Back on terra firma I ate a set lunch in a nearby cafe. I found these set meals intriguing – you never knew what sort of a surprise was in store. This one produced a bowl the size of a bucket full of mushroom soup, an equally large plate of spaghetti and a glass of juice. All for five sol. But the biggest surprise was that
Hamlet
blared from the television set in the corner. That night I dined at the posh hotel in the main square. It even ran to fabric serviettes instead of the usual paper one cut into quarters. The meal cost five dollars more than my hotel room, but the Lake Titicaca trout with garlic was divine. Back in my room I put the one-candle-power heater on, survived a lukewarm shower, erected my emergency lighting system and, toasty warm, jumped into bed to read.
The bus to La Paz left at eight in the morning. And what a swish beast it was. The collection point was only two blocks away so Oscar carried my bags to it. I was presented with a form I had to complete with my passport number and other details in order to get on the bus, but no one looked at my ticket.
The road to the border of Bolivia was fairly good. For a while it ran alongside Lake Titicaca’s immense blue expanse, which had an occasional boat at its edge and looked as limitless as the sea. Then we were among rolling brown and yellow hills and fields dotted with animals and mud-brick villages. Potatoes, barley and fava beans grow here in land that is still ploughed by oxen. Women shepherds stood in the fields knitting and near one village a small boy played at bullfighting, waving a towel at two young steers. Occasionally we passed through a town. There were few vehicles on the road, but we did encounter a van that had three sheep sitting on top of it in the pack rack.
Then the lake was near again. Behind it, brown hills rose in front of another range of higher mountains whose tops were heavily laden with snow and ice.
At the Peru–Bolivia border I shuffled slowly forward in the long line that waited in the dusty street in front of the immigration office. I had read that the border officials were notorious for stamping passports with the wrong date, then tracking you down and fining you. But I encountered no such problems. Next I walked a couple of hundred yards up a hill and, passing through an old stone arched gate in the wall that divides the two countries, emerged the other side in Bolivia.
Soon after being reunited with the bus we came to Copacabana, a lovely little town set between two hills and nestling around a splendid bay. This place has been a site of pilgrimage since Inca times and now it is a religious sanctuary, famous for the Virgin of Copacabana, a black Madonna who is said to perform miracles. We stopped at Copacabana for lunch and in a tree-shaded garden I sat on a piece of chopped-up log thinly disguised as a chair, at a table of rough wood, and ate what was described as a ‘send whitch’, a whacking great lump of bread the size of a small loaf.
After lunch we were transposed onto a Bolivian bus that was old but horribly fast, especially on blind corners in the mountains we entered. The bus, top heavy with piles of luggage tied haphazardly high on its roof, swerved dreadfully along narrow dirt tracks below which five-hundred-metre drops fell terrifyingly close. The speed maniac of a driver roared up and down the mountains with his brakes screaming. By the time we reached La Paz they were making the horrible sound of grinding metal and pouring forth smoke like a train. To stop the bus on the steep downhill street of our final destination the driver had to jam its wheels into the kerb at an angle. But the view was superb from the sides of the heavily snow-capped mountains down to the beautiful blue lake with its sunny islands.
Halfway to La Paz we arrived at the isthmus of Lake Titicaca where we had to alight and get into motor boats while the bus crossed the lake all by itself on a barge. The barge was welcome to it. The boats were grossly overloaded and we were bobbing about on a freezing lake with no life jackets. But this was still hugely preferable to the bus. I can swim, but I can’t, as yet, fly.
After a couple more petrifying hours in the mountains, the bus was running on flat ground in a valley of brown and yellow grass with soaring mountains in the background. The countryside looked much the same as Peru. We climbed again to negotiate the highest pass of 4200 metres and looked down on La Paz before descending to it at 3800 metres. The city appeared to radiate up from its centre at the bottom of a deep valley and, rising from the bottom of this bowl, it swarmed up the surrounding hills. The houses were all much the same brown colour as the hills, only the odd tree made a splash of green, while behind the enclosing arms of the brown hills a backdrop of jagged snow-covered mountains stood against a clear blue sky.
Almost four kilometres above sea level, La Paz is called the world’s highest capital city (but it is only a de facto relationship – Sucre is the legal capital). Many visitors suffer soroche here – the city is so high that it doesn’t need a fire brigade. It is hard to keep even a match burning in the oxygen-poor air, making it a depressing place for pyromaniacs.
When the Spanish marauder Pizarro swooped on this peaceful spot in 1531, a prosperous community lived here, irrigating crops and fruit and mining and working gold and silver. The Spaniards seized the mines and founded La Paz as a post on the trade route between the silver mines of Potosi in the south of Bolivia and the Peruvian ports. The Spanish extracted fortunes of gold and silver from the Potosi mines, making the miners work under atrocious conditions. The Potosi mines were the holocaust of Bolivia. The Indians died in droves, despite – or maybe because of – being given coca to keep them working harder without food. Black African slaves were also imported by the million and worked to death or killed by silicosis.
Bolivia, landlocked and isolated, is not only the highest but the second-poorest South American country. It has a predominantly indigenous population of 6.6 million, seventy per cent of whom live on the bleak alti-plateau west and north of La Paz. There are also a mixed bag of other nationalities – Europeans descended from Canadian Mennonites, escaped Nazi war criminals, missionaries and one per cent of the population is of African descent. Half the size of Western Australia, Bolivia shares borders with Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Chile and boasts some of the world’s wildest frontiers, as well as the highest concentration of cosmic rays on earth. Perhaps that is what gives it its feeling of otherworldliness.
Since Simon Bolivar gained independence for Bolivia in 1824 there have been 189 governments – there is an abnormally high mortality rate among politicians. President Murillo was publicly lynched from a lamp post in the square named after him.
Agriculturally Bolivia is a subsistence nation that exports small amounts of coffee and timber and is the world’s largest legal exporter of coca, earning US 1.5 billion dollars from its sale. But only half of this remains in the country. One-third of the Bolivian work force depend on coca for employment. There are 54,000 hectares under cultivation in the Chapare region alone, and they yield 100,000 kilos of coca per annum, all of which is exported. Although cocaine is illegal Bolivians chew coca leaves daily and make tea from them. Mama Coca is the daughter of the earth goddess and the earth cult revolves around the coca leaf, the use of which was a privilege originally reserved for Inca priests and the royal family but which eventually spread from Bolivia to Columbia. Cocaine is grown as coca leaf, then dried, soaked in kerosene, mashed into a pulp and treated with hydrochloric and sulphuric acid, then with ether, to produce white crystals.
From high above La Paz we began to descend through the poor and littered upper suburbs of tin or straw-covered adobe houses that flank the approach. The muddy, uncared-for roads were lined with downmarket auto repair shops and junkyards and Indian women washed laundry in the sewage-laden river. Then the earth dropped away and it all disappeared as La Paz lay four hundred metres beneath us, climbing the walls of the canyon that is almost five kilometres from rim to rim and gives the city in its arms protection from the fierce winds and weather.
Driving down the one major thoroughfare, whch follows the path of least resistance through the canyon and along the course of the Rio Choqueyapu, we reached the city centre. From the downtown skyscrapers of the main square everything zoomed steeply uphill to the rim, behind which the whitetopped, seven-thousand-metre peak of Illimani loomed.
Happily I parted company with the bus. The sight of the remains of several of its ilk, as well as the forests of little crosses beside the road commemorating other vehicles that had gone flying over the edge, had not endeared me to it. Putting my watch forward an hour made the time now five and already it was decidedly frigid. Winters in La Paz are very cold and dry and the temperature falls below freezing as soon as the sun sets.
I was taken for the proverbial ride by a taxi driver. I knew he was a villain when he let a kerb-side window washer clean his stationwagon’s rear window and then refused to pay. And the poor fellow didn’t even complain. Apart from this taxi driver, I liked all the Bolivian people with whom I had dealings and found them courteous and kind.
The hotel I finally found was in San Pedro, or Saint Peter’s square, opposite the prison. While negotiating the price of the room the manager, a kind and gentle soul, joked that I could get free accommodation over there. Hooray! I now had enough Spanish to understand a joke. The hotel, a hulking two-storey stone edifice, was okay but very cold. My room didn’t have a window, just a skylight recessed a million kilometres away in the lofty ceiling. Staring up at the grotty piece of plastic sheeting that covered the skylight and the bare light bulb that dangled beside it, I longed for my sunny room in Puno.
Begging another blanket, I doubled it over on my bed, but the air was still too cold to allow my hands out to hold a book. My room had a TV, which to my surprise featured the news from the BBC in English, the main item being a plane disaster in Paris. Nice comforting stuff to watch when you’re travelling. Once again I very nearly electrocuted myself using the diabolical electric shower in the bleak Arctic bathroom with its perpetually wet floor. I would have gladly swapped the TV for a bath-mat or a heater. The electric socket by the bed light didn’t work but instead of fixing it someone had roughly banged another into the wall alongside it. The hotel had wooden floors throughout and what sounded like herds of elephants passed along the corridor beside my door.
Abandoning my freezing room for the marginally colder streets, I walked downtown and found much activity and a busy night market. Hundreds of lantern-lit stalls lined the main street, and in the clear air lights glittered all over the slopes where the city crawled up the sides of the canyon. The main avenue, known as El Prado, was a promenade of trees, flowers, monuments and old homes with iron latticework and balustrades. Many small streets, mostly cobbled or unpaved, branched off the main drag. They were lined with tiny shops that sold leather, weavings, alpaca items, silver and antiques, while street vendors offered, among a variety of goods, irons heated by charcoal, stone carvings, and medicinal cures of the ancient Incan medicine men. A couple of beggars sat on the steps of the large San Francisco church in the main square and a man with no hands played a mouth organ. There is no welfare system in Bolivia.
With all the clothes I was wearing the cold was bearable, but I pitied the poor and homeless. Most women wore national dress – you couldn’t fail to be warm in all those skirts and petticoats – but many were heavily laden, their backs bent almost double with bundles and babies. I resisted the offerings of unbottled drinks, cream cakes and other goodies, possibly featuring instant typhoid, and, meeting two English girls who had shared the horrors of the bus ride from Copacabana with me, went with them to a chifa, a Chinese restaurant and had a decent meal of fried rice, chop suey and local beer. The beer was good around here but it was impossible to find it cold. Fridges were sometimes used merely as storage and were either not turned on, or turned on so low that their contents were barely cool.
The chiming of the San Pedro church clock in the square woke me in the morning. The square had benches, photographers with old-fashioned boxed cameras draped with black cloths on stands, the ubiquitous pigeons and a few scrappy bushes. I couldn’t find anywhere that served breakfast so I bought a couple of plain bread rolls from a street vendor and walked along munching. The bread was good enough to eat and cost only a quarter of a bol per roll – there are three bolivianos to an Australian dollar. It was a sharp climb up to my hotel from the main plaza but in the narrow streets that rose from it there was much less of the horrendous traffic that congested the centre and gassed you with exhaust fumes.
All that day until late afternoon I walked around La Paz with only half an hour off for lunch. It was a delight to wander aimlessly up and down the extremely steep but fascinating streets. I found La Paz was well endowed with elaborate churches. Ninety-five per cent of Bolivians profess to be Roman Catholic, but it is a hybrid Christianity incorporating the ancient folk religion, especially in rural areas. Ekeko, the little dwarf household god responsible for matchmaking, finding homes and success in business, still has a big following. Perpetually lost, I found the hechiceria, the witches’ market, by mistake. Here women sat on the footpath selling potions and spells to kill, cure or get you a lover, as well as talismans to ward off evils arising from the aforementioned spells. Then there were incenses and fragrant woods to burn for all of the above reasons or just because you liked them – and dried llama foetuses that were so totally gruesome I couldn’t imagine owning one no matter what it might do. Items used in white magic and animism, including grease, nuts, wool and concoctions, were on offer. Although I fancied some of the spells, I desisted, imagining the outrage of an Australian customs officer confronted with them.
Further on was the hurly-burly of the black market which sold everything – contraband, medicines, sulpha drugs, codeine containing analgesics, pots, pans, leatherware and food galore. Stall after stall, street after street, it continued on both sides of the road for kilometres. In my meanderings I came upon the hotel that a British boy on the bus had told me about and went in to inspect it. I was shown a big, sunny room that cost twenty bolivianos and booked it for the following day. Taking a short cut that led in the general direction of my present hotel, by some miracle I rounded a corner and was right at the door. Maybe one of the talismans rubbed off on me.