BOLIVIA and recollections 8 years on

LA PAZ

These are the descriptions of city life from 8 years ago and they easily recall a vivid picture of bustle and colour: Busy, crammed into a deep volcanic crater surrounded by mountains with snow on one at 6000m, teeming with market stalls selling fake armani watches, papayas, fried chicken, clothes, mobile phones, shampoo, dried llama feotuses and herbs, mass of people on the move with beggars and street dogs.  Marches and protests every day with lots of riot police and people picking fights as whacked out on drugs.  Coca growing is very big in parts of Bolivia as for centuries been a staple part of the diet and think it helps to ward off hunger. Good Coca museum.

DEATH ROAD BIKE TRIP

I get bored after a day or so in a City so was a very brave bear ( I disliked and still do down-hills and even worse on stone – gravel!) and joined the Death Road mountain bike ride of 3345m descent on asphalt and gravel over 64km.  As usual, I was at the back coming down sedately looking at the fantastic geology in the Corioco Gorge, scree slopes, faulted rock slabs, semi bare montane vegetation, waterfalls cascading down vertical rock faces, mini ice field etc and fantastic views of the well forested Gorge.  Anyway I wasn´t too far behind the others who love the speed so didn´t have to get into the van!  It is so named as its single track and winds along the side of a gorge, which until they recently built a new road, took 2 way traffic and whizzing cyclists fell off the edge to their doom.  The new road is a series of zigzags on steep hillsides much of which is either geologically unstable or prone to mudslides or massive rock falls etc.  One guy in our group skidded on a corner and his bike went 50m down the steep back but he managed to jump off and was unhurt, with the bike hauled back up on ropes.  We finished with a pool swim and hotel lunch – a good day in fab weather.

JUNGLY ECO LODGE AND ZIP WIRE AND RAFTING

The jungle tour was cancelled as the wet season had made the roads very difficult plus the frequent storms made flying in a small plane a tad interesting.  So, we went to an Eco Lodge in deep sub-tropical valleys of the Yungas forest or upper end of the Amazon basin near our bike trip.  The road above the  river was still single track cut through rock with blind bends and bus and truck wheels go very close to the loose gravel edge and in at least one place there was a gravestone with names of about 25 passengers who died when the bus crashed 100 foot below. I recall this road and from the bus window, it did seem at some points, the bus ‘went out’ over the very steep and long drop to the river below.

The Lodge was small, friendly, Bolivian owned and run with basic cabins, tree house and tree platform.  The government recently relaxed the rules governing how much coca a family can grow so there were more forest clearings. The soil is exhausted after about 5 years and so people move on to cut more forest with the trees taking 20 or so years to grow back. I went out at 5.30am at dawn to amble and look at numerous butterflies, moths, flowers, some birds and their long dangling nests etc.  I didn’t know this at the time, but the paths were part of the Choro Trail, an Inca path between the mountains and low ground mainly for gold which is still panned in small quantities in the Corioco River.

I confronted another nervous encounter by joining a zip wire trip. I recall my churning stomach and nervous but increasingly ecstatic hollahs as I did two 500m lines across a 200m deep valley.  I asked to go first as too much time to ponder and whoosh – away! The scariest part was trying to remember all the instructions for how to brake, how to turn around and haul oneself back in etc, but fortunately being small I didn´t have to brake on the 1st line but just glided in and on the 2nd the haul back in was easy.  One guy despite breaking and burning his hand through the gloves still had to smash his legs into a stone ledge to stop – although he was Ok, I recall the ouch! All had a good time.

We were lucky with the weather again for white water rafting on the Corioco River as the storm arrived the next day. Instead, it was hot with blue skies and we were on the river for 3 hours.  Although I enjoy pottering on quiet waters, I am cautious about fast, bubbling water, big rocks and stoppers so I went on a raft rather than a kayak and had great fun!  Those in inflatable kayaks skilfully encountered the rapids and nasty spots  although our tour leader got sucked down into a stopper and was on her last breaths and another guy smashed his pubic bone into rocks on falling out and down.  Overall, I recall feeling chuffed at overcoming dancing nerves to do these 3 activities and enjoying them too!

ALTIPLANO

We left La Paz through crazy typical traffic with heavy duty trucks, buses, cars, bikes, markets busy with people, dogs etc all using the roadway and one dog got smashed in half by a bus in front of us.  We travelled for 6-8 hours across the S Altiplano at about 3700m.   This was a high, bleak plateau between the east and west Andes stretching 800km between La Paz and the Argentinian border.

The landscape had a very harsh beauty of browns, greys, tinges of red and yellow through the bare or semi bare rocks set against the red brown soil and green splashes from the scrubby grassland and crops where there was some water.  There were small, rectangular mud adobe houses with thatch or tin metal roofs and small circular huts which perhaps stored crops or forage for animals often surrounded by a mud brick compound wall.   Some parts had extensive stone wall fields of all shapes which stretched across the hills.  I saw cultivation mostly by hand or simple tools such as 2 yoked bullocks – oxen pulling a simple plough on strips say 15m by 30m.  There were some tractors and much larger ploughed areas with a large dairy cow herd but often small flocks of sheep or llamas being tended by a lone woman or child sat in a vast landscape. I recall this vast, stark plateau and passing a lady bent over hoeing a small cultivation plot and a few small houses.

POTOSI MINES

These mines were the richest source of silver in the world during the Spanish Empire where 9 million or so indigenous forced labourers and African slaves died over 300 years.  It is the highest city in the world and sits under the red and yellow mountain called Cerro Rico –Rich Mountain of silver and tin in the Cordillera Oriental.  The city was alive with a buzz through the narrow streets with numerous handsome colonial buildings including the finest churches in Bolivia. The Spanish used their wealth to fund art and architecture, for example building a superb fortified Casa Real de la Moneda or Mint with 200 rooms around 5 courtyards as part of the economic and financial heartland of their Empire. The churches were festooned with carvings such as pillars of grape laden leaves.

The Mines were still actively worked almost all by hand with some outside money such as from USA or Europe looking to investing in kit to re-work the spoil heaps and extract the x % of minerals ´left´first time around.  But, as one of the miners who led us on a tour explained, it still felt to them the investment and wealth is still coming from and to, the outside world with Bolivia not earning relatively much from the finished products as processing etc is done in Chile etc.  The current ranking of mineral wealth mined was zinc, lead, tin and silver with much dependant on world prices.

The Mine tour took about 3 hours and after walking past animal carcases in a small butchers shop we kitted up in overalls, boots and headlamp before heading out to a co-operative miners food stalls where we had to buy a bag of goodies for them, as an appreciation of being allowed to watch them at work and stopping to talk to us etc.  The bag contained coca leaves, cigarettes, plain biscuits and dynamite with fuse etc.  We had a demo by the miner of the dynamite which I offered to hold whilst the fuse was lit but he then wandered off a fair way to let it go bang. I recall holding the dynamite but not the miner walking away! The mountain is riddled with holes as different groups of miners follow hopeful seams and no one knows exactly the locations of all the shafts and tunnels. Thus, the potential for collapse is high and increasing and so one has to run when there is a shout with banging on the tunnel wall to warn of a lit dynamite. One has 50 secs to find a strong rock bolthole!   This did not appeal being 100m of so underground when dynamite was on the menu.

We were underground for 1-1.5 hours and until recently, the excursions were really risky as one tourist died from a panic attack, the vertical ladders swung around the deep darkness of the shafts and arsenic poisoning was a real danger.  The H&S aspects for tourists had improved, and I did not feel claustrophobic in the tunnels but recall viewing the quality of the timber props with some raised eyebrows, we did not go down a long, vertical shaft ladder deeper into the bowels. We watched miners shimmy up and down.  I probably would have had a go IF I could have gone with a guide on my own and there was no hanging around to allow the imagination to take hold!

It seems there were 2 main types of worker, those as Co-op members with health cover and a pension and the remaining 70% who seemed to be órdinary´labourers with no cover. It takes a continuous period of 5 years to become a co-op member and if you finished with one group say at 4.5 years because the work dried up, you had to re-start the 5 year period with someone else. The healthcare examination tells you your lung capacity and once you reach 50% damage you can retire and get a pension but many continue.

Anyone can open a hole or mine in the mountain if they have money to invest in the wooden props needed for the shafts, pay for the compressed air and pumps etc and employ x people depending on the richness of the seam with profits split according to your status and input.  Some teams go for quantity of rock output such as 20T -week earning 4-5000 Bolivianos of 7-10% purity, whilst others aim for quality of say 54kg-week with 50% purity and the same monetary value.  People want to do the dangerous mine work as it pays well at say 600 Bolivianos per week for a Member working 7-8 hours for 4 days and 60 Bols per day all week for Ordinary labourers. Children of 12 or 13 work in the mines either as company for their father or the breadwinner if dad had been killed and a family member is allowed to then take their place.  Similarly, for women as they have been allowed to work in the last 4 years.

UYUNI SALT FLATS

We drove for another 7-8 hours across a desolate, harshly beautiful landscape 212km to Uyuni. The distances are not great on a tarmac road but these are dirt-gravel with roadworks, diversions, river beds and single track and not many vehicles are seen. Uyuni developed as the railway junction from Chile and Argentina in 1889 as it was Bolivia´s gateway to the outside world.  We went to the train graveyard outside town where several engines, wagons and other rolling stock stand in the sun bleached landscape, rusting away and stamped with British engineering.  Some of the bullet holes are supposedly from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but there are many such holes and no one really knows where those two went.

I recall the Salt Flats were dazzlingly white in the blue skies and strong, high altitude sun.  The salt is about 1.2m deep with 20m of water below and geysers from a volcanic mountain on the horizon occasionally cause bubbling although the water is cool.  On the day tour we were showed the family business of producing salt, from hand digging and drying out on the Flats, taken by truck back to the village and off loaded by hand, shovelled onto an indoor drying platform heated by brush wood in an oven, iodinised and then bagged by women doing 2-3000 1kg bags a day.  It is low money at 1 Boliviano for 50kg of salt. I recall this seemed a back breaking, tough working life.

There had been a lightning storm the previous evening as we drove on to the Plain, giving shallow water across parts of the Flats. This produced brilliant reflections of the Andes on the white flats.  We had lunch next to Isla de Pescado which is a coral outcrop from when it was once sea with cactus groves of 1000 years old or so.

TUPIZA

Another long drive across similar landscape but becoming far rockier with canyons and some spectacular red- white- grey rock formations eroded through wind and water.   Very occasionally, there was a ruined mud adobe house in the middle of no-where or a small collection still inhabited with subsistence through llama farming.

I decided to do the so called Triathalon Day which was 2 hours in total by jeep, with 8 squashed in to keep costs down,-around various gorges running off the main Valley to look at fantastic rock formations and colours and pretend when on the horse you were BC and SK as this was their country.  There were eroded tall pillars in phallic shapes and a surreal sight of a nun in habit half running up the side of a friable red sandstone cliff face above a low but wide river course.  I did not fare well on the horse as I recall feeling very out of sorts with nerves all a jangle (and very annoyed with myself), but fortunately found a perkier mode for a 2 hour mountain bike trip down a big hill on a winding gravel road. I enjoyed this more than I thought with surreal lunar type landscapes and then whizzed hard along the flat through lots of muddy puddles..a good workout at 3500m!

Next day–Argentina!!