• Warm showers — you don’t know what you’re talking about unless you’ve ever showered in freezing cold mountain water pumped directly to your shower from above 4,000m (~13,000 ft) without any heating because the gas bottle is empty again.
• Potable tap water — it may not sound like much but have you ever had to use bottled water for brushing your teeth?
• Hygienic food — I am going to spare you the details. Use your imagination.
• Heating and insulation — ever spent a night at 4,500m (~15,000 ft) in a ramshackle hut without any heating?
• Toilets that don’t clog — do you put your used toilet paper into the bin? You think that’s gross? You do know that’s what half the world does?
• Fast, reliable transportation — bliss is a night in a museum-piece Bolivian bus as it rattles over unpaved roads for endless hours. What’s an easy three-hour train ride for us would be an arduous twenty-hour bus ride for most of the world.
• Fast Internet — now this may not be as important to most people as it is to me but my new high-speed DSL connection surely does save my day.

We complain and complain (and that includes me) about everything. In fact, we have a pretty darn good life.

PS: I’m back in Germany and just moved to Hamburg. If you’re around, come visit me!

Early the next morning — at 6am, to be precise — we get to the bus station and are startled to find a huge group of travelers waiting for the same bus. They speak a language that sounds vaguely familiar but that I do not understand a word of. They look neither Western nor Latin American. They are extremely easily confused, cluster around the bus’ baggage hold while their bags are loaded on — blocking the entire process — and are only moved out of the way by a long-haired dude that manages to herd them into their seats.

Suddenly, the long-haired dude comes to us and starts talking to me: turns out he is the tour guide of a group of Turkish travelers from Istanbul who do a six-countries-in-three-weeks trip through South America. He is the only one in the group who speaks English (along with another guy who spoke pretty good German). Also, turns out that none of them — not even the tour guide — speak a single word of Spanish. Do I speak Spanish? “Ohhh, you do? It would be soooo nice if you could translate for us.”

So, in the weirdest twist of events I have ever seen, I suddenly find myself translating for a group of Turkish travelers on the Bolivian-Chilean border, high up in the Andes on a pass above 4,000m and asking myself WTF!?!?