Bolivia

Mid November, 2006

Taking a bus south and skirting around the bottom of Lake Titicaca, I entered Bolivia and stopped briefly at Copacabana on the shore of the lake. To quote Lonely Planet, Copacabana is "neither figuratively nor literally the hottest spot north of Havana", but I did find that it was a nice place to make a brief stop. However, since I'd had plenty of "Titicaca time" on the Peruvian side, I pushed on to the capital, La Paz.

La Paz was reasonable enough as far as the capital cities of South American countries go. At first it was a little weird to see the shoeshine boys in the street. They all wear balaclavas on their heads over baseball caps, so all you can see is a pair of eyes through little holes and under a visor. This apparently is to hide their identities, as having to do what they do is somewhat shameful. It takes a little while to get used to the fact that they are not, in fact, about to mug you, and I was constantly reminded of how the youth of Britain are now banned from wearing caps and hoodies in certain places. This lot didn't seem at all delinquent though, just constantly keen for work regardless of the type of footwear you sported. I can't count how many entirely inappropriate offers I had to buff up my suede and Goretex Merrels.

In La Paz I met up with Lucy who I work with at the BBC back in London, and who had also taken a career break to travel. Her path was taking her through South America in the opposite direction to me, but we coincided in La Paz and went to a fake English pub which was quite entertaining in its lack of authenticity. It was quite weird, but at the same time quite nice, to talk to someone about work stuff and work people after eleven months away from it all.

La Paz was also memorable for the (slightly touristy) Mercado de las Brujas, or Witch's Market. This is basically a series of street stalls selling charms, indigenous medicines and the like, including such items as dried llama foetuses, (pictured). It also features old men sitting by the road who will read the coco leaves for you, but they don't do it for gringos. That is actually quite a good thing as it stops the custom turning into just another tourist gimmick.

After La Paz the overnight bus took me south to Potosi, where they mine an ore containing silver and various other metals. The main point of visiting Potosi is to go down into the mines, which was quite an experience. First you are kitted out with rubber overalls, boots and a helmet with miner's lamp, all of which seems a bit over the top when you think you have signed up for a gentle stroll around some tourist-compatible mines. Then they take you to the miners market, where the miners themselves go daily to buy supplies such as dynamite, fuses, detonators and of course the coco leaves which they continually chew to help them along in their work. At the market you buy some of the above commodities as gifts/tips for the miners that you will meet underground. By the standards of most visitors these things are very cheap, but to a Bolivian miner they can be quite expensive.

The guide, always an ex-miner who has learned English, demonstrates at the market how you can chuck dynamite around to your heart's content; it will not explode on its own. He also demonstrates that you should never put a detonator between your teeth by... well... putting a detonator between his teeth. It is at this point that you realise how little European/Western concepts of "health and safety" mean out here...

There then follows what turns out to be quite an experience. You are led through the mines, scrambling up and down shafts between levels, moving quickly along tunnels and regularly having to jump out of the way of two-tonne wagons of ore being pushed and pulled by four men. All around were men at work in pretty appalling conditions, drilling, shovelling, blasting and transporting the ore. One particularly interesting moment came when they started blasting two levels beneath us. Suddenly four miners appeared at our level, (having just lit the fuses and legged it upwards), and as they appeared I thought that I could smell gas. Before I could say anything the thumps started occurring below us, and everyone, (except the miners, who didn't seem bothered), eyed our tunnel’s supporting beams with a little scepticism...

On the surface after the tour came the gratuitous dynamite detonation display. This consisted of the guide showing us how to roll the explosive into a ball, place the detonator in it and insert the fuse. They then lit the fuses, and left the dynamite fizzing in the hands of their hapless visitors, (see picture)! Eventually relieving the tourists of their bombs, (the fuse is over a couple of minutes long), they then walked over to some open space nearby, and set them down. There then arose the unexpected complication of a lorry approaching the charges on the mine’s access road! A lot of shouting and hand waving got the lorry to stop sufficiently far away that it suffered nothing more than the shower of pebbles and dirt that we all got...

After Potosi I travelled on to the town of Uyuni, the place to arrange tours of the remarkable salt flats and volcanic regions in the south west of Bolivia, and booked my place in a six-seater 4WD vehicle for the three-night trip which would eventually deposit me in Chile. The next morning when I checked out of my hotel I was reminded that I was in one of South America’s sketchier countries. The hotel room had mysteriously increased in price overnight from 75 Bolivianos to 125! To add to that I found that the English-speaking guide, explicitly promised by the tour operator for our salt flats expedition, spoke not one word of anything but Spanish. In fact Martha The Guide turned out to be not much of a guide anyway, more a cook with an itinerary, so her lack of linguistic abilities didn’t matter too much and I suppose it did help me to practise my Spanish. However, another South American tour operator was telling fat porkies to Gringos...

Fortunately the fellow travellers I was crammed into the jeep with, Israelies Ofer and Erun, Herman and Diane from Belgium and Casper the Dutchman, were a good bunch of people. After visiting a "train graveyard" and a salt hotel, (constructed entirely out of salt), our next stop was the amazing salt flats, miles and miles of blinding white plain stretching out to the horizon. The place was full of tourists who were, like ourselves, using this uniquely featureless landscape to confuse perspective and construct interesting and wacky photos. Then, after what I understand is the traditional vehicular breakdown on these trips, we reached our hostel for the first night. In fact it was during this breakdown that Martha The Cook With An Itinerary really came into her own, as it turned out that she was as much a mechanic as the driver/mechanic was. Having a look at what they were up to I noticed that we continued our journey with two bolts per front wheel suspension unit where there should have been four, but at least both wheels were pointing in the same direction now...

The following day we went on further south to visit some very beautiful lakes and rock formations, including a famous "rock tree" formed by wind erosion. It being desert, the temperatures could vary wildly during the day but would plummet to below freezing at night, and the lack of light pollution made the sky at night an incredible sight. I hadn't seen such a detailed night sky since I was in the Great Thar Desert in India, last February.

After a very early start on the third day, we started off by visiting a volcanic region. There were huge steam geysers spurting out of the ground, and pools of thick brown mud steaming and bubbling in the early morning light. We took a pre-breakfast dip in a very hot thermal pool, which felt wonderful after I had got over the idea that taking my clothes off in temperatures hovering around freezing was really stupid....

Eventually we reached the border with Chile, where Diane, Herman and I said goodbye to the others and got on a bus to carry on to San Pedro de Atacama on the other side.