The chicken lady

During our stay in La Paz we took a short trip to Coroico to stay a night at an animal sanctuary. To get to Coroico we hopped on to a local minivan with about ten other people. One of those people was a tiny local lady with about five teeth.

The lady was wearing typical local dress - a blue floral apron over a red woollen jersey and a long green skirt, with a thick grey polarfleece blanket pinned around her shoulders and a brown woollen hat on her head. She had a 2.25 litre bottle of Coca-cola and a little plastic cup with her. Every ten minutes or so she got the man next to her to pour her some coke and she would sip away happily.

After about half an hour of her sipping away happily, we stopped in traffic. The lady leaned out of the window and motioned to one of the street vendors who were selling chicken, rice and potatoes in small plastic bags. (This is the Bolivian version of takeaway food - they just put anything in a plastic bag, including soup and cups of tea).

"Chicken!" she croaked at one of the vendors. He handed her a small bag, which she poked her nose into then all but threw back in his face. "I want wings!" she said. "Don't your chicken have wings?". He scurried away and came back a minute later with another bag, which she checked suspiciously and accepted.

She sat there for a bit, nibbling absently at her chicken. Soon she tucked the bag away at her feet, only to pull out a massive plastic bag full of coca leaves. (I swear, this woman had a picnic hidden under her skirt).

I offered her some peanuts in the hope that she would share her coca with me, but no such luck.

An update mostly about food and a little bit about insects

It's our last day in Santa Marta and it's suffocatingly hot, although we've been drinking a lot more water since we found out you can buy it in a bag for much cheaper than a bottle. A 1.75 litre bottle of water is approx $2 and a 5L bag of water (though a little inconvenient) is much more affordable at $1.10. You get dehydrated here really quickly, mostly because of the heat, but also we've been doing a lot of walking and all the food here either is full of sugar or salt (or both).

It's a bit more expensive in Colombia for food than it is in Ecuador. In saying that, you can still eat pretty cheaply if you want to. Street food is cheap, if you don't mind a deep fried egg roll or cheesy dough ball for breakfast, or alternatively bags of fresh mango are about 70 cents. Then for lunch, it's $4 for a massive plate of rice and beans and fish/chicken/meat with soup as a starter and a glass of juice. One thing Colombians do really well is fresh juice. They sell lime juice and fresh fruit cocktails by the glass on the side of the street for about 70 cents and it's always nice and refreshing.

This morning I didn't wake up until 10am (we didn't really have any plans today). We had some muesli and yoghurt for breakfast and a black coffee (which is only 35 cents for a cup). It's so, so hot in our room that you always wake up in a feverish sweat, although I'm getting used to it by now. The showers are always the pipe-through-the-wall type with a single stream of cold water which is actually really nice in the heat.

There aren't too many insects in our hostel, although while we were in hammocks there were plenty of massive toads, spiders, cockroaches and even a baby boa constrictor (which was climbing into a boy's hammock, probably trying to find somewhere to curl up and go to sleep to digest the toad it had just eaten).

And to tie the topics of this post together (Colombia, food and insects), the specialty food in Barichara is "hormigas culonas", which is fried ants (literally "fat-bottomed ants"). Apparently they taste like a mixture of dirt and old coffee grounds. I probably won't be trying them.

Nicola