Abbie's big driving adventure

Last Sunday, I was eating gelato with my roommates Paulo and Bryn, when our friend Josefina (who also works at Natura) called Paulo to see if we wanted to go for a drive to a cool park outside of Santa Cruz. The only catch: neither Josefina nor Paulo drive. After much reassuring that yes, it is legal to drive in Bolivia with a US driver's license (I have since learned this may not be the case - shhhh...), and that the traffic on Sundays is nothing like the traffic I had been seeing every day since I got here, I find myself behind the wheel of Josefina's mother's car, navigating through lane-divider-free roads among drivers that make Boston drivers look like zealous adherents to traffic laws.

The first thing I noticed was the extreme lack of accelerating power. The high price of gasoline has induced many car owners to install natural gas tanks on their cars - a trend I can't imagine us speed-hungry US-Americans adopting any time soon. The second thing I noticed was that it's easier to be in a car than on foot in Santa Cruz traffic. I found myself surprisingly not fearing for my life, as the movement of the cars that seemed so erratic and terrifying when I was on foot seemed surprisingly predictable and reasonable when I was a part of it. They tell me that sharks don't seem as scary when you're diving as they do from the surface, maybe it's the same with Santa Cruz drivers.

So we made our way out of the city, past a huge market of used clothes from the US, through suburbs and smaller towns, to the Lomas de Arena park. And I thought Santa Cruz traffic was going to be my driving adventure. I have seen bad roads, but I have seen most of them from the back of a chicken bus, not from behind the wheel. Suffice it to say that the potholes and puddles got bigger and bigger, until the one where water went over the hood of the car. That's when we switched to gasoline and everyone got out and pushed while I started the car and attempted to drive. And it stalled. And I started it again. And it stalled again. And as we tried to figure out how to open the hood, and as the sun started going down, eventually something must have dried out and the car suddenly started to work. But at next big puddle we decided to stop the car and go the rest of the way on foot.

Now this whole time I had no idea where we were going, or what "lomas de arena" meant - and then we arrive at a mountain of sand. Oh, lomas de arena must be sand dunes. We climbed to the top and saw more dunes, and more beyond those. By this time the sun had mostly set, and in the light that remained and under the stars that were starting to come out, I understood why we had come all this way. It was beautiful. We waded in a lagoon and lay on the sand looking up at the stars, and weren't to worried about whether we would be able to get out in the car because it wouldn't have been such a bad spot to be stuck for a while.

Unfortunately my old rechargable batteries that I had charged the night before seem to have reached the end of their life, so the beauty is captured in my memory, but not in digital form to share with you.

And in case you were wondering, we made it home fine. If this academic career doesn't work out, maybe I should buy myself a chicken bus.