Moving Through Bolivia

I spent a week in La Paz. There is something I like about big, massive, congested cities. La Paz has its charming idiosyncracies that make it an interesting place to stay as well. My favorite thing about La Paz is that they have zebras directing traffic. Yes, zebras. Other cities have traffic cops--and there are some of those-- but the local government decided that people dressed in zebra suits would be more effective at directing traffic for some reason.
What did I do in La Paz? Not much. I pretty much just enjoyed eating good food for good prices and indulged in my newfound capuccino addiction. I never drank coffee until I passed through Colombia and then I got spoiled by the good stuff. A cup of cafe con leche with a little bit of sugar there is a cup of heaven as far as I am concerned. After you leave Colombia, you can only find good coffee in the big cities, everywhere else you can only find that powdered, instantaneous shit. Capuccino is the closest I have come to recreating that perfect cup of cafe con leche. Knowing that, as soon as I left the city, I was going to have to endure freezing temperatures and monotonous food, it was easy to stay a week.
I did do one touristy thing while I was in La Paz. I road on El Camino de la Muerte or Deathroad if you like. Back in the day, it used to serve as a highway between La Paz and Coroico to the east. With 100+ fatalities every year it earned the moniker El Camino de la Muerte after a U.N. study determined that it was the world's most dangerous highway at the time. The Bolivian government has since built a new highway and the Deathroad has become nothing more than a high-falutin mountain bike trail. Apparently there are still some fools who die on the mountain bike tour but I was not one of them. We were babysat a little too much by the tour guides to my liking but I compensated by smoking copious amounts of marijuana during the 10,000 foot descent. Even though we had our nannies with us, the tour was still fun. It was nice being able to hurl down the side of a mountain without carrying half of my body weight in gear. I consistently stayed at the front and only had to ask the tour guide in front to move faster once.
After studying a map of Bolivia, I have decided on a rough course of where I want to go in Bolivia. I am in Oruro right now and I plan to traverse Sucre, Potosì, el Salar de Uyuni, and Tarija in that order. Once I get close to the Salar de Uyuni, I will be in a very remote part of the country so I am mentally preparing myself for the monotony of eating nothing but cans of tuna and cookies and riding on dirt roads for days on end. It should all be worth it, though, as the Salar de Uyuni is best described as an extraterrestrial, altiplano desert. If I play my cards right, I should be able to pass through the town where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed on the way to Argentina. I had back-to-back one hundred kilometer days on the way to Oruro from La Paz so there is a possibility that I will complete my tour of Bolivia in less than a month.
George Bush really opened up a can of worms with his excessive use of the word terrorist to describe pretty much anyone that disagrees with the dominant imperialist agenda whether it be religiously fanatic Muslim suicide bombers in the Middle East, left-wing narco-rebels in Colombia, or, now, animal rights activists. What the hell does terrorist mean anyway. If the definition of terrorist is someone who terrifies in order to coerce change or adherence to the status quo than I propose that the U.S. government qualifies. We are, afterall, the only country to ever detonate a nuclear bomb on a civilian target. The government of Evo Morales has taken a cue from the Bush school of rhetoric. He blithely calls the supposed international assassins, that his government filled with bullets, terrorists. I usually support Evo Morales's actions but this goes too far. Even if the government has incontrovertible proof that these men intended to assassinate the president, these men should have been arrested and not killed while sleeping during a S.W.A.T. style raid. The pictures of the so-called "terrorist" ringleader naked and bloody in his bed belie the governments case that they were planning actions. If the government really had proof of their intentions they should have tried much harder to arrest these people and bring them to justice. Extrajudicial assassinations of terrorist subjects set a bad precedent but I can only say that the Bolivians are learning from us.
I admit that my creation of the Ganjobicicletholic is more in the spirit of Abbie Hoffman than of Martin Luther but I have been thinking a lot about morality and how it needs a serious updating. My objection to the major religions of the world is that their morality is obselete. I can see how homosexuality would be considered sinful in a patriarchal society. When the man is always in charge in a relationship, who is in charge in a relationship between two men? One uppity bottom challenges the entire patriarchal hegemony of power. When the vast majority of people tend the earth and the average life expectancy doesn't exceed 40, be fruitful and multiply makes a lot of sense. The problem is that when the earth becomes overpopulated, as it has, being fruitful and multiplying only fucks things up worse. Old-time religion also lets people off too easily for their profligate, consumer-whore ways. What is worse, a man stealing bread to feed his family or a man buying a $10,000 Rolex when there are people starving in the world. How about when a man buys a $1,000,000 Ferrari that gets less than 10 miles to the gallon when he could buy a much more practical car for much less or, even better, ride a bike. The religious leaders of the world stand in shocking silence, or worse enable this selfishness as our society celebrates these pompous asses. If this world were truly just, as those who believe in an omnipotent god would have us believe, the Ferrari driver would feel such a palpable sense of hatred anytime he left his house that he would not buy the Ferrari in the first place. For me there is nothing wrong with having money. It is the obscene displays of wealth that irk me. Religious leaders are too busy bickering about homosexuality and abortion to realize that we are destroying this planet we will soon send the human race to extinction if we don't drastically alter our behavior. For this reason, religion needs a serious updating.
As a quick note, the Supreme Court of the U.S. recently said it was okay for the F.C.C. to fine television networks even for the accidental airing of expletives. This decision pisses me off. What the fuck is wrong with cursing, goddamnit? Since the internet is, thus far, free from this censorship, which in my opinion is a direct violation of the First Ammendment, I have only one thing to say: fuck the skull of the rotting corpse of Jesus while fingering the Virgen Mary. I think I will silkscreen a shirt that says this and wear it to church.