R + D | South America

Danielle and I went to the tourist information office in Uyuni, Bolivia, today to do some homework on the hoards of agencies offering tours in the Salar de Uyuni and Southwest Circuit. They all do the same thing basically. Six tourists, a driver, and a cook cram into a Toyota LandCruiser and head out to the salt desert for a few days (finally an appropriate use of an SUV). Most people say it is a spectacular experience. A few say it was a nightmare and they almost died (jeep breaks down, no radio, no water, temperature drops to -26C at night, guide gets lost, etc.). So checking out the sixty or so agencies at the tourist office is important. It was a first stop in Uyuni.

Wow! Just when we thought Bolivia could never get its act together, we walked into the world´s best tourist information office! Most tourist information offices around the world just aren´t that useful. Someone scribbles something on a free map you´ll never really use and then asks you to sign the guest register to justify their salary at year end.

This office, however, was incredibly useful, and at the end there was no guest register, just a survey. They had bus schedules with prices, comment books of local tourist agencies organized by month, one for good comments one for quejas (complaints), eager staff, a book exchange with a good English book, and lots of useful maps. The centerpiece of the office though was a Microsoft Access database cataloging surveys filled out by hundreds of tourists based on their experiences with the different tour agencies doing the Southwest Circuit.

The professional and very helpful Weimar laid out two chairs in front of the computer and proceeded to show us rankings of all the agencies by any criteria we could name: food, quality of the vehicles, quality of the guides, number of tourists recommending the agency, number of complaints against the agency . . . etc. We spent a while oohing and aweing and taking notes and narrowing the list down to a few. And then I saw it, the perfect criterion: a field in the database for nationality. I looked at Danielle knowingly and then almost simultaneously we combined our broken Spanish to ask if there was any way to rank the agencies by number of tourists from a particular country using that agency. Two clicks of a button and Weimar produced a ranking of what I will call the ¨Israeli factor.¨ A ranking of the agencies based on the number of Israelis filling in surveys for each. Dafka!

We used two independent criteria in making our decision: (1) best overall rating, (2) fewest number of Israeli respondants.

Let me say here that if you ever want a real friend, you should befriend an Israeli. Danielle and I have some amazing friends of Holy Land descent. Zivvy, Dror, Shiri, now Itai and Gaia, Effie, and most recently Benji, are some of the most loyal, generous, good-natured, down-to-earth people we know. (You other Americans, Canadians, South Africans and what-have-you are just okay. But keep trying).

Let me also say that I am a staunch supporter of Eretz Yisrael and nothing I say should be construed as slander of the Holy Land. I denounce Hamas, Hezbollah, the European Union, and all the Israel haters out there.

But, let me also say, that the Israelis traveling around South America (and the rest of the world for that matter, India, South East Asia) are not doing our mother land any good.

I´ve always believed that Israel has terrible public relations. Say what you will about the Palestinians and Israel´s enemies, they sure know how to win the public relations battle. Of course, part of this comes from them not giving a damn how many of their own public die to get their message across. But nonetheless they know how to make themselves look good and Israel look bad. The best example of this is the BBC. I love their news, but they are the world´s biggest sucker for confusing anti-Israel propoganda with news. If the BBC really wanted some real anti-Israel fodder, they should come to South America and report on just how unbelievably rude, cheap, loud, obnoxious, aggressive, and culturally insensitive travelling bands of Israeli youth are.

Let´s see . . . On a combined walking, bus, barge trip from Puno, Peru, to Copacabana, Bolivia, there was the travelling Israeli medical student who had every tourist pamphlet between Lima and La Paz fluttering from his pockets and sticking out of his backpack. For hours he fiddled with little improvised packets of these pamphlets, re-arranging piles of them stuffed into bolsitas, munching away on assorted candies as the wrappers fluttered to the ground. We talked for a while and he expressed ambivalence about going back to Israel in a couple of days and finishing medical school. It took a while for me to figure out, but I realized he was strewing a trail of trash behind him like he was afraid of not being able to find his way back home. Of course, the locals thought it perfectly normal that trash should be deposited wherever it is created.

Our accompanying Dutch, English, and German travelers were too polite to say anything. But good old Danielle piped up with a ¨hey is this your garbage?¨ and handed it to him.

Like many an Israeli backpacker he had also perfected the art of highly audible open mouthed chewing. When I first saw this phenomenon in Ecuador–of an Israeli backpacker chewing his cud—I thought ¨well, those Israelis just have different manners.¨ It was not until I saw llamas on the Inca trail displaying their munched up boluses of altiplano grass on their bottom lip that I realized maybe the masticating Israelis showing us their spaghetti and sauce in mid-chew are trying to imitate the local Andean camelids.

Then there was the 2 hour bus ride next to Guy. The CD of hip-hop Andean folk music was interrupted by the chwarck! of him sniffing back his snot at regular 30 second intervals. He regailed us with stories of his bargaining prowess. How deftly he could bargain the price down on food, transport, shelter, and souvenirs. “How much did you pay for this bus? … Oh, really … I only paid 20 soles…did you bargain?¨

His most effective strategy, he explained, was to exploit the poor mathematics education of the rural South American campesinos. Rather than asking how much a particular item cost, he would ask how much of said item he could obtain for a given price. This really threw them off and reaped great discounts. He offered us the link to the ´secret´online Israeli backpacker´s guide to South America, and looked at us with pity when we said we could read Hebrew but couldn´t understand it. “What? You´re Jewish? Why didn´t you tell me?”

His crowning achievement though was his 22 km trek along the train tracks from Machu Pichu to Ollantaytambo. This stretch, as one might guess, is usually done by train. He was indignant though that tourist should not have to pay more than locals for the train. I tried to point out to him that tourists usually earn more money in an hour at home than locals earn in a week and maybe it was a good idea to have differential prices. He looked at me again with pity, and remained proud to have really stuck it to the man.

Things came to a head a few days ago in Potosi when we went on a mine tour–three hours of crawling, squeezing, sliding, and climbing through tight, dark tunnels in an antiquated silver mine. We decided to go with a smaller company and signed up with Julio Ceaser and his ¨Greengo Tours¨for the following morning. Looking foward to a private tour, we were a little disappointed the next day to learn that there would be a third person in our group. Reflexively Danielle asked ¨¿Es de quel pais?¨
Julio Ceasar: ¨Israel.¨ We sighed.

But we greeted our new friend enthusiastically. I thought a good starting point would be the incredible story of the intrepid railway walker. The guy responded ¨yea, why do we have to pay more than the locals? I walked back from Machu Pichu too! They cheat you! It´s unbelievable!¨

Apparently, what we thought was the whim of a cheapskate is actually becoming the new Israeli Inca Trail.

These mine tours are not trivial. You are taken into working mines with horrible conditions. Cave-ins, fumes, explosions, accidents happen. They are dangerous to say the least and this seemed fairly clear to us prior to departure.

The main entrance is a very narrow 200m long tunnel the floor of which is a wall-to-wall rail track made of very rickety wood along which, at totally unpredicatble intervals, three men come barreling down with a very unstable wagon piled high with one ton of rocks. One man runs backwards in front of the wagon to try and coax it to stay on its track, while the other two futilely strain against the back of it to try and slow it down. As soon as the rumble of one was heard, our guide, in a near panic, would shout ¨there!¨and point to a slight widening in the tunnel where we would sprint and plaster ourselves to the wall so as to get off the tracks. (A nurse in a taxi a few days later acknowledged a lot of orthapedic injuries, many likely the result of runaway mine trains).

Our Israeli companion began to get a little nervous in the main entrance tunnel which was understandable. His response though, rather than to pay the utmost attention to the guide (an experienced ex-miner) was to start kvetching.

¨Carlos what are you taking us here?¨ open palms gesticulating in disdain. ¨Is it safe?¨ This was only the beginning of a long hour of criticism and disobedeince by our Israeli friend. Finally, to our great relief, he told the guide that the dust in the mine was bad for his voice and that he had a performance the following night. Performance? Finally I realized why the guide kept calling him Elvis. One of our two guides accompanied the Elvis impersonator out of the mine while we quietly obeyed the other guides instructions and finished the tour.

Israeli backpackers don´t use the Lonely Planet like the rest of us. They´re too smart for that. They have their own website with all the special deals and bargains listed. There are hostels and restaurants all over South America with Hebrew endorsements written in marker on notebook paper taped to the windows and many serve falafel and shwarma. One way to avoid the Israelis is to avoid these places. If you can read Hebrew you can circumnavigate the places on the website. Finally, as most of those in question are fresh out of the army and don´t have much cash, you can out-spend them and stay in nicer places and eat in more expensive places (no shwarma though, sorry). But the ultimate weapon is the ¨nacionalidad¨field in the database in the tourist informatation office in Uyuni.

We´ve met one or two Israelis down here who you wouldn´t mind spending four days squashed in a jeep in the desert with, but the rest would really disappoint their imas and abas. It´s a pity since they obviously don´t represent all Israelis.