Singani

My second day in Tupiza was spent hiking around the area taking in the landscape - visited Cañon del Inca (with a small waterfall), Puerta del Diablo, and a valley of odd-shaped rocks names the valley of penises. Phallirific.
That night I hit the town with Joel and Eileen a English/Australian couple, respectively, and a plethora of other folk from our hostel. We started out at a restaurant named "The Alamo" - nice. Afterwards, everyone cleared out and Joel and Eileen and I wanted another drink. So we went to a karaoke bar and ordered cocktails of the local liquor - singani. Foul stuff that is thrice distilled from grapes. It is 80 proof and somewhere between tequila, vodka, and paint thinner. Apparently it has mildly psycotropic effects.
So after some of those I was feeling the music at the karaoke place - something I never do. I murdered a version of "House of the Rising Sun". Shortly thereafter the rest of the hostel squad arrived - apparently not really ready to call it a night. We ordered a bottle of singani and I convinced the multi-national squad to sing. The English sang Elvis' "Can't help falling in love" and me and a French guy sang "Michelle" by the Beatles. I tried to move people to the dancefloor but was unsuccesful. However, my gregarious attitude was, apparently, interpreted by a small gay, Bolivian man as invitation for courtship. Eileen made the situation worse by telling him, in spanglish, that I would come with him if he procured some margarine and a donkey. This surely confused the Boliviano. I made a hasty exit to my hostel.
Monday, I indulged myself and left on a 4-day tour of SW Bolivia with Eileen, Joel, and two Argentineans - Mariano and Lucas. The SW circuit of Bolivia is extremely dry, extremely high, and contains bizarre lagoons, volcanos, and geologic formations. The 1st day we were supposed to see some natural rock wonders but our guide, apparently, got lost in the maze of dirt tracks through the remote area. So we aimlessly off-roaded for 12 hours and saw some distant vicunas and a rodent relative of the chinchilla. Towards the end of the day the drivers, sensing our irritability, tried to cheer us up by singing quechua songs with mouths packed full of coca leaves. I wasn't having it.
The next morning we awoke to a temperature of -4 degrees fahrenheit and journeyed to an extinct volcano with an arsenic lake at its' base. We played 3-3 football at the end of the day, all of us immediately regretting this because of the 4000 m altitude. The Bolivians and Texan won.