360 Degrees Longitude (41 page)

“They are not thinking clearly as you or I. All they know is their hunger and that you are well fed.”

Javier went on to explain that the entire middle class in Panama collapsed when the United States left. He used the example of his friend who was a butcher. “My friend made $2,000 a year when the United States still controlled the Canal Zone. But since they left, he can no longer find work as a butcher. He now makes much less doing odd jobs as he can find them. Many in Panama preferred the United States being in control of the Canal Zone. The promise was that the citizens of Panama would prosper when the United States left, but the opposite has occurred. Of course, you will never read that side of the story in any newspaper.”

I went on to explain how our experience in El Chorrillo helped us realize that going overland to Colombia through the Darién Province was probably not a good idea. “So we will be extending our stay in Panama City until we can find a flight south.”

“Then you
must
experience Carnaval. It starts this Saturday. We have the best festival in all of Central America! It will be a delight for your children!”

• • •

“Carnaval?” September said, when I returned from Spanish class, passing along Javier's recommendation. “I dunno about that … Carnaval can't be very appropriate for the kids.”

“I said the same thing, but he swears it is
for
kids.”

Carnaval is, of course, the four-day-long festival that is celebrated before the beginning of Lent. It is celebrated in the streets with a daily parade and dancing until the wee hours of the morning. It isn't the first activity that comes to mind when thinking of something that is kid oriented.

I had a mental image of Carnaval: There would be a crush of people who had been drinking too much, and essentially naked women gyrating in the streets. Brutal, yes, but I would risk it for the sake of the kids' cultural enrichment. Everyone we had talked to always used one word to describe the festivities. Wild. Okay, fine. Wild what? We were about to find out.

September gave each of the kids a business card with the hostel's name and address on it and two dollars so they could get a taxi home if we got swept apart by a sea of unruly partyers. We then bid adieu to the new stack of books in our hostel and set out to discover what the fuss was all about.

The police had set up security checkpoints so that the only way to the festival was to pass through them. They checked us and our backpacks for weapons, then let us in. Once through the security checkpoint, we were almost immediately offered the chance to buy a bag of confetti.

This was a bit unexpected. Gee whiz … I didn't really feel the need to throw confetti, so I politely declined. The vendor gave me an amused look, like he thought I was a bit of an idiot.

People were milling about with their kids and pushing strollers. We ventured into the throng, heading in the general direction of the music. I took note of the police in their olive-green fatigues and oversized weapons strolling up and down the street ensuring the peace.

No sooner had I started to wonder when we would see the scantily clad women, than we passed a middle-aged woman holding hands with her husband, who was pushing a stroller with his one remaining free hand. They looked a little too old to have kids in a stroller, so I assumed the child in the stroller was their grandchild. The woman looked at me and gave me a smirky sort of smile. Just as I returned a quizzical look she took a handful of confetti and threw it in my face.

I was stunned, rooted to the spot and sputtering in confusion. Where was that blasted confetti vendor when I needed him?

This repeated itself about five more times in the 60 seconds that followed. Clearly adult males are the preferred targets and it was pretty obvious I was unarmed. Plus, I was a genuine gringo, which was probably a triple-word score or something.

Even though September and the kids weren't the focus of aggression as I was, soon enough they too were targeted. Within a few minutes after entering the battle zone, we had all been plastered with handfuls of confetti. It didn't take us long to formulate a plan of retaliation.

“Okay,” I said to Katrina and Jordan. “Here's what we'll do. People want to get me and Mom more than anything and you can dart in through the crowd easier than we can. So you kind of hide behind us, then when someone gets us with confetti, run after them.”

For 20 cents a bag, we could keep Operation Blitzkrieg going for a long time. We just kept feeding Katrina and Jordan bags of confetti when their munitions supply got low.

As can happen with this kind of play the tactics quickly escalated. We hadn't gone through too many bags of confetti before the Super Soakers started to come out. Jordan, armed with a bag of confetti, had crossed enemy lines. The target was a woman in her sixties who had dumped a bag of confetti over my head. Jordan had locked onto his target when she suddenly grabbed him and held him while two of her girlfriends, both also in their sixties, doused him with their Super Soakers.

I watched, mouth agape, as the scene unfolded. I was worried that Jordan was going to return from his mission in tears, but when he did return, all he wanted was a Super Soaker and revenge.

I could understand that.

A vendor was ready with high-capacity water guns, preloaded and ready to fire. Suddenly Jordan was transformed into a little Rambo.

With his Super Soaker at Carnaval, Jordan was going to get revenge for every pat on the head, every pinch on the cheek, and every poke in the ribs that he'd received in the previous nine months. His target was anyone over 30, and he could strike with impunity. He was in his element.

After several street battles where Jordan could avenge all wrongs inflicted on the family, we made our way back to the hostel.

Not much more than 24 hours later we would be receiving a 1:45 a.m. wake-up call so we could catch our 4:00 a.m. flight to La Paz, Bolivia. We didn't know it then, but in La Paz we would be walking into a Carnaval war zone that would make Panama City look like a stroll through the Hundred Acre Wood.

February 27–March 6
Bolivia

J
ust keep your head down and make a run for it,” Arthy, the owner of our guest house in La Paz, advised. We had met him three seconds earlier and it seemed we were already trusting him with our lives. Reviewing the situation from inside our taxi, we could see that the odds weren't in our favor. It was the third day of Carnaval and a huge parade was in progress. The crowd had already been whipped into a frenzy.

The only way to the guest house was through the crowd and the parade. Our taxi driver gave us a sympathetic look and a gentle shove out the door. What else could we do? Wait for the crowd to go away? Our experience with Carnaval in Panama told us that wouldn't happen until the wee hours of the morning. We dove for daylight between a group of Quechua traditional dancers and a brass band, and raced across the wide street, pulling our suitcases behind us. At the halfway mark the crowd realized fresh meat had just been delivered.

At first it was just one water balloon. The barrage that followed was not unlike what happens to a chicken being pecked to death by its peers. The first little peck is totally harmless. But then the other chickens sense blood and a mob mindset ensues. Totally defenseless, we were pelted with all sorts of mayhem from water balloons to spray foam to buckets of water dumped from the second-story balconies above.

We arrived in the reception area of our guest house covered in foam and soaked completely to the skin. We spent the rest of the day drying our clothes, nursing our wounded dignity, and plotting revenge.

 

Jordan's Journal, February 28

Today me and Katrina went out and got bigger squirt guns and a bucket full of water balloons. After we were done throwing water balloons, having water gun fights, and being squirted with foam, we were soaked even though we wore our rain jackets. Today is the last day of Carnaval. It was a lot of fun
.

At 12,007 feet, La Paz is the highest capital city in the world. Having flown in from Panama City at sea level, we were making a huge change in our environment. It took three days to recover from the effects of altitude sickness: fatigue
and
insomnia (is there no justice in the world?), headaches, nausea, and loss of appetite. Even after three days when we started to feel “normal” again, a flight of stairs would still leave me clutching my chest and gasping for air.

The entire greater La Paz metropolitan area, and by extension, the corner of Bolivia into which it is stuffed, is the highest of almost everything imaginable. Bolivia has the highest commercial airport, the highest capital, the highest salt flats, the highest ATMs… You get the picture.

The statistic that we didn't see quoted was that it has the highest people. Chewing coca leaves in Bolivia is as legal as chewing gum (unless you are doing your chewing in Singapore). A casual glance up and down the street confirms that
everyone
in “traditional” dress is chewing something, and I don't think it's Wrigley's.

So what do you do in La Paz while recuperating from altitude sickness? You go to the Coca Museum, of course.
A staggering percentage of Bolivia's economy is based on the cocaine industry, and the Coca Museum proved to be fascinating, albeit in a disturbing way. The Coca Museum explains anything and everything about the coca leaf, from its uses among indigenous peoples more than 500 years ago to how to chew it, how to refine it into cocaine, and how to smuggle it out of the country. Did you know that Dr. Sigmund Freud was the first documented user of cocaine? Or that the successful outlawing of the active ingredient of cocaine in Coca-Cola in 1914 was the beginning of the lobbying efforts that resulted in the U.S. Prohibition Act in the 1920s?

One of the most titillating “facts” at the Coca Museum was that the Coca-Cola company imports over two hundred metric tons of coca leaves every year into Atlanta, Georgia—not to use the active ingredient that gives the coca leaf its infamous reputation, but as a flavoring.

This “fact” is according to the Coca Museum in La Paz, Bolivia. I found this information a bit difficult to believe—if the Coca-Cola Company is really using coca for any reason, you would think the general public would go nuts. Half of the population would be trying to snort Diet Coke and the other half would be bombing vending machines. However, for the record, if this news breaks—I'm a Diet Pepsi guy.

As soon as we hit the ground in La Paz we visited several travel agents to explore our options for crossing over the Andes into Chile and to the southern part of the continent before the southern winter set in. We planned to circle back to Bolivia and Peru after going south.