Santa Cruz, Bolivia

We're home, after a nearly 19 hour trip.

They say a liberal is a liberal until he gets mugged. I guess the problem is that neither Angela and I consider ourselves liberal to begin with so the saying doesn´t apply to us.

During the entire trip we've been staying in less-than-stellar parts of town. Not to say that we've been asking for trouble, I mean, we don't stay in the skanky rooming houses next to the train stations or bus terminals, but we do stay in pretty inexpensive hostels. The problem is that we are overly curious and walk everywhere instead of taking taxis or renting cars because we don't want to miss anything, we want to fill our senses with everything that one can only experience on foot and sometimes I suppose we let our curiosity get the best of us, despite that sixth sense telling us 'don't go there'. Three days ago was one of those days. I knew we shouldn't have gone there ('there' is a hill in the center of Cochabamba with a monument to the woman heroes of the independence movement "Heroinas de la Coronilla") but I didn't say anything. Angela did say that she had a bad feeling but we agreed to keep going. It was all fine until we started to head down the deserted hilltop monument. All of a sudden we were surrounded by three young guys with long butcher knives yelling at us to get down and hand over everything. My first thought was anticipating the feeling of the cold blade entering my stomach, a feeling that the leader of the gang was threatening to make real. That thought quickly faded when I glanced over at Angela, who wouldn't hand over her bag to the second guy even while the third held a knife to her throat.

In the end we lost all our money, credit cards, Angela's ID, my new camera -the first I've owned in over 20 years- assorted other stuff in our pockets, my prescription glasses. The worst was the loss of the best pictures of the trip, including photos of the ancient colonial cities of Sucre and Potosi with wonderful architectural details, photos and movie clips of indians protesting against discrimination, photos of political graffiti and posters including very refreshing ones from the local Trotskyists, photos of our trip of the salt flats of Uyuni -one of the natural wonders of the world-, and photos of the amazing people we met during the trip -locals as well as from other parts of the world-.

All in all though, we came out physically unscathed. I will have to reserve the feeling of sharp cold steel entering my gut for another occasion. Angela and I both agreed that we came out winners, having come out with our lives, as everything else is replaceable. The pictures of things we can most certainly find in the Internet, the pictures of the people we met would probably bore you. Most importantly, this event could have happened to us anywhere in the world, including right in our front yard in the U.S.

We can't say we're not angry, but we know that crime is a factor of the incredible poverty in this land-locked country. Bolivia's mines have generated amazing amounts of silver, copper and tin for the world, creating wealth for international and local mining interests but nothing for the local population. Now with the green movement and electric and hybrid cars a reality and photovoltaics in everyone's mind... and sometimes on their roof -at least in the industrialized countries-, with the consequent demand for adequate energy storage which only lithium batteries can provide, the greatest reserves of lithium in the world in Bolivia's Uyuni Salt Flats promise to further increase wealth for a few at the expense of many.

Aside from that isolated mugging incident, we found the people of Bolivia to be amazingly warm, friendly, polite, helpful, and many more nice adjectives. Even the ones with decidedly different points of view than ours. The country itself is beautiful despite its extreme poverty, and I would highly recommend it as a travel destination for it's cultural and geographic richness. For those with an interest in politics, the country is in an exciting phase as the indians begin to assert power as a majority under the leadership of Evo Morales, to the chagrin of the mestizo and white ruling classes, who at best make only feeble attempts to disguise their racism. Certainly there are mistakes being made, and the opposition makes great fanfare of these mistakes. But no progress has ever been made without mistakes, and this revolution is irreversible.