Jabs, tabs and Gutenberg

I'm gonna blog the shit out of everything.

I just got jabbed with Yellow Fever this morning, plus a bit of Hep A to keep me going. Two dead arms and an empty wallet and I'm only just started with the innoculations. The Travel Clinic gave me about 20 sheets of information on all the diseases I can get in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Cuba. I guess Chile would have been an extra five sheets, but I didn't mention that. We're only stopping over in Santiago for a couple of nights on the way through, and I'm pretty sure there's a virus rule of not infecting people in transit.

Reading travel warnings makes it seem like the only safe place to go is down Carlisle Street, Balaclava. And to be fair, I've never contracted much worse than a sesame bagel and a soy latte. We still need to ward off rabies, malaria, typhoid, Hep B, the flu and a few others before we go. I think he might be an overly cautious doctor, so I might ignore a few of them. What's the worst that can happen?

If the diseases don't get you in South America, it seems you can be sure the muggers and scammers will. Good news for the muggers though; we have just bought a new Samsung Galaxy tablet to take with us. It's tiny and awesome. Kirsten is filling the little sucker up with hundreds of books from Project Gutenberg. It is a whole new world I didn't know existed. Free books. Thousands of them. Kirsten can easily go through a book a day when she's in peak form, so it will save us a whole lot of space, weight and time. It's also going to be our internet device so I can blog the shit out of Bolivia etc.

I'm currently reading a book called Marching Powder about an English drug smuggler who ended up in San Pedro prison in La Paz. It's the first book I've read on Bolivia and it's far from encouraging. But it is amazing; such a fascinating book. I'm only a hundred pages in, but I'm pretty sure I'll finish it in no time. (It's also the first book I've read since fitfully reading War and Peace for the last six months - I've punished myself by not allowing myself to start another book until Tolstoy is toast. I've had to break the rule for Marching Powder.)

I find prisons fascinating. I've watched a few documentaries including two or three by Louis Theroux that scare the crap out of me. But they're most frequently about US prisons, which appear to be their own breed of shitfulness. San Pedro sounds nothing like them. Prisoners have to pay to enter the prison. Then they have to pay to buy or rent a cell. They have to buy and cook their own food. Families live inside the prison, when only the husband/father has been incarcerated. It's freaking with my shit. And it's not a fiction book. San Pedro prison is a tourist attraction too, but I'm buggered if I'm going near it.

Time to go back to my book.