Hooray! Transportation Strike!!

Mercifully, the mini vans, the local “bus” service, are on strike today until 6 pm, leaving the streets and intersections clear and crossing the steeets less hazardous.Have to say, getting around on foot, my favored mode of transportation when I travel, has been curtailed here in La Paz. I only cross an intersection, always clogged…

BytarpleyFebruary 8, 20180Comments

Bolivia 2018

High Flyers

Although I had read about the cable cars in La Paz and seen pictures of them, I thought they were for tourists. Actually, they started in 2013 as a tourist feature and then evolved into a means of public transportation for locals. By 2020, the city expects to have 11 cable lines in…

BytarpleyFebruary 6, 20180Comments

Bolivia 2018

Choletas Wrestling

So what is there to do on Sunday afternoon in La Paz, Bolivia? Check out the website on the phenomenon that is women’s wrestling. According to my tour guide, even the WWF has welcomed them. First, the ladies must make their grand entrance. “Choletas” is an affectionate term for the women who are…

BytarpleyFebruary 5, 20182Comments

Uruguay 2018

Why Has Hollywood Not Made This Movie?

The featured image shows the gate house of the old Uruguayan prison, Punta Carretas. It is now an upscale shopping mall in an upper middle class neighborhood. That a McDonald’s is housed there I find amusing. What I learned on a recent tour, and did supplemental reading about on the internet, was that there was…

BytarpleyFebruary 1, 20182Comments

Uruguay 2018

Bring on the Beef

Uruguay and Brazil are about as different as the rural South is from New York City. Montevideo is high energy, efficient, and prosperous. Other than the capital, there are 17 other cities, all agricultural centers devoted to raising cattle. Most of the residents here are not churchgoers, unlike the bulk of Latin America, which is…

BytarpleyJanuary 31, 20180Comments

Brazil 2018

Farewell Brazil

The featured image was taken inside the Museum of Tomorrow, an extraordinary experience. Very difficult to photograph. What you are looking at is a rotunda that contains six floor to ceiling screens showing rotating films about the impact of population growth on the planet. This is only one of fifty or so permanent exhibits.…

BytarpleyJanuary 28, 20183Comments

Brazil 2018

Visit to a Favela

The featured image is of an exhibit currently in the downtown Rio Bank of Brazil. The artist is Austrian. Using shoeshine boxes, he shows in this massive sculpture his impression of the Favela: impenetrable, forbidding, and imprisioning. Well portrayed in the film, City of God, the first Favelas in Rio were a scramble to…

BytarpleyJanuary 25, 20182Comments

Brazil 2018

Rio

If only Rio looked as pretty as it does from the top of Sugarloaf mountain as shown in the featured image. When I arrived on Sunday afternoon and stepped out of a taxi in front of my hotel, all I could think of was the line made famous by Bette Davis: What a dump.…

BytarpleyJanuary 25, 20183Comments

Brazil 2018

At Pousada da Mangueira

In the film, The Sheltering Sky, actress Debra Winger has a conversation with someone in a rail station and says, “we are not tourists, we are travelers.” There is a difference. When I went on formal tours to Machu Picchu and Patagonia, I was a tourist. All energy was devoted in getting from one attraction…

BytarpleyJanuary 20, 20180Comments

Brazil 2018

Immersion in Candomble

Until I arrived in Salvador de Bahia, I had never heard of the Candomble religion, which has 5000 year old roots in Africa. As best I have learned, it is an anamistic faith and respectful of the forces of nature. Then Portuguese sent Jesuits to Brazil to convert the locals. When the Africans were imported…

BytarpleyJanuary 18, 20182Comments