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Never
a Dull Moment Date:
13 June 2001 Leaving Bolivia (for Argentina) was like entering a different world. Argentina felt modern and sophisticated, and very expensive. On our first night we went out and blew twenty quid on dinner. That might not sound like a lot for steak, seafood, two bottles of wine, a brandy and a coffee. However, two days before in Bolivia, we had breakfast, lunch, dinner, a litre of beer and two glasses of rum and coke each, and it cost about £7 for both of us put together. Bolivia is different. You could say that Bolivia is full of surprises. But thinking about it, what exactly would you expect? What does the average Briton know about Bolivia? The initial impression is that, well, many mod cons are absent. Even La Paz, the capital, which is a big, busy city, doesn’t provide much in the way of entertainment in the way that (say) Quito does. The traffic was the most laissez-faire I’ve ever seen. It’s not aggressive or anything, but people just seem to follow whichever path is most convenient. At night they drive with their lights off, “to save petrol”. Packs of dogs run freely around the streets. Again, they’re not dangerous; they just run around happily in groups, as if pulling an imaginary sled. In fact, although you have to be careful at night, we felt pretty safe the whole time. Rather alarmingly, the shoeshine boys wear balaclavas, but apparently that’s so nobody recognises them doing such a lowly job. After a couple
of days, we set off for Cochabamba. Again, there was nothing to do there,
but it does at least have lots of fantastic restaurants and bars, and
we’re not hard to please. In fact we could have stayed there for
weeks, but we had to move on, this time to Sucre, and the fun began. As we arrived in Sucre, however (at about 7.00 in the morning after a night on a bus), there was a massive blockade of trucks surrounding the entire city. We had to get off the bus 5km outside and carry our bags through the blockade. Thankfully, there were enterprising folks the other side with taxis. Once in the city, you wouldn’t have known anything was amiss. There was nothing going on, just like anywhere else. There was a big pile of concrete along one side of the main square, but it didn’t appear to serve any purpose. The city itself is actually the real capital of Bolivia, only nothing to speak of is left there. The population is only about 130,000. The government and all administrative duties (except the High Court) have long since moved to La Paz. However, you can see the original government building, with a copy of the declaration of independence, in the Casa de Libertad by the square. All Spanish colonial cities have a central square, beautifully kept, tree-lined, surrounded by all the most important buildings, and the square in Sucre is one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen (apart from the concrete). Every year they run a rally-cross through it. We didn’t know it, but we arrived the weekend of the rally. A city-wide blockade should be a drawback when there’s a motor race on, but somehow scores of cars had arrived from all over the country. So Nathan (an Australian fellow traveller) and I went to the square, where the drivers started and finished. Even though surrounded by people, the cars flew across the finish line, one by one, squealing their tyres around the corners (if they didn’t the crowd voiced their disapproval). One guy must
have been really flying because he came across the line less than five
seconds behind the previous driver. Perhaps distracted by the pursuit,
he failed to slow down sufficiently for the corner. He locked the brakes
but, way too late, he headed straight on towards the town library, with
thirty or so people between him and its wall, and - maybe that’s
what the concrete’s for - with people scattering everywhere he stopped
with a huge crash and for a second all was silent. Nathan went running
across as fast as he could. I thought this was a bit bloodthirsty, until
I remembered he was a doctor in the army. Enough excitement for one place and, anyway, we’d heard that the road was open to our next stop, Potosí. When Bolivia was rich (even 100 years ago 1 Boliviano was worth US $6), Potosí was one of the main reasons, due to the huge deposits of silver there. Now, most of the silver’s gone, but the mines still run on a private basis. This means that individual people can get permission from the co-operative who runs the mines to climb down, blow up some rock, sort through it and carry it out. It also means they run guided tours down there, so a few of us went. Before you go down, you can buy some cigarettes, alcohol, coca leaves and dynamite to give as gifts to the miners you meet. They never touch anything else underground. Our guide blew up one of the sticks of dynamite before we went down, for fun, and we took the rest. This isn’t a mine with huge lifts and shafts. You scramble through little gaps, a bit like potholing, until you find someone with a hammer and a pointed rod, whacking it into the rock until they’ve made a dynamite-sized hole. This takes half a day. Then they put the dynamite in the hole, tap on the walls to warn everyone else, set light to the dynamite, and have two minutes to get up to ground. After that they spend a couple of weeks going through 10 tonnes of rubble and carrying any silver, tin or zinc up to the surface. This can make them up to £80. The cigarettes and coca leaves sustain them for 8-20 hours a day. However they’re also important as offerings to the devil. Although they’re Catholics above ground, they think (understandably) that underground they’re on his patch, so they like to keep him happy. There are loads of effigies with different names, and we put some leaves, smokes and a bottle down by the biggest of them, Tío Jorge (Uncle George). Every Friday the miners all get together there and have a big party, and drink the alcohol. The alcohol, by the way, is 96% proof - if it is impure they believe they’ll get impure minerals from the ground. Apart from what claims to be the highest cyber café in the world, there’s not a lot else to do in Potosí, except freeze. Sucre was over 3000m up, and Potosí is over 4000. Heating is a rare luxury. So we went, even higher, to Uyuni. Of course, no sane person would do this without a reason, but everyone who’d been there had told us that Uyuni was Bolivia’s absolute no-can-miss destination. It’s the kind of place you wish you could stumble across accidentally, so you can be completely surprised and overcome by its beauty. But you can’t stumble across it; you have to know about it before you’d ever consider going there. Even so, it’s incredible. Date:
22 June 2001 Uyuni gets such a big build-up, we were sure we were going to be disappointed. Not one person who’s been there doesn’t list it amongst the best places they’ve ever been. Actually that isn’t 100% accurate. Uyuni itself is a dreadful place, freezing cold and with nothing at all to do. It’s expensive too (cigarettes £1 instead of 50p) and that’s because it’s a seller’s market - there’s just nowhere else nearby you could possibly go to buy anything. The only reason anyone goes there is to take a journey into the nearby salt flats and beyond. For $85 each (an absolute fortune in Bolivia) you get a 4x4 Jeep with a driver/guide and four days’ food (simple) and accommodation (basic). There’s no other way to do it though - it really is like the end of the world. After an hour on the first morning we reached the edge of the salt flat. There was once a huge sea there, but when the Andes were pushed up all the water went, and left the salt behind. I’m talking hundreds of square miles, of just white. Without a cloud in the sky, the reflection from the sun is dazzling. You have to keep touching the ground to remind yourself it isn’t snow. Under normal circumstances it must be impressive enough. This year, however, the rains had been heavier than usual, and this makes it even more surreal. All morning and for half the afternoon we drove through up to 50cm of water. On every horizon were the surrounding mountains, reflected perfectly in the water below. It looked like we were on an iced lake. As I suspected, I can’t really do it justice in writing. You’ll have to take my word for it (or go there, of course). It’s beautiful. Even so I was wondering why we needed four days. As it turned out, the other days took us out of the salt flats and on to one spectacular sight after another. We saw 1200-year-old cacti. We would drive over the brow of a hill and see, beside us, the top of a 5000-metre mountain. We went past a desert full of towering rocks with such bizarre shapes that they’re called the Salvador Dali rocks. There is a lake which, rich in iron, magnesium, algae and plankton, is completely red. Another one, full of different minerals, is reputedly green. When we got there it didn’t look very green, because there was a perfect reflection in it of the volcano behind. Within five minutes, the wind had got up, the surface of the lake was broken, the reflection had gone and there it was. Green. There were hot springs. Sulphur geysers. And when the Jedi warriors appeared on the horizon… OK, they didn’t really, but if they had it wouldn’t have seemed out of the ordinary. When you get back to Uyuni your main concerns are (1) pizza and (2) how quickly you can get out of there. We were going south, towards Argentina via a place called Tupiza. There are only two buses a week, but there was a train. There were no Primero class seats so we went Salon instead, which was less than £3 for a five-hour journey. We feared the worst (sharing the carriage with goats, chickens etc.) but we were in for a surprise. Baggage checked on, comfortable seats, two films, on time. If only we had Salon class at home. Tupiza - how exciting. Five years before, twenty tourists had come here. Now the numbers are starting to go up, largely because someone wrote a book pointing out its most important legacy. Where did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wind up? Where else but Bolivia? In 1908 they held up a payroll being taken to a mine near Tupiza, and relieved it of Bs 15,000 ($90,000 - did you wonder how I knew the Bs/$ exchange rate 100 years ago?). They never got far, and a few days later they were dead in nearby San Vicente. Apparently they’re still buried there, but in unmarked graves. On our first day in Tupiza we went horse riding. Seven hours in the saddle - I’ve never known anything like it. It took all the hairs off my legs. But it was brilliant fun - proper horses, not seaside nags, and it was real Wild West scenery. We rode through canyons, past even more weird rock formations, across riverbeds, alongside train tracks (and even through a train tunnel). There was one slight mishap involving a bicycle, which was reminiscent of our cycle ride in Baños, Ecuador, when most of our group had intrepidly set off down a pitch-black road tunnel, not noticing the sign saying “one way”. A group of schoolchildren were walking the other way, and there was an ugly pile-up in the middle. On this occasion, it was the other party riding the bike. This time, however, the boot was on the other foot, because I was riding a horse. Having just been chased by a pair of dogs (far too fast for my liking), we had just returned to a walk, when the cyclist approached, aiming between the train tracks and us. Having negotiated the first three horses, he veered across towards me. Indio, my horse, turned away from his path, but he veered back again. I decided that Indio and the cyclist were more in control of our destiny than I was. Surely, whatever you do, you can’t make a horse walk into a bicycle. All the guy had to do was stop, but he didn’t. The next thing I knew he was on the ground and Indio, probably still alarmed by the dogs, had set off at an even greater pace than before. When we eventually slowed down again, I looked round and shouted to see if he was all right. He seemed to be waving to say yes. However, he must have had his fist clenched, because next he stood up, took his jacket off and started chasing after us. This was his second mistake - he was now on foot, but we were still on horses. We never saw him again. All that was left was to negotiate the final road back into town. It was about a mile, and every house along it was inhabited by the owners of more dogs. It was pretty hairy, but it meant that we rode into town at quite a pace, feeling more than ever like a posse of outlaws. The next day, we went by jeep to the scene of Butch and Sundance’s final hold-up, near a mountain called Huaca Huañusca. We even took pictures of us holding up our local guide, using sticks and branches for guns. Boy, he must get tired of that one. And that was the end of our odyssey in Bolivia. There’s really nowhere quite like it First published in VISA issue 57 (Sep 2004) |