Bolivia

9 Jan 2009: I can´t believe that I am nearly at the end of my travels...4 months in South America sure does go fast! One more week left which will be spent in Easter Island and then back to Sydney....so am trying to bring this blog back up to date...which means all these entries will be out of synch....so lets starts with dear ol´Bolivia first!

This country is chaotic....I have never seen a border crossing in such disarray as the one between Peru and Bolivia. The day we picked to cross was also market day which could have had something to do with the chaos. People, carts, all types of food everywhere. Buses and trucks vying with pedestrians for a precious piece of real estate on a dirt road. Wasn´t uncommon for someone just to park their truck in the middle of the market place (which was the border crossing by the way), leave it and remain away from it while a traffic jam and a cacophony off horns build up behind it. Mad place! There is a job a-begging in Bolivian customs and immigration to streamline the process....first we all had to line up to collect a piece of paper....then we all had to file into a room to fill in that piece of paper....then we all had to file into another room to present that piece of paper to an official...at this stage you would think you would get the stamp in your passport...but oh no....we then had to cross the road...remember having to contend with the mad market place and then queue up again to finally get the entry stamp....and was it worth all this hassle to get into Bolivia? I would have to say yes...but the country did take a few days to grow on me.

La Paz is just another continuation of the chaos. The setting for La Paz is spectacular. La Paz and its nearby suburb El Alto are situated between 3600m and 4000m making it one of the highest cities in the world...and you feel it! By the time I got to La Paz, I had been living and sleeping at altitude for nigh on a month at that stage but I still suffered when only going up the slightest incline...which is an issue in La Paz ´cos all you do is climb hills all day! La Paz is set in a valley or a bowl and is surrounded by a high antiplano...the city is spreading along this valley and up onto the hills and antiplano. Social structure here is interesting....the lower down you live on the hils, the richer and more educated you are. Even though this city has only 1 million inhabitants, it seems all 1 million work in the many markets around the city centre. There are market stalls continuously all day....a stall is shared between many owners...someone may sell bread on a stall betweeen 4am and 9am...and then he needs to clear off for someone else to take the stall for the early morning shift and so it continues all day every day.

One of my most enduring memories of La Paz are the Cholitas...indigenous women who wear bowlers hats (apparently inspired by Charlie Chaplin), wear their hair in a single long plait, wear many layers of shirts (could be upto 20 layers of skirts), finished off by a brighly coloured shawl! They are everywhere....mainly concentrated in the markets and the Witches Market (that sells all types of potions!). A popular form of entertainment now in La Paz is Cholita wrestling which is sort of like WWF wrestling where instead of muscle bound men and women perfroming as the wrestlers you get a chubby, bowler-hatted, multilayered Bolivian woman instead. Loads of vids of it on the web...look it up!

Stayed in an Irish owned hostel in La Paz...called the Wild Rover of all things....sold Barry´s tea-bags, made a great cup of tea (good cups of tea are hard to come by in South America!), taytos, real cornflakes...I was in heaven!

The highlight of my stay in La Paz has to be mountain-biking down what is classed "The Most Dangerous Road in the World"...so labelled by some world organisation for the amount of accidents and deaths on the road. It is a narrow strip of gravel road, 3m wide in some places with up to 900m drops and it used to be the main road into La Paz from south of country. Nowadays a new road has been built diverting most of traffic way from it and allowing it to be used by mountain-bike enthusiants or in my case just the curious. The first 20kms of the bike-ride is on the new road and that was thrilling enough....speeding down some very steep road on an unfamiliar bike...but the views were worth it...have to say this was my favourite bit. When we got to the gravel road, the clouds had rolled in bringing along the rain (´twas rainy season)...which was good in someways because it prevented me from seeing exactly how high we were and how far down you would fall if you went over the edge....believe me I went down the road VERY slowly! But even though I was petrified it was good fun but would´t do it again...especially since I met an aussie guy a few days later who said his friend broke his back doing that bike-ride...I had thought the guides only made up these stories to scare the tourists!!

After La Paz, it was off down the country to Sucre, a beautiful colonial Spanish town that earned its wealth from the nearby silver mines in Potosi. Another claim to fame it has is that dinosaur footprints were found here around 20 years ago when a local cement factory was blasting its way through a quarry. Even though you can now only view the footprints from afar, it was amazing to see them...so many concentrated in one palce...all moving southwards in an annual migration march...footprints of many different species...one could see where a herbivore was being chased by a carnivorous dionosaur..one could see two dinosaurs of the same species walking side by side, or you could see footprints of two dinosaurs in a circle which is leading people to think they were either fightling or in a mating dance! Just fascinating to be able to see this and to be told what it can tell us about their behaviour!

In Sucre, two local women...the equivalent of Bolivian Jehovah´s Witnesses, I think, tried to convert me...all through Spanish too, mind you! Was chuffed that I understood them...even though I didn´t quite believe what they were trying to sell me. What surprised me is that they didn´t know where Australia was! They knew Ireland because they knew of Europe but they didn´t know where Australia was. So there I am in Sucre, pretending where I stood was South America...when I jumped to the left it was Europe...okay, okay, not exactly geographically correct and when I jumped to the right of the South American spot, it was Australia...think they got it...not too sure...left them as soon as I could then as I was worn out from hopping around the place...they probbaly thought I was mimicing a kangeroo.

Next stop were the silver mines of Potosi...silver was discovered here in the 1500s and it soon became one of the wealthiest and largest towns in the world...hard to believe now. They say the Spanish (Spanish aren´t liked too much in this part of the world) mined so much silver from Potosi that a bridge made of silver could have been built between Potosi and Madrid....now that´s a lot of silver! Nowadays, mining still goes on but mainly for tin, lead and zinc. Some silver is still left but not a lot.

Conditions in these mines are atrocious. Boys are young as 10 work there, even though I think legally they are not supposed too. Accidents and premature deaths are common. Bringing tourists to some of the mines (either unused or working mines) is now a common activity. Before we went into the mines, we stopped off at the Miners´Markets to buy coca leaves, 96% pure alcohol, biscuits for the kids, dynamite and ammonium nitrate crystals...hope my hands aren´t swabbed anytime soon! It was challenging in the mines...some of the mines are very narrow so lots of crawling on all fours or on belly were involved...also lots of climbing down rickety ladders and up into small holes were involved...my short and inflexible legs are not suited to a mining life, I can tell you that! The miners we met were delighted with the coca leaves we bought them and the alcohol went down a treat as well. I did try some of the 96% pure alcohol...awful stuff. And we were allowed to denonate some dynamite...thrilling experience...sounds was amazing. Am still unsure and conflicted about the ethics of tourists crawling through these mines for fun...even though this is where people work in atrocious conditions....but then again we were told the money we were bringing in and the gifts went back to help some of the families...so who knows!

It was then onto a bus for a hair-raising ride though the antiplano to Salar de Uyuni. Since it was before Christmas and the bus was full I got the honour of sitting upfront in the cab with the driver and his co-drivers....who were full of chat...not! But at least I got first rate views! This place is like the Wild West of the movies...which kinda makes sense...since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hung out a lot in this region when they tried to make a go of things in South America! I will never forget the hissing brakes of this bus accompanied by teh most headache inducing local music I have ever heard...but it was fun and I survivied to live and tell a tale for another day.

From Uyuni, I did a 3-day trip of the Bolivian Salt Plains (largest salt plains in the world) which were spectacular....many an hour was spent on the miles and miles of dazzingly white salt plains trying to get that perfect perspective shot...I failed miserably! On this trip I saw hundreds of flamingos, mutli-coloured lagoons, smoking volcanos, spouting geysers, bubbling mud pools, lolled around in a natural thermal pool even though the air temperature was near zero, drove through the beginnings of the Atacama desert and spectacular lightning storms in this part of the world. It was an amazing trip. Tough going at times but so worth it!

And that was the end of my Bolivian trip...was only there for 2 weeks but managed to do a lot in that time! After Uyuni, it was an overnight train to the Argentinian border (where the crossing was so much more organised) and a Christmas Eve bus ride down to Salta where I spent a very pleasant Christmas...but that´s the start of another blog!

Til then,
Siobhs

---

---