Quik Thinking

In the morning we caught a flight to Lima, for which I was finally forced to check my umbrella. Lima was a lot warmer than Cusco but not as pretty, although as a large metropolis filled with regular people it felt more "real". I was surprised to see that Scotiabank has a substantial presence in Lima! Sadly, the beach has pebbles instead of sand. But we were able to find outstanding fish and chicken dishes to eat. The traffic is pretty chaotic and some cabbies are just nuts! In the evening we met up with Michal's friend Heidi, who lives in Peru, and one of her coworkers (Aaron) for dinner and then hit up a club.

The next morning Aaron met us at our hostel and we all took a bus to the national museum. The bus system in Lima bears describing. First off, it's not actually one system at all; instead of a single municipally run transit authority, there are several bus companies that run buses along the same routes in competition with each other. It's a lot like Karachi, except nobody hangs off the sides of buses. Unfortunately, it was nearly always too hard to figure out which bus would get us where we wanted to go. I missed being able to rely upon Google Transit.

At the museum we checked out the exhibition about the Shining Path, a Peruvian terrorist group that caused the death of 69,000 people over the course of 2 decades. We only spent an hour at the museum because it was free and we soon grew hungry. After lunch we took a cab downtown and wandered about for a while, soaking in the atmosphere. I loved the promenade so much that I could see myself living in Lima if only I spoke Spanish. As we were leaving, we ran across the wedding ceremony of somebody pretty high up in the Peruvian navy. It had taken up most of the Plaza de Armas and some of the soldiers were taking pics with anybody who wanted.

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Upon leaving Aguas Calientes we discovered to our delight that we'd been given seats on the fancy train car. Not only did we have enormous plush chairs but there was a masked dancer to entertain us. On the down side, this train took us only halfway to Cusco so we had to take a cab the rest of the way. During the ride we saw these strange rickshaws that looked like they'd been built out of motorcycles.

When we arrived in Cusco, it was raining heavily and Michal was feeling ill so we called her a doctor. The doctor diagnosed her with bronchitis and sent her to a nearby clinic in an ambulance for an x-ray and a blood test before giving her antibiotics. Fortunately, all of this cost her only $100. Later that night JM & I went to check out an interesting bar while Michal rested. I thought it was kinda overpriced but the decor was pretty impressive so we took some great shots of the props.

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Michal had been in charge of setting her alarm to wake us up and, sure enough, I was woken up early the next morning by the sound of it. What we didn't realize for about half an hour, however, was that her phone was still set to Bolivian time, which is an hour ahead of Peruvian time. It was annoying to have been woken up so unnecessarily early but at least we hadn't woken up an hour late.

When we left our hostel it was pouring rain and there was already a long queue at the pickup spot so we waited for half an hour while the rain crashed down around us. I'd expected that the buses wouldn't actually leave on time but they ended up being surprisingly punctual. The ride to Machu Picchu took us up some treacherous mountain roads but treated us to scenic views in exchange. After getting to the site, we waiting in another queue to get in, while I ate four of the sandwiches our hostel owners had graciously prepared for us and we acquired a tour guide.

The ruins themselves were spectacular and even the rain that haunted our first couple of hours could not diminish the experience much. After our tour ended, we left the site to buy outrageously priced drinks and food, wishing that we'd brought more water with us. Then we returned for a more free-form exploration of the ruins. At one point a few llamas showed up and defecated right in front of us. Good times, indeed. Although we'd originally expected to stick around until late afternoon, we were so exhausted by noon that we hopped on the next bus back to Aguas Calientes.

We'd also been planning to return to Cusco late the next day but, since Aguas Calientes doesn't have a whole lot to do, we decided to leave in the morning instead. Changing our tickets wasn't too hard and after getting that out of the way we retired to our room to relax while felines and canines crashed down around us in watery form.

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While Cusco is the closest major city to Machu Picchu, it's still too far to make a day trip there; for that we had to take a train to a little tourist-trap of a town called Aguas Calientes, whose sole purpose is providing tourists with a base from which to explore the ruins.

In the morning we rose bright an early to catch a 7:42 train to Aguas Calientes. During the trip our train actually went down the wrong track at one point and had to back up to switch tracks, which I'd never before experienced. Three hours later we arrived in Aguas Calientes and eventually found our hostel. Unlike the other hostel rooms we're shared so far, this one had neither Internet access nor a TV. I was glad to not have the TV but I did miss having Internet access.

After getting settled in, we went out for lunch. I finally managed to eat alpaca, which I'm pleased to report does not taste just like beef or any other meat I've had before. The flesh was very tender and I enjoyed it tremendously. It began raining while we were at the restaurant so we busted out some rain gear and set off to purchase tickets for Machu Picchu at 2pm, which is when they go on sale. Incredibly, it took over 20 minutes for the 2 guys at the ticket sales booth to get around to selling us our tickets, despite there being nobody else around and this being their primary responsibility! They also claimed not to have any change, just like nearly every other sales staff we've encountered in Peru. You'd think that any place accepting only cash would make a point of having plenty of change on hand...

Following a brief pit stop at our hostel, JM and I went to the hot springs. Although these ones were a lot smaller than those in Budapest, they did have one neat feature: a gravel-covered floor that felt pleasant to walk on. Once we were done with the hot springs, it was time for dinner, for which we patronized a French Peruvian restaurant that wowed us with its menu and presentation. We didn't do much else after dinner because we needed to catch a bus to Machu Picchu at 5:30 in the morning.

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After leaving Bolivia, our first stop in Peru was Cusco. Our guide book had warned us about elevation sickness in Cusco with its 3400m elevation but after spending over 6 hours at El Alto airport, which is at 4000m, Cusco felt like a welcome change. Continuing our streak of ignoring the guide book, we took a unofficial taxi to our hostel to save 5 soles ($2) between the 3 of us. After dumping our bags at the hostel we took a walk through town to see the sights. I noticed, to my surprise, that all the stray dogs in Cusco are very chill and just ignore tourists instead of hounding them for attention or food. When we began feeling hungry we had dinner at a vegetarian-friendly restaurant called Greens that had amazing food.

Thus sated, we returned to the hostel to shower and rest for a while before going to check out the local nightlife. Perhaps because it was a Sunday night, not much seemed to be going on. We ended up at a little club playing reggaeton and crowded by Argentineans smoking while they danced, taking breaks only to chant slogans villianizing Evo Morales, the populist president of Bolivia.

Despite having gone to bed quite late, I found myself awake rather early the next morning so I went to the living room and tried to use the hostel's wifi but it proved to be prohibitively flakey. While I was doing that a gorgeous woman walked in and inquired about brekki. I had forgotten that the hostel served brekki but I decided to join her and we got to talking. She was also a chronic traveller and we got along really well but she had to check out that morning and was stressed out about finding another hostel for her and her travel buddy. I regret not asking them to join us for dinner.

When the girls finally awoke we hit the town again for the first international hat brunch. The food was delicious and we polished off every last scrap the brought us, even though we were stuffed after that. After returning to the hostel and resting for a bit, we took a taxi to visit the four Inca ruins outside Cusco. That took a few hours but it was a fascinating experience, even without a tour guide. In the evening we had a mediocre dinner followed by a rousing game of Pictionary and then retired for the night.

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We had planned to attend a New Year's party that would last all night so we took it easy on the 31st. Michal's guide book had recommended an Indian place called Gopal for cheap vegetarian fare so we went there for lunch. While it was certainly cheap (at ~$2/meal), the quality of the food was pretty mediocre.

JenMarie and Michal wanted to see if they could find new shoes for the party so we went to a mall next. I was fascinated by the diverse and oftentimes strange mannequins on display there. In addition to a wide variety of ethnic looks and amusing poses, ome of them had half their heads sliced off at the top! We even saw a manniquin that resembled ET.

At the shoe store, whose owner spoke excellent English, JenMarie found not one but three pairs she liked and since the price tag said they each cost under a hundred bucks, we figured that with the 7:1 exchange rate this would be a steal at a mere $41 for 3 pairs of dress shoes. She paid for them with her credit card and even Michal bought a pair. On the way home, as we were vocalising astonishment at the low prices, JenMarie happened to glance at her receipt and was horrified to discover that the prices had been in US dollars.

Upon telling Daniel's family about this predicament, his mom Rosa revisited the store with the girls to return the shoes. Unlike stores in North America, however, stores in Bolivia don't let you return goods; you can only exchange them. But JenMarie could not afford the extra couple of hundred dollars she'd accidentally spent so they asked to return 3 of the 4 pairs. The store owner was initially reticient but when they threatened to dispute the charge with Visa, he capitulated.

Once they'd sorted things out, we all took naps to fortify ourselves for the long night ahead. We'd planned on leaving shortly after 9pm but Rosa got stuck in a long queue at the hair salon and we didn't acually make it out of the house until after 10:30. Fortunately, the party wasn't very far away and we got in with plenty of time to ring in the new decade, which involved throwing confetti on everybody around us and making a lot of noise.

Food was served in short order and an enormous queue formed to partake of it. But Daniel's cousins and I jumped the queue so I didn't actually have to wait that long. It was ironic that they suggested it, since they'd only recently returned from a four year stay in the UK, where queues are practically sacred. With the eating portion of the night out of they way, we then danced until morning. I didn't begin to feel sleepy until we were on our way back so the nap must have worked.

We woke up in the late afternoon to celebrate Rosa's birthday with a BBQ. Many more members of the extended family came over. They used lemons to clean the grill, which seems like a great idea and I plan on trying it the next time I need to clean mine. I also had a chance to eat a Bolivian tamale, which tastes nothing like the Mexican and Salvadorean ones I'm used to. I think it's my 2nd faourite Bolivian food after saltanas.

Saturday was a big day. We flew to La Paz in the morning, checked into our hostel, ate lunch and then wandered around buying trinkets for a bit before going on a private tour of the city. Our tour guide was awesome. First she took us to the Valley of the Moon, where decades of acid rain have eroded the rock to form a breathtaking terrain. At first I though it was named because people thought it looked like the moon but our guide informed us that the name actually predates the acid rain and was given to the area by the people who once lived there because they believed that the moon would protect them.

The next stop on our tour was a lookout point in the midst of the city, from which we could see the entirety of La Paz stretching out in every direction. We also visited the cathedral and parliament building before ending at a market where our guide explained to us the significance of some mystical props that were on sale there. Since we were in the market, we had dinner at an organic vegetarian restaurant to counteract all the meat we'd been consuming over the week.

Finally, I got a haircut before we retired to our hostel room for the night. Even though at 10 bs (~$1.42) it was the cheapest haircut I've ever had, it was also one of the best. In fact, the barber was so skilled with his razor that I got him to shave my beard too. Now I've had my hair cut on 4 contients.

In the morning we took a taxi to the airport to catch our 8:30 flight to Cusco and managed to get there with enough time to grab brekki and mail out postcards. No sooner had we boarded the plane, however, than we were required to disembark due to unexplained technical difficulties. We spent the next couple of hours sitting around in the secure area until they announced that the flight would be delayed by 5 hours and gave us coupons for a free meal.

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Sleeping in airports sucks. Don't do it. Seriously. It's worth paying an extra couple of hundreds bucks for your ticket if you can avoid having to spend the night in an airport between flights.

Getting through Bolivian customs and immigration was very easy and quick when I arrived in La Paz. But when I tried to board a domestic flight from La Paz to Cochabamba, they got confused by my Portuguese name, Pakistani birthplace and Canadian passport. They kept asking me if I was Brazillian and ended up searching through all my baggage!

When I arrived in Cochabamba there was nobody to pick me up and my CDMA phone, which worked in Mexico and Peru, couldn't find a signal. I didn't have an address for my friend Daniel so I stood around looking lost for a couple of minutes until a random guy who spoke English took me to a travel agency and got them to call Daniel's number for me. In the end it all worked out.

Daniel's family has a lovely house in Cochabamba and after a shower I took a cat nap in the guest bedroom they assigned me. It felt amazing to sleep in a real bed again. We then had tea and hung out in the living room for a while before heading out for supper. Driving around in Bolivia is interesting because there are many roundabouts and no lane markers.

We had dinner with some of Daniel's many cousins at a Restaurant called Tuesday. My Spanish has grown rusty to the point of uselessness but they spoke enough English to hold a conversation. After dinner we met another cousin who took us to this little coffee shop where we got to chew coco leaves.

On the way back we went to a drive-through pharmacy. They also have drive-through liquor stores, although we didn't avail of any. While driving, Daniel's cousin played for us an album of songs about the president, who continues to enjoy popular support. The songs reminded me of the Russian national anthem but with pan flutes. There's an idea for Obama!

In the morning we went to Los Castores for saltanas, a uniquely Bolivian breakfast food that comes in both sweet and spicy varieties. Daniel taught us the correct way to eat them so that we didn't get our hands messy. I chased down my saltanas with a glass of papaya juice with milk. Papayas grow locally so they use fresh ones that taste amazing.

After brekki we wandered around the outdoor market, which was comfortably reminiscient of outdoor markets I've seen in other countries, buying knick-knacks. We were disappointed to discover that the toques had been made in China. Everything else, at least, was made locally. People kept driving cars through the narrow streets, although, at the pace they were moving, I have no idea why they bothered.

Instead of lunch we went out for an early dinner around 4pm. I had a tough time deciding between rabbit, mackerel and chorizo but in the end I ordered the chorizo, which was delicious. Not all of us were happy with our food, however. JenMarie's "chicken soup" turned out to be soup with half a chicken plonked down in the middle of it! Being vegetarian normally, she couldn't bear to stare at the thing and removed it from the bowl to eat the rest of the soup. She ended up taking it to go and we gave it to a little campesino boy who was selling fruit on the street. I'm sure he appreciated it more than she did.

After dinner we returned to the house and took naps. When I woke up Daniel's dad Berto was regaling Michal with tales from his adventures living abroad. He's spent most of his adult life stationed in various developing countries, initially with the Peace Core and then later serving as a microeconomist for a non-profit. That man needs to publish a book on his memoirs!

While he was in the Core, he learned how to play poker and offered to teach us Draw poker. So all of us played poker around the dinner table in the evening. I thought he'd win but his wife turned out to be even more adept than he.

On Wednesday morning I had occasion to talk to Daniel's sister Tania at brekki. She's been following in her dad's footsteps, having already worked in a few different countries. She met her husband while in Sudan for a year and both of them now live in Sri Lanka with their 2 year old daughter. It was from her that I learned about how the tsunami was indirectly responsible for the civil war in Sri Lanka ending a few months ago. Not having heard about that before, I was blown away by the news, since I can remember people leaving Sri Lanka and coming to Karachi in the early 90s.

Tania also helped design some of the fixtures in their house, which the family designed themselves in the mid 90's. My favourite feature of the house is that it has North American power outlets in addition to Bolivian ones.

Once JenMarie and Michal woke up, we went to see the world's largest statue of Christ, 40 metres high and set atop one of the many hills that encircle the city. We ascended the hill by cable-car, allowing us an amazing view of the more populated side of Cochabamba. Once we were at the top, we could see the other side too. Although the ring of hills imposes a natural limit on urban sprawl, the city hasn't yet run up against that limit. Daniel thinks it won't be more than a few more years before that happens though.

The statue itself is hollow on the inside with a stairwell leading up. We walked up it, looking out the little windows as we went. When we got as far as the outstretched arms we walked partway down their length, although we couldn't proceed any further because the route had ben barricaded.

In the afternoon we visited a little restaurant built on the banks of a stream. After eating we played a dice game called cacho that Berto taught us and then rode a zipline across the river. We also drank chicha, a drink made from corn. The girls were not fans of it though. Because I'd gone to bed late and woken up early, I decided to take a siesta upon returning to the house.

A few hours later we had a light dinner and then went out to see what the local bar scene was like. We left around 10pm. Apparently that's way too early because the first 3 bars we tried to hit up weren't even open yet! We decided to kill time at a karaoke bar that was empty. But we soon discovered that JenMarie was the only one among us who could actually sing karaoke with any semblence of accuracy. We also met a girl from SF who was visiting Cochabamba and would be in Peru next so we made plans to try and meet up there if we could. Eventually other peeps showed up and put us to shame wither their excellent singing so we blew out of there and went to a nightclub.

There was a dance floor at the club so we danced for a while before taking a break for drinks. JenMarie's exotic European look attracted the attention of a local boy who asked her to dance. According to him that was the worst nightclub he'd been to in the city. Maybe that's why it was open before midnight.

                   

Click here to download:

bolivia-1.zip (15062 KB)

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About four and a half years ago I was finishing up my undergrad in CS at Waterloo with plans to pursue a masters in Software Architecture. But over the previous couple of years I had grown increasingly fascinated by the burgeoning field of user experience design. I also wanted to write Linux software, however, and there didn't seem to be much demand for Linux developers who were passionate about building products that were easy and fun to use. It was then that VMware contacted me. They were trying to expand their UI team, which actually produced highly regarded commercial Linux software. So, when they offered me a chance to join them, I took it and moved to Silicon Valley with very little idea of what my life would be like. Moving 3000 miles away to start my first real job in a place where I didn't have any friends was somewhat scary but also very exciting. I spent a lot of time hanging out at Stanford, volunteered for local organizations and joined a small group at a great church I found.

Working on the Linux UI for VMware's Workstation product was great: I was learning a lot, my coworkers were inspiring and the weather was a marked improvement over Southern Ontario. Once a year we were encouraged to attend an industry conference of our choosing. My first time I picked the Computer Human Interface conference, which was held in Montreal that year. The conference was wonderful, although the focus that year was on designing software for mobile phones rather than virtualization. I returned to work with thoughts of mobile phone software filling my head but VMware didn't do much in that area so I didn't have much opportunity to apply what I'd learnt about it. Nevertheless, there was plenty else to fire my imagination and keep me occupied.

After about a year of living in Silicon Valley, I grew bored of the suburban life and moved to San Francisco when VMware began running shuttles between SF and the offices in Palo Alto. Despite the longer commute, I was much happier living in the city. As the opportunities for socialization increased, I found that the Blackberry I'd bought for mobile email access and Google Maps was getting long in the tooth. GPRS was painfully slow and it couldn't handle EDGE so I replaced it with a 1st-generation iPhone shortly after they went on sale. Despite its shortcomings, the iPhone was easily the best smartphone ever created and I began wondering how much longer it would be before smartphones began to conquer the mainstream market.

I also found myself wanting to do more international travel after having flown around the US a fair bit giving talks about VMware and virtualization at college campuses. I'd been wanting to visit Peru in particular but was intimidated by the thought of wandering around there unable to speak any Spanish. So in the summer of 2007 I spent a fortnight in Guatemala taking immersive Spanish lessons. While I was there, VMware was spun off from EMC as a new public corporation and we got stock options with a 4-year vesting schedule. After some initial exuberance, however, the stock sank down to underwater levels when the entire world economy was dealt a series of body blows by the real estate and financial sectors. On the bright side, a few months after the IPO I was able to get an office in the city and could bike to work in 15 minutes again.

While most corporations were in lockdown mode due to fears of a big recession, Apple was busy addressing the criticisms its original iPhone had received, chief amongst them being the lack of any 3rd-party native apps. In the summer of 2008 they opened up the app store and suddenly there was an easy way for independent software developers to build and sell iPhone apps. As the number of iPhone and iPod Touch users grew, the appeal of that market opportunity began to explode. Although I had no experience writing software for either Mac OS X or any mobile device, I grew intrigued by the prospect.

Meanwhile, after three years of working on Workstation, I wanted a change. That change came in the form of an exciting new project that had me hacking on X11 code. I wasn't the only one working on exciting new stuff, however. Google and Palm had decided to introduce innovative new platforms to the smartphone industry. Although both were running the Linux kernel, they had eschewed the aging X11 in favour of  their own newfangled graphics display systems. While Google invented their own runtime for apps, developers would be able to write them in the popular Java programming language that I had used extensively before my days as a Linux UI hacker. Similarly, Palm had created an app framework that could run apps written using Javascript, with which I was also familiar.

As the project I was working on at VMware matured, we started having to put the various pieces together. That was when I realized that enterprise software development wasn't conducive to the kind of lightweight and iterative development methodology that appealed to me. As time wore on, the appeal of striking out on my own to write smartphone apps grew increasingly strong. While I toyed with the idea of hacking on stuff in my free time, the reality was that after spending all day writing code at work, the last thing I felt like doing when I got home was writing more code. Finally, in October I made the decision to take the leap. The stock price had risen over the past few months and enough of my options had vested that I could afford to take a couple of years off work to pursue my dream of hacking on mobile software. Better still, working on my own meant I could work from wherever I happened to be, allowing for more travel.

Rather than wander from place to place, I wanted to spend a few months living in one city and get to know it well. I wanted a city where people spoke English, the weather was warm, the cost of living was fairly low and the infrastructure (i.e. drinking water, Internet access and public transit) was decent. After some research, Kuala Lumpur seemed like the best bet. I was initially going to move there at the beginning of December but then a good friend told me she would be visiting Peru (and Bolivia) immediately after Christmas and invited me to join her. I knew she spoke fluent Spanish so I jumped at the chance and moved my departure for KL out by 6 weeks.

Since leaving VMware I have spent the past 2 months working on my first smartphone app. I took up the first week conducting market research to figure out what to make. Based on my research, I decided to write an asynchronous social game based on an existing party favourite: Pictionary Telephone. Wanting to let people with smartphones running different platforms play with each other, I decided to use a client-server architecture. For the server, I picked Google App Engine as the framework because I had toyed with it a year or two ago and liked it. I came up with a REST API for letting clients interact with the server and then built up a simple prototype of the game with a bare-bones Web UI so I could get early feedback on the experience. As I got input from people, I kept changing the prototype until it was finally fun to play, at which point I began work on the first smartphone client (for Palm's WebOS), for which I got a prototype working this week.

It's almost time to bid farewell to California now, as it flirts with bankruptcy, but even after 4 years there are things I never did while I was here, like hiking in Muir Woods. Perhaps I will return someday and get around to that. Right now, however, South America awaits!

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I've divided this into sections and ordered the items in each section by diminishing importance.

On person (in zipped pockets or money-belt)

• passport
• cash & credit/ATM cards
• printouts of tickets
• pen & small notepad
• driver license

Clothing

• underwear
• pants
• shirts
• socks
• hiking boots & moccasins
• sweater
• rain poncho
• jacket
• slippers/flip-flops
• suit: pant, shirt, tie, blazer
• gloves/mittens
• pyjamas
• toque/hat
• quick-dry pants
• swimming trunks

Toiletries (in Ziploc bag)

• soap/shower-gel, shampoo & conditioner
• toothpaste
• insect repellent
• hand sanitizer
• deodorant
• moisturizer & balm

Medical supplies (packaged together for easy access)

• aspirin
• ibuprofen
• anti-diarrhetic
• cough suppressant
• band-aids
• alcohol swabs

Electronics

• power adapters
• camera & charger
• Palm Pre, charger, USB cables & ear-buds
• netbook
• USB flash key-fob
• GSM phone

Everything else

• resealable Ziplock bags
• Invisalign case & Efferdent
• metal water bottle
• micro-fibre travel towel
• brolly
• toothbrush, floss & toothpicks
• vitamins & probiotics
• flashlight
• a book
• Spanish flash cards
• razor
• fanny pack
• snacks
• toilet paper
• mesh laundry bag
• keys

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Anytime one travels internationally, there are two things that always need to be worried about: obtaining cash and finding toilets. While it is sometimes possible to rely on traveller's cheques, the sort of places that accept those tend to be the places I generally wish to avoid. I thought that I'd be able to use my CitiBank card at foreign CitiBank ATMs for free but they actually charged me more for using their ATM than other banks did! 

And, unlike South/Central America, you can't just use the greenback with impunity in Eastern Europe. Instead we had to hit up local ATMs in every country we visited. The airport in Budapest played a mean trick on us. None of the ATMs would dispense any cash to foreign bank cards so everybody had to use the currency changers. By contrast, the ATMs at the train station in Sofia readily gave us cash, although it took me a while to figure out what the UI meant because it was in Cyrillic. Istanbul's ATMs were hit-or-miss but enough of them worked that we didn't starve.

As for toilets, we discovered that there are no free toilets in Eastern Europe! Instead you can just pay to use toilets in subway stations or restaurants. On the plus side, they cost very little and I actually preferred being able to shell out 30-50¢ to use a clean toilet instead of having to by something I didn't really want just so I could relieve myself.

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