Travels with a Cartoon Character

Traveling across Bolivia with a four year old is like traveling with a cartoon character.

My family began our plans for some post-Christmas travel with grand visions of something along the lines of New Years in Buenos Aires, but economic realities drove us to a wiser course – eight hours on a bus from Cochabamba to La Paz, followed by another four to the small valley town of Sorata.

Bolivian bus travel is always full of enough whacko-ness on its own. For a second year our bus got held up briefly en route to La Paz by a spur of the moment road blockade (road blockades are popular here). That gave us time to stretch our legs, eat a few local snacks and examine the truckloads of pigs that seemed unaffected by the blockade. I guess pigs get priority.

I knew that the eight hour schelp through the altiplano would take its toll on a four year old (my daughter, Mariana), for whom “bored” (pronounced “bowed”) is a recently acquired word specially designed for long bus rides. So I came up with the brilliant idea of bringing my laptop and a copy of a movie that goes well beyond being “her favorite”. It is an obsession, The Little Mermaid. How does a four year old memorize all the lyrics to a five minute song?

Look at this stuff,
Isn’t it neat?

Wouldn’t you think,
My collection’s complete...

I want to live where the people walk...

You get the picture. My 15 inch computer screen entertained a good portion of the forward section of the bus, including some women in bowler hats who probably didn’t have a clue before who Sebastian the singing crab was.

Entertaining people on buses seems to be natural to a four year old. This morning during the fourth flat tire on our bus from Sorata to La Paz Mariana explained to other passengers the exact ways in which she acquired her vast collection of vacation bug bites, leg scrapes and assorted owies. At one point she told a group of women sitting in a standed bus in Achacachi that she had, “fallen like caca”. She gets her gift of metaphor from me.

Her clearly favoritie amenity at the frumpy and ancient hotel we stayed at on Sorata’s plaza was not the century old high colonial cielings or ample pealing paint. No, it was the unbelievable discovery that the hotel was home to four baby kittens, each of whom had to put up with an hour or so of being held, sung to, and generally tortured. Wherever we ate she would be sure to tell the wait person that our hotel had four baby kittens. I have no idea if this will start a stampede to see them, but sharing the nes seems of great importance to her.

Our travels also somehow ampled up my little one’s focus on her second obsession (after Ariel the singing mermaid), “The Daddy Money.” Since she was two, Mariana has periodically announced her need to play with my small coin purse and whatever Bolivian cash and coins it contains. She used to declare in mixed Spanglish, “Hay que jugar el Daddy Money!” Now every other night or so, for some reason I can’t explain, she wakes up at exactly 5am, comes to my bed, shakes me awake with a cheerful greeting of, “Hello little guy!” and then asks if she can play with the Daddy Money. During the day this means we set up an elaborate store to sell off whatever trinkets we can scrounge from my backpack – kleenex, gum and such. But at 5am I am certain my 10 and 20 Boliviano notes are asleep.

The advantage of course of playing Daddy Money with a four year old instead of my two older kids (19 and 20), is that at the end I get it all back.

Happy New Year to all our Readers!!