Up, up and away

Went for a meal in Joyride last night and met Tatiana who is doing wicked things with Skype to provide news bulletings to remote areas over community radio.

Joyride cafe 

Early night and we left Sucre at 5am this morning. I´ve got bruises on bruises! You can´t really say we´ve been offroading as we were on the main roads, fairly amazing. Most people don´t have cars and I think we have passed probably 3 times as many people walking as vehicles.

It was absolutely hurling it down when we left which made for exciting driving, and it was also freezing. Within the first hour, we had to wipe shampoo on the inside of the windows to prevent it fogging up, and then came round a corner to find an idiot in a white 4x4 had gone straight into someone coming up the hill. That gave an opportunity to get some photos of the scenery from outside the vehicle.

We arrived in Alcala and had a look at their set up. get this, they have a satellite but it only gives 128k and 19.2k up, so no Skype except to listen to. The folks here have it all upside down compared to the Brits. Here it is, you ahve brought us the internet, but when are we getting a phone line. There was a meeting of the local council, institute, the telecentre, and various others to discuss what could be improved about the Telecentre, etc. I´ve heard all the complaints and suggestions before, and it didn´t take tlong to see they want everything for free (including a training course to help local people master the basics of computers at 10Bs- just over $1), and the connection is too expensive so although they freely admit it´s essential, they won´t pay.

Asked how much local people spend on making phone calls - there is one phone in the village - and it´s about 10Bs a week. It doesn´t seem like a difficult bit of Maths to work out that the money they are giving to the local telephone company would support a far better satellite connection and you could prob provide Skype phones so they could have mobile coverage in the vilalge over wi-fi.

Biggest problem is how on earth you make money out of these connections beyond phone calls. Folk here earn about 20Bs a day, and that won´t be 365 days a year. Anyway, this will all have to be thought through a bit as it seems to make far more sense to spend any money on internet and phone rather than a crap phone line that goes down at the first sign of rain - 4 months a year!

We are now in El Villar which is a tiny village with two foot deep mud instead of roads. I presume there is no way to keep yourself or your house clean and it must get pretty depressing. We´ve had to wade (in the car) through several rivers - funky! I´ve been totally enjoying the whole experience! We are now on our say to Sopachuy - pronounced Super Chewy - to spend the night, and then back to Sucre in the morning, because there is some Champions League football match on! Then back to Santa Cruz for me and hopefully a changed flight so I can stay a few more days. I will be gutted if I have to come home already.

There is so much potential here because no-one is really doing anything, but I think the regulations might be the killer. More later when we get to SuperChewy.