Arrival

Captain's log: Stardate 14101.5

We left the UK early on Monday 12th, flying from London city airport to Madrid. Madrid was cool, but we didn't do too much. They had a "museo de jammon".

On Tuesday evening we went to the airport and got our plane to Cochabamba. It was full of small annoying screaming creatures that people seem to want to have around. We barely slept, and then our plane ran out of fuel and so we had to stop at Santa Cruz 500Km from Cochabamba. Local time was around 0300. Rather than refueling and being on our way, we got off the plane and had to wait until 0545 for the next scheduled plane to Cochabamba. We met a very friendly lady who was from Cochabamba but had been studying in the Netherlands for the last two years, She gave us some useful advice about where to go and where not to go, and how not to get ripped off.

We finally got onto the new plane (not sure if everyone fit on or not since the initial plane had been a 767-300 and the new one was a 737-300 + there were the people who had booked onto the Santa Cruz -> Cochabamba flight). Landed in Cochabamba at around 0700, only 3 hours late. We couldn't check into our hostel until 1300 anyway, so the delay meant we arrived once things had started to open at least.

After dropping our bags off we wandered around a bit and got some coffee. The first place gave us nescafe .... HOORAY! Luckily after that we found actual coffee and everything was better. There we bumped into an English lady who had been living in Cochabamba for 15 years, and a Bolivian lady who had lived in the US for 32 years before going home. Also our waiter had studied English in Liverpool.

We finally got into our room (a 10 bed mixed dorm) and met some of the others. So far they've all been quite nice. There's a programmer from SF and three Danish girls.

My Spoken Spanish is getting better, as is my reading, however I still don't understand most stuff spoken to me. Amy is of course amazing at it :)

Amy's volunteering charity has got in touch to say there's not much going on ATM, so it looks like we might go to Inti wara yassi (http://www.intiwarayassi.org/) sooner rather than later, where hopefully I'll be given some Pumas to walk, or maybe a spectacled bear. We're going to meet up with Amy's contact tomorrow, and probably hang around here until at least the weekend. Not much in the way of plans: exploring, sorting out sim cards, studying spanish, that sort of thing.

Not really sure how this whole blogging thing works, so I'll try and work that out, apologies for any quirks until then.

Andy