Sloth News Day...

So it's worth commenting on our second home here in Santa Cruz. It's La Plaza 24 de Septiembre, the main square where everyone and a three-toed sloth seem to hang. The plaza is literally in the center of Santa Cruz and it's one of the few places I've seen the city's divided factions in one place. Spend a few minutes there in the evening and you'll see Japanese chess players, Moonies, Mennonites walking home from the market in overalls and straw hats, Cholitas in their bowlers and petticoats, kissing teenagers and convalescing seniors. There are guys in white dinner jackets selling coffee from carts and six-year-old kids selling newspapers. And a sloth. Guidebooks say he had been relocated to a zoo after falling ill. But yesterday I was sitting under a tree and saw a few leaves fall. Looking up, I saw the guy's beady eyes glaring right back at me. His mouth was full of leaves. I swung back to the same bench today with Sonya, hoping to snap a pic. But he had climbed high enough to look like nothing more than a furry piece of trunk.

We will be out of town until Sunday night. So check in again Monday for the latest post.

AP article

Interesting...but the source leaves me skeptical.

Another day in the park

We're in La Plaza 24 de Septiembre, the city's main square. Sonya's reading Atlantic Monthly. I'm reading the beauty pageant section of El Deber. More than soccer, more than the presidential campaign, more than the department of Santa Cruz's upcoming bid for autonomy, the newspapers have been covering the heated contest for the title of Miss Bolivia. The winner will compete in Miss Universe and Miss World and become a perennial celebrity here -- the society pages yesterday noted the birthday of Miss Santa Cruz 1978.
So as I'm reading the bios of the 18 contestants, I hear a bit of a stir in the otherwise quiet park. Looking up, I see five of them passing by. Que casualidad, no?!?
It wasn't long before a small crowd formed. Some passersby posed with the contestants. Others gawked and whistled. Most just gawked.
All local biases aside, my favorite is Miss Santa Cruz (top right, click to enlarge). There's something very down-to-earth about her. Look at that smile!

The end of Bolivian poverty

I'm no Jeffrey Sachs -- I got a B in microeconomics and did even worse in macro -- but I think I've got a solution to some of Bolivia's economic woes. See, things shut down from 12-3PM for siesta, like in many Latin countries. But unlike in, say, Spain, they take their siestas very seriously here. Nothing, I mean nothing, is open. I tried to buy the Sunday paper during siesta yesterday and wound up taking a long, long, fruitless walk. So what if a few kiosks stayed open and became known as the places where one could buy a paper, smokes, batteries, phone cards, etc. during siesta time? I think they'd do mad business. Who knows? Maybe that and the country's rich natural gas reserves could bump it up a few notches from its ranking as one of the hemisphere's poorest nations.

Our "Santa"dote

We took advantage of free time before Andrew's journalism classes begin and took a four-day trip to the quiet mountain town of Samaipata. About three-hours west of Santa Cruz, It's where Cruzenos go to escape the noise and ugliness of Bolivia's most populous city. Think of the Poconos or the Berkshires or Big Bear. It's also a jumping off point for treks into the largely untouched Amboro National Park. The part of the park that we explored with a biologist and a young Austrian couple was pretty dramatic -- 20-foot high tree ferns that looked like dinosaur food, bright orchids, bee-like hummingbirds.

Since the park extends from the foothills of the Andes to the Amazon basin, there is a diverse array of ecosystems within its 1.6 million acres. The area also was a crossroads for the highland Incas and lowland Amazonian peoples. We visited ruins that archaeologists and anthropologists believe are evidence of an unusual coexistence between the two peoples.

Click on the photos of our trip to enlarge: