Field Report 16:
Bolivia - June 16, 1999

By Jeff Bell
 

(From Luxembourg, about my travels during the third week in May.)

In truth, the contrast between Peru and Boliva is not overly great, comparitively speaking. And I only spent two nights in Boliva, much of it being violently ill in my hotel room in La Paz. Still, it sounds so dang exotic to give Boliva top billing. One of our stereotypes aboard is that we Americans begin with lists, describing what we've done in terms of how many, how much, perhaps not bothering to relate or give any mention to the meaningful stuff. Europeans in particular get a kick of this, they've got a couple dozen countries around them and in general would prefer NOT to visit them all.

For me, when I think of Boliva, one thing comes to mind: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Boliva? My brother concurs, we share that perspective. The scene of the trio arriving by train in outback Boliva burrowed deep into my grey matter. And true to form, nothing is ever quite what you expect. I arrived in Boliva by bus, not train. And La Paz overwhelmed me with it's dramatic setting and wall to wall people. I really liked it.

Days near the equator are nearly uniformly 6am to 6pm year round, and the best hours are around sunrise and sunset, so it seems that everyone has settled into a pattern of getting up just before dawn. The morning of the Boliva trip I was picked up by another member of the Byzantine web of happy, prosperous family members, relatives and friends of the original lady in Cuzco who had set up my entire week. She suggested a trip to Boliva.

On my trip out I settled into a seat alongside an American woman with lots of Peru visits and more than a few gripes about, well, the problems in the world. I felt like it was a long mutual support session with me being strangely acutely aware of how often we said "right, right" to each other, feeling like we really got the world figured out, and strangely aware of how I would only relate that way with another American.

After a multi-step border crossing process at a sleepy outpost, we stopped in Copacabana, a place I certainly had pictured differently. The road into Boliva was dirt just over the border for awhile, a misleading harbinger, but not entirely. Copacabana was only a few dusty cobbled streets wide and extremely quiet. It was the middle of the work week and barely a soul stirred, the wind was the main thing you noticed, along with the beautifully colored, faded sides of the buildings, and the peacefully slow pace that people moved to.

On the afternoon bus ride into La Paz, I sat across from a college aged American girl who represented a certain supercharged American stereotype I'd seen before in Peru. It was as if she was acutely aware that she was experiencing something special in her life, but every moment, manufacturing a whole show out of her aliveness, speaking Spanish more to hear herself speak it than for necessity. It was at the same time great to see, interesting, yet disturbing to feel that there was something competitive as much as beautiful to her excitement—competition with parents, friends, peers, who knows. She was experiencing what .000001% of the world's population gets to do, and having a great time of it, reflecting the cultures she was seeing in her dress, jewelry and motion, but certainly not humble. I remembered a scene on the Inca trail when a likeminded boyfriend counterpart like this interrupted his girlfriend midstream with some jarring correction having to do with how she was misusing the imperfect command form. I thought of my brother who subscribes to the notion that a certain stupidity seems to come with college training.

La Paz is situated high in a valley that falls steeply and suddenly out of the high altitude, barren Andean plains. And I'm talking high. One flight of stairs leaves you breathless in La Paz. The air is remarkably clear up there, making the drop over into the La Paz valley dramatic, where you are suddenly greeted with a massive, almost fake looking spread of solid tan colored rooftops like the contours of the insides of a cinammon cake. People are literally scattered everywhere along the streets, and an interesting mix of traditional Quechua and Aiymara people and typical big city folks. Some foreigners describe La Paz as dirty, I would call it lightly dusted and with character.

The next day I took a day trip out to some Inca ruins, eating some soup which got me good and sick for the next few days. Boliva is a relatively inexpensive country in South America and it is more heavily traveled by Europeans than Americans for some reason. We seem to overlook our Southern neighbors more often than are absorbed by them. On this trip there were all sorts of Europeans represented (I remember some Hungarians), but no other Americans.

Boliva is the least well to do of the South American countries, being landlocked for one thing. Bolivianos, the coins, look like arcade tokens, and my hotel, while looking like a four star hotel, suffered periodically from the fact that the water in La Paz isn't particularly reliable. You got tuned in to recognizing which gurgling sounds meant water coming back on and which was water going off. Still, La Paz seemed to me to be a lot better place to live than grey, desert like Lima, and the city itself was plenty wealthy and full of good food, stores and things to do.

The final trip out of Boliva and the high plains of Peru included a plane flight from Puno to Lima over the Andes. Oh, the Andes. It's hard to describe just how powerful, large, and different it felt to see this small stretch of the Andes from the airplane windows. I feel like I came away from this trip feeling that the Andes are the mother of all of South America. Everything seems to flow from the Andes. The brown waters of the Amazon are brown from the silt washed down from the Andes. The backbone of the entire continent is this single, enormous stretch of mountains. The Amazon itself is nothing but a large flat delta just over the other side of the Andes (Iquitos, Peru is only 200 meters elevation).

We made a stop in Ariquipa, smack in the middle of a series of snow covered volcanic Andean peaks that looked so inviting I wanted to jump out of the plane and run up the sides of their long slopes. Up high above us I could see complex walls, cornices, and rounded slopes that were the stuff of high altitude mountaineers. I was struck at how little these mountain climbers focus on describing what is one of the great rewards of what they do— the awe inspiring views that they get. I came away from this trip to South America feeling incredibly jealous of birds, wondering just how deeply they enjoy the views.

Even the name, Andes, has always had some sort of magical feel for me, perhaps because of it's proximity and close phonetic relation to another magical word—Incas. Only a couple letter changes difference. This was the place the Incas chose to rule over, a stretch of the Andes from Ecuador to Chile. It's amazing how all humans when they see a map, instinctively understand that a map is an arial view. And a compression. And we grossly underestimate, are incapable of comprehending just how much grandness is being represented in our maps. It's said that when the tradewinds are blowing strong against the Andes, fluctuations in the speed of the rotation of the Earth can be detected. This mountain range is very, very large.

Next—the last week in May, the Galapagos islands.
 

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