Back in Bolivia

Por fin, at last, I am back in Bolivia! This time I’m here to study bat-pathogen diversity for my Ph.D. dissertation. There’s no pressure at all… not.

I arrived less than a week ago to La Paz, and I am blown away by its beauty. The town sits way up high in the Andes*, and looking around you can see mountains for miles. I am staying with a friend and colleague Erika, and the view from her living room gives a perfect glimpse of La Muela del Diablo – The Devil’s Molar – an “extinct volcanic plug”, according to Lonely Planet Bolivia.

We take public transit everywhere, the most exciting of which is El Teleferico; they actually have a gondola as public transportation! So, I can get where I need to go while also having a birds eye view of one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been. It’s amazing.

El Teleferico

A view of La Paz from El Teleferico

So far, my work has been focused on two things: obtaining collection permits and planning logistics for field site travel.

Permit collection, besides the typical signed piece of paper from the federal government, includes travel to each town or village where I’m planning to work and asking permission from a town representative who, as a voice of the people, will (hopefully!) let me collect bats on the land. This is tough because 1) some sites are multi-day trips and 2) I call myself “survivally fluent” in Spanish, meaning, I can keep myself alive, but not much else. Talking with well-respected members of small communities will be a high-stress task, to say the least**. Nonetheless, permission from both the federal government and the local people are absolute necessities.  

Travel to field sites is the second bugger. My research is focused along an elevational gradient, which means that I will sample bats at a range of different elevations. Bolivia is a great place for this, because the country has a nearly perfect east-west elevational incline. The fun part about this is that I get to see a lot of the country’s social, environmental, and topographical diversity. The not-so-fun part is that all of this travel is time consuming, and the cost of transporting my entire field team (me, Erika, a Bolivian bat biologist, and my friend Amy) adds up quickly.

Despite it all, things are looking ok. I left La Paz last weekend for a quick stay in Cochabamba, and now I am in Santa Cruz to see my Bolivian family, pick up my field assistant Amy, and meet a biologist at the natural history museum. Little by little, one travels far… so they say.

* Thanks to altitude sickness medication, I can function. Breathing is difficult though. Walking up-hill is a don’t (they are REALLY hard to avoid here), and I won’t be going out for a run any time soon.

** Don’t worry, Erika will help me. She has been to many of these sites before, and some of her previous work (she’s a wildlife vet) has included many anthropological aspects. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without Erika.