Bolivia!

Much to the dissapointment of my mom and all other women in my life, our original plans on travelling to Columbia were cancelled! Upon reaching the travel agent in Panama City, we were told that Canadians need an onward ticket when arriving in Columbia, leaving us with the option of buying a return fare there and only going one way! We vetoed this and began looking at other destinations. At one point we had the woman just ramble off all the cheap fares in South America, and upon hearing Santa Cruz we jumped on it. Although this was the first time any of us had actually heard of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, we thought it had a nice ring to it and decided to commit. The ladies around the office all got quite a kick out of these 3 gringos who were buying plane tickets to places they´d never heard of. After buying, we vowed to resist looking up any information on the country and city until we were on the ground in Santa Cruz. It was a pretty interesting way to travel (not that I usually know where I´m going anyway...) and I hope to get the chance to do it again sometime. Our flight left at 4am, and since we didnt want to pay to keep our bags at the hostel for the day, we just moved into the departure lounge at the airport. Half a day and a dozen jello pudding snacks later, we were on our way to the southern hemisphere. Seeing as we didn´t know the conditions we´d be flying into, we assumed that any destination in Bolivia would be high in the mountains. We had visions of sherpas unloading our backpacks onto snow covered elephants and dog sledding our way to the center of town. These were destroyed when the captain announced it was a sunny 29 degrees on the ground, boooo. The city and landscape actually look similar to southern Mexico, and I´m not yet ruling out the possibility that we´ve somehow flown back up to Mexico... The rest of the day will be spent finding out where we are, and how to get around Bolivia!

Pictures! I had hoped to do more, but the connection here is slooow. So there´s just the one, a shot of some random twisting river as seen from our plane, somewhere near the equator. I have some great shots of the two tucans that are being held hostage with clipped wings at our hostel. Very fake looking birds and after studying their habits (Im reading a Charles Darwin book right now, so it seemed the proper thing to do), I have determined that they do not subside purely on Fruit Loops.

Darnit, I have since learned that the random twisting river shot didn´t even make it...