Bounding Barefoot Through Bolivia

"Life is a hospital on which every patient is obsessed with changing beds. This one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he´d get better if he was by the window ... It always seems to me that I´ll be well where I am not and this question of moving is one that I´m forever entertaining with my soul ... Anywhere ! Anywhere ! So long as it is out of this world."

- Charles Baudelaire

I side with a different Gallic viewpoint, Voltaire´s maxim that paradise is where I am. What I share with Baudelaire is a visceral and profound attraction toward the nexi of travel: bus stations, train depots, and airports. The palpable sense of movement and emotion. Choice, mystery, possibility. Freedom.

Buying my ticket earlier to Cochabamba (I leave in three hours), I read through the melodic mantra of diverse destinations: Trinidad, Chulumani, Copacabana, Caranavi, Challapata, Sorata, Totura, Samaipata ... . Invigorating and delicious. To me, these names bear all the poetic resonance of the last line of James Joyce´s Ulysses: at once a record of where the novel was written and, no less importantly, a symbol of the cosmopolitan spirit behind its composition:

"Trieste, Zurich, Paris".

Why Cochabamba you ask? Tomorrow marks the midway point in my five-month South American odyssey. In February my Anywhere! Anywhere! should include touching ground in Zürich. I´ll visit Cochabamba´s Tea House Zürich on the morrow and celebrate the journey. I only hope they serve coffee.

Improving just slightly on my literary selection, I swapped books today at the British Consulate. Not only do they televise the BBC and brew a decent bean, but they graciously exchange a single book for a book. GB rocks. Anyways, bartering my stack of comics has weighed down my rucksack with: The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald, Anna Karenin by Tolstoy, The Prince by Machiavelli, and Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche. One of the books I exchanged was The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver -- recommended with enthusiasm.

IS CUMA LE FEAR NA MBRÓG CÁ GCUIREANN SÉ CHOS.

"The man with boots does not have to worry here he puts his feet."

- Gaelic proverb, read on a sugar packet at The Winding Stair ... a café in Dublin.

A moment of silence if you will. My beloved sandals broke in the jungle (okay, I stole them from Dad). Shit. Or to quote Gustave Flaubert: "At the end of the day, shit. With that mighty word, you can console yourself for all human miseries, so I enjoy repeating it: shit, shit."

Bolivia doesn´t sell decent sandals. Shit.

This e-mail has been sponsored by Alexander Coffee of La Paz. Upon arriving there in the early evening with my backpack, everything was free. Two double cortados and a slice of complimentary cheesecake. An epic café that I will never forget. Life is beautiful.

"The sole cause of man´s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

- Pascal, Pensées, 136

Poppycock. Blaise should have stuck to mathematics and left the pontificating for the more adventurous.

- jaunting with joviality ... Shoeless Kev Sharbonneau