Today started off with one of those experiences that can only happen
in the Third World. Nature called for me a little earlier than
usual. Since the town has no sanitary facilities, except for a few
private outhouses, I’d been relieving myself in the field, usually in a
place with a grand view. This morning, however, I was compelled to
do as the locals do… I walked the two blocks uphill to the entrance to
a gully. In the gully, I walked about 50 m upstream, confronted on
all sides with human feces and toilet paper scraps. I found a relatively
clean area and did my thing. As I walked back to town, I passed a
guy I had seen in the square. He was squatting in the streambed.
It must be lovely when water actually flows in the gully; it will wash
everything right into the central plaza. This place has a long way
to go.
We got into the field by 8:30 and hiked for 1:45 hr to get to where we had left off the day before. By the time Matt and I got there, Brian and Rich had already finished three sites. We took one and then Brian and Rich climbed the ridge to sample around a covered interval. Matt and I went ahead to the next outcrop. There I realized that we had probably done all of the magnetostratigraphy we could do on the east side of the ridge. We were into the fault zone and the rocks were getting redder and rotten. I told this to Brian over lunch and we decided to go back to the Jeep and head for Oruro, ~ 85 km away, for a shower and a real bed. No one argued against the idea! The road to Oruro is dirt the whole way. Along the two-hour drive
we saw dozens of Vicuñas. The Altiplano is stark and windy.
It had snowed on us during lunch and a few more flakes fell as we drove.
We passed several old cinder cones and a gold mine in one of the Miocene
ignimbrite sheets.
Oruro is a stark, dismal city of about 250,000. We got rooms, after much confusion, at the Hotel Lipton. I got a room with a private bath for $6. Of course, there was no hot water in the cold room but it felt good to be clean. I also washed a few clothes. We went out to dinner at a good pizzeria called La Canona near the central square. Afterward, we walked down 4 WD sidewalks to an Internet café to check our email. I answered a few before Hotmail suddenly became very slow. I gave up in frustration after 45 minutes, paid my 60¢, and we grabbed a cab back to the hotel. Rich had spotted a karaoke bar a couple of blocks down from the hotel. So we all went down and drank a few beers and sang a few songs. I soloed on “500 Miles”. Back at the hotel, I had a brief encounter with Montezuma and went to bed. The noise on the street was a bit loud but I fell asleep almost instantly around 1:00. The 10 km or so hike at >13,000’, had very little effect on me today! |
