South American family travels

And so to Argentina and Chile on an unusual journey for me with both my husband and my mother along for the ride.  I always feel more foreign in South America than anywhere else – I don’t know the continent and while I can just about manage a road sign or a menu I don’t speak Spanish. I understand even less of the various accents of South American countries where the citizens of each are proud of their own and damn that of their nearest neighbour.  Argentineans and Chileans in any case are always ready to traduce each other.  Certainly their capital cities are in remarkable contrast: Buenos Aires wears an air of age and crumbling grandeur overlaid chaotically with contemporary poverty and the poor urban planning of a city growing out of control. It is full of atmosphere and confusion, a seductive combination for the inquisitive traveller until a blatant mugging, my mother had a gold chain snatched in an all too face to face confrontation, outside the great baroque Theatre Colon brings into too sharp a focus the potential for violence in an increasingly bankrupt state with vast gulfs between rich and poor. 

 Santiago, Chile, on the other hand, appears, ‘though it is not entirely the case, a tightly controlled city. It is moving forward fast in terms of new buildings and new foreign investors joining the handful of hugely rich Chilean families who have held most of the business strings in Chile for many years. They by and large are seen to have a social conscience and a desire to spend their money well, whether or not this will be the case with foreigners bringing business in and taking the profits out will depend on government and governance.  Meanwhile there is a sense that this small capital is readying itself for a boom and growing both culturally and financially – for now for the tourist, the culture is spare and any older edifices as graffiti decorated on their exteriors as they are in Buenos Aires. 

At the moment an extraordinary exhibition of drawings by Paula Lynch in the Bellas Artes with a surprisingly successful installation of men’s shirts in the main hall by Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen plus a collection of drawings by many of the great surrealists and with more contemporary shows to come should encourage visitors rather more than the permanent collection of decidedly mixed and slightly depressing domestic exhibits. 

Those in search of pre-Colombian art and artefacts at their best should hurry out to the Santa Rita vineyard, an hour or so’s drive outside Santiago to revel in the small Museo Andino  set up by the late owner of Santa Rita to show his personal collection of South American work.  A visit to Santa Rita which is one of the oldest established wineries in Chile and looks more beautiful than most, was part of a Chilean  itinerary devised by my son who is currently working in Santiago.  Knowing his stepfather well, lunch and dinner were well to the fore in the planning and a delicious lunch, plenty of wine of course, in the cool refectory dining room at Santa Rita was followed by a stay at the even more remarkable winery currently being set up by Norwegian born billionaire Alex Vik.

Here in the MIllahue Valley, the wine expert Patrick Vallette is creating something extraordinary; a vast winery with an entirely innovative daylight friendly membrane roof, a staggering acreage of new vines and new wine under the Vik label and a 22 room luxury hotel with spectacular views over the whole area, which will also be a haven for indigenous fauna and flora including the huge spiders my husband was so keen to find.

Thwarted of his ambition to see an armadillo in Patagonia he did manage to find one large black hairy spider at Vik to make up.  Plan South America, Harry Hastings’ travel company based in Buenos Aires and catering largely for the wealthy middle and old aged traveller and well out of my usual sphere had not necessarily bargained for demands of this sort when they organised our Argentinian/Chilean Patagonian travels.  I admitted defeat early on with the planning of this journey knowing that the ‘well we can probably get an overnight bus’ or ‘I don’t know where breakfast will be’ would not play well with an impatient and demanding husband in tow so I succumbed to being middle aged or old if not wealthy.  My Mother of course would probably have managed the overnight buses and lack of feeding entirely successfully but Plan did arrange our travels beautifully and we stayed in places in Patagonia that I doubt we would have reached without them. 

In Buenos Aires we stayed in L’Hotel Palermo, one of the small boutique hotels in Palermo the most villagey district of the city with its cobbled streets, cool bars and small designer shops, luckily filling up with winter collections so not too much temptation there even with our present state of UK permawinter. L’Hotel Palermo is pretty and comfortable although lateish check in times when arriving from a long flight are never perfect even if they are standard.  The Palermo did its best, getting us into one room where my mother and I fought for first shower while my husband slumbered snoringly on the bed until lunch.

Dogs are everywhere in Buenos Aires, in Argentina and Chile altogether. whether the well-trained sheep and cattle dogs, pampered pets being walked in crowds by professional walkers round the precincts of the city and its parks or endless happily well-fed strays.  In Santiago they sleep in the shadow of the Moneda Palace with its presidential offices and uniformed guards; they are streetwise characters, traffic aware and always apparently friendly.  In Buenos Aires apart from the astonishingly well behaved walking groups often beached in specially cordoned park areas, the street dogs walk carefully across pedestrian crossings looking to right and left or wait for a surge of human traffic as a signal that pedestrian signs have turned green.  In villages and cities doggie congregations gather near likely food outlets and restaurants and in small towns one notices water containers on pavements attached by string to a window frame for the convenience of any passing mutt.  In the port town of Valaparaiso in Chile occasional street kennels are graffiti painted to match the current urban decor.

Harry suggested a range of restaurants for lunches and dinner in Buenos Airess between visits to the fantastic collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts; a sort of ritual homage to Evita's grave and more extraordinary tombs in Recoleta Cemetery; the Plaza Major with its protest groups and famous pink palace, the Casa Rosado; the uninspiring Cathedral en fete for the new Pope, it's former cardinal archbishop; and the other major sites and wanderings of the city.  We usually got it wrong with lunch when we didn't make it recommended spots due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time but we didn't fall so low as one of the many Macdonalds outlets. 

The restaurant Resto stands out for me although my mother and I got lost in the adjacent streets and thought we might never get to this peaceful and minimal high-ceilinged room tucked away in a building without obvious signs.  It is worth it ‘though and particularly if you are all steaked out on quantities of Argentina’s best beef – I had grilled vegetables which h sounds deadly but in the hands of a chef trained by Ferran Adria was quite spectacularly good.  At least one dinner passed in a blur of too many caipirinhas and too much good wine and it is good in Argentina and Chile – without ruining while possibly unintentionally wrecking yourself you know you will feel positively bouncing with health the next morning.

From BA we flew South on Patagonian winds to El Calafate and an estancia stay at El Galpon de Glaciar off a barren stretch of road following the shore of Lake Argentina about 30 minutes from the town.  Our flight had taken us over mystery mine workings looking like nasca lines in barren country and over rivers winding endlessly through an empty landscape to an unseen goal. Geese, duck and decidedly brainless black headed swans wander the gravelly beaches of the lake below the Estancia, plovers dip and dive on the lawn, hares fool among gorse bushes and sheep in profusion wander the scrubby ground.  Groups of them have their moment in the sun when tourist groups arrive by bus for an exhibition of horsemanship and dog control by gauchos, raffish and romantic  in their berets and boots, followed by a mutton barbecue.  One has a feeling, looking from a distance, that the sheep however notoriously stupid, know what to do as well as the dogs.

 Galpon de Glaciar is plain, no frills comfort with alarmingly hearty food such as a dish of polenta with tomato sauce and cheese that would have fed an average family easily.  Contrast indeed with our glacier viewing boat trip on a Marpatag excursion where quite aside from the excitement of glaciers and icebergs in intervals of unexpected sun, we were fed a perfectly formed 6 course lunch – o and that excluded the minute muffins and pastries that arrived with coffee shortly after we embarked.  Anyone becomes poetic when faced with icebergs, mysterious, stunningly coloured, vast, dangerous, floating on green amethyst water turning to milky turquoise in changing light and followed by the sight of the great walls of glacier ice glowing blue against black valley shores. 

We landed too in a small sunny cove to see an abandoned farm, sad actually by idyllic in these conditions.  Feral bulls of considerable size watched us from the hillside, the National Park has been unable to remove all the cattle that were once farmed here and now, as wild as cats, they continue to munch their way through a protected habitat. The Marpatag tour avoids the best know Perito Moreno glacier where great chunks of ice explode continually from the ice cliff to join the icebergs.  A pity to miss that sight perhaps but totally exclusive views of the Spezzatini and Uppsala glaciers well away from the tourist razzmatazz, condors overhead and that lunch rather more than made up.

From Calafate, a long flat drive over tundra like blackened country, wrap around nothingness for mile upon mile,  to the Chilean border and on to Cerro Guido estancia hard by the Torres del Paine National Park.  Here there are flocks of guanacos, bright coloured lakes, hurtling rivers and waterfalls, majestic and magnificent condors and wealth of other birdlife.  Actually our clearest, nearest, view of condors was by the Chilean border post when one imagines they are opportunistically intent on the build up of cafe rubbish.

No armadillos ‘though – hard to spot I fear scurrying through the undergrowth imagining stalking pumas on their heels. The guanacos in large herds have sentinels ready to give the alarm but seem remarkably unconcerned by the humans who they now see trekking and camping throughout the park.  I have to say not for me a 9 day slog in that wind – it wasn’t blowing very hard one gathered on this, yet another unexpectedly sunny day, but it took my feet from under me without much difficulty.  Crouching to take a photograph meant not being certain whether getting upright again was even possible.

Large areas of the park have been burned in two recent fires when campers encountered exploding gas canisters or attempted to burn rubbish and it is easy to understand how, in this climate, anything more than grass may take decades to re-grow.  As for the teeth of the Torres themselves, they are a constant draw for the camera lens, fading in and out of cloud and always looking slightly better for this shot than the one before – so several dozen identical, slightly clearer or not images later.....Icebergs here too hard by a windswept area of beach and looking from a distance as if they are growing in the gritty sand.  They seem almost anchored in the bay and pieces of ice float into the shore should you have a cocktail shaker handy for an historical pick me up.

Cerro Guido estancia is almost a village, its own local school now a government requirement; an echoing hall of a sheep shearing shed a hundred years old with machinery to match.  A cook house with a black iron range caters for the workers and a mandatory police post seems not to be regularly manned. There are cottages and bothies, small gardens, dogs as always and sheep by the thousand.  The only one apparently safe from the pot the spoilt Clothilde who is thrives and gets fat as a living lawn mower by the main house of the hotel.  A separate dining room, a healthy stroll from the guest house, contains the biggest barbecue for asado on a mega scale with a chimney outlet more crematorium than kitchen.  A young cook produces food here of some finesse including plenty of fish and the best Madeira style cake ever and serves it in a warm wood lined dining room impermeable to the gusting winds but with a pink early morning view towards the Torres that is hard to beat.

Our final destination before a last leg north to Santiago was via a flight from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt and the lake district of Northern Patagonia.  We stayed at Casa Molino, built originally as a private house on the shores of Lake Llanquihue and with a view across the lake to the Osorno volcano, looking just as a volcano should with its snow capped pointed summit.  Brown hawks pottered about like sparrows on the lawn in the early morning, not the least concerned with any human being doing the same and waiting for the habitual early morning mist to lift from the lake.  In the evening a stage set scene, a pink volcano across a lake turned from navy to aubergine in the setting sun watched from a clover covered lawn with pisco sour in hand. A small winter garden otherwise known as a conservatory allows for the view without the chill and the main suite has a window almost the length of its front wall which occupants seem blissfully unaware provides two way viewing.  Our bathroom was up a wooden staircase from our bedroom right at the top of the house and not possibly ideal for the less agile client.

Our day trip to Chiloe might have been diverted in the absence of the penguin colonies for which the islands are known – they flew south a week or so earlier.  Chiloe has, however, other attractions in its remarkable wooden churches originally established by travelling Jesuit missionaries and later run by Franciscans are now UNESCO World Heritage sites.  Arriving on the main island of the Chiloe archipelago by car ferry, the scenery looks familiar, a combination of Scottish fishing village and Hampshire fields and hedgerows scenically scattered with sheep and cows. There is gorse, small boats and fuchsia bushes, wild lupins in profusion, monkey puzzle trees; indigenous to Patagonia, we had one in the garden in Scotland and it thrived in its ugliness. Even the huge gunnera leaves, nalca here, are familiar as a staple of better dressed garden scheme gardens in the UK. The attractive old larch and cypress shingled wooden houses are something different even if the hardy looking locals might be quite as at home in the Western Isles as here.  Sea lions do what sea lions do on rocks and buoys in the harbours; gulls and less identifiable seabirds wade and fly and away; offshore there are dolphins and whales. 

We drove first to the small town of Dalcahue; Chiloe is much bigger than I had realised and there was no chance in a day of seeing more than a handful of the archipelago’s churches or getting to the capital, Castro.  Our Lady of Sorrows in Dalcahue was quite predictably closed it being a World Heritage site and all. From the outside it is charming, white painted wood but sadly careworn, an image set off nicely by the quartet of vultures perched on the weather vane at the top of the spire.

 On into the market area of the town there are shell fish stalls carrying enormous mussels, cockles and odd barnacly type stuff with red bits that arrived in my lunch to my entire satisfaction. A rather good looking cheese shop sells the local produce which we were assured tastes of not much but works as sandwich filling. The open sided artisan market, for which read tourist but none the less pleasing, is stuffed with coarse knitted jerseys, woolly hats of all shapes and sizes, and balls of deliciously coloured wool which are undoubtedly at their best in a purely ornamental role.  Otherwise baskets, carved wooden bowls and boards and the usual audience of passing dogs. 

In an extraordinary restaurant adjacent to the market and built out over the water,  a wide choice of small busy kitchens vie for trade, each with its own solid looking cook or cooks, all women of a certain age, most with a fondness for particularly lurid eye makeup.  Their cooking is full on fill you up seafood and potatoes in a variety of forms and we tried an assortment.  The most famous Chiloe dish is curanto, a great pile of mixed ham, chicken, shellfish, potatoes and several different potato dumplings helped out with bread or possibly potato bread fried like an unsugared doughnut and quite distressingly good.  Curanto is traditionally layered into a hole in the ground lined and covered with nalca leaves but these days, to its advantage one suspects, it is also cooked in pots.  Its initial aspect is somewhat unprepossessing it must be said but once attacked its individual components prove perfectly delicious.  Beyond that the choice was huge slabs of hake and salmon fried or grilled, all impeccably fresh, this is a major salmon farming area which may be a less good thing in the long run.  Lots more potatoes in every direction and a rather more delicate shellfish broth full of fat shells and those peculiar red bits.

Wobbling back to the car on a sea of fish and wine, we set off into the unknown with our driver/guide, Rodrigo not much more clear about our direction than we were.  He had never been to the churches in the NE of the island before.  We managed to get to the three towered, blue fronted church at Tenaun, the charming church of San Juan and perhaps the most appealing of all, the church of Colo in a tiny hamlet hidden away at what really was the end of the road, a scattering of houses, a handful of cattle and, more eccentrically, a very uncoiffed poodle covered in mud from rolling and a pair of spaniels. The churches themselves were built mainly in the 18^th and 19^th centuries using the shopbuilding techniques so familiar to local artisans and often without  nails.

They have been and continue to be restored under UNESCO auspices but still by the local communities in a tradition of community work and have none of the austerity of European gothic stone or the overblown latin baroque.  These are very much churches for people and for communities and they breathe warmth and friendliness even down to the usual well blooded saintly statues that made locally hold none of the austere horror one is more used too – they too one feels are familiar, a part of the community.  Many of the churches have stars painted on their blue arched ceilings and the decor altogether is decidedly cheerful and welcoming.  Unlike in Dalcahue, in the villages someone could be found to open locked doors with enthusiasm and some pride. 

A traffic jam leading to the ferry was our only hiccup making the Chiloe expedition a longish day but one no to be missed – 2 or 3 more or longer could quite easily be spent on the islands although it is possible that the greedy traveller might turn into a fish flavoured potato dumpling without due care and attention.

Safely arrived in Santiago and delivered to the Plaza El Bosque hotel with old fashioned rooms like small apartments and, on the downside, slightly dubious drains, we did the Santiago sightseeing tour and had a barbecue on a 7^th floor apartment balcony which was a first for me.  Our travels, now in charge of a son instead of a travel expert, were equally carefully organised and aside from winery excursions and capital entertainments involved a night in Valparaiso with its painted houses lining the high streets above the port and the system of rickety funicular elevators to carry passengers up and down from areas not ideally made for large modern cars. Valparaiso is another World Heritage Site but it is a hustling port too with massive container ships as well as Chilean naval cruisers constantly on the move.  Beach going Chileans gravitate to the high rises of neighbouring Vina de Mar but the streets of Valparaiso with their fine line in graffiti art can be wandered round for hours, it was known in the past as Little San Francisco, not to mention watching the comings and goings of the port. 

Valparaiso’s long history makes it a city of monuments too; the oldest stock exchange in South America, the longest continually published Spanish language newspaper in the world and various memorials to Chilean heroes of land and sea including Lord Cochrane, commander of the Chilean navy for Bernardo O’Higgins.  The Museo Naval y Maritimo, the neo-classical former naval college overlooking the port has stained glass windows of both red headed national heroes as well as the balding but apparently equally and perhaps less probably red- headed Arturo Prat, hero of the naval battle of Iquique who crops up in street names all over Chile. The museum itself would be a pleasure for the seriously navally inclined but is a delightful building with enough model ships and odd and ends of this and that to keep the less informed tourist entertained for a half hour or so.

We stayed in the gloriously improbable Brighton bed and breakfast which hangs on to the cliff side in the upper town more by willpower and habit than structural underpinning so far as one can tell.  The Brighton prides itself on its Victorian atmosphere which luckily includes working modern bathrooms, a coffee machine and, less importantly, frosties at breakfast. 

Our cheap air tickets on BA/Iberia meant a night flight to Buenos Aires and no pain for one who habitually passes out as soon as she sniffs an aeroplane interior, for at least 8 hours given half an opportunity.  Bearable leg room in an aisle seat and the lure of the chair back film screen and a good book polished off the remaining hour or 4.  On our return on an Iberia flight from Santiago, no screens in the chairs, a huge man next to me who consumed every morsel of the completely unthinkable Iberia food that appeared plus crisps and sweets non-stop to fill the gaps not plugged by gallons of full fat coke.  I just avoided the health lecture and read a whole Bernard Cornwell book on the basis that anything more serious just wasn’t going to work.  I think I might have slept a bit too before we got to Madrid and the change for a London City that was if anything colder than when we left it. So much for spring springing – autumn in Patagonia is definitely more temperate.

 

The lure of the camera

The Salar de Uyuni is one of the natural wonders of the World. A high salt desert and, yet another Bolivian superlative, the largest salt lake in the World; we saw it in the wet season when shallow water turns the surface into a huge mirror and a source of endless entertainment for photographers. The frontier feel town of Uyuni on the edge of the lake, a former railway junction, is enhanced by the antique train graveyard on its outskirts, a further source of pleasure for sunset photographers when dying light gilds ancient rust with improbable majesty.



In truth the keen photographer finds it almost impossible to put down his camera in this part of the World, remembering only that one extraordinary view or another of a salt mirror or the rocks and coloured lakes, the cacti topped with flowering tonsures, the beautiful barren views of the Siloli desert, not to mention thousands of flying, resting, shuffling flamingos, may need heavy editing before boring the home audience to death.


Regretfully one has to admit that 1 vicuna, a handful of flamingos, the extraordinary rocky ‘Salvador Dali’ landscapes in some areas of the desert that the artist surely must have seen, the steaming, bubbling geezers, friends bathing in a hot spring, and one flaming red or green stretch of water from a mineral coloured lake, may be enough but it is so very irresistible and so very hard to choose one or another from all your thrilling compositions even if they don’t look quite so good in their hundreds at the third viewing on the home computer.....

Bolivian Heights

Much of Bolivia is at literally breath taking altitude. La Paz is the highest capital in the World; Lake Titicaca, the sacred lake so important to the Inca civilisation, one of, if not the highest navigable lakes in the World; Potosi at over 4000 metres and the Siloli desert, where we stayed in a duende haunted hotel at 4,600 metres, the highest desert. Tourist cars carry oxygen cylinders on the Altiplano and headaches are habitual during acclimatisation. We were lucky not to be unduly affected, badly blocked noses the most irritating minor affliction and that occasional moment when, after a brief uphill walk, you take a breath that just isn’t quite there.

After a wet and chilly La Paz, we were caught out too by the sun at altitude, suitably on Sun Island, Isla de Sol, in Lake Titicaca, where we mistakenly basked for long enough in welcome warmth to peel most of the skin off our faces a few days later and make us unusually grateful for the following morning’s pouring rain. The weather cleared in time for a glimpse of snowcapped mountains in the late afernoon light and for a visit to a floating reed island whose occasional inhabitants had fully imbibed the merits of a temporarily captive market.



A visit to the town of Copacabana on the shores of Lake Titicaca, particularly festive on a Sunday, is one of the delights of the lake. The great whitewashed Basilica is a magnet, not only for pilgrims paying respects to a miracle working image of the virgin but for drivers of new cars and trucks decorated with flowers and ‘baptised’ outside the cathedral with copious quantities of beer. Aymara women complain vociferously and reasonably about photographs but may be prepared to relent at the cost of a good sale from their market stall and, standard in Bolivia where hats, the ubiquitous bowlers and other more rakish styles, are de riguer, there is an excellent hat shop hard by the cathedral – buyers should be warned that transporting more such squashable purchases than can be carried on one head is nothing by trouble.



We were mistakenly seduced again by headwear in the constitutional capital of the country at Sucre, where the Supreme Court sits in a building of imperial splendour surrounded by schools and universities in this beautiful colonial city. A shop called Sombrero distracted us even from Sucre chocolate, noted for its particular perfection and sold in dozens of boutique outlets where chocolate cake and chocolate espresso appear to be a standard breakfast. Sucre, with its spacious squares, well-kept churches and monasteries, its bars, sophisticated shops and comfortable hotels has an affluent feel borne out by its clean streets and well-dressed population.

Bolivian Life

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.