No, not kidnapped

I just hid the blog for a minute. It's back. With sloths.



That's a baby sloth eating. Eventually the grown-up sloth eats a bit too. They were going fast. They probably suspected that they, and we, were about to be hit by a tremendous thunderstorm. Must suck to be a sloth in a thunderstorm.

While we're at it, here, also in Parque Generalísimo Francisco de Miranda (No Longer Known as Parque del Este), is an iguana. It knew I was coming and wisely hid behind a chain link fence where it was safe from my driving skills.

Sidewalks

I'm obsessed with making Caracas's sidewalks useable.



This is what it looks like on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night in much of Chacao and Las Mercedes, the only rich-ish neighborhoods that have anything like walkable streets. In fact, this is in El Rosal, which is widely credited as the most walkable part of Caracas. So what is wrong with this picture?

1. Yes, those are cars. Yes, that's a sidewalk. I've been asking the omnipresent parking attendants why they leave cars on the sidewalk and most claim that their business has special permission. When I ask to talk to the owner, the owner is never there. I have been telling police that I think this is bollocks, and that they should do something about it. They generally tell me to talk to a supervisor. I'll let you know how that goes. As is now, you can either walk in the street or walk through here:



2. Above, I said it's a sidewalk. But when you look close you can see that there's no significant change in relief between the street and the sidewalk. If anything, the sidewalk is just a poorly built parking area. Poorly built in the sense that the concrete is cheap -- notice all the cracks. (I recently noticed someone had used wood chips as an aggregate in a sidewalk in Chacao. The wood is gradually disappearing, leaving cavities. It looks kind of cool except that the cavities fill with dirt and grime and the concrete will probably endure much less time thanks to this cheap trick and the lack of engineering inspections.)

3. The lighting just doesn't work for pedestrians. Granted, Chacao is doing something about that. On Francisco de Miranda, the main avenue through that municipality, the city installed two-tier streetlamps with lower lights for peds and higher ones for traffic. Good stuff. Only problem is that the installation took months, during which there was no light at all for a long block of the street. During much of that time sidewalks were also closed for construction, so everyone had to walk in the street behind limp caution tape.

I keep thinking about making flyers to try and rally pedestrians to demand their rights...but further research is needed. I don't even know who we should be making our case to. Like I said, I'll keep you posted.

Those doctors

You might have heard that Venezuela and Cuba are close these days, with Cuba sending doctors, light bulb installation crews and zoo animals to Venezuela in return for oil. What is less known is that Cuba's decades-old policy of sending doctors all over the world is now being bankrolled, at least in part, by Venezuela.

The picture is of Huachacalla, Bolivia, one of the loneliest towns I've ever visited. It's in the Altiplano, a plateau at about 3,500 meters (12,000 foot) elevation near the Chilean border, where (at least a couple months ago) the pavement of a sparkling new highway abruptly ended along with most taxi and microbus routes from La Paz. It's a place where arrival is easier than departure, as nobody owns a car and there's no traffic on the half-built highway. K and I got a ride in the back of a salt truck that thumped us along for an hour through an increasingly chilly twilight to Sapaya, an even lonelier town. In the nicest, nastiest and only hotel in town, which was built to pretty high standards, there were, in the morning, small brown pellets at the end of the hall, clear evidence that a sheep had been there at some point in the night. Locals gave various estimates of the population, but when they said there were "80 families in the pueblo" they meant that 80 families return to the town for an annual feast day. The full-time population of the living couldn't have exceeded 100. The main reason for either tourist or laborer to go there is Coipasa, site of a ghost town, a lot of salt, and clear evidence that Lonely Planet's writers don't always visit the places they write about.



But I digress. As usual. The picture on the left shows the view downhill past the army barracks. On the right is the view uphill to the town square, where old Aymaras were celebrating Day of the Sea. Someone stopped to chat with us. On learning I lived in Venezuela she said that was a good country, that Venezuela was providing Cuban doctors for this village. This woman must have been at least 50, as she looked 70, and she said it was the first full-time doctor in that town in her life.

I'm sure there are many messed up aspects of the program, known as Barrio Adentro, including corruption and the awesomely low wages of its employees. But hey, when it comes to aid programs, nobody's perfect. We were wandering through one of the poorest regions of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, a place where many people subsist on potatoes and llama meat squeezed from the thin, sandy soil and thin, dusty air. To stumble onto a Venezuelan-Cuban clinic there felt like we had come around a rock to find a grove of mango trees in full fruit, a morsel of tropical plenitude. It was also a reminder of how everywhere I go, people with the least stuff are the most generous.