Hey! Sorry dudes I haven't gotten a chance to get caught up with ya!

After being in La Paz for a night, I went to Lake Titicaca and stayed on Isla del Sol. It was really gorgeous! You had to climb up this huge huge huge hill to get to where the hotels were. With the altitude and the heavy packs and everything, it was an extreme physical exertion, even for me.

I didn't know where to go and I hate hustlers, so I went to the HI hostel. The travel agent in the town on the lake who had booked my boat recommended it (without booking me) and some girls on the ferry said they were going there, so it was the best I had to go on. The HI hostel kind of sucked, and the Aymara ladies who ran it didn't speak or understand a word of English, but it was cheap and close.

The views all over the island village were fabulous. There were restaurant patios overlooking the lake every few feet. I joined the Irish girls at my hostel for a coffee at a patio across from the hostel. The beverages were sub-par but the sun and sea were worth the whole trip.

The only thing to do on the island is to walk across it, which theoretically takes 4 hours one way. The only way to get back is to take a boat, and I didn't know what time they ran but I was sure they were done for the day. It was 4:30 by the time I left the girls, and I knew I only had a couple hours before the sun went down (it is winter down there), but there was nothing else to do and I was feeling energized after recovering from the climb.

I reached the halfway point of the island right at sunset, and turned back around to try to get home before it got too dark. This was pretty faulty thinking, as it gets dark pretty much when the sun goes down, and I had, being generous about my speed, an hour and a half walk ahead of me. It wasn't long before I was stumbling in the dark. Then I remembered I had a mag light! I pulled it out and twisted it on. The keychain-sized light, which was so impressive when shone upon my reading materials in the bus, barely made a scratch in the darkness of the island. Disappointment! Anyways I speed-walked the path back towards the village lights, thinking I'd be safe once I got to the end of the island.

Wrong! Counterintuitively, the darkness was even more of a hazard once the trans-island path splintered into winding, stepped stone streets, and I had to figure out which rocks were part of the sidewalk and which were part of the scenery. The problem was that there was hardly any light in the village- only a few scattered street lights, and even the hotels and restaurants were kept very dark, with most of the lights extinguished. I was practically crawling on my hands and knees at points, trying not to fall over a cliff.

I asked directions from some locals and eventually stumbled upon my hostel. Then I had to head out for food. I went to the nearest restaurant, where I found the girls, who had had exactly the same problem as me, except with a slightly better flashlight. Very slightly.

The next day I headed back to the town and from there to La Paz, where I would spend the end of my trip. I had wanted to go hiking, but I would have needed to get a couple people together, which is hard when you're traveling alone. It was a moot point anyways because I ended up getting sick again. Seems like whatever had gotten into my system in Uyuni on Tuesday hadn't quite gotten out of it (I had been battling scattered bouts of nausea ever since) and I was sick again Saturday evening- worse than the first time. One of my friends at the hostel (some people I had met my first night, who were back there again the same days as me) works in a hospital and knows about medicine and stuff, so she helped me get the right antibiotics (everything is over the counter in Bolivia). They also came down and checked on me in the night, which is wicked sweet- you know, when you're sick in a really weird country, alone, in a hostel- somebody has to take care of you!



I was feeling better by Sunday night, when I went to Cholitas wrestling! The woman sitting next to me in the gringo section was telling me that she'd been in Bolivia a year ago and met someone who was writing an article on Cholitas wrestling for National Geographic, and it coincidentally had just come out.

So cholitas wrestling is theoretically WWF starring Aymara women in traditional clothes. In practice, only two of the, what, 5 acts? were pairs of females, the rest were men. The plot was the same each act: the bad guys are friends with the ref, the good guys would have won in a fair fight, but the evil ref and the cheating of the bad guys interfered. Most of the time they won anyways. The female acts both had the same plot too: a good, virtuous Aymara girl fights against a bad-ass rebellious girl in Western clothing. None of the chicks looked all muscular, but pulled all the moves!!

Some of the guys in our group got beat over the head by one of the girls, which was pretty awesome. One of them, a particularly outspoken American, became a devotee of a middle-aged wrestler with sideburns and star-spangled tights, whom he referred to as Neil Diamond until we found out his name was Mister Atlas. He bought the most delightfully HORRID poster of Mister Atlas you can imagine, and kept waving it in the bad guys' faces. At the end of the finale, Mister Atlas ran over to our corner and signed it. All the little urchin children gathered around to see.

It wasn't a tourist attraction for gringos- our presence was superfluous. The rest of the audience away from the ringside youth hostel seats were all Aymara, old and young alike, and very into the show. They show was pretty crazy, in that "would never happen in America" kind of way. The acting and moves were relatively lame, but we were nearly run down by wrestlers stumbling out into the audience many times, having to jump up from our seats and dodge out of the way. Some people in our group were beaten with props, and we were all sprayed with water and Pepsi. (One of the bad guys stole the bottle of Pepsi right out from under my neighbor's chair. That's why she's a bad guy I guess!) It was uncontrolled enough to make it authentic even among the fakeness.

I spent Monday in Lima, as I had a 13-hour layover between flights. I hung out in Miraflores for several hours, then met up with a family I met last time I was in Lima two years ago. I barely made it to the airport- I got into a really really cheap cab, with a little paper sign on the windshield that read "taxi," and it kept breaking down on the highway. Lima is a dangerous city and I wasn't sure if it was safer inside or outside of the car, so I just sat tight as the driver worked on the engine. At one point I saw him just spit in it and slam the lid. Well, it started running, so I guess he knows what he's doing. (Didn't Jesus cure somebody's vision with his spit?)

I only had a few hours to relax after I got home- we had our first Pirates of Penzance rehearsal last night! Much younger chorus members than in the last show. I do love Pirates. Glad to be actually doing Mabel this time, instead of covering and never getting a chance to sing.

Also! I am doing Bastien et Bastienne (an opera Mozart wrote when he was 12) in Harrisburg next weekend. I know, last minute! I am an SOS soprano. More on it later.

Love you guys!

Amanda