After more good food (granja heidi, ossobuco with a barley risotto and saffron sauce if you must know.... i was llama-ed out having had it stewed, minced, chopped, whole, sprinkled on yogurt you name it on the trek) i tried and failed to jump on a bus to cusco via the slight obstruction of numerous good friday parades which were jamming the streets to footfall, let alone the traffic. It did eventually leave a few hours after scheduled during which time i made friends with the tax kiosk man who got me a deal with my last pesos at the local wateringhole which made me equally popular in turn with a few of the other travellers. 19hours later having had our passports checked by 4 different authorities and gone through the least heavily guarded border yet on foot (bridge semi-complete with chicken wire) I was in La Paz where having dropped off my things at Las Brisas I headed onto Wild Rover (eventually). Here felix lay in wait with a whole bevy of travellers ranging from Eric the swedish rasta to tom, whom i´m fairly certain was a laid-off stock broker.
We failed to find `friendly, cheap and tasty` Yusefs but sated our falafel craving after a typical bolivian service wait (bare in mind we were the only customers) of an hour or so and wandered around the surrounding streets and through a rather subdued witches market and plaza murillo. It transpired that the combination of elections and easter had subdued south americas wild child into a sleeping puppy. traditionally drinking is banned on easter weekend and so elections (dry since parties used to ship in truckloads of free alcohol to bribe locals) are held to coincide with this atypical behavior. Having hidden the previous night, saturday, under the tables in silence at Rover nursing our drinks in the worlds highest irish run bar (because the lights were off didn´t seem to discount the possibility of the police asking to see the bar and turning the lights on in my opinion) we acquired a taste for illicit drinking and headed, brown bag in tow to a viewpoint in the park, which was also closed. On the upside we did find the worlds most dangerous ferris wheel and amused the locals with a display of dangerous driving by the light of the sparks flying off the top of our dodgems. Later continuing in the illicit vein we headed to one of La Paz´s many underground clubs where a labrinyth lies in wait of gringos behind a shutup shop front that is hauled up at the sound of approaching taxis (their locations are not so secret that every taxi driver doesn´t know their address) after a full 10minutes sleep I headed onto the airport past a disconcertingly mounted write-off, destination: Sucre.
Sucre was everything that La Paz wasn´t - affluent, bright white (hence the nickname) and old, colonial to be exact. We spent more time than necessary at Joyride the local tourist operator who appeared to have a monopoly on the entire town with a bar, restaurant, cinema and tour centre taking up pride of place by the main square opposite the cathedral. It wasnt all free beer though, on the first evening we watched El Mina del Diablo in preparation for Potosoi which was grim to say the least but achingly well done. (We met the protagonists sister who was also featured in the docudrama when we went to the mines, she informed us that Basilio still worked in the mines, along with his uncle and brother and then sold us some of the minerals found in the cerro rico, especially dihearteningly I later heard tales from Rosie*). The film was startling, contrasting not only the surprising simpilcity of the raw humility and pride of being a miner, and of the devout catholicism dabbling in the occult. Outside the mines, Christ reins supreme, each of the entrances to the sprawling warrenlike complex bears a cross surmounted on the entrance. But inside, in the depths of the mountain, they are isolated. Millions: Bolivians, first free then enslaved first by the conquistators and then their devil imageary; Black slaves, who on average survived less than a year, have died in the mines of the 'Mountain that Eats Men', killed by explosions, accidents, or failing that ravaged by silicosis that eats away the lungs and kills men in their thirties.
Next day my strength failed me rather on what was advertised as the dino DOWNhill but turned out to have several km in several places of uphill mountain biking - before hurtling back down on the other side past sights including a vast slab of mountain pockmarked by the footprints of dinosaurs who´d traipsed through a drying lava flow a few million years before there; bizarre, especially since half of this mountain had collapsed despite the footprints gaining some notoriety the month before. To be honest much of the time I was keeping occupied by focussing on the road and so often the sights passed in a green, blue or strawcoloured haze, I did however, notice the eagles circling over a cottage in the valley and the local boys tearing up a football pitch whilst girls in traditional dress attempted to cheerlead.
At the end, well, slightly past, this being Bolivia they neglected to be very forcoming on where to stop, i was revelling in my own bloodfree existence when a llama fell of a cliff behind me after a brief, but fatal, skermish involving a jugoboy, oncoming lorry, out of control taxi and a nearly flattened me. I have no idea how the llama (max capacity 35kg, camel-like tendency to try to grind your bones to dust given have the chance and a distinct pattern for cliffside suicides emerging - perhaps these explains the ubiquity of all that llama meat) has managed to survive thousands of years.
Once we´d managed to coax the taxi back to enough of a semblance of life to arrive in Potosoi we suited up and fell down a few mineshafts before distributing the bags of cocaleafs, cigarettes, 96% alcohol and banana catalyst to the miners, and crackers to the women and children guarding the entrance. The whole package cost 20Bs each - and yet was more than they could hope to buy themselves in weeks. All this after a quick masterclass in the art of explosives, I thought Adem was ripe for a home office enquiry having been photographed shoving sticks of dynamite into bags of ammonium nitrate and then fleeing the unexpectedly deafening explosion that followed and appeared to pass straight through you. There were several dodgy moments (the tunnel that smelt so strongly of gas we had to reroute and then the explosions nearby unaware of the tourists now passing perilously close but mostly Salvador, one of the children of no more than 10 who had been begging outside being discovered helping his uncle mine. I had asked him on the outside if he worked in the mine and he had replied that he helped in the medical centre on site but it was definately him pickaxing 400m down), these I imagine pale somewhat with what the miners face routinely.
Onto Uyuni which was much more civilised than expected and easily sold the best conitos and casa negras for 50centavos. It also hosted some distinctly strange Bolivian cuisine including llama products best not bandied about on the internet. However a gem emerged in the form of a true Italian pizzeria for a taste of home before 4 days away from civilisation, but with a cook! The last of the sleeping bags battened down we piled into the 4WD caravan awaiting us and were swiftly guided through rusting trains, salt processing networks, a last market and then km-upon-km of salt 200-500m deep and stretching as far as the world cares to show you at any one point. Rising eerily from this hexagonal network of blinding white were desert ´islands´ which appear to float above its surface, their cacti oddly silhouted against the salt. All very surreal but there are the obligatory photos to show on my return to prove its existence.
After day one we stayed in a particularly bleak village in a hotel made entirely (floor, walls, beds, decorations, thankfully not pillows) of salt, it was nice actually and stunning when the sun eventually rose the next morning over the salt flats.
Having driven all day through deserts and lakes and scaled a few boulders we arrived in the national park on the southern border very cold, not helped by the large holes in most window panes, annoyingly the 3 sockets for charging in the entire guesthouse had just 3 hours of power a day, i did manage to fight my way through to gain one although it did mean guarding it until the urge to sleep ahead of our 4am wakeup call eventually got the better of me, had some interesting kitchen talk though and can now make pancakes with 2 ingredients. 5am the next morning and we were on the way, tired, cold and hungry to the geyers. However my car never reached the geyers since we broke down at 5.15, some emergency repairs later we limped a further mile and then unpopped my sleeping back and the alpaca presents (just think your presents saved my toes!) and huddled 4 across the seat waiting with baited breath (it only froze the windows otherwise) for rescue. Whilst pretending it wasnt happening I listened to an interesting extract of Nial Fergusons the ascent of money about the spanish obsession with all things shiny with a detailed account of plunder at you guessed it; Potosoi.
2 hours later and the sun was melting the ice encrusted windows nicely - enough to see the rest of our entourage reappear and vaguely to recollect being rebundled and car-ed before a massively needed pick me up at base camp (wed used all the fresh hot water in attempting to restart the engine, this did not work, it froze) breakfasting on those aforementioned pancakes.
*Apparently the filmakers, Europeans who went on to win the sundance festival from Basilio Vargas´ miserable existance renumerated him with a thirty puond cheque, which cannot be cashed since the lower limit is $50. To take matters to an ultimately desparate level, the villagers reguse to believe this and instead have ostracised Basilios family believing them to be secretly hiding the promised monies. It was a litte sickening to hear.
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