The true traveller in South America is keen to get his or her money’s worth. Air fares to and within this part of the world are far from cut price – overland distances are great and a trip of several weeks or even months encompassing several countries and diverse climates is likely to be the most cost effective and value added if you are in the business of ticking swathes of the world off your list before you die. Been there, done that – no need to go again. I always hope I will get to almost any country again. A first trip anywhere, even one of some duration unless you actually move to live and work there, is often scratching at the surface, seeing and doing the predictable and stirring up a curiosity for more; for the places off the beaten tourist track and for greater understanding of local peoples and cultures.
So I have just returned from not much more than two weeks in Bolivia, definitely not enough and I would like to go back again. With two of my sons currently based in South America, I may find good enough excuse beyond sheer self-indulgence to revisit more of both country and continent. On this trip time was our enemy and required a pre-planned and booked itinerary that, once organised, gave the illusion of days passing more slowly so packed as they were with experiences. In fact we barely spent more than a single night in any one place, returning once or twice only to our base, the cosy Hotel Rosario in La Paz, to collect varying amounts of stored luggage, the layers needed for frozen nights at high Southern Altiplano altitudes abandoned for the thinnest mosquito proof garments to sweat through the Northern Amazonian rain forest.
Like so many places in these peculiar climatic times, Bolivia has had more than its fair or usual share of rain this year. Mudslides have ripped hundreds of houses from their fragile perches high on the rim of the canyon where La Paz sprawls like batter in a bowl, an upside down city where the heights are the purview of the poor and the harshest weather conditions while the rich populate the more temperate residential streets, the malls and cafes at the base. A government attempt to cancel carnival this month after natural disasters that have left thousands homeless was stopped short by public outcry. Those homeless people and their neighbours and communities look forward to carnival as the best holiday of the year and are not about to give up their healing days of pleasure to the pervading gloom whether or not they have a roof over their heads.
Carnival was just beginning on our last day in La Paz, the streets crammed with children; small girls in dressed up versions of the ‘chola’ costume of indigenous Aymara women that includes perfect brown or black bowler hats balanced neatly above long plaits of hair finished with decorative tassles; masked boys armed with silly string spray cans, huge plastic water pistols or water filled balloons for festive soakings; incandescent wigs, fairy wings and spangles; tight tights and leotards; everyone smiling and talking; circulating, buying and bargaining among the rows of heaving snack stalls piled with stacks of beer cans, plastic litre bottles of clear neat alcohol and tumbled bundles of paper decorations.
Those plastic bottles of alcohol are a standard ingredient of the gifts required to be taken to the miners scratching a living from the meagre remaining resources of the warren of tunnels in the once rich silver hill at Potosi, the Cerro Rico. This high city in the central highlands of Bolivia is a Unesco heritage site for its central colonial streets and squares and importance as home of the former National Mint of Bolivia. Potosi is nonetheless poverty stricken; its outskirts a scramble of dwellings inhabited by miners on the barren hillsides wherein they work independently in dangerous and unregulated conditions, ever hopeful of the rare treasure that will raise them above their surroundings.
Tourism into the mines is adding a little icing to the miners’cake as suitable gifts, the coca leaves and alcohol essential to dull the discomfort of their work, must be bought at the miners’ market for offerings to both men and their guardian god. Tio (Uncle) is usually represented as a devilish horned figure suitable to the hellish depths and conditions in which the miners work. Miners chew coca leaves for hours before and during their time in the mines. Other gifts may be cigarettes and sticks of dynamite, not something one often finds in the average hardware store. We arrived on Men’s day in Potosi which meant other, more cheerful additions to our gifts; improbable great bunches of white daisies, confetti, streamers and beer to be clumsily carried into the muddy, crumbling tunnel to hell, hampered as we were in ill-fitting gumboots, overalls, helmets falling over the eyes and headlamps attached to enormous batteries that threaten to pull your helmet off or you over backwards. Afer the first few bashes on the head from low beams and rocks, the helmets become a more acceptable discomfort.
The more adventurous can descend to the lowest depths of the mine, crawling in tunnels like potholers. We kept, more or less, on our feet, bashing our helmets on overhead beams and sweating with rising heat and nerves as our torches picked out crystalline growths of arsenic or the cotton wool threads of asbestos. Young boys are often forced into the mines, working with their Fathers, or. instead of a sick or dead provider in order to feed their families; their life expectancy is low – if they survive accident and injury, their lungs, and the young are particularly susceptible, are likely to be destroyed by the miners’ killer, silicosis. Interestingly the teenage miners we met were deemed too young for our bottles of pure alcohol and were only permitted a few cans of beer, a bunch of flowers and a sprinkling of confetti.
A prosperous city like Sucre with its schools, universities and well-kept colonial streets, even the central, and, like Sucre, UNESCO protected areas of Potosi, belie the hardness of life for the majority of indigenous Bolivian people. They,like the miners, scrape a living in inhospitable conditions and are increasingly disenchanted with the policies of their government led by populist and self-styled 'first Amerindian president', Evo Morales. The poor in Bolivia are proud and live in a present where life can be enjoyed or suffered for what it is without overmuch ambition for the further shores of consumerism that remain so far out of reach.
There is little begging; perhaps the occasional very old or infirm individual outside a church; it is clear to tourists that they are usually an irritation with whom miners and others put up for some slight reward. Ordinary people are busy and getting on with their lives and livelihoods, the invading traveller is usually in the way even if he has money and is keen to spend it. You are defied to patronise with your smile or your cash, instead you can take it or leave it - you can buy if you want, go ahead, if not, fine, but don't point your camera and expect a smile. People, especially determined looking cholla women, have better things to do than be a tourist photograph whatever the lure of their photogenic hats.
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