disappeared to. To cook the afternoon meal for the entire restaurant. The executive chef, heading a staff of her daughters as chefs assistants and servers in between laundry, mothering, entertaining, and clearly still birthing children while the Don made use of the hammock and put on a shirt that day. Fierce doesn’t even begin to describe this woman. I shouldn't have been so surprised. Life in Bolivia is traditional, especially in rural areas like here. She’s doing all the correct things and teaching her daughter’s to be masters of their own homes someday. But I am in awe, unsure whether to feel appreciation, as I do, or instead wish she had the choice to spend the afternoon in the hammock instead of the Don. For equality's sake but maybe at the expense of her happiness? This is the only life she knows, after all, and her mother before her and so on. In this place, pondering alternative realities is like my Netflix subscription. A luxury. But quite useless. All meditations aside, her cooking was outrageously good. I was almost sick in the heat when the soup was served, but it was impossibly tasty and I couldn’t refuse it. It gave me strength. It gave me life. The music thumped. More patrons came in for the afternoon, fixed meal and a daughter served them their soup. A headless pig dripped from the ceiling in a nearby corner. Two dusty china hutches were the only thing decorating the opposing wall. Piled next to the other, shared wall, more opportunistic bricks. We talked about Donald Trump and I complemented the platter of food that arrived, beef steak, egg, fried plantain, rice, and tomato. The Don laughed when I took a picture. Obviously. I had to. It was gorgeous. And I had to remember this place because I couldn’t get over the enormous domestic effort being driven by this one Bolivian Supermom, the Dons wife. When the time finally came to go I was almost regretful. I felt attached to this extraordinary Bolivian family and the super mom who had quietly, magnificently, ruled over everything that had transpired in my life these past 4 hours. How could I tell her thanks for all you do and if no one else thanks you I’m sorry? How do I tell her do you know how much you slay with no modern conveniences a workload that people elsewhere can’t even comprehend? Each day? With all of the challenges imposed by living here? Not only that, but what would the rest of them do without her if she went on vacay?? The Don would surely die. We said our goodbyes, our conservation work completed, for now. Don wished me buena suerte. We then were back in the car with the windows down for the cool breeze. The only way the heat is tolerable is if its moving. The tropical savanna countryside was breathtakingly beautiful and with warm soup belly and renewed strength and inspiration I adored flying down the dusty road above it. Beautiful Bolivian cattle and tiny scrubby horses. Everyone we passed on the road was in the midst of their siestas. Everyone except Bolivian supermoms all across Bolivia, of course. Did you think about them? Does anybody think about them? I may not agree with the inequality so ingrained in the lifestyle throughout rural Bolivia and I’m not alone even in Bolivia in this, but I will never forget the power of a Bolivian supermom. The feats she accomplishes. Every day. That was the last day of 2016 and it was one of remarkable beauty that I will remember forever.

For those of you who know me, the fact that I waited for a taxi for four hours and didn't fire-bomb something is noteworthy. 2-3 hours waiting is a good average, however, each taxi that passed this day happened to be full. Whatever the cause, the fact that I haven't been driven insane by this weekly tradition is a testament to not my capacity to improve as person, but to the way this place slows down time. The 2-4 hours that pass are equally as irksome as the 12ish minutes you usually have to wait for the NYC subway if it's running delayed or you arrived at the platform just as the last was departing. It's relativity at work. The change of pace of everything around you makes the wait tolerable. But only just. Also you have little other choice in the matter. Things move slower here. It's a wonderful change and I think I am embracing it well. Possibly because I have always been part sloth.

Process for watching new Episodes of Sherlock in rura Bolivia: 1) wait at taxi stop for 3-4 hours for ride. Cover yourself in tarp to prevent mosquito-born death 💀 2) hitched a ride yay! Great panoramic view from my seat 🚚 3) found an Internet cafe with a fan working computer! Success! 💻4) 😍😍😍🕵️Sherlock

1) la plaza en Sachojere 2) Una Sachojere tienda for buying diarrhea bread and soda 3) a house in Sachojere. 🌈 4) I washed all my clothes by hand, look

El Centro

El Centro de Parabas Barba Azul sits on an unnamed dirt highway leading south from Trinidad. Sometimes the highway is open if rain hasn’t turned it into a muddy torrent. It’s very close to the village of Sachojere, where one can walk to buy bread, soda, phone credit, or a fresh empanada for 1 Bo, but that’s about it. If you ask nicely, you can pick a papaya from a guy’s yard. Coconuts are free to anyone who can reach them. The trees grow in the plaza. Sachojere is tiny but even it has a central plaza. All of the rural villages I've seen do. Three cabanas comprise the Centro. An office, kitchen, and dorm for volunteers. The dorm sleeps four but I’m the only volunteer here for the moment after someone from Canada ducked out. Which makes the daily routine here a bit difficult. The manager of the center lives in the office suite. We communicate usually by squinting through the sunny distance for where the other and whatever the other one is doing, and either joining in to help or continuing with our own tasks. A trail goes Northwest past the last fish pond to the Macaw aviary, which is surrounded by an electric fence and an authorized personnel only sign. When not living in the field for weeks at a time, the routine of the center is to feed the macaws their pain-stakinly collected jungle fruit at 7am, 1pm, and clean up at 7pm. Meals for the macaws is a rough chop of various in-season, ripe foods that grow nearby. Typically it’s 1 banana, 1 cracked, and 3 closed motacu palm nuts, and a handful of smaller palm seeds or guava per bird. Because the bird’s food, except for the bananas, depends heavily upon what’s in season, this is maybe the most stressful animal keeping job I’ve had. Mango season means buckets of mango for weeks. Workers at the center dream of mango season, I’m not kidding, they do. But then it’s gone and often with nothing as plentiful to fill the void. Nothing seems to be ripe right now. When something is about to become ripe, you will always be second to the monkeys. Monkeys will always beat you to the guava tree. They take maddeningly small bites out of giant ripe fruits and throw the rest to the forest floor. I’ve never felt so betrayed by monkeys. I also never imagined I would be competing with monkeys for ripe fruit. The day’s activities revolve around the needs of the captive macaws, who are slated for a breeding and reintroduction program one day. Volunteers at the center go on daily collecting trips for hours, searching for the macaw’s staple food, motacu, and whatever else is macaw-approved and of course, ripe for the picking. When not foraging for the birds, the volunteers can cook, eat, work together or seperately. We work on projects, investigations for the center, maintenance, laundry, data entry, etc. Our water jugs and groceries arrive each week by taxi, the white, beat-up rust bucket station wagons that carry passengers, mail, loads of supplies, whatever, to and from Trinidad and the several villages dotting the unnamed highway to the south. Laundry is done by hand on your own time. When you throw another load of clothes into your clothes washer at home, remember somewhere in Bolivia a girl is contentedly washing hers by hand and hanging them up to dry in endless colorful zigzags in her dusty yard. Currently at the center, I’m occupied with creating a new enrichment routine for the macaws and scouting for nesting parrot pairs, their foods of choice, and entering my sightings into eBird to help with eco tourism for the center. When the other half of our crew arrives back from their week in the field planting habitat, it will be my turn to go!

Motorbikes and palm trees and people and bony dogs and noises and Spanish and dirt roads and paving stone roads and rickety wooden bridges over green muck open sewers and heat and storefront vendors and electrical wires. These sights are deliciously new as I whiz around on the back of a motorbike owned by Jose, who rescued me after my taxi dropped me off 8 blocks too far south of La Oficina Paraba Barba Azul, mercilessly unloaded my 3 heavy burdens, overcharged me, and drove off. Most people watched from elevated sidewalks and their store fronts as I struggled under my own weight, commenting “eso una mochilla grande.” Or telling me they didnt know Jose, or the Proyecto, or even la paraba. Hopelessly lost, scared, and basically immobile. But then Jose answered the phone. He gave me a ride to his friend’s house, Don Hernaldo, where I could finally leave my bags until later when I took the afternoon taxi to El Centro, for which the stop was right outside. Amazing news. Baggage-free and with my people, finally after three days of travelling, I began to relax and enjoy myself. Motocrossing around the cramped streets of Trinidad is probably my new favorite thing, short of the macaws. Lucky Bolivians. They live simply. In Trinidad, sturdy, minimalistic buildings of colorful concrete or brick line the roads. It’s a typical city. There are restaurants and cafés and banks and markets and shiny dentist offices and bike shops and bakeries and the Cathedral. Most in rural towns live in an open air hut with a few wooden planks for walls and packed straw roofs. Perfect for catching that life-giving breeze in the heat. Not just the people live simply, the animals too. There is very little meddling in the lives of their beasts. Cows, horses, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, pigs, wander freely through the streets and the countryside. Some in good bodily condition, some not. Some with collars or ropes claiming ownership, some not. I find it beautiful how one with nature their struggle is, for the animals and the people. Bolivians fully embrace their circumstance. They carve their place in it. They don’t attempt to dominate it. It’s the tropics though, so I suppose it would kill you if you tried that shit here anyway. And who wants to try to dominate nature when it’s so damn hot.

Looking around my hostel in Santa Cruz and the view from the window.