As a graduate student, I finally had the opportunity to work on a project in southern Bolivia. Although I had spent previous summers camping alone while conducting fieldwork in remote areas, this was to be my first journey overseas, to a country known variously for coca growing, revolution, and the final resting place of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

La Paz is nestled in a series of steep valleys that are eroded in a jagged, blasted moonscape of sun-baked volcanic rock. One of the city parks is called "Valle de la Lunas" or Valley of the Moon. The city has sprawled up the valley slopes onto the Altiplano, or high desert. As my taxi drove from the airport over the lip of the high desert, the city was spread out below, partially obscured through a haze of heavy smog. After finding the company office, a driver took me to a hotel in the old part of the city, popular with young, dominantly British and Spanish backpackers. Left to my own devices for several days, I taught myself the phrases and words to order breakfast and dinner, and wandered through the open-air market to practice my nascent Spanish skills on vendors of flashlights, jeans, and trilobite fossils. I found Bolivians to be the friendliest of people, who seemed to delight in talking to a Norteamericano. At first, I felt no ill effects from climbing the steep streets in what has been described as the World’s highest-altitude capitol city. After several days, altitude sickness left me with a feeling of exhaustion and constant headache in spite of six weeks of hiking in the Colorado Rockies.