We started our Andes trip in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a city in the eastern part of Bolivia, where we wanted to visit a college friend of mine. We got there after a short flight from Rio de Janeiro, which would be quite painless if it wasn’t for the fact that neither of us got much sleep the night before as we were both trying to finish up conference papers before taking off for a three week vacation. We stayed in Santa Cruz itself for 2 full days (Friday and Monday) and used the weekend to go to Samaipata a few hours away by car.

Santa Cruz has a pleasant downtown, surprisingly small for a town of over a million people. As we later learned, the city is very spread out and largely suburban (more like the Palo Alto / San Jose area in CA) and much of the nightlife occurs on a few strips outside downtown.

Much more than California, in many ways, Santa Cruz seemed like a libertarian paradise. Traffic police was conspicuously absent from the city, traffic lights we installed on only a few intersections, and even then were typically ignored.

Santa Cruz also gave us the first opportunity to try converting our Portuguese into Spanish. During our first afternoon in Santa Cruz (walking around by ourselves, without our hosts), we stopped to get ice-cream (Bs.4 each = US$.50) which was our first interaction with the locals. It was a bit complicated because first we needed to negotiate the fact that we needed to get change for a Bs. 100 bill. (We had a Bs.10, but I was saving it for taxi back.) After the woman said that sure, they can give us change, we asked her for flavor we wanted, but instead of giving us the ice-cream she said our order had to be “canceled.” After a moment of feeling utterly lost, I made a wild guess (from the context) that by some strange logic “cancel” might mean “pay” in Spanish and showed her the money. She nodded. My friend later explained that it does mean “pay” in the sense of “cancel the debt” i.e. pay what you owe.

Speaking of paying, Santa Cruz surprised us with low prices, despite the fact that we read about it in our guidebook. US$1 was going for 8 “bolivianos” (which most people colloquially call “pesos”), and asking for US$200 from an ATM gave us a thick wad of cash that took us a while to spend. While the exchange rate is 1:8, prices in Bolivianos were typically only 2-3 times higher than dollar prices in US. Taxi cost Bs 6-20 depending on distance; a dinner in a restaurant (with desert, etc) was around Bs.40; a room in a hotel typically cost us US$10 to US$15. When we later crossed into Peru we found the prices noticeably higher, though still lower than in Brazil.