Calling Occupants....

Siamak, microwaves and some olives

Spider Maisie

On the road again

To lighten the mind numbing boredom of job hunting and to the plug the gap between proper posts here's a pictorial update. We're moving back into our home tomorrow and, given the holes in the wall we've stayed in over the past few months, we are truly thankful to have it to move in to. A brought flowers on her first visit so M dressed up as Spider Man to celebrate.

Spider Maisie

I will get round to finishing the tale of the tail end of our adventures and depositing one more post in the bloggybank. Soon. I'm sure you all can't wait. And there'll be a house warming of sorts as soon as we get the smell of benjy out of the place. So there's that to look forward to aswell. Wowow Weewoo.

A Wimba Way (Gold Teeth and a Curse for this town)

La Paz is Crazytown. Buckets of slop and car horn wars. Bolar hats and cheekbone hatstands. Being shouted at everywhere you go. Paul Theroux in The Old Patagonian express spotted a bizarre trend on his travels throughout South America whereby cities and towns and rivers and mountains would be so inappropriately named that the misnaming seemed deliberate. And so we have La Paz, meaning peaceful, but by far the noisiest city we've probably ever visited.


It’s located at an altitude of 3600m making it the highest capital city in the world. There’s several other interesting aspects to this beguiling city which contribute freely to the craziness, not least its people and their colourful culture and traditions, its bizarre topography and its swarming, restless streetlife. Poverty is endemic and the housing and accommodation is meagre at best. There’s very little room for the population in the valley so the city has expanded vertically, the ramshackle housing dramatically clawing its way up the side of the mountains overlooking La Paz. Building blocks are sold individually here and you get the impression that the primitive settlements are literally cobbled together in the most restrictive and inhospitable of spaces, brick by brick with minimal infrastructure to support them.


The Bolivians are a fecund people so the combination of the tiny houses and the very large families results in the colourful sacraments of Bolivian life pouring out onto the bustling chaotic streets. Other less palatable and even more colourful sacraments pour out onto the streets aswell but we don’t like to talk about those.


Meals in particular are public events with stews of many hues and ingredients being served from buckets and makeshift streetstalls to the food loving but hygiene starved Bolivians. Seeing a full family sit around one plate of dinner on a kerbside, each of them politely taking turns to retrieve their mouthfuls, is a common simultaneously touching and tragic sight. It’s very much a hand to mouth existence here. They’re very obviously a proud people and even though most meals are eaten in public, the meals are almost bashfully consumed. These goulash medleys are prepared al fresco on every street corner and in some doorways resulting in the headiest and most potent of smells singeing your nasal hair from very early morning. Llama stew for breakfast? Be still my thrashing stomach. For a fussy vegetarian like me, who likes his food it really was tough to find anything even vaguely edible. Anything I touched would either taste of meat or feature a surprise cameo meat derivative and I got a dodgy tummy on a couple of occasions. The one place where I could get guaranteed satisfactory sustenance was at an overpriced Burger King where I’d be charged full price for a Whopper……..without meat. Even this got really stale after a week.



The downtown area’s main thoroughfare is a landingstrip oasis of level land surrounded on all sides by steep hills rushing up and down around it. The effect of this bowl shaped city is that people and traffic tend to tumble out of the sidestreets belching cigarette smoke and diesel fumes only half in control of their own momentum and collisions between men and men and men and metal are common. La Paz has a relatively small but very heavily condensed population of about 1 million. All roads to and from La Paz are treacherous narrow arteries winding through threadlike mountain passes (more about them later ) giving the city a feeling of remote isolation, a sanctuary from the hardships of life in the rural Andes, a refuge from the biting winds.


All commerce in La Paz is negotiated on the street. A one-stop-shop supermarket in La Paz is rarer than rocking-horse shit. Everything from random cuts of bruised meat, vegetables in distress, cleaning products in filthy containers, stationary, small marble headstones, mechanical lubrication products, electrical switches, baby clothes, counterfeit sportswear, bolar hats and lucky charms are all sold in dedicated highly specialised streetside stalls packed to absolute capacity and manned by cocoa chomping women and children in their colourful native dress. The dark and musty cobblestone streets of the famous Witches Market is a very disturbing place.

Anyone there for the last of the baby tombs...

The indigenous peoples of Bolivia are very religious and one of their primary deitys is Pachamama – Mother Earth. All kinds of ritual and occult ceremony are performed in her honour and the accoutrements to these oft performed sacraments are freely available in the Witches Market. For example no building is erected anywhere in the country without a llama foetus buried underneath one of the corners as a sacrifice to Pachamama to protect the building. Other macabre ingredients for spells and customs include dried frogs (used for luck and riches) and armadilloes (hung over an entrance to ward off thieves).

Miniature talismans are also big business and the Bolivians believe that if you acquire your heart’s desire in miniature, the real thing will follow within the year. So you have racks of miniature ceramic houses, laptops, butcher shops, cars, babies, pianos – you name it, lining the stalls of the Witches Market and they’re some of the most popular purchases for squeamish tourists who wouldn’t feel right offering a llama foetus up as a souvenir.

How Do!

The footpath real estate business is cut throat, each pedestrian passageway colonised to its very edges by ambitious vendors and their unruly wares. The net effect of the congestion on the footpaths is that the hordes of pedestrians are forced out onto the street into the path of the Ben Hur movie that is La Paz’s traffic. Chaos seems to be encouraged here as a trial to be overcome. Chaos and cities normally coexist quite harmoniously. Chaos in La Paz was no fun. It was like bad jazz. The main artery, an integral link in the chain of one way street rat's nests which keep the city’s traffic moving, is commandeered on average 3 or 4 times a day by demonstrators or protestors hopelessly making some representation for their plight. Everything grinds to a vexed halt until the demonstration winds up or is broken down. We’ve seen several individual groups of protestors, apostles for completely separate causes, literally queue up on the periphery of the busiest junctions waiting their turn to contribute to the entropy. Demonstration is an art form in Bolivia, but apparently a highly ineffective one. Dynamite and fireworks are used in abundance to call attention to whatever demonstration du jour is snaking its way through the city. When you have 4 major demonstrations a day, with all of the protests unimaginatively incorporating dynamite to highlight their specific plight, all you get is annoyed. Like I’ve already said, La Paz is 24 hour noisy town.


Another primary contributor to the brain numbing noise pollution is the interesting Bolivian rule of the road which states that at a junction, whoever blows their horn first has right of way. So at every junction in the city you have upto 4 carhorns in competition to rise above the din and gain right of way. This rule becomes even more ridiculous if you’re trying to sleep anywhere near the city at night.

Dawn on the morning we arrived in La Paz

The place is an endless taxi/minibus traffic jam. Very few of the population own a car so the millions of taxis or collectivos (communal minibuses which run on a dedicated route and stop indiscriminately, anytime anywhere to pick up passengers on that route) offer relief from walking up the steeper-than-stairs hills all throughout the city. Each collectivo or minibus has a designated Demis (Roussos) who, through the open window, bellows out the speed-dial list of stops on the route into the already heavily congested soundscape. It gets unbearable when the traffic has ground to a halt and there’s collectivos as far as the eye can see all competing for the same fares and the clamour of car horns and deranged destination incantations bounce off the walls and right into your brain. Another curious road rule is that any vehicle entering a roundabout has right of way – the complete opposite to what most people are used to. There are several Red Cow like roundabouts in La Paz which defy comprehension at rush hour.


Let me preface this next bit by saying we weren’t in the family way during the shooting of this next scene….. We had heard from several travellers we’d bumped into along the way that taking a bike trip down the World's Most Dangerous Road, or the Road of Death as it’s affectionately referred to locally, was an unmissable experience if visiting La Paz.

The Death Road - Photo borrowed from travelblog.org

It’s not just sensationalism to draw tourists either. Hundreds of people are killed on this stretch of road each year with packed passenger buses plummeting over the edge of the precipitous cliffs or cars and trucks colliding on the incredibly narrow corkscrew track which constitutes the roadway. There’s even a couple of cyclists a year (generally thrill seeking gringoes) killed while doing the very trip we’d be undertaking. Earlier in April a young Israeli guy died when his front fork snapped and he went over the side of the cliff at high speed at a particularly notorious bend. The company he went on the trip with are still doing business today under a different name and have accepted absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for his death. Ahh Bolivia.


Despite these horror stories, I think we were only in the city for 2 days when we had our trip booked such was our enthusiasm. We went with a company called Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking (there’s up 10 companies providing equipment and tours) who completely sold us on their excellent equipment and safety record. The bikes were top of the range Kona downhill mountain bikes, dual suspension monsters with hydraulic disc brakes sensitive to even the slightest little finger squeeze – worth about $3500 a piece. We’d need them as the ride was 64Kms of mostly downhill riding with some lung busting uphill stretches over some of the diciest terrain on a public road anywhere in the world. The leisurely spin would involve a descent from a starting point of 4700m to a couple of hundred metres above sea level and we were told to dress for ice, snow, rain, sun, mosquitoes and humidity – a pretty impossible task but given the altitude we’d be starting at and where we’d be finishing we were told to expect any imaginable combination of weather conditions over a very short space of time.

Me hair'll be ruined!

We were both pretty excited at the prospect but also well respectfully terrified. It was our first downhill biking adventure and we didn’t need to be told we’d chosen a pretty challenging cherry popper. M was initially pretty nervous but our guides were great, exceptionally good, with a detailed pre-ride safety and technique lecture and several hardware checks and shouts of encouragement all the way down. The ride started off on tarmac but quickly deteriorated into a narrow muddy subsiding gravel trail with apparently bottomless drops just at your elbow. The exhilaration induced by the breakneck speed you’re travelling and the ensuing massive rushes of adrenaline clouding your judgement and response times combined with the harum scarum loose gravelly surface, unexpected hairpins and scarily steep /drops into the rainforest hundreds of metres below made this trip …..special. The scenery was incredible aswell but you very rarely got a chance to enjoy it as you were generally concentrating really hard on staying on the bike. An interesting physics tip given to us by the guides was that a bike travelling downhill at speed will go where your eyes are looking. It's basic physics. And it’s scarily true. So throwing your head around in awe or even sneaking a peek at the scenery really wasn’t an option as you struggled to control the trajectory of your missile mount with minimal margin for error or adversity.


But what unbelievably great fun! It was like someone had managed to engineer a rollercoaster with a 60km downhill stretch. It was a jowl flapping, dramatic, teary eyed ride which we’ll never forget. At several stages it was impossible not to break out in the widest grin imaginable. We thankfully managed to complete it without any mishaps. There were however 2 nasty spills in our group alone which served to keep our minds focused and concentrated and us hopefully safe. M thoroughly enjoyed it aswell and although I told her I was hanging back to keep her company and protect her, there were times when I was right on the edge of my abilities barely touching the brakes travelling at an eye popping speed on a very volatile surface and she’d be right on my shoulder grinning maniacally to the bottom of the hill. Fair play to us. Another memorable highlight and proud achievement of our South American holidays. For obvious reasons I didn’t bring my camera on the trip but there’s a slideshow here and a photo here which will give you the gist (that's the road weaving its way down the mountain.)


And for some independent observer’s perspective here’s an excerpt from Lonely Planet: "Many agencies offering the La Cumbre to Coroico mountain bike plunge give travellers T-shirts plastered with: "I've survived the World's Most Dangerous Road." Keep in mind, the gravel road is just that: it's narrow (just over 3.2m wide) and has precipitous cliffs up to 900m high... and there's traffic. At the time of research, in the past 3 years eight people (higher figures sometimes quoted) have died doing the 64km trip (with a 3600m vertical drop) and readers have reported close encounters and nasty accidents. Most of these are due to little or no instruction and preparation, and poor quality mountain bikes (beware bogus rebranded bikes). In short, many agencies are less than ideal. Be aware of outfits which deflate prices - cost cutting can mean dodgy brakes, poor quality parts and literally, a deadly treadly. Multilingual guides are necessary for coaching and control. Ask agencies for proof of rescue equipment (rope rescue, harnesses, belays, oxygen), and a predeparture briefing. Ensure a quality company on this spectacular route before you freewheel your life away."


So without us really planning it, Bolivia - and La Paz in particular - has become a pretty important stop on our South American adventure. My comment about enjoying backpacking more in countries with depressed or backward economies notwithstanding, it’s an intriguing country where you regularly see sights that would turn your stomach, lift your soul or break your heart. As a people Bolivians are the most beautiful, kind and friendly we have ever experienced. Generally they have nothing more than a smile to offer but they do so unquestioningly, automatically but completely sincerely. Bolivians bring new meaning to the term beautiful people. They generally look like they’ve just woken up from an illicit sleep, puffy eyed, red cheeked and tousle haired. The kids are absolutely amazing – wandering the streets hand in hand in knitted woollen jump suits, funky sun hats up to their ears in shit but smiling greeting blue eyed gringos with the politest fascination and a shy “Ola”. They’re the most angelic, charming, self contained and happy kids in the world, watching the world go by as they bounce along on their mothers backs chewing a banana twice their size or sitting guarding the family’s streetside stall.

El Alto

I’m having a hard time trying to figure out how these still so impoverished and abandoned. Its probably just ignorance or naivety on my part but it’s the 21st century and these people are still living hand to mouth in subsistence conditions where you wouldn’t put animals. Bolivia is the second most corrupt country in the world (Pedro, our miner guide, delivered the deadpan punchline that he was personally working on getting Bolivia to the top of the list) and this is apparently the prime cause of the people’s suffering. The top 2% of the population, the rich non indigenous white colonial descendent population, govern and control with only their own financial interests at heart leaving the indigenous population uneducated and lacking even the most basic infrastructure.

My iPad

An eye opening example of this was the New Road, the road which was to replace the World's Most Dangerous Road for heavy traffic, which was just opened in December. It took 12 years to build and has been opened 5 months and already it's crumbling. Stretches of the road were built over landslides without even the most basic engineering input. Holding walls themselves are crumbling onto the road causing a serious hazard in themselves. Apparently massive budget overruns and corner cutting took place with the majority of the funding for the road pocketed by the corrupt officials and used for the usual palatial mansions with swimming pools filled with hookers and cocaine.

Waiting for the bus to Copacabana and Lake Titicaca

On a lighter note, the mannequin spotting got completely out of hand in La Paz. There was also some impressive graffiti and stencil art aswell which I didn't expect. I'll put together a post soon dedicated exclusively to the most tragic mannequins in distress we experienced on our travels. The graffiti photos would make up a whole post on their own as well. But anyways, stay tuned for the wrap up in Rio, how we got there and the culture shock of returning home.

PotosiPotosiPotoseeeeeeee

Spare polka dots for the background

Weary wanderers have returned. They say the best part of any journey is coming home. The best part of coming home for me is definitely not having to cocoon myself from the filth of a random bed in my far from unfilthy itself sleeping bag.

So I’m gonna throw up some photos and words to complete the tales of our adventures. The laptop died in Bolivia and left me with the choice of endeavouring to continue the updates but with exponentially more hardship - blogging in Bolivia is bad buzz, or taking a holiday from the blog altogether. I chose the easier option as usual. So some of the words were written already and recovered kicking and screaming from the belly of my comatose laptop. Some of it will be entirely from memory and given my far from reliable recollective abilities please don’t expect factual accuracy.

We left Uyuni and its one solitary ATM which was out of service the morning we were leaving and as a result we had to promise the owners of Tonito hotel that we’d get them the $30 we owed them as soon as we got to La Paz. But they’d have to wait until after Potosi and we jumped on a minibus run by the equivalent of Fennells or Behans or Rickys – the kind of company whose bread and butter is ferrying revellers to remote dens of iniquity at all hours of the morning - outside the town at 10am to bring us there. Buses in Bolivia are incredibly adhoc affairs. They’re generally very old minibuses imported either semi or completely clapped out from Japan, the steering wheels ripped out and sellotaped to the left hand side and a furry dashboard and a Child of Prague installed while they’re at it. Generally there’s a gaudy mural of Jesus or a beatific Llama on the back and the dodgiest of Bolivian folk music blaring out the windows. Bolivia definitely wins the prize for the worst indigenous music. But again, it was so bad as to be almost endearing.

Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

The bus we took through the desert up into the mountains to Potosi had no air conditioning and cling film on the seats to protect the beautiful upholstery from the buckets of airborne dust kicked up during this and countless previous journeys. This combination of events lead to an incredibly sweaty 6 hour spin. The buses very rarely leave on time, each time the driver goes to pull out a woman in a bolar hat with a hundred-weight of randomness and a couple of swaddled babbies on her back appears out of the dust demanding to be let on the bus before it embarks. Then when the bus finally gets going, it stops at random intervals to pick up or let off these enterprising women to sell their wares to God knows who in the middle of God knows where – I’d say even God would need SatNav to find one of these ladies if he needed some half cooked llama meat in a hurry.


But interestingly no piss stops. So you had a situation where every time the bus would stop to pick up a passenger there’d be a rush by several incontinent German girls (Cabáistes) to the door to slash against a wall or behind a bush. The driver had no qualms about leaving people behind if they couldn’t close the deal quick enough. Bolivia’s international initials are BO and by jaysus did we know it on that bus. These colourful indigenous ladies with their blanket fulls of half baked goods travel in packs between towns and all the unfortunate outposts in between to sell their wares. One woman, a late arrival who had previously been sitting on the floor in the drivers compartment almost under the steering wheel was ushered into the passenger compartment the instant a seat became free. Within seconds we knew why. The bang of benjy humming from her every pore made our heads spin and the driver obviously felt it was affecting his ability to drive. This was pure, concentrated body odour from years of water and soap avoidance. This woman was like a black hole of hygiene, her filthy gnarled feet wouldn’t look out of place attached to a freshly excavated mummified Cro-Magnon man - or woman. Time to stop inhaling through your nose again – I did a lot of that in sunny BO which is extremely debilitating when the air is as thin as it is. But we survived as usual dining on a full packet of half melted “Kukys” (A Bolivian trademarked brand of chocolate chip cookies) and arrived in Potosi in the afternoon.

More random business hours you will not find

We’d gone from Uyuni at 3653m elevation to Potosi at 4090m a gain of over 400m. People in Bolivia, especially the lightweight gringos, are obsessed with altitude and talk about it like we talk about the price of houses or the traffic at home. It’s pretty important to keep track though as if you’re prone to a bout of altitude sickness it will effect your respiratory and digestive experience, not to mention your ever sensitive zen, drastically.

Potosi is a mining town with a fascinating but deeply troubled history. It was founded sometime in the mid 1500s specifically to exploit the rich reserves of silver discovered in the towering Cerro Rico the mountain on whose banks the town was formed. This remote mining outpost became the richest city in the world for a period during the 17th century so deep were its reserves of valuable silver. But these riches came at an extraordinary cost in human life. It is estimated that the Spanish put 12 million souls to work in the mines, some pulled from the indigenous population, the majority of them made up from slaves from the Congo but all of them working under the tyranny of forced labour. Over the course of the next 200 years, depending on which historical estimates you believe, between 5 and 9 million souls perished in the mines due primarily to the extremely harsh conditions but also due to the excessive exposure to the poisonous mercury which was used in the silver ore process. Workers were sent underground for periods of 6 months at a time and if they survived the incredible hardship, ended up blind when they resurfaced. There’s a saying that the Spanish could have built a bridge of silver from Potosi to Madrid. The locals have modified the saying slightly to say that they could also have built a bridge of bones. Potosi in it's heyday was more affluent than Paris or London. I met a Norwegian journalist who was working on the theory that the vast reserves of silver plundered from Potosi by the Spanish underpinned the entire European Industrial Revolution. While the silver deposits were depleted long ago, the mines are still worked to this day by Bolivians who lease the mines from the Government and work in small fragmented co-operatives to eke whatever living they can from the minerals (tin, copper, zinc) painstakingly extracted from the mountain.

A relatively tame bus mural - Potosi

We took another Torture Tourism Tour down into the mines for a full day and will never forget it. First we took a trip to get kitted out with helmets, battery packs, headlamps, wellies and overalls. Then, kitted out like Bob the Builder Gringoes we wandered the town market to pick up supplies for ourselves but also presents or offerings to the miners for allowing us to come and watch them work. These presents included cocoa leaves (the raw material for cocaine) which these guys chew incessantly, washed down with cheap and sugary fizzy drinks. Preparing round meals in a square hole, a dark tunnel hundreds of feet below the ground is problematic. So the miners forego the luxury of proper food for the more convenient short term energy boosts which Cocoa and Fanta provide. Their colourfully rotten teeth tell their own story. We also bought bottles of 96% proof alcohol – every Friday afternoon the miners, ranging in age from 12 to 62 congregate at an underground temple devoted to their underground god - a very well-hung derivative of Satan as far as I could figure out - and drink to his and their good health. Interestingly they have other gods for when they’re above ground, gods who hang out in the sky and give light and heat but not the all important mineral wealth. And the final and most interesting gifts we bought were sticks of dynamite. Dynamite is legal in Bolivia. It’s sold (in Potosi anyways) on the side of the street or in special miner’s markets which are open to the public. The majority of the miners still use the very primitive method of hand drilling holes and inserting and detonating sticks of dynamite to make progress further down into the earth’s core and to hopefully rich deposits of valuable minerals. So with pure alcohol and dynamite as gifts (these guys don’t fuck around) we took the minibus up to the entrance of the mine we’d be exploring for the rest of the day. Our guide Pedro was a small, chatty and cheeky ex-miner who escaped a life of misery by becoming a guide. It has to be said that the miners earn on average twice what a general worker earns and are very well respected locally. This doesn’t make their lives any easier. Before the tour even began, as we congregated at the tour operators office, Pedro was already scalping tickets to a local soccer derby later that evening.

Fontarama

The working mine we were visiting had 7 levels. We would be visiting the top 4 levels. Big awkward fellas like me or anyone with even the most nascent agrophobia would be well advised to avoid this trip. The tunnels are narrow and very low with dangerous outcrops of rocks and primitive electrical cabling snagging your clothes as you shuffle your way down towards the centre of the earth. All your senses are dulled by the complete absence of light, the muffling of all sound and the fact that you’re covered head to toe in restrictive protective clothing including a heavy battery pack for the even heavier miner’s helmet and a face mask to stop you inhaling the toxic mineral dust floating around down there. It would be dreamlike if it weren’t so nightmarish. The miners have devised innovative ways to traverse the tunnels and ascend or descend a level. One of which Pedro demonstrates here.

Munchkin inching down a mineshaft guzzying cocoa

We travelled in single file, bookended by the guides so we wouldn’t get lost. At random intervals we’d hear blood curdling, terror inducing shouts to warn us that a mining car was hurtling down the very tracks we were stumbling over. We’d have to race Indiana Jones style to a distant part of the tunnel which would be just wide enough to accommodate the fully loaded careering mining car and us, a group of disoriented and dirty tourists who just wanted some cool photos. The going was seriously tough, as tough as a lot of the treks we did, even though we were taking our time. You'd regularly lose your footing and stumble and gouge your hip or elbow on the uneven walls of the tunnel. A lot of the tour was done on our hands and knees up or down incredibly steep shafts in almost perfect darkness. Working in these sweaty claustrophobic conditions must be heartbreaking. The miners were traditional miners using very manual mining techniques handed down and hard learned through the centuries. There was 1 electric winch serving the entire mine. Everything else was powered by sweat. The ancient iron carts, which looked like relics from the early days of the American railways, are loaded using shovels and then pushed along the tracks by a team of piebald men who, once they gain momentum aren’t going to stop for anything – hence our frantic rush for a lay-by when the shout went up. The loads are then dumped into a shaft where there’s another team of shovel bearers to load the mixed rock, gravel and assorted minerals into huge rubber buckets which are then winched somewhere else to be processed. Kids as young as 12 (technically illegal) lured by the promise of high wages, or co-opted into a lifetime of pain by the weight of tradition, begin their apprenticeship here with the small jobs, bringing the miners cocoa and drinks. We couldn’t wait to see the sun after 3 hours below. I cant even begin to imagine what it must be like for a child with a lifetime of this harrowing work ahead of him who has watched his father and brothers worn to the bone by the impossibly thankless work. The trip was both physically and emotionally draining and Pedro said if there’s one thing to take from our trip to a Bolivian mine, it’s that you should never in good conscience moan about your job again.

I, Me, mining

We finished the trip with an exciting overground demonstration of the building and detonating of a live dynamite charge. All the photos from the mine are by Bronwyn, a nice ozzie girl who kindly forwarded on some photos cos I chose not to bring my camera into the mine – an English couple we’d met had their camera die a miserable death in the mines and recommended we leave ours at home.

Bleedin' Dynamite!

We paid a flying visit to Potosi bus station to book our onward ticket to La Paz and got our first introduction to the most primitive and distressing form of advertising endemic in Bolivia – shouting. People are paid (I presume) to sit on stools beside the offices of bus companies shouting destinations at the top of their voices like a deranged mantra. “A La Paz A La Paz A La Paz” was a particular favourite as was “Cochabamba Cochabamba Cochabamba!!”. The cacophany of 20 or more of these people's shouts echoing through the already bustling station has to be heard to be believed and would make a great sound effect for an ad for Hedex or Solpadeine or even Prozac. I suppose the majority of people here wouldn’t be able to read the signs on the offices advertising destinations so that might explain the shouting but it doesn’t make it any less painful to have to listen to.

Every morning in Potosi outside our hotel there would be hordes of the cutest schoolkids running pint sized down cobblestoned hilly streets to school. All of them would be immaculately turned out, doused in hair oil and wearing the obligatory mini labcoats making them look like prematurely accomplished science prodigies. A lot of them carried a set of panpipes under their arm the way Irish kids would have a tin whistle or a recorder. The kids are obviously taught the ancient art of elevator music from a very early age. We caught a couple of impromptu street performances by school bands and they were lively but painfully tuneless. I wonder does the sight of a tin whistle in other countries provoke the same feelings of dread as a set of pan pipes does when pulled out of a poncho at a party.

A broken shower curtain and an in-shower fuse box

The hotel rooms in Bolivia seemed to be custom built for the compact local clientele as each room we stayed in seemed to be getting smaller. The bathrooms were layed out in such a way as to test the functional limits of a tall man’s bend joints. You almost needed to put your foot in the toilet bowl to balance yourself enough to get out of the shower in some of the places we stayed in. We did however fare pretty well in Potosi with food. We found a café which served up nice falafels and salads and we basically ate all our meals from there. We did get adventurous and visited a Mexican place for our last meal before our overnight to La Paz and it was truly a bad decision. We instigated a new travelling rule : never try a new restaurant before a long bus journey. I spent the entire 10 hours on a flaky bus farting like a clockwork whoopee cushion. My stomach was in serious distress aswell and I vowed never again to get adventurous with food in Bolivia. M and the rest of the passengers on the bus who were assailed with my wafts of stealthy methane accepted my vow of culinary chastity gratefully.


We arrived in La Paz at 530am in a state of abject dishevelment. I don’t think we’d had a more uncomfortable bus journey prior to this one (it was, thankfully unbeknownst to ourselves then, to get even more interesting on our marathon bus journey to Rio.) We were completely disoriented having been woken by the driver shouting at us to get off. We took refuge in a taxi which pulled straight into a traffic jam and a storm of horn blowing and men shouting abuse at each other. At 6am on a Sunday morning? Welcome to La Paz – the noisiest city in the world.

Estamos Embarazada

This just in.........For those of you who don't have Spanish (join the club - our grammar was corrected by people shouting at us in the street!) here's a little assistance......

La Paz, Bolivia, May 2007

The excitement was uncontainable.......

Excuses, Excuses - listed geographically

Laptop In A Coma

So it's finally happened. Le Laptop has decided to go into hyper spasm. Dust, travel, heat - it was bound to happen sooner or later. I know how to fix it but I need some software. Sourcing llama foetuses is not a problem - they sell them on the side of the street here for their PachaMama rituals. Locating an XP Recovery CD in English in crazy fragrant La Paz is going to be fun. So expect an update when you see one. From our Think Tank in La Paz. Out.

Chilenos The Buffet Slayers (Depression for Dummies)

Bolivian Curtains

We’ve eventually left Chile, the most expensive and most westernised country in South America. It was an interesting exercise in cultural comparison between two adjacent countries. Argentineans and Chilenos generally hate each other. Chilenos have the better economy but are considered rude. Argentines have class but are self obsessed. Or that’s the way the stereotypes fall out in the heated comparisons you hear when any reference to Argentina comes up in Chilean company or vice versa. Chileans also have a reputation for being mean spirited, rude and landgrabbing, military obsessed souls. We witnessed several very bizarre impromptu military parades, one through a traffic jam in Santiago, another around the car park of a huge shopping mall in Calama. No one seems to pay much attention to the regular public preening of this very proud army banging out jazz standards, people for the most part treating the parades as an inconvenient incursion into their daily lives.

How could you miss?

Chile’s over ambitious desire, bordering on greed, for territory is the reason why poor Bolivia is now landlocked. Despite what the ever optimistic Bolivians see as this temporary situation, this unfortunate country, landlocked by Chile’s greed, still retains a (semi functional) Navy. The Argentines are pissed because the Chileans on several occasions have very cheekily used Argentina’s difficulty as Chile’s opportunity to grab more land – particularly in the south of the continent towards southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Argentina would find themselves at war with some random neighbouring country and Chile would hurry down to some remote Argentine outpost and stick their flag in a piece of dirt and that’d be that. Which goes a ways to explaining the ridiculous multiple border crossings we endured in Tierra del Fuego. We did get some very interesting insights into Chileans from a couple of American Santiago residents we spoke to and from one very entertaining English speaking Chileno called Rodruigo. In most developed countries appearances are important. In Chile appearances are everything. There’s a complex and multi levelled materialistic stratification of society and people will go to bizarre extremes to jump up a level.

We heard stories of Chileans getting pulled over by traffic cops for using a mobile phone whilst driving – not particularly unusual. But when the mobile phone in question turns out to be fake it gets interesting. Young Chileans have also been known to wander around bopping to headphones with nothing at the end of them – the definitive silent disco. Santiago in particular was incredibly American feeling with the way the city was laid out, its suburbs with strip malls and supersized ultra modern gas stations etc. We talked to a couple of Santiagoans who said that the Chilean’s obsession with the American way of life has gotten completely out of hand with people following their North American cousins’ lead into severe credit card debt to finance their glitzy and expensive lifestyle. Shiny new apartment blocks are shooting up around the city and look completely out of place in some of the older suburbs. Being a techie the best touchstone for me for the level of consumerism or affluence in an economy is to take a wander into any large electronics store and check how big the widescreen televisions are and whether or not there’s one of those home entertainment rooms where you go to be blasted with sub bass from JT’s latest pop opus. There were several such well equipped electronics stores in Santiago and even a couple in Calama, a rural mining town in Northern Chile.


One of the stores used a very interesting technique to sell fridges. They stacked hundreds of pallets of 3 litre bottles of Coca Cola all around the fridge display area, in the fridges and on the fridges themselves. Chilenos love the Coca Cola so it was like reverse sales psychology - here’s a clever way of keeping your Coke cool! In Calama also, the moneyed men from the mining companies came all decked out in the unofficial uniform of the Ralph Lauren Polo shirts – the bigger the logo the better, Timberland shoes and Docker chinos. Interestingly the mall had 3 men’s shops, a Ralph Lauren store, a Timberland shop and a Dockers franchise. Any potential embarrassment about looking like an identikit of the fella beside you was offset by that warm feeling of looking the part. A typically Chilean scenario. We’ll discuss the Chilean ladies distinct lack of fashion sensibility in a minute.

Gareth O'Mannequin, the world's first depressed dummy (La Paz)

Sitting watching the coverage of the Virginia shooting in one of these malls was an interesting experience. These people absolutely aspire to and completely buy into the American Dream. These shooting massacres, a seemingly unavoidable by-product of a dream with the right to bear arms, were treated like an unwanted wake up call from the extant reverie of a population still avidly pursuing the neon supersize dream, eyes closed as tightly as they can for the maximum experience. People sat guzzying buckets of KFC, devouring the contents of towers of Pizza Hut boxes, queuing for 20 minutes for a McDonalds steadfastly ignoring the craziness being beamed into their “Foodhall”. Speaking of the American Dream/Nightmare, Chileans have definitely bought into the North American obesity problem aswell.

Dinner in Calama

We took another overnight bus from Santiago to Calama in northern Chile with the intention of hitting the altiplano and the Atacama desert. We misunderstood the lady who sold us the ticket and thought that the journey would take 9 hours. 24 hours later, eyes facing different directions and digestive systems in revolt from 24 hours of prepacked zero roughage meals, we breezed into dusty Calama. Calama is a desert town, the kind of town that appears like 1 forlorn, frayed at the edges patch on a windswept and dull patchwork of desert landscape. It’s some kind of mining outpost – the largest copper mine (and the ensuing officially largest hole in the ground on the planet) is about 20km out of town so there’s money in Calama, a lot of it North American I believe. A lot of the civic buildings are huge, architecturally designed curved concrete affairs. There’s even a sprawling North American style mall with a food court where we sat on a couple of evenings (the only place where you could get non deep fried food which wasn’t chicken), eyes boggling at the Chileans wanton and unabashed buffet abuse. In Argentina there may be a lot of food available at restaurant buffets or barbeques. Foreigners make the mistake of feeling that because you’re entitled to as much meat as you can stomach with the cover charge, they must put away 3 or 4 plates of steak in one sitting. You’ll find that the abstemious Argentines generally only partially fill their plates, take an inordinate amount of time over their meal and even then leave at least half of it for Mr Manners, or Mr Sixpack, or Miss Tightbutt. Chileans, on the other hand are worse than the Irish. The buffet place in Calama has resorted to downsizing their plates so that the hungry Chilenos can only physically fit a limited amount of food on their plates, the restaurant desperately trying to break even on their buffet enterprise by presumably trying to embarrass their clients out of several return visits to the buffet well. It don’t seem to work. We witnessed 3 stumpy gentleman, probably in their mid 50s, lunching at the buffet. They were all unhealthily huge with stretchy jumpers struggling to cover the dull orbs of their bellies. You got the impression straight away that each of these guys got up in the morning dreaming about their coming lunchtime’s buffet adventures. Each of them while filling their tiny plates made no effort to disguise the fact that they were also sampling, using their fingers, every piece of meat, every piece of cheese, olives, dressing, potato chips, every variety of vegetable, every condiment - every everything that was laid out on the table as they mooched around deciding what to actually put on their plate. They’d had a 3 course lunch in snacks even before they’d sat down to eat! One old guy made 3 return visits for dessert alone, each time returning victorious to his table with the heads of 4 different desserts. I watched a schoolgirl take 15 hits from the Mayonnaise fountain for just one plate of chips. Every course is accompanied by a fresh hit from the Soda Fountain or, more commonly, a three litre bottle of coke is purchased to be shared between friends and imbibed liberally throughout the meal. The avarice and eating without consequence was worse than I’ve seen anywhere in North America and that includes me being let loose on the 5 dollar buffet in Reno. You have to remember the Chilenos are small squat people by design anyway. There’s a massive obesity crisis sweeping the nation due apparently to Chileans lack of awareness of the ramifications of such a diet long term. One night in Santiago we were heading out pretty late and hadn’t had dinner. So the only vaguely palatable quick fix option for 2 hungry veggies was a pizza and the only pizza place we could find was an upscale Dominos (it had seats). Our pizza order took about 25 minutes and in that time we witnessed terrifying abominations of over indulgence.


For a start the smallest pizza Dominos Chile offer is a 2-3 person pizza, about 12”. They don’t sell water or cans or small bottles of soft drinks. They only sell 2.5 litre bottles of Coke or Sprite. Our single pizza order came with one of these bottles of Coke plus 2 portions of garlic bread thrown in, free gratis, for nothing under the terms of a Get Fat On Us offer which they hadn’t even bothered to advertise or tell us about. One family, a mother and a father, a teenage kid and a kid around 10, picked up 3 of these 12” pizzas and the ensuing bounty of free beverages and side dishes. It would appear they did this every night. Their clothes were in a state of Polyester Panic with the stretchy pants in danger of walking right off the job due to the stressful conditions and the imminent late night salted carbs and sugar feast. The dad looked like a the quintessential lost soul in the throes of advanced addiction – in this case a junk food junky. Unshaved, unwashed, the sauce from last nights pizza feast still embedded in his whiskers his eyes glazed over as he, the hunter gatherer possessively grabbed the pizza boxes, shoved them under his arm and wandered back to his lair to nourish his family. There was 3 of us to the one pizza we’d bought and we couldn’t even finish it it was so doughy and laden with stodgy cheese. We seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time observing Chilenos eating unhealthily. The irony is not lost on me or my new upsized stretchy pants. We knew before we arrived that Chilean cuisine was exceptionally bland at best, without even the chance of the Italian influence to spice things up and provide you with good pizza or pasta. But it really is horrific. Even if you wanted to eat healthily, there’s zero options for you. We had very little choice in the crud we shoved down our throats and maybe if we had to live in a place with such limited healthy options and over abundance of exceptionally cheap unhealthy options, we’d be fat as snails aswell.

Filling out the paperwork at the Bolivian border

Calama was a strange town. Just walking down the streets left you both bemused and alarmed. Rural Calama featured many instances of overweight lowride ladies in polyester pants with reinforced seams strutting purposefully, always purposefully, tapping out their intentions, letting people know they're going places at an impressive one and a half steps per second with their high heels click clacking on the tiled pavements. The all pervasive smell of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume fills the air and jars in your nostrils. Another Argentine / Chilean stereotype is that the Argentines are a far more elegant and beautiful race. I have to say that on recent experience alone, I concur. The ladies apply their perfume in Calama as if it were an insecticide. Your lungs are in some distress from the altitude anyways, so when you get a blast from the downwind of these noxious nymphs you're left wheezing in their wake, crouched on the roadside to allow them walk far enough ahead so you don’t have to inhale within their lingering 40ft aura. I reckon that the perfume is a ploy to make up for their complete lack of attractiveness. Instead of the men going “Wahey look at that!” like in Argentina, they tend to go “Woohooo!! What the fuck is that smell!? – have I been tear gassed? Awwww Nuts….Not another coup!?”. They look up, confused and disoriented to spy this vision of permed, plump, perfumed, polyester womanhood batting her eyelids in a disinterested way suggesting that there's a random task to be urgently completed before siesta. I'm not sure where these ladies pick up their clothes but they're very very odd. Simultaneously oversized and figure hugging, high heels will always feature - knee high boots are very popular also. Spanglish slogans writ large across their chests in the largest possible font, generally in gold or silver; "c'mon to the rock n roll woman" “peace and spirit baby, you know i want to” "i know boyology" “sixpensive” "mince 50 pesos per pound" (I made the last one up).

Man in motion

And it’s not just the odd mad woman either. Watery-Eyed-Bling is the gold standard for the fashion conscious Calama woman. It’s surprising how when some bizarre fashion trend takes hold, even in a small town like Calama, everyone, to sate the irrational urge to fit in, dons the most hideous of outfits. M felt pretty uncomfortable for most of the time we spent in Calama. Always on the street, if I was a few steps ahead or behind her and she appeared unaccompanied, she would get lashings of unwanted attention from the beauty starved local men. They’d whisper all kinds of lewdness and wink their eyes and lick their lips and whistle…. But never if I (1.5 times them – in height anyways) was around, charming courageous little maneens that they were.

Maneen in motion

Anyways, enough Chileno bashing. The reason we were in Calama was to get out of there as quickly as possible to the wilds of the Atacama desert. Unfortunately the only way to do this was to jump on an overpriced guided tour of unguaranteed quality, or hire a jeep and do it yourself. Seems logical enough. I’ll always choose the DIY option when it comes to discovery. However, when I went to enquire about renting a 4x4, I was told that 1 jeep for 1 day would cost me USD$200. Holy Jesus. You can buy a restaurant in Argentina for that! Apparently, because there’s so much American money in the town with the booming mining industry, renting a vehicle is extremely expensive no matter what rental company you use. I couldn’t hire a car – there were none available. But the car hire lots were full to overflowing with every make model and type of 4x4 imaginable. The mining companies (everything in this town kowtows to mining money) are obviously their sole customers and pay the inflated prices to ensure constant availability – at that price no one else could afford the luxury. We totally prefer backpacking in countries with collapsed economies.

The courtyard of our gorgeous colonial hotel in Calama

Depressed beyond tablets and carrying all our luggage having checked out of our accommodation we scuttled back to the hotel in the intense heat and promptly checked back in again to examine our consciences. It would appear that San Pedro de Atacama would have to wait. Travel is funny. Apparent setbacks can result in interesting previously unconsidered alternatives and so it proved in Calama.

The Tren De Los Nubes train trip which I’d so been looking forward to turns out to be on a typically South American unexplained hiatus for the near future. We knew that there was a train which left Calama bound for Uyuni (You-You-nee) in Bolivia on a Wednesday evening at midnight. Beyond that we had very little knowledge of the train journey other than it was very very cold and notoriously no frills with apparently no glass in the windows, wooden seats, no lighting or heating, no toilets and no dining car.

Complimentary Goods - the toilet on the train

Enquiries at the train station would be necessary. Trip 1 : to the station involved a quick meet and greet with the skeleton staff. “Hi, I don’t speaka the Spanich but I would like to know all you can tell me about the Slow Train to Uyuni”. The Chileans pronounce it Ooo-Jooonee so after some confusion we eventually got to the buying tickets bit. “Tickets?”….(Finger slitting throat action). In South America this ominous gesture can mean anything from “closed”, “on the fritz”, “fucked”, “dead 10 years”, “killed by communists”, “liable to give you a terminal disease”, “swallowed whole by Pacha Mama”, “on a cocoa break” or, if used in reference to a toilet – “hold your water and move on kid, no gringo will recover from seeing what’s behind that shithouse door”. In this situation I took it to mean the ticket office was closed. When would it be open? Manana I was told . In Spanish this means tomorrow. In South America however it can mean anything from simply tomorrow to “I don’t know”, “please gringo - I am sleeping – return with your silly questions at a more convenient time”, or even “ a straight answer will require monetary intervention”. When I asked what time I was told 0830-1200, 1500-1800, 2100-0000 – typically bizarre and irregular hours designed to confuse and disorient the over eager gringo. Apparently the ticket office for the train we wanted to take was only open on a Wednesday and during the hours outlined above.

M tracks down my dislocated Zen

So Trip2 : I returned the following morning – Wednesday - to find the shutter still down on the ticket office. I wandered around the station for 10 minutes before I encountered a staff member. She was sitting in an empty room the size of a tennis court, behind a desk with one lonely antique phone perched on one corner of the desk and an electric fan blowing her face in and out of shape. She appeared to be concentrating very hard on the facial sensations the fan was causing. Perhaps she was moonlighting as a fan tester, or maybe she was testing how windproof her makeup was - selling tickets at this station only took up 1 hour of her valuable time a week. “What’s the story with the boleteria there love?” I said in my most flowery noun-only charades-for-verbs Spanish. She appeared startled and asked me was I sure today was Wednesday. Tuesday + 1 = Wednesday I replied with diagram, desperately trying to remain calm and counter the semi chaotic inertia with hard logic. She appeared flustered and eventually decided that I’d need to come back in the afternoon. It seemed like they really didn’t want to do business with me. Trip 3 : I was starting to get very pissed off. We couldn’t make any decision on our next step until we figured out what the ticket situation was with the train. I needed to get some kind of answer from the railway staff. After another inexplicable 20 minute wait in a completely deserted train station, the shutter grinded begrudgingly open and I eventually got to purchase 2 handwritten tickets for a trip that night on the Slow Train to Uyuni for the princely sum of $12. This was by far the cheapest we’d ever been charged for a journey to another country. We eventually discovered that the passenger train service is run by the British owned Ferocarril Antofagasta-Bolivia which loses money on the line but is required by an 1888 mineral transport treaty to keep the passenger service running indefinitely. This might explain some of the inertia of the staff, no targets to reach, no company statement of excellence, dismal wages, hours alone with an electric fan in an empty room – how could you be motivated? But anyways, back to the train trip. It’s apparently one of the more scenic train trips in South America. We would be travelling across vast and unending saltplains, through deserts and volcanic mountainscapes, ascending through the Andes to an eventual elevation of some 3700m. We could also look forward to spotting flamingos and dust devils and willy-willys.

Flamingos

The majority of the old railways on the continent are out of commission due to the improvement of the road infrastructure or because they have basically long since become unviable due to the relative inexpensiveness and proliferation of buses and the anywhere to anywhere ubiquity of the spaghetti bus routes. So its only in anomalous situations where an old law dictates that a stretch of railway must remain open or that a government decides to keep a subsection of a famous railway line open for tourist trips that you can still experience train travel in South America. The demographic of the travellers on our train would seem to back that up. The motley human freight consisted primarily of locals or Bolivian émigrés who couldn’t afford the more expensive, faster and more comfortable bus journey along the same route, with a healthy dose of stinking backpackers, mostly European with a couple of notable Chilean punker exceptions, hungry for adventure and a break from the all pervasive overnight bus journeys which are the trademark of travel in South America.

Our carriage gets abandoned again

We got to the train station around 10 abandoning Chile and the city of Calama which was in the throes of an Argentina versus Chile football match. We had some reorganising of luggage to do and we both had to layer up for the trip. Due to the lack of bathrooms (or what turned out to be the absence of the bathroom keyholder who was hiding somewhere feeling particularly unmotivated) poor M had to don her long johns behind a door in the waiting area as a particularly slow Bolivian gentleman passenger proactively monitored her progress. He was similar in dimensions to a jockey, with perfect black hair and dark features and eyes which seemed to lock involuntarily on random objects for minutes on end like a baby experiencing something for the first time. He was dressed completely in brand new no-brand denim and sported homemade woollen insoles in his tiny leather boots. His name was Edwin and he was most definitely on the highway to heaven. He would stare at you for minutes at a time and then follow your eyes to stare at whatever you happened to be looking at. He held in his hands the equivalent of an Argos catalogue which he appeared to be engrossed in but if you watched him you could see his eyes dart all over the room from under his fringe, desperate to take in every detail of every movement in his environment. We spent a very disconcerting couple of hours in the waiting room being minutely observed by this stranger who you didn’t know whether to pity or be wary of. As the evening progressed and the departure time drew nearer more fodder for his compulsive observation trickled in.

I give Calama a bad name

Anything goes on the railways it would appear. People were arriving with second hand mattresses, stinky fridges, greasy cookers, crates of Coca Cola and bedsheets fashioned into carry-alls, cornerfull of the most random collection of solids, liquids, gases, fruits, vegetables, animals, fabrics and other summary indiscernibles. All of this crap needed to be stored in the overhead lockers or under your feet so space for passengers was at an absolute premium.


By the time we boarded the train at midnight the waiting area was packed to capacity with chattering travellers and their luggage mountains. We boarded, found our seat and were a little bit freaked out to find the bould Edwin sitting awaiting our arrival in the seat directly facing ours. We were to be studied for a further few hours it would appear. We stashed our luggage where we could trying to leave some legroom for the 20 hour journey. The old Bolivian women, obviously having completed this journey many times before, fashioned beds out of the facing seats by placing boxes and bags of the random crap they were carrying in the gaps between the seats where normally your legs would go and lying across the gap. They had blankets and shawls and funky indigenous leg warmers and woolly Spin-Doctor hats and other than their cargo of oddities which they were importing to sell, they travelled very very lightly indeed. They seemed to be as intrigued by our luggage as I was by theirs. You could see them eyeing up our padded rucksacks and backpacks wondering what useless commodities they contained and whether the contents could even be sold for a profit at a streetside stall. Otherwise what in Gods name were we lugging them around for? Every time we opened a backpack to trawl out a creature comfort or a snack you’d spot them leaning forward to steal a furtive look into the depths to see could the riddle of the bulky backpackers be solved.

Trains through deserts cause uncontrollable pensiveness

The train, as it was, consisted of just two carriages which over the course of the journey seemed to be abandoned in random fashion at deserted, unpronounceable destinations only to be claimed by another engine a couple of hours later and transported another couple of hundred miles…. to be abandoned and randomly claimed again and dragged a few stops closer to its final destination. You’d be sitting reading or even sleeping in the carriage and suddenly you’d hear a thunderous terrifying clang of metal on metal as the engine forcefully attached itself to the carriages by the power of diesel and physics. Getting mounted completely by surprise by a diesel engine out of nowhere is what I imagine it must be like to be a streetdog in any of the towns we’ve visited. Progress was slow throughout the night with inexplicable stops in the middle of nowhere a common occurrence. We had one big bad Bolivian woman who got into the pioneering railway spirit of things by snoring like a freight train and farting like a foghorn at an edgy veggie convention. But other than that the night passed uneventfully with the assistance of an ipod and a sleeping bag pulled over our heads.

Semi-Cama(tose)

There’s something about the movement of a train over tracks which sends me to sleep anyways. While it did get pretty cold during the night it never got anywhere close to the -10C that we’d read about and the seats, while neither wooden or barbarically uncomfortable, did make for pretty uncomfortable sleeping positions. We were woken by the sun the following morning and had our first real chance to check out the scenery while eating our banana sandwich breakfast. Miles of white sand and rocky outcrops, everything scorched beyond recognition by the sun, mountains and smoking volcanoes on the horizon for backup. The train stopped at the Bolivian border for a couple of hours allowing us to get off the train, stretch our legs, smoke ‘em if you have ‘em etc. There’s a much more sociable aspect to train travel with the stand up, walk around spaciousness of the train carriage providing a far more interactive experience than travelling on a bus.

Subbing In Bolivia

At each of the stops some local kids would board the train and basically run amok, trying on gringo’s headgear or sleepingbags, rooting in their luggage for objects of interest, posing for photos and generally trying to fit a lifetime deprived of social interaction into an hour long train stop with random bemused travellers. We moved on and travelled 6 hours into Bolivia supping red wine from our plastic bottles and chatting with the other passengers to pass the time. Towards the end of the journey I slept uncontrollably, waking up to give out and go straight back to sleep again. I didn’t know it at the time but the onset of severe altitude sickness was upon me.


We rolled into Uyuni around 6pm the following day. Here’s a telling guidebook quote regarding Bolivia which leaves an interesting first impression : “Bolivia has some of the best mountaineering opportunities in the world but infrastructure is not well developed so don’t expect to be rescued if you get into trouble”. My first experience of Bolivia was basically “Oh my God, what have we done?”. It was that bad. As I ran around the town trying to scrape up some accommodation my nostrils and lungs were assaulted with the worst smells imaginable. Uyuni is very much a market town with anything you need to buy available from hundreds of adhoc streetside stalls. There aren’t many shops per se, everything except the pharmacy is open air. Arriving into a new town just before dark is always a bad idea as it gives you a very skewed and unflattering impression of a town – especially after a long journey – remember Valparaiso? Every street corner in Uyuni had open air steel framed stalls belching out rancid roasting or deep fried meat odours. Llama meat is particularly popular and relatively affordable in the area and unfortunately for me its also a very, very strong smelling meat as it cooks. Here’s another interesting quote from our guidebook : “Llama meat contains parasites similar to those in pork. So make sure it has been cooked for a long time and is hot when you eat it”. Abject poverty is absolutely endemic in Bolivia so bona fide llama meat is a treat whereas the bits that get left over - offal basically – is what made up the bulk of the streetside barbeque fodder. My stomach was doing handstands as I desperately tried not to inhale the acrid smoke – even the air seemed deep fried. But because of the altitude, if I stopped inhaling for even the 5 seconds it would take me to pass one of these stalls, my heart would nearly burst and my lungs would scream blue murder until I inhaled the fetid air again. The air at this altitude is very thin and your lungs find it a lot more difficulty to extract oxygen. Running around holding your breath in smoke filled air is a recipe for near collapse and when I eventually found a habitable hotel (after 4 attempts – dirty buckets in bedrooms and bedsheets on the floor mopping up water were some of the reasons for declining certain establishments) I literally collapsed on the bed and didn’t rise for a couple of days as my body desperately tried to adjust to the new altitude.

Somewhere in Bolivia

I got hit pretty hard with the thoroughly incapacitating altitude sickness and I puked the first night, had an incredible headache, constant shortness of breath – even walking to the bathroom necessitated a rest stop – insomnia and a hunk of burning lethargy. The effects of altitude on the human body are random but total. Any niggling ailment you may be carrying is magnified tenfold. Your digestion is effected, you wake up in the morning with a urgent need to blow your nose and when you do, you produce a Jackson Pollock painting in your handkerchief. Every morning. M felt it aswell but held it together a little better than me.

Olivia from Bolivia (taken through a dirty bus window)

I generally take buckets of photos. In Uyuni I think I took 10 in 4 days, 5 of which were of the inside of the hotel room. That was how crap and unmotivated and lousy I felt. M used this time very productively and managed to do some wheeling and dealing and organise us a 3 day tour of the Salar de Uyuni (the main reason we were in Uyuni) – a tour of the desert and salt flats of Bolivia.

Sunrise, minus hundreds of degrees, 2 geysers

You’ve all heard of Adventure Tourism and Eco Tourism. Well the Bolivians have invented Torture Tourism. Our 3 day desert adventure involved jumping into the back of a Land Cruiser jeep with 4 other tourists, the driver and a cook and following a 1000km route around the desert to view the salt flats, some active and inactive volcanoes, some wildlife, and a lot of lakes – basically giving you a chance to experience the strangeness and vastness of the landscape here first hand. Think of it as Wanderly Wagon meets Paris-Dakar.

Meet The Lamberts

We were sharing our tour with 2 Danish brothers and their American/Phillipino and Croatian partners. Rune, the older brother is living in La Paz and working for a Danish NGO and was full of fascinating history and insights into Bolivian life and culture. Sven the younger brother was on a flying visit to South America to see his brother and to propose to Maria on Maccu Piccu. Our first port of call was the Salar de Uyuni – the worlds largest (and highest) salt flats (everything in Bolivia is generally the highest). This was one of the most surreal landscapes I’ve ever seen. You have vast, seemingly endless plains of ultra bright white salt flats shimmering horizon to horizon in the intense heat under a perfectly blue sky. Your brain has difficulty trying to figure out where the earth ends and the sky begins. You look at objects in the distance and they seem to be literally floating in space.

Our jeep, guide and travelling companions - Salar de Uyuni

This was definitely the highlight of the trip for me and such a pity it was on the first day. Salt, Halite and Gypsum are still extracted from the flats by hand by the industrious locals and mini piles of salt dot the landscape like abandoned works in progress. Then after the first of many stern shouts of Vamos!! from the driver we all loaded up and it was off to Isla Pescado a cactus covered island in what used to be the lake. We had lunch of hairy avocado and vittles, supplemented by our own bread and bananas and off we went again to San Juan where we overnighted in what amounted to a shed with beds.

Isla Pescado

We went for a wander in the town and I ended up ill advisedly challenging a young fella to a game of soccer played with a semi deflated volleyball covered in llama shit. I’m not the man I used to be, even less so at 4000m, and after retrieving the ball (which I’d bogtoed exuberantly) from over a very high wall I proceeded to fall face first into the dirt trying to execute a complicated step over manoeuvre. Embarrassed, wheezing and bleeding we headed back to our lowly cattleshed.

Laguna Verde

There was only electricity between the hours of 6pm and 8pm. The cook prepared our vegetarian meal of deep fried inedible somethings (the others had deep fried chicken and chips) in the most spartan of kitchens and off we went to bed by candlelight. The following day we hit Laguna Canapa and saw some flamingos. Its quite a suprise to see these odd birds in such an unforgiving landscape. We plundered photos like the scavenging tourists we were and headed on again for more lakes eventually pulling into a refugio on the shores of Lago Colorada for dinner and sleep. We all shared a room that night and Rune produced an interesting trick for heating the room – a tin pan filled with pure alcohol and set alight to burn and heat the room.

Sven and Rune - Hunting High and Low

Temperatures can reach well into the minus numbers here at night due to the altitude. Altitude again makes even the weather more extreme. You’re closer to the sun so you get burned during the day and you freeze during the night. But you’re also closer to the stars and out here you get treated to the most spectacular astronomy show. I have never ever seen a night sky quite like what we saw in Lago Colorada. It was the first time I’ve experienced that domed effect where the stars seem to wrap around the earth like a pin-pricked, dusty black blanket over a classroom globe. Absolutely amazing. We arose at 5am the following morning to witness the sunrise over the geysers. Even though I’d layered up to the max, the time I spent outside the jeep taking photos as the sun rose was still the coldest half hour of my life. My thumb basically froze into position and my fingertips were tingling for a good hour afterwards. I’m surprised the camera itself didn’t stop functioning. We were driven to many more remote lakes and then we hightailed it the 600km back to Uyuni for a victory dinner in the outstandingly delicious Minuteman Pizza.

Bolivia has the worst mannequin rights record in the world

I’m way behind in detailing our escapades but internet (along with electricity, water, and women with teeth) is precious in Bolivia so please be patient. We’re planning more days off in Copacabana, a little village on the shores of Lake Titicaca, so I’ll play catch-up then. Maybe if I laid off the disparaging social commentary y’all might get a better insight into what we’ve been up to. But that’d be no fun at all.

Join us next time for some....



Til next time…… Keep It Landlocked.

Thanks for the photo Sven

That's All Folks (This is CALAMA!!)