October 13th Wednesday

It has been a little since I wrote. Santa Cruz has been great, the weather here is absolutely beautiful. It is the windy as well as the dry and hot season here. There are tremendous fire throughout the lowlands here in Bolivia, partially because of the heat and the wind, but also because it is the time to slash and burn for farmers in the countryside. This leads to a large amount of haze every few days. The wind helps though, in the afternoon temperatures reach around 100F which in my opinion is pretty hot for October.

I've spent most of my time here in the Museum, working on planning ahead on a project that will measure inundation periods and fire history of the Pampas del Heath using remote sensing. There are several experts here with whom I have learned all sorts of new things, like unsupervised classification with ERDAS. I've also done other things with them though. On Sunday, Belen and I and a couple of her friends went to a park on the outskirts of the city where there are huge gigantic sand dunes. I have no idea where these came from, but suddenly, across the flat horizon, 10 story high sand dunes appeared. Wish I had taken a picture...

I am so excited about the idea of living here next year. Bolivians are much friendlier, at least in my experience, than Peruvians. In fact, to Bolivians, Peruvian is a synonym for "thief". Perhaps the ill feelings are due to the war which denied Bolivia access to the sea, but I agree with them. In Santa Cruz I've encountered less pickpockets, scams, or begging than in Cusco, and Bolivia has one of the poorer economies of the entire Western Hemisphere. Everyone seems to be very happy here. It might be the first place I've been to, when asking about where you would like to live, everyone I've asked has said they would stay here. Not a single person desired to go to the US, and very few wanted to go to Europe. Most people are completely happy here, in the beautiful weather in a friendly atmosphere.

My bus leaves today at 7PM. The bus trip will last about 16 hours and gets into La Paz sometime tomorrow morning. I'll be in La Paz for a few hours and then take another buscama to Cusco. I expect to get there sometime on Friday, after about 30+ hours on a bus. This will be a true test to the battery power of my Ipod, and my ability to be content looking out a window. I'll probably get through my book, The Poisonwood Bible .

On Tuesday I will arrive back into Dulles. It’s hard to imagine that these 4 months have gone by so fast. I will continue the blog throughout all of my travels in the US and especially when I come back here and finish out the year.