Coca y colores

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I am in Bolivia! I feel so excited to finally be here, for some reason Bolivia overtook Brazil on the list of places I was most excited to go to on this trip and here I am. I passed through Argentina only momentarily to get here, going San Pedro (Chile)-Salta (Argentina, Jujuy Province)-La Quiaca (Jujuy Province, the border crossing for Bolivia)-Villazon (border town in Bolivia where you cross immigation and pick up buses and trains north). I havea couple of hours until my bus north to a town called Tupiza, which was originally just a place to pass through on my way to Uyuni, but it sounds interesting so I will stay there a couple of nights and pick up the famous ´death train´(actually, I never heard of it until last night when I read about it in the lonely planet, and I dont know why it is called the death train, aside from the obvious) from Tupiza to Uyuni, which apparently has some amazing scenery if you go in the daytime and only takes 3 hours.

Yesterday I took a seven hour bus ride up a steep climb from Salta into the Altiplano, which in sharp contrast with Salta was as barren and harsh as you´d imagine a high up plane between borders to be. The big clouds hung heavily around the mountains and we drove through them, and then as it turned dark the trip was very dull and felt as though it might never end. But I got to La Quiaca, a fairly ugly frontier town og halffinished buildings and hundreds of Bolivians in transit hanging around day and night. I stayed in a very basic place which was v cold but clean and safe, and slept quite well. Today I took a taxi up the road to the Argentinian immigration control, where I saw all the Bolivians who were hanging around the streets last night, got stamped out, walked the concrete bridge across the river to the long line for Bolivian immigration, and got stamped through there. Love having these stamps in my passport!

This place is just a frontier town so there are no tourust sites as such, and I wouldnt want tohang around on my own at night here, but it is very interesting for my first taste of Altiplano and Bolivian life. There are so many older ladies here transporting heavy goods in multicoloured linen tied to their backs. they are carrying anything from several crates of apples to bags of conrete, plus small children and babies, on their backs, walkig long distance. Men and teenage boys too. Moat seem ioncredibly strong and dont have much trouble but some are visibly struggling with their cargo,knees buckling with each step, spines bent over, each step taken quite gingerly but at no less a pace than everyone else. It looked like a raceat the immigration office. Traditional dressis alive among the elders, of which there are maný. I feel like I stepped into the pages of National Geographic. They wear bowler hats, grey, black and brown, some short and some tall like mini gallon hats. Colour is very central to the indigenous costume, I need to fid out how they make dyes for neon yellow and pink, because it is very prevalent. The stalls lining the street here from immigration into town islined with people selling indigenous crafts, alpaca jumpers, ponchos, bags, hair bobbles and so on all made with traditional colours, weavings, patterns etc. It is like looking at Eric Clapton´s mind circa Blind Faith - psychadelic. The women all wear their hair very long and in plaits, the older the woman the long and nicer the plaits, often finished with little pom poms or ribbons. They all wear long skirts and sandals, and when they are carrying stuff, their skirt lugs forward nearly touching their feet, so that at any second they could easily trip up on it, and the cobbles below them. But they dont. Their faces look a touch chinese and their complexions are a lovely coffee shade, in various states of wrinkliness depending on age. There are loads of tiny kids running about - no subsidised daycare here, methinks - all very cute, quite well behaved consideing they´re sat around all day every day, some playing with their mums, eating,playing with the dogs and cats roaming around, and sometimes peering curiously at me from behind the safety curtain of their mums. Teeth here are all in a really bad state, not least due to the chewing of coca, which is plentifuol here. Although coca leaves are tolerated for indigenous people, cocaine is striclty illegal, but there are several army pòlice patrolling here as it is a notorious smuggling point, and they must know what´s going on, but they dont seem to bother anybody. The selling of coca leaves, always packages in transparent green blags and taped up - so as to lok extra dodgy - is not hard to see but it feels as though vendors do try to walk the line between making sure customers can see the wares on sale from the street, and keeping it under wraps, just in case. Now that I am here and I see that life is indeed quite tough, phsically demanding and cold (being on the altiplano where night temperatures drop to minus 20 degrees most nights), I have a better understanding of why the coca leaves trade and the raw coca paste they chew is so important. I would need it too if I had to hail five bags of cement on my back after having raised three kids. It mkes me even more angry atthe North American and European governments (ie, our lot) who force all kinds of trade sanctions and deals on Bolivia to smother the coca tradé. It is a delicate issue. on the on hand, I am obviously against the coke trade. But to stop growing coca leaves would be to remove a large portion of indigenous culture, and to make Bolivian altiplano life that much harder than it already is, both physically and financially. Maybe if the retard rich kids of the UK and the UK would find a better habit, they could play a part in solving this sticky problem and help themselves out. Then we could put Bono and his tiresome save the planet yarn out of business too, which would obviously please me greatly.

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