Welcome to Bolivia, jerk

"Eight rolls of toilet paper, please," I said to the one-eyed woman in the wheelchair. In Bolivia, you need to provide your own toilet paper wherever you go. Don´t rely on restaurants or even hotels to provide it for you.
"Five Bolivianos, " she answered. A good deal, I thought. Less than one dollar for eight rolls!
"OK, that´s fine, I´ll take them." My stomach churned as the need for this toilet paper was serious and immediate.
"Those are white," she pointed to some different rolls of toilet paper on the other side of the store.
"OK that´s fine, eight white."
"But those are blue," she pointed back to the original eight, "and we have pink, too."
"Eight white will be just fine," I said through clenched teeth and cheeks.
She yelled something to another man who seemed to be her gopher, as from her wheelchair she seemed only capable of shouting orders and drawing out simple transactions.
"Five Bolivianos, correct?" I offered in my attempt to speed this transaction along, reaching into my pocket for the change.
"No, eight Bolivianos."
"I thought you said it was five?"
"No, those are five," she said, pointing to the blue and pink toilet paper.
"OK, fine, I´ll take the blue." I gave Amanda an annoyed and impatient look I hunched over in intestinal pain.
"Those are eight, too."
"Well what is five Bolivianos?!?!"
"Those," she motioned toward the maxi pads.
You can´t be serious. "I don´t need maxi pads for Christ´s sake, I have to go to the bathroom!" Amanda was trying not to laugh, but trust me, this was not funny.
"Fine." I picked up the eight rolls of blue paper in a plastic bag and put them in her lap. She called to her gopher to be her hands, and he started adding rolls to the bag.
"What are you doing?" she asked him.
"I thought she said nine rolls?"
"Oh for the love of God!!!" I pulled the extra roll out of the bag and threw the money into her hand, running across the street to the hotel just in the nick of time.
Now, we got a really good deal on this hotel - About $1.20 for the night. No kidding. This was a great find; something to write home about. However, when you´ve got explosive diarrhea, the last place on earth you really want to be is a $1 hotel in Bolivia.

Needless to say, it was a rough first day in Bolivia (Copacabana, to be specific). Since then, things really haven´t gotten much better. I started planning my trip to the jungle, which occupied my entire weekend plus Monday. I scheduled two flights to Rurrenabaque, the base town for jungle tours, both of which were cancelled. The landing strip for airplanes to this town is made of grass, so whenever it rains, flights are cancelled. And considering that this is the RAINforest, it happens quite often.

When I discovered the third flight I had scheduled for Monday would be cancelled or delayed, I threw in the towel. Amanda and Jeff couldn´t find a volunteer program, which they had planned to do while I was in the Amazon, so we all decided to just skip to the next step and leave the frustration behind us. We are now waiting for our train in Oruro, which will take us to Uyuni where we will leave tomorrow for a three-day tour of the Salt Flats! The landscapes are supposed to be amazing, with red and green lakes, hot springs, and a horizon where you can´t distinguish the land from the sky. The tour actually brings us to Chile! From there we will make our way to northern Argentina. I´ll write from there!

Joan