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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "robinasia" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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05:28 pm
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Walk On
What a day. I'm back in La Paz, the city in the stars on the high plains. This is going to be my last journal entry on this particular site. For a while, it looked like I was going to have to sign out on a sombre, defeated note, but now I'm feeling significantly better, so I'm going to end things (but only on this particular address), with joy and gratitude. I logged onto the internet this afternoon for the first time in days and was confronted with shocking news from home that left me in a mess. But, as I say, it appears now that things aren't as bad as they looked at first. Things have been said that needed to be said, and my heart is warm as I write these lines. So, let me close things off with the record of a wonderful experience I've been priveleged enough to enjoy over the last few days.
It started in Coroico, that gorgeous town on the side of a lush green mountain. I had a room looking directly down on the plaza, which was vibrant with cheer and life on a Saturday night. I bought some beer and sat up there on a chair, looking out the window with Neil Young and Nick Cave playing behind me on my speakers. By and by, I went down to the plaza and joined in the weekend festivities with some of the handicrafts sellers and the travellers they were hanging around with. We ended up staying up until morning, playing guitars, swinging pois, drinking beer. I met this lovely Barcelona girl, and then realised that I didn't want to leave Coroico just yet. But I was told it was too late to change my ticket to the following day. So, at noon, with very little sleep, I got in a minibus taxi that was to take us to the foot of the mountain where we would await the bus to Rurrenabacque, a town in the Amazon basin in the North. There were two other gringos on the bus; the rest were outrageously drunken Bolivians; it seems there was yet another festival taking place that day. All three of us gringos were Rurre bound, and we got talking on the dusty road down below where we sat and waited for our bus. There were Matt, an Arizonian, and Natalie, a Kiwi. To our mutual and pleasant surprise, it turned out that we had quite a bit in common; most significantly, we were all long term travellers with no clear sense of where our lives were headed but deeply in love with life on the road. In fact, although I've been away for almost a year and a half now, my trip was the shortest of the three of us. It's uncommon in these parts, I've found, to meet travellers who aren't on a tight itinerary, rushing on to see as much as they can before getting back to whatever it is they do. The three of us had a cold beer and eventually the bus trundled along and on we jumped.
We had a few hours of daylight on the bus, and, yet again, the scenery was breathtaking, and in a different way than all those other breathtaking Bolivian landscapes I've written about. We followed the course of a river that flowed far below us, at the end of a sheer drop of maybe one hundred metres. Jungle mountains and cliffs rose above us. There were some hairy moments en route, when I found myself gripping the edge of the seat and praying we wouldn't tumble to a fiery death in the river valley below. At one point, Natalie and I were discussing how many accidents there surely were on these narrow, snaking, dusty clifftop roads, when she looked down and pointed out the smashed blue carcass of a truck that had met its end in precisely the way we were discussing. Danger aside, I was ecstatic, thinking over and over that Bolivia is fast becoming my all time favourite country to travel in. (That almost feels like a blasphemy against mighty India, where so much happened for me. But here it's different; another, just as valid side of me is being nourished in Bolivia, even if this looks like a purely self-destructive side from the outside. But believe me, this is me at my happiest.) Another amusing, crazy memory: when we stopped off for dinner, after our meal we stood beside the bus, talking and waiting until it was time to board again. A stupendously hammered Bolivian man stood beside us, mumbling incoherently to himself, his fly open and his shirt poking through. He began to dance, to perform the splits, and to demonstrate karate kicks for us, despite the fact that we were more or less ignoring him. It was hilarious, though a little sad, and I really had to wonder what was going on in that man's chaotic mind.
All being experienced travellers, we were well stocked up on Valium and sleeping pills to get us through that bumpy, twisting, fourteen hour descent to the lush and green lowlands of the Amazon Basin (I only use the tablets for such journeys now, and no longer for recreational purposes, and it can't be denied that they make bearable journeys that would otherwise be intolerable). Still, I only managed a couple of hours sleep (it's the most you can hope for on a Bolivian bus), and we were all fairly jaded when we got into Rurre in the morning. But we all agreed that this was a good place. It was sunny, properly warm, just like being back in Asia. And Rurre is one of those towns that's 'touristy', but in the positive sense of the word, like the town of Pai in Thailand. It's mellow, quiet, tranquilo all the way. Walking from the bus station, we were greeted by a cheery old American man with a white beard. Natalie asked him what brought him to Rurre, sensing a crazy story behind his smiling face. She wasn't wrong; he began to relate to us how a Romanian man convicted of murder had predicted that the Apocalypse was almost upon us, and that four American cities would be destroyed soon, so he had decided it was time to move somewhere less endangered. He's been in Rurre for ten years now. There was another guy, also American, driving around in a wacky wooden motor vehicle selling homemade banana bread and granola bars. White paint on the wooden panels on the sides and front of his vehicle declared that, "Evolution is a fairy tale for grownups", and that, "The Da-Vinci Code is ridiculous". Silly old bastard; I'd have liked to have gotten into a fiery argument with him, and no doubt I would have if I stuck around Rurre for longer than I did. That said, his banana bread was fairly special.
The others knew of a nice hostel and we got a room with three beds. It was a bit pricier than my usual places of accomodation, but worth it. There were serene patios with colourful crazy paving, and a ring of hammocks sheltered from the sun by a canopy. Ah, hammock life. It had been a while. Hear me now; the man who invented the hammock has a special place in my heart. Having checked in, we had breakfast and coffee and then went to one of the many tour companies in Rurre - again, one of the others had a recommendation - and booked a three day tour of the pampas, the wetlands north of Rurre, for the following day. Matt and Natalie passed the afternoon on the viewing point up a hill out of town, but I was too exhausted to do anything but lay in a hammock and read. I nodded off for a while. We went out that night to the Mosquito bar. There was great comradarie between us three, who had clicked so easily and naturally together, and I felt good about the upcoming trip up the Beni River into the pampas. I knew, though, that I needed sleep, and should have a reasonably early night that night. The thing was, I met a girl, a terrific English girl whose name was Bliss (I seem to keep meeting people with great names), and I hung around with her until the early hours on a hammock on a hotel rooftop overlooking the river.
Morning came, and I barely made it in time for the tour. As soon as the jeep took off to take us to the River Beni, I felt terrible. My stomach was cramped, I was nauseous. But I stuck with it and when we got to the riverbank we all had an ice cold beer. Never, never, has the first mouthful from a cold can tasted so good. I was revived. I had heard the pampas tour was a fine opportunity to see the wildlife of the Amazon Basin, but I was taken aback when, before we had even boarded the boat, a long canoe with an outboard engine, we had our first glimpse of the pink, freshwater dolphins that populate the river. Then, when we were boarded and moving (along with a Swiss guy and a couple from England and Sweden), it was a matter of seconds before we saw our first alligator. After that, we saw them every few metres, some of them monstrous creatures that slunk sinisterly into the water as we approached. Also, there were caimans, similar to the gators but black, and more aggressive and dangerous, too. Then there were taipurs, or something like it; comical, cute and chubby rodents the size of pigs that one day are sure to feature in a Disney film. There were paradise birds, who made crazed noises and had punk-rock mohawk hairdos. There were spider monkeys, hordes of them, cheeky, funny little yellow creatures with yellow bodies and white, pointy ears who came to our boat to devour the banana that Negro, our highly likeable guide and boatman, held out for them. There were herons, flamingos, eagles, and those toothpicker birds of children's book fame that land in the mouths of alligators and clean away the scraps of stuck meat.
We came to a bend in the river and Negro cut the engine. We heard the whoosh of exhaled air and saw the pink, large dolphins jumping and frollicking in the water. We could swim if we wanted, Negro told us. The words were barely out of his mouth and we had all dived into the waters, delighted by the refreshment after the hours spent in the high jungle sun. I love to swim in water that isn't too cold, as this water was perfect. Having dolphins periodically surface a few metres away made it all the more wonderful. After our swim, we continued on upriver, reaching the last of the riverside huts (one of the things that appealed to us about our tour company was that it would take us further upriver than the groups, so we would be more remote and isolated). We put our bags in the bedroom and kicked back in the hammocks, relaxing and awaiting dinner, which turned out to be a lavish feast. The cook was a fine and friendly lady who always had a smile for us during our stay there. The people of Rurrenabacque generally seemed content with their lives. After nightfall, Negro took us out in the boat again, and we shined our torches towards the reeds at the banks of the river, where now all that could be seen of the innumerable gators and caimans were their eyes, red dots glowing menacingly in the gloom. For the rest of the night we swung lazily in the hammocks, drinking Bacardi, listening to the countless sounds of the jungle at night.
The plan for the next morning was to go walking out into the marshes, the pampas, and try to find an anaconda. But I awoke with pains in my stomach, and had to make several trips to the toilet. No doubt I'd eaten something dodgy in a local comedor. I felt dreadful, and in no state to go exploring. But when I told Negro I'd be skipping the trip because I had a dodgy stomach, he made a gesture for me to wait just where I was. Before long, the cook came to my hammock with a cup of specially prepared tea which she smilingly assured me would end my discomfort. It did. The others told me afterwards that Negro had took a knife out to the jungle and took the bark of a tree and the leaves of another, the ingredients for a natural remedy to stomach troubles that saved me from a day of discomfort and unhappiness. Later in the day, we had another opportunity to swim with the dolphins. It was then I learned that swimming with the dolphins wasn't just a pleasant, romantic kind of thing to do; it was the only safe way you could swim in the river. The dolphin, explained negro, is the king of the river, and it eats piranhas and fends off the caimans that would undoubtedly attack us and drag us to our watery deaths if we didn't have the protection of our mammalian friends. As we swam, we could see gators on the banks, looking on at us but knowing they'd be in for trouble if they got any ideas about dining on gringo flesh. At one point, Negro left the boat and captured a baby gator, holding it by the jaws so it couldn't snap his hand off and so that its tail, which is a formidable weapon, was paralysed. But we noticed that the index finger of his right hand was missing from the knuckle upwards. He explained that one day, he had caught a full sized gator for a tour group, but had let his guard down for a split second and it was chomped off. He was lucky, he said; it could just as easily been a whole hand or a forearm.
In the evening, we took the boat downstream and fished for piranhas. Moa, the Swedish girl, was understandably upset, being a vegetarian, and she sat unhappily alone as we took part in our bloodsport. I caught two piranhas, though I also managed to hook a small sardine through the eye, no doubt causing the creature awful suffering, and I felt bad about it. The piranhas we caught were served up with dinner that night, but my stomach wasn't back to full strength so I had to decline the opportunity to sample them. Apparently they taste like fish.
The third day was mostly spent travelling, first back down the river to the base from where we started, then back down that most formidably dusty of roads and into Rurre. Natalie, Matt and I checked into the same rooom again. We showered, relaxed for a while, had a beer, and went out to meet the others for one last bash in the Mosquito bar. It was a fine night, and in the morning, the other two got up for coffee and breakfast to see me off on my long, arduous bus journey back to La Paz. I believe they'll be reading this, and it's hardly necessary for me to say that they are a pair of fine souls for whom I have a big love, and it was very decent of the cosmos to throw the three of us together for that happy, worry-free period. Salúd.
I think this hasn't, perhaps, been my most interestingly written journal entry to date, as there's so much that happened I find myself just drily recording events, not stopping for reflections or what have you. Plus, as I've said, it's been a demanding day, and I feel drained. The bus to La Paz was among the most difficult I've yet had. I had intended to continue on directly to Potosí today to make sure I was there in time for my training-in period, but I just couldn't face another journey so soon so I checked back into El Carraterro for the night. I should still make it in time. Truth be told, I've been burning myself out lately, and it will do me good to get to this new job in Potosí and have some downtime.
So, to everybody who's read my musings on these pages since I kicked it off back in Vietnam last year, many thanks and take care of yourselves. Much, much love to you all and please, for whoever's worrying about me a lot, please don't. If you knew how happy I was, how beautiful all this was for me, it would all look different.
I will set up another journal site (I can see now that some things are just not appropriate to relate to people who worry a lot about me), and so if anybody wants to read what I'm up to, my email address is robdoyle3@hotmail.com. Send me a message and I'll give you the new address.
Rob Doyle, signing out.
Take care my friends.
Current Location: La Paz
Current Music: The Verve - A Northern Soul
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06:33 pm
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A Postcard to the Future
I've arrived at Coroico, a village or small town perched high up the side of a verdant and cloud enveloped mountain. Today the skies above Coroico are a moody grey, a snug fit for the melancholy of the hour. It was only three and a half hours to here from La Paz, time I spent finishing a book and looking out at the stunning landscapes (Bolivian scenery is rarely anything less than stunning). We passed over, around and beneath great barren mountains of brown and grey rock with sparse and hardy vegetation. Then, as we descended, we penetrated a wall of thick cloud. When we came out of the clouds, the scenery had changed; no longer were we in the spare and rugged altiplano. Although we were still high in the mountains, there was now an abundance of trees and plant-life covering the mountainsides all around us. Forests replaced bare rock. Part of the trip here saw us descending the 'World's Most Dangerous Road' between La Paz and Coroico, which every day sees hordes of tourists paying around fifty U.S. dollars for the privilege of cycling down the notorious road, too tense with concentration to pay much heed to the incredible views, as they focus on not hurtling off the sheer six hundred metre drop to their deaths. I've never considered myself an entrepenaur, but the success of the 'World's Most Dangerous Road' bike trips has been the spark that ignited an idea for a venture of my own. It will be called 'Robert Doyle's Hammer Attack Challenge'. The ingenuity of the plan and, I hope, its future success, lies in the simplicity of its conception. Basically, it goes like this: you pay me fifty quid (it's an extra five for a safety helmet, if you don't have one of your own) and I come charging at you with a hammer, lashing out wildly. If you manage to get away, great. You'll receive a t-shirt printed with the words, 'I survived Robert Doyle's Hammer Attack Challenge!'. If you don't succeed in getting away from me and my hammer, well...
So Coroico; Coroico is small and pleasant. There's not much to do here other than take short treks to the nearby beauty spots, but I arrived too late in the day to get to anywhere other than a viewing point twenty minutes uphill (and I didn't even go there), so I contented myself to strolling around the sloped cobblestone streets, almost devoid of cars. There's a lovely plaza here, complete with a row of dreadlocked handicrafts dealers hailing from various parts of South America, a fixture at every plaza in every town in the region. I won't be sticking around here; I've already booked a ticket for the bus to take me to the jungle town of Runnebacque, on the Amazon, which leaves tomorrow in the early afternoon. I calculated that if I want to take a trip down the river and still make it back in time to Potosí, I can't afford to dally here. Coroico; will I even remember it's name in a year's time, or half a year's? I very much doubt it. Most likely, my memories of the town will be as indistinct and hazy as the recollections of a dream. I'm reminded of a town I spent only a single night in, in Cambodia, just after I had split from Dave when he was heading South and I wanted to see the North. I've no idea now what that town was called, and only a few images and impressions stored tenuously in my memory by which to recall it. Some day (maybe), I'll read back on this journal entry and perhaps it will help me to salvage a little bit of Coroico from the oblivion of forgetting.
Current Location: Coroico
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11:12 am
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Don't Look Back
Last night the restlessness came on like a fever, and I decided that I'd leave La Paz this morning. I'm here now in the district of Ville Fatima, waiting for a bus to take me to the small town of Coroico, which I'm told is very pretty, and a popular weekend spot for the more moneyed La Pazean. I don't have very much time before I'm due back in Potosì to begin working for Koala Tours, and that's given me the imperative to keep running. Maybe, if I don't stay too long in Coroico (and I probably won't, no more than a couple of days), I'll make it to the steamy jungles of the North, to take a boat trip down the Amazon. As I move into ever smaller towns, away from the capital, it's possible that I won't have much internet access, so this might be the last entry I write here for a while.
La Paz is a fantastic city, one of the most intriguing and exciting that I've yet to visit. But my time here has been marked by a troubled mind. Yesterday won't go down as one of the happiest days in recent memory. I slept late after the indulgences of the previous night, and woke bad-tempered, lonely and bored. I wandered La Paz, swapped some books, ate when I wasn't hungry and then ate again too soon. But things picked up in the evening. I rejoined the others at the hostel, Charo and the Anarchist Republic and a couple of others. We listened to some music, talked, went out for a beer. Better than hiding away on my own to brood and wonder what to do. Later, I ate a disgusting piece of meat on a skewer. What was it?, I asked the vendor. Meat of the heart, he replied. Meat of the heart.
Current Location: La Paz (at a bus station, waiting to leave)
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06:43 pm
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And God is Never Far Away
(I can write what follows with greater openness and less anxiety because I know now that my mother won't be reading it. But anyone else who will be upset by talk of drugs and such things really shouldn't read it. I've caused all kinds of trouble recently with what I've written about, and this has really been getting me down, to the extent that I've regretted giving the address of this journal to various people. Perhaps, soon I will change the address and give it only to certain select people, and if anyone else wants it they can email me.)
I first heard about Vivian's when I was recuperating from sickness in a hostel in Cordoba. A gringo traveller told me that in La Paz there was an underground, after-hours club that all the taxi drivers knew about where you could take cocaine, not legally, but openly, at your table with your drinks. They served coke from behind the bar, he said. It was more expensive and not as good as the stuff you can find on the street, but the place was still very popular, especially with travellers. Apparently, the owners of Vivians made regular payoffs and had some kind of agreement with the authorities so they could run their club and sell the drugs with minimal hassle. I heard about Vivian's a few more times along the way. I knew I would go there, not because I thought I'd like it, but just to appease my curiosity.
Last night I visited Vivian's with Charo and an Irish-Beligian-Italian-miscellaneous who called himself the Anarchist Republic of Odis, or something like it, refusing a proper name until there was no longer a single child-slave on the planet. (Only then, he said, would he or anyone else deserve a real name.) We started off in the hostel, drinking beer and eating a tasty vegetarian meal with a gang of the others. Guitars were strummed, spirits were high. I knew I wanted to try coke in La Paz - there was no way I was coming to South America without sampling it's most famous export - and I was planning on going to Vivian's later on. But I had been advised that the stuff they sold there was rubbish and overpriced, so I asked the receptionist at the hostel, and he said yeah, no problema. But then the dreadlocked Argentinian that the others buy their dope, and sometimes coke from, appeared, offering to get some for me at a better price. He came back in an hour, and I cut up the coke with the others who had chipped in on it. I tried a line with a stingy Bolivian who kept bumming off everyone all night, for beer, cigarettes, cocaine. It was good. We stayed in the hostel until perhaps one a.m., listening to music, having a good time. Then we went out to a bar. The stingy La Paz guy suggested the fake Hard Rock Cafè, as he was barred from the pub we had wanted to go to, though he couldn't recall why this was so.
The Hard Rock cafè was dreadful, gringo-heavy and accordingly overpriced, with shit music that started out, admittedly, at least in the hard rock genre, though in the dodgier end of even that spectrum, but before long turned to awful hip-hop, R'n'B, and Raggaton, the blend of latino music and hip-hop I've unhappily discovered in South America, and one of the vilest musical styles I've ever encountered. No matter; we sat over our beers and I got talking to the aforementioned Anarchist Republic, who turned out to be a far more amiable and likeable figure than his self-given moniker would suggest. I listened to what he had to say, enjoying the conversation, though occassionally I would feel that icy emotional plunge and have to disappear into the toilets to replenish the pleasure centres with another line. I've never had any great love for cocaine. For me, it's always been the drug of capitalism, of vacuous yuppies and vapid rockstars. Moreover, on the few previous times I've tried it, the effects never impressed me too much. Usually, what would happen would be that I'd feel high enough for perhaps half an hour, a little longer if I was lucky or if the coke was better than usual, and then would come the chill, the brutal sense of hollowness and dread, an unnameable but intense emotional pain that would leave me wild eyed with anxiety to take some more and postpone that awful drop. But this coke was better, and though the high was no more than moderate, incomparable to that of ecstacy or even speed, at least there was a significantly longer period before it transmuted suddenly into its stark opposite. I only noticed it by the contrast with the others (neither Charo nor the Republic were taking any coke), but the cocaine certainly kept me wide awake. It was perhaps half past three when the three of us left the others and the club behind and got in a taxi to take us to Vivian's, and I had been up since early that morning, but I still felt fresh and alert.
When the taxi pulled up on a deserted street my first thought was that we were too late and that Vivian's was closed. The building the driver pointed to was dark and no movement was to be seen within. But we got out and found a dark stairway leading down to the basement of the building. Here, we heard the noise of cheesy disco music and saw, through a locked door of iron bars, the garish lights of the club. The doormen opened up - it took a while - and we were admitted. Surprisingly, the staff were friendly, not the gruff contemptuous gangsters I was expecting, though there's no doubt that they were all enlivened by ample doses of cocaine, and of a better stock than that sold to the tourists. The tourists; there were plenty of them, of us, in there, so early on a Friday morning. The design of the club was an unfortunate throwback to the seventies of disco and glitterballs, mirrors everywhere. We sat down, and soon a tall, dark, pretty girl of indeterminate nationality came to our table. She was completely wired, more so than I was, and eager to make sure we were all happy and got what we wanted. She was a bit surprised that we didn't want any cocaine. We ordered one beer between the three of us, as it was sold at an extortionate price. My mouth was fiendishly dry by now, but I had been instructed to leave my bottle of water in the backroom between the club proper and the locked door that led to the stairway and the street. A bottle of water from the bar cost ten times what you usually pay for it.
Soon I needed another line. I found the bathroom, behind the dancefloor with the mirrored walls and ceiling, where gringos danced with the occassional Bolivian whore to that terrible music. The door to the bathroom, in fact, was part of the mirrored wall of one side of the dancefloor, giving the impression of some kind of secret chamber. Inside, I was unnerved to find that the bathroom, too, had mirrors everywhere. One-way mirrors, said my paranoia; there must be cameras back there, or just people watching, to see if any of the club's clients were being cheeky and bringing their own supply in with them. As I took a piss I gazed into the mirrors and imagined what might happen if I were to put the toilet lid down and do a line; perhaps they'd be waiting for me as soon as I left the toilet and would throw me out; worse, maybe they would make an example of me and give me over to the police. But fuck, I really wanted that line, so I flushed the toilet, put down the lid, and cut out the coke and hoovered it up as quickly as I could. When I was putting it away there was a sudden rapping on the door that set my heart racing. But it stopped just as abruptly and didn't start back up again - just someone impatient to use the bathroom. Nonetheless, I put the wrap of coke into my shoe instead of into my wallet as a precaution, before opening the door and crossing the dancefloor, back to the table, avoiding the eyes of the barmen and the whores.
It was horrible. Everything; the atmoshphere, the music, the spectacle of all us silly gringos lapping up the novelty of Bolivian underworld intrigue and drugs. There was certainly something menacing in the air, however. To my left was one side of the club, covered from end to end with red curtains. Behind these curtains, a watchman was looking out onto the street. We could see the owner and some of the staff occassionally looking towards him with seeming tension, and now and then his arm would appear from behind the curtain, gesturing, sometimes holding up a single finger. What did that gesture mean? One police car? One car full of rival gangsters and machine guns? I had my wrap of coke ready at all times to be flung under the chairs in case there was a raid. I really needed water, but I didn't want to pay the ridiculous price they asked at the bar. To my surprise, they let me into the backroom for a sip from the bottle I'd left there. While I was in there, I spoke with a man who I had initially taken for a foreigner, perhaps an Italian, but who it transpired was in fact Bolivian. He was the cousin of the owner, who was out watching over his dominion from the bar with his trashy blonde gringa girlfriend. And no, he didn't actually work here, he was only helping out for this one night. I liked this character, and we chatted away for a while. I asked him if it was possible for a gringo, a gringo like me, to work here. He said he wasn't sure. Was it dangerous? Oh yeah. Wait a minute, I'll ask my cousin for you, he said. The surly proprietor came backstage briefly to listen to my question. He looked at me for a moment, then said, come back tomorrow night at ten. You will start then, working as security. The pay is fifty Bolivianos per shift. I asked him if it would be dangerous. Oh no, he replied, looking away and sniffing. Part of me was tempted by the idea, but the other side knew right off that of all the foolish or self-destructive things I've done in my life, this could be the one that would have the grimmest consequences. True, I might learn a thing or two about the Bolivian drug scene, but why should that be of any great importance to me? Besides, I'd probably learn a few other things, like how it feels to be stabbed in the stomach, or gang-raped in a Bolivian prison. No, I won't be going to Vivian's this evening.
The Anarchist Republic left, wanting to be reasonably fresh in the morning to work on the volunteer project he's undertaking in Bolivia. I sat for a while with Charo, feeling increasingly anxious and unhappy. She told me about all her friends in Quilmes, Buenos Aires, and how they always had that look of great sadness in their eyes at the end of a night of cocaine. I know what you mean. A while later we took a taxi home. It was perhaps half past six. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep, but I didn't want to stay in Vivian's on my own or take any more cocaine. Better just to brave the comedown, which was inevitable anyway, and call it a night. I put in my earplugs - the rest of the hostel would be waking up soon - and lay in my bed as the pale blue light of morning crept into our grimy dorm. I couldn't sleep. Soon, my thoughts became dark; the future, my life, everything started to look hopeless. I knew well what was happening, that I was paying the price (the other price, apart from the money), for my chemical euphoria of a few hours prior. I knew what I had to do, and struggled to counteract this insidious bleakness with more balanced perspectives and positive thoughts. But it was hard to think of anything at all that was good and true. I was miserable. Eventually, I slept.
Current Location: La Paz
Current Music: Neil Young - See the Sky About to Rain
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04:41 pm
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All Things Good or Ungood
I had some tasks to take care of today. I rose early enough and left the hostel on my own. I wanted to be alone, but then I got lonely. I managed, though, to cash the traveller's cheque that they shunned in Tupiza because it was too old. Then I went to the immigration office on the Prado, the big main road in the middle of the city. I wanted to extend my visa for up to ninety days (they gave me thirty days on arrival), and happily, it was a fast and painless process. Free too. So now I can work illegaly in Potosì. I like La Paz a lot, as I've said; there's a good likelihood I'll look for a job here some time, maybe teaching English. I imagine I'll only stay for a month in Potosì, then perhaps travel a bit more. But at some point I'll probably end up back here. I imagine it's not too hard even for a gringo to find employment in the capital.
I changed a book this afternoon, and later I'm hoping to exchange more in 'Oliver's Travels', a repulsive establishment, boastfully promoted as 'a 100 per cent fake English pub'. Apparently, the proprietor is an arrogant English arsehole who gets drunk and sings the praises of the British Empire, mocking other nationalities. But they have a terrific book exchange.
I passed the day in solitary, not very happy wanderings. La Paz is still enchanting, even when I'm blue. Down in the centre, by the San Francisco cathedral, there are rows of shoeshine boys, the kind you find all over this city and this country. But the ones in La Paz are strange; they wear these sinister balaclavas with only a slit to reveal their eyes, like ninjas or terrorists. I was sitting on the steps on the Plaza Murrillo yesterday when one of them approached me and offered his services - I nearly jumped out of my skin. Also down on the Prado, there were these people dressed as zebras, covered from head to toe. At first I hardly noticed them, presuming they were promoting some product or restaurant or pub. But then I looked closer, and I realised they weren't promoting anything at all. They just stood on the busy street, waving their arms as if directing traffic - I think some of them actually were - and some of them held ropes that were stretched along the street to channel pedestrians away from roadworks. And there are soldiers in the streets all the time, those futuristic looking ones with the riot shields and the body armour. They're all armed to the teeth with machine guns, shotguns and teargas cannons. Every bank has a security guard with a shotgun standing sentry outside, with thick red cylindrical bullets on a belt or a strap. 'Bailando en este Carnaval', with the ninjas, zebras and soldiers.
Up the two hillsides that make up the city, La Paz is full of lovely little cobblestoned streets with old and dignified buildings, either colourfully painted or boldly aged and fading. Down one of these streets, I visited the Museum of Bolivian Musical Instruments. I was too distracted, however, to learn or take in much, though I did have a few diverting minutes fooling around on an old organ. Later, I sat at the always crowded, always smiling Plaza Murillo and was briefly cheered up by children who laughed gleefully as some of the hundreds of pigeons that flock to the plaza landed on their outstretched hands or perched on their shoulders.
What to do with the rest of the evening I'm not sure. I've lost that sociability I had there for a while. Last night I sat in the patio of the hostel with the others, but though they seemed like decent people, I found I had nothing to say and couldn't be interested in conversation. I feel that way again, now. Same goes for reading. It's one of those days.
Current Location: La Paz
Current Music: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat (Live)
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01:55 pm
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The Dangerous 'Perhaps'
(This is a rough first draft of the most incredible tale I've yet to tell myself.)
He knew! He knew! I swear to God he knew, he was in on the whole thing! He had appeared before me in the crowd suddenly, the very same street busker, strumming his guitar. And he had looked at me, through the crowd, smiling a knowing smile, winking at me. He had held my gaze and smiled that enigmatic smile as I passed, dumbstruck, silently signalling that he already knew what I was only now realising... My mind was reeling as Charo and I emerged onto the resplendent Plaza Murrillo, with the cathedral and the Palacio del Gobierno on one side and the Parliament building on another, all lit up gorgeously in the night. Something was going on; a large group of soldiers were surging out of the Government building; a line appeared carrying riot shields. The crowd dispersed, the old women with their plaits and their trilbys scurrying down from the plaza steps and out of the way, as if a Wild West showdown was about to commence. I was transfixed, eager to see what was going on. "Maybe Evo Morales is here", I said, pulling Charo towards the commotion. I felt how tense she was; "Don't worry, this is La Paz, don't forget it means 'The Peace'", I joked. But that terrified-animal look had stolen over her face again. "But Rob, this is South America", she urged darkly, tugging on my arm, "Things are not how they appear". But by this stage, nothing could convince me that all of this wasn't a great cosmic joke that I had been playing on myself, now and for all of my life. Tear gas would have made me cry with laughter, bullets would only have split my sides. But Charo's fear won out over my curiosity. The last thing I saw as we jumped in a taxi to take us the last couple of blocks to the hostel (Charo was too overwhelmed to walk any further), was a swarm of press photographers crowding the sides of the doorway to the Government building...
Cut to the afternoon of the previous day. I was walking down an as-yet unfamiliar street, intimidated by La Paz and perhaps minutes away from being submerged in loneliness and gloom. Not really sure where I was going but feeling in a rush to get there, I nonetheless paused on the road to watch a street busker who had just finished playing a song on guitar and harmonica. Before he had started up again, there was Charo, the Buenos Aires friend I had met in Potosí; she stood out from the crowd with her long black hair and black clothes, a true porteña. Relief and delight flooded me; I greeted her, asked her how she'd been. Turned out she had only arrived that morning (I had been here since the day before), but she had already been shopping; from her black hip-bag she produced a long phallic cactus plant, thick as a bicep - San Pedro, procured from some old woman in the Witch's Market. We walked together and came upon the Plaza Murillo, my first time to visit this part of the city. Then we walked uphill and found her hostel (up the opposite hill to my hostel and the Witch's Market; I've now worked out that La Paz is essentially a city-canyon, with one interminable main road that runs through the centre at the base, and two steep hills on either side from which you can descend to the main nerve any time you're lost). The hostel was shabbier than the place I was staying in, but there was an instant 'buen onda'; grungy South American and European hippy types sat in the sunlit patio strumming guitars, smoking joints and passing maté gourds. In the dorm room, I found Roberto, the Brazilian I also knew from Potosí. We greeted one another cheerfully. The dormitory itself pleased me right away; there was traveller's art and graffiti covering all the walls, and some of the ceiling, too. Much of it was clever and inspiring, with a Leftish leaning. Someone had plastered a Yankee dollar to the ceiling and written "No tenemos dollars, pero tenemos dolores" - "We don't have dollars, but pain". There was a slogan that read, "Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, dance like no-one's watching". I had seen this somewhere before, or a version of it, and it had moved me then as it now moved me once more. We sat around chatting, listening to music. Charo gave me my first violin lesson, which left me wanting to learn more. I decided I would check out of my hostel the following morning and move here.
The three of us went out that night for dinner and drinks, saw some live 'cumbria' music being performed in a lively pub. Buen onda. I arrived at the Carretero Hostel early the next morning, and right away myself and Charo got busy with what we had planned the night before; the extraction of the mescalin from the San Pedro cactus she had bought in the market. It took us six hours of teamwork in the grotty kitchen to prepare the brew, with opportunities to leave the skinned and chopped plant boiling while we went out and joined the other guests in the patio. One Equadorian guy wore a t-shirt that proclaimed 'Victor Jara para presidente', and he played Jara songs on guitar while others joined in on whatever makeshift or actual instruments came to hand.
It took us until about four o'clock to prepare the San Pedro. It would be Charo's first time to try an intense psychoactive substance (apart from marijuanna, which anyone who knows me knows I stay well away from), but she was eager to try the cactus, having heard much about it and done her research into its effects. She had heard, rightly, that San Pedro had the potential to make its user more connected with nature, and she was keen to have such an experience, being even more urbanised than I am. The problem was, we were in the heart of La Paz, with only two or three hours daylight left by the time the juice was ready. It was too late to head for the Valle del Luna, a reportedly impressive area of canyons and hills outside of town. If we were wiser, we would have waited until the morning and then set out with the full day ahead of us, as the San Pedro effects last for many hours. But we were both impatient, and so we drank the foul-tasting brew and left the hostel, descending the sloping streets to take a micro at the ever bustling Plaza de San Francisco on the city's canyon-artery. Charo had asked someone at the hostel where we could go to find some nature, some countryside, and he had said to take the bus for El Alto, the elevated plane housing another massive tract of urbanised space high above the already towering La Paz. We were to get off somewhere en route, where we could then scramble off the motorway and into the steep-sloping wilderness. But we waited too long in the micro; the San Pedro was slowly kicking in by then, relaxing my body and giving me a mild but growing sense of euphoria. I was enjoying the ride, not caring to get out, and before we knew it we were in El Alto.
The effects were obviously kicking in on Charo, too; she was visibly confused as she asked the micro driver as we disembarked into the furious bustle of El Alto where we could go to get away from the city. He suggested another micro and we boarded that. Then we were speeding off again, God-knows-where, with me loving every second but Charo growing ever more anxious. The micro reached its last stop without us having passed anything that could even remotely be considered countryside; we seemed even more deeply enmeshed into the madness of the city. Yet again we boarded a micro we were told would take us away from the city; once again we disembarked in some unknown and noisy stretch of concrete jungle. Now Charo was becoming seriously unnerved; "It never ends, it just goes on and on...", she muttered, low and in grim awe, as if seeing the horror of the Sprawl for the first time, with new and incredulous eyes. But me, I was becoming ecstatic. Get off the bus and breath in the toxins, I wanted to tell her (but my Spanish was too clumsy and my mind too exaltedly languid); laugh the laugh of the damned! This is the Wilderness, this is Nature in our age; the smog and the barb-wire and the screaming steel and the endless concrete; there's no escape! It doesn't get any better than this - surrender to it!' From that point on I couldn't wipe the silly grin off my face, no matter how bad things got for Charo. I felt supremely tranquil, passing untouched through the chaos of noise and motion, relishing every instant. I felt as cheerfully resigned and ironical as the Buddha must have felt after he declared that all we take to be real is sleight of hand, a magic show of consciousness.
But Charo was in the throes of an ever more desperate bad trip, and I felt sorry for her. I took control, reassuring her constantly as we jumped in another micro to retrace our steps. "I just want to arrive", she kept saying, huddling against me away from the windows, as if the Miasma, the infinite Nightmare outside might reach in and drag her out. But that was what I had wanted to explain to her; the way to deal with this was to take the path of unconditional resignation; there was no escape from the city for us. There was no point waiting to arrive. I had already arrived; nothing could touch me. (That silly grin splashed across my face.)
We found our way back to El Alto, and even Charo could emerge from her inner hell enough to be momentarily enchanted by the sight of La Paz below us in the dusk, a few lights blinking on here and there, with the great sweeping hills and mountains and high plains streaked all around it. La Paz is the Sky City, a miracle and a madness. We hailed a taxi, jumped in. It was tough trying to explain where we wanted to go - the middle of nowhere. But we managed to find a spot along the stretch of hybrid wilderness and post-industrial wasteland between El Alto and its lower Mothercity. We payed the bemused taxi-driver and got out, walking back some way along the side of the busy motorway until we found a gap in the fence I had spotted, leading onto a dusty pathway that snaked around the hill through some forest. It was getting dark now; Charo was still in the horrors and my reassurances were having a limited effect, as had the fact that we had now 'arrived', or almost, at a site at least somewhat removed from the tarmac, the car-horns and the cars. We followed the trail until it led to a stretch of rubble verging a sloping forest, high above the city. Further on, we came upon the skeleton of a derelict basketball court, eerily perched on a terrific viewing point of the city, which by now was fully lit up. La Paz was a Golden Canyon, a city in the stars, stretched out before us, between the clouds and the Milky Way. We sat in the rubble against a low wall and surveyed the splendour. The skyscrapers of the city centre with their restless neon signs were clumped together far below us, and the two hillsides of the city rose up on either side, shimmering in the night and with the throbbing of the mescaline in our brains. Adding a near perfect symmetry to the view was a forlorn white cruxifix, a few feet in front of us, looking down sadly over the City of Stars.
In her confusion, Chora was struggling with English, as I was struggling with Spanish (and with understanding the fiendish Argentine accent). But her body language and her countenance said it all; she hadn't arrived yet, and she never would, not tonight anyway. She was going through an emotional squall, and she kept muttering that it was all too much, too much, closing her eyes to shut out the tempest of hallucinatory information surging in on her. It was all I could do to hold her; I had a real feeling for the loneliness and dread she was going through, but no idea as to the particularities, and so I knew the best I could do for her would be to try to reassure her with my calmness, my presence, and whatever comfort I could offer her. After some time, she began to weep, soon uncontrollably. No doubt she was going through some enormous emotional upheaval, perhaps finally confronting some devil that had always haunted her from the back of her mind. We sat there, with the distant roar of a jet engine the second most present sound in the night, after her sobs. We were desolation angels, one weeping under the weight of an incommunicable sorrow, the other smiling the ironic, cheerful smile of the Buddha.
When she eventually stopped crying, Charo seemed a little better. Later, she confirmed for me that it had been an important moment for her, a process of internal therapy that she was glad to have gone through, despite the pain. Meanwhile, I had been thinking hard and happily about something that Borges had suggested to me, by way of Schopenhauer, perhaps only the day before: the idea that everything that happens in our lives, every minute detail of suffering, joy and indifference, has been orchestrated in advance by none other than we ourselves. I had been familiar with the work of Schopenhauer before reading this, and had no idea that he had made such a fantastic claim, or of how it fit into his metaphysical system as I understood it. What provoked me right now to ponder on this, one of the many bizarre notions proposed in the ingenious fictions of Borges, was a comment that Charo had just made, to the effect that she never could have guessed that she would be here, on this vantage point, with this person, feeling these feelings, seeing these sights. Also, for me, this moment, this view, seemed to me too perfect, too dreamlike, for it to be the work of raw and stupid coincidence. Seeing that she was calmer now, I ventured to suggest to her that perhaps we both had, indeed, known that this would come to pass, that we had even planned it ourselves, but before we were born, and now we had forgotten it and were the dreamers lost in the dreams that we ourselves had crafted. But this wild suggestion threatened to send her back into the fullness of her confusion, so I left it and returned to my private musings.
By and by, the question of returning to the city before it got too late became pressing enough for us to move. Charo was reluctant, frightened by the prospect of having to re-submerge into the cacophany, but she knew it was what we had to do. We left the derelict court, the stray dogs, some of them the size of wolves, and the stray humans that lurked in the shadows of that uncanny perch, and found the motorway. We put out our thumbs and were picked up by a city-bound micro. My rapture was undimmed, but Charo was sweating again with feverish anxiety. She clutched me tightly, looking out the window at La Paz at night in fear and revulsion. She worried that we woulnd't find the way, but as I guessed, the bus took us down that main central artery at the base of the canyon, and soon the illuminated Catedral San Francisco was in sight. Outside, La Paz was a carnaval. Vendors hollered and laughed, youths leaned out of the open doors of micros shouting their repeated declarations of destination and price. People everywhere smiled, kissed, laughed, argued, walked, hurried. I was in love with La Paz; before that wild ride, before the San Pedro, it had already begun to dawn on me that perhaps this was a place for me.
Now I was more familiar with the city, and I assured Charo that I knew the way to the hostel, and that it was close. Uphill we walked, then turned right towards Plaza Murrillo. Charo was taking it step by step, struggling merely to cope with the cactus-enhanced madness. But I was lost in metaphysical speculations, that strange idea of Schopenhauer's having taken an unusual hold over my mind. Under the influence of the San Pedro (and La Paz at night), it seemed not such an impossible and merely amusing, mental-game of an idea. It was as I was pondering thus that I looked up and saw, through a heavy crowd, that same street busker strumming his guitar. With a start, I realised that this was the same street, the exact same spot, at which I had so unexpectedly encountered the friend who would rescue me from loneliness the previous afternoon. With something approaching shock I gazed at the busker, not stopping, because Charo was dragging me forward in her impatience to return to the relative sanctuary of the hostel. The busker met my mesmerised gaze with that knowing smile, that wink... It was too much.
Back at the hostel, we retreated immediately to the dorm room. The first thing I saw when I switched on the light startled me: I distinctly remembered having flung the Borges book from table to bed as an afterthought, as we left the dorm after having drunk the San Pedro. Now, I saw that the book had landed perfectly upright in a highly unlikely fashion. The sight transfixed me. For Borges, all of the universe is a book, and there may be no seperation between the labyrinthine passageways of our minds, and the forms in which we perceive this universe. Transfixed.
I wouldn't have minded joining the others on the patio, where they were drinking beer and playing music, warming up before heading out somewhere. But there was no way I could leave Charo alone in her waking nightmare, which was only marginally ameliorated by our arrival at the bright and familiar dormitory. Besides, I was still perfectly happy and relaxed, lost in the labyrinth of thought that the night's events and reflections had led me into. It suddenly all seemed clear; I was the Sorceror at the beginning of time, and everything that had happened to me and would happen to me was my own creation, my own work of art. And it must have been the same for everyone else, casting spells over themselves so that they took their own illusions for reality, staging a great and intricate dream-spectacle for reasons inscrutable to them themselves. Perhaps we all knew each other back then, I speculated, back in the time before time, when we wrote this script. Perhaps we have all met many times before, and will meet many times again, in different lifetimes or different worlds. Or, even beyond that, perhaps we were all the one person, the one Mind, before, and now we meet as different facets of ourself in the illusory fairground of the universe.
In a moment of relative sobriety, I caught myself giving this fantastical metaphysical speculation such abnormal credit, and wondered if I really did believe it. But wheter or not I believed in it wasn't quite the question, I realised; the truth of things is ungraspable to us, and the notion that all of my life and of your's and everyone else's lives, were the dreams that we had spun and then allowed ourselves to take for reality, seemed no more incredible a lie than any other human attempt to solve this inhuman Puzzle of existence. Moreover, it was hugely intoxicating, entertaining, to believe in this notion, not just to flirt with it but to run and dance with it. And again, perhaps the very fact of even believing in such a conception as this would somehow cause it to become true. Do we really know enough about how things are to state with certainty that this is not the case? It seemed plausible, more than plausible, in the ambience of that strange night. The more I fascinated over this idea, the more I seemed to find signs everywhere that confirmed it; it was as if I was only now noticing the clues that I had left to myself when I wove the tapestry of the universe, clues like those I had probably been passing by, unknowingly, all my life. 'That way, Madness lies', said the ghost of my old psychoanalyst from a corner of my mind. 'No no, you're wrong', I replied; 'it's in all directions - surrender!' He nodded and winked and skipped merrily away somewhere. Ah, so he was in on it too...
But, drunk as I was on these increasingly wondrous speculations, I managed to come down from my cloud and attend to Charo with, I hope (and I believe), genuine care and compassion. I had been through similar experiences myself, and not only when consuming substances - I recalled how dependent and grateful I had been, deep in the mines of Potosí, when claustraphobia had enfolded me and pushed me towards the brink of total panic. I stayed with Charo for many hours, talking softly to her when it seemed she was becoming lost in the labyrinth of her own sadness and fear. We didn't listen to music; Charo couldn't have handled it, and I didn't need any. The art and writing on the walls were more than enough to feed my fancy (that quote from The Big Lebowski; that poem; that friendly questioning if I was sure, very sure, that I wasn't living in a Platonic cave of unreality; could it really be that they were messages left there by myself, in some form, to myself?) The fear never fully left Charo, but she was increasingly capable of handling things, the poor creature, and eventually she slept. My thoughts were going in circles by now, and though it was pleasurable, I judged it better to let them be nourished by the soil of sleep, and I lay on my bed and closed my eyes. I can't remember what I dreamed of.
Current Location: La Paz
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11:35 am
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Forking Paths
La Paz; too much too soon. (Jesus, this keyboard is all over the place; usually I can type about as fast as I can think of the words, but they screw around with keyboard design here so I'm like a tortoise today.) The overnight journey from Potosì was surprisingly comfortable, with seats that reclined back a long way, and heating too. They showed a truly awful film, of course, but I suppose it's only fair that they appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator (he was sitting three rows in front of me). But for some reason the bus arrived at La Paz a couple of hours early, just as I had succeeded in nodding off, leaving me cold and confused in a great unfamiliar city. I waited in the lobby of a full-up hostel until sunrise, then spent an unhappy hour hauling my backpack up and down the steep hills of the capital, looking for somewhere to stay. Eventually I bumped into Maxim, a French medical student I'd met on the tour of the mines in Potosì, and he led me to a pleasant enough hostel, situated right in the middle of the Witch's Market.
I hadn't showered, slept or changed my socks (which always makes me feel uncomfortable), but as Maxim and a friend were going right away to the Coca Museum, I dropped off my backpack and joined them. As museums go, this one was highly interesting, compact and informative. The coca leaf has played an enormous part in Andean and South American life for millenia. I myself have enjoyed its benefits when confronted with great altitude, cold, hunger and fatigue. Like wine or the holy communion, coca has a religious, symbolical and magical stuture for the people who use it. It is offered to Pachamama and the other divinities, used in magic rites to predict the future and assure good fortune, and on social occassions as a sign of friendship, reciprocity and acceptance. When the Spanish came and exploited the indiginous population for slave labour in the lucrative mines in the region, the clergy soon pronounced the coca leaves to be 'diabolical'. However, when they saw how much it increased productivity among miners who worked forty-eight hour 'days' with no nourishment other than the coca, they quickly changed their tune, going so far as to make coca 'chewing' compulsory among miners. The Incan civilisation used coca as a very effective anasthetic, while centuries later European medicine was still using barbaric techniques like knocking the patient unconscious with a blow to the head, or plying them with enough alcohol to knock them out.
There is a written legend of the coca leaves, in which God spoke through the medium of an indiginous holy man, prophesising the happy discovery of the coca leaf, a divine offering of condolence for the hell the people would have to suffer when driven deep into the earth to exploit minerals for the invaders from the North. Part of this legend is a dark and prescient description of what would happen when the white man tried to use coca for himself: "But if you torturer who comes from the North, the white conquerer, the gold seeker, should touch it, he will find in it only poison for his body and madness for his mind. For his heart is so callous as his still and iron garment. And when the Coca, which is how you shall call it, attempts to soften his feelings, it will only shatter him as the icy crystals born in the clouds demolish the rocks and mountains." Yeah, us white men, we fuck everything up, turn everything into something that we can be addicted to and ruined by.
There was an interesting section on drug addiction, and how the addict becomes intoxicated on the 'chemical orgasm' so much so that the rest of his life begins to fall into squalor. Here, the museum started to get a little preachy for my liking. I found out why; the museum was the joint project of various anti-drug organisations, including the Bolivian anti-narc unit fighting to eradicate the coca plant and its conversion into cocaine. There were supposedly admirable photos of poor people getting intimidated or arrested by heavily armed soldiers. I won't get too much into it here, being less than fully informed on the issue, but my tentative opinion is that if the rest of the world wants to buy cocaine, and these people have no other resources at their disposal to ensure a decent standard of living (and I'm told they often don't), then they should be left alone.
An amusing fact; apparently Sigmund Freud was the first cocaine user in history, so it's to the father of psychoanalysis that we owe the persisting fashion of hoovering white lines into your nostrils to sex things up a little. My favourite exhibit was from the period when cocaine use was not only fashionable but legal in Europe and the States; it was a poster advertising a brand of cocaine, with a Monroesque diva languorously pouting with a cigarette in hand, wearing a beret, with the word 'KOKAIN' scrawled in front of her in fifties B-movie font. I really have to get a t-shirt so-emblazoned. And don't forget that they used to put cocaine into Coca Cola, until this was made illegal in 1912 (now they continue to put coca in, for the taste). And while I'm at it, here's yet more confirmation that the U.S. of A., the nation that's currently dictating the trajectory of the human race culturally as much as politically, is adrift in an ocean of nihilism, addiction and criminality; although only five percent of the world's population live in the States, fifty percent of the world's cocaine is consumed there. Fifty percent! I hope, at least, that it's of better quality than the overpriced crap to be found in Ireland.
Out, then, of the Coca Museum and into the bustling, disorientating early afternoon of La Paz. I still felt alienated, overwhelmed, but I went along with Peter and another guy to El Alto, an area just outside and above the city. We took a 'mini' out there, one of the vans that function as buses throughout Bolivia as the chief form of local public transport. La Paz is dizzying, hard to believe. The city, the capital city, is built on the sides of high and steep hills. An enormous, snowy mountain towers over it in the distance. Most of the houses and buildings are of unpainted red-brick, giving the impression that the city grows organically out of the mountainside and the walls of cliffs. My head was reeling as we arrived at El Alto, where the weekly wrestling event was to take place later, and the famous Sunday market was already well underway. We entered the market, which was vast and had just about everything for sale - clothes, CD's, cars, food, animals, tatoos - along with various fortune tellers and diviners demonstrating their talents before curious crowds. I broke away from the other two and took shelter in a comedor, where a tasty almuerzo of pasta and beef refreshed me somewhat. But I was in no mood to watch the wrestling. La Paz was too much for me yesterday; I hadn't slept properly in too long. I returned home, showered, and retreated into the mad and absorbing multiverse of Borges.
I felt unbearably lonely yesterday, and sadder than I have for a long time. Although I've been socialising a lot in the last couple of weeks, there's always been this undercurrent of loneliness running through it. I think I miss my friends, or at least having one person around who knows me well and who I can talk with and confide in. Usually I compensate for this necessary unavailability by being open with anyone I meet with whom I can connect. But almost everyone in my hostel is French, and though they were likeable and friendly lads, it's impossible not to feel like the odd-one-out when you're the only person who doesn't speak French at a tableful of chatting young men. So out I went into the night, where it lifted me to find that La Paz becomes gorgeous and enchanting when lit up. There's a fine cathedral at the bottom of the road (the streets here either go upwards or downwards), and the Witch's Market is actually a tranquil area, despite it's location in the heart of the city, surrounded by the gringo's ghetto of restaurants, hostels and webcafès. The Witch's Market, by the way, is where La Paz people (and tourists) come to buy dried llama fetuses (for good luck), magic potions, lucky charms and other strange commodities. That constant quirkiness, I'm finding, is a characteristic of Bolivia as much as it was in India. In fact, being in La Paz is like being back in India, expect for the obvious fact that the teeming strangeness is so uniquely Bolivian and South American and not Indian.
As I said, yesterday was too much, too soon. But I did what I had to do last night; I slept deep and long, amazed at how many hours had past without interruption when I finally woke up and looked at my watch. My sleep hadn't been too great before that. I need to get it back together. But today I'm rejuvenated and more prepared to attack this, the sloping capital. Although it's not as high as Potosì, La Paz is still lofty, at 3,600 metres. But it's warm here, hot even, during the days, though the chill descends at night.
For breakfast this morning I overcame my laziness and avoided the overpriced, comfortable gringo cafès and walked uphill to one of the markets, which was as bright, bustling and charming as any other I've seen. I drank a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice; there are vendors everywhere in Bolivia with these mobile machines for first peeling, then squeezing ripe and luscious oranges into a glass; they never add water or sugar and the cost is virtually nothing. It's like pouring liquid gold into your body, and has become part of my morning ritual, and of my meagre efforts to improve my otherwise unbalanced diet (much too much meat, chicken, rice and chips with mayonaisse and tomato sauce; ubiquitous, economical, tasty and hard to resist). Then some coffee and bread with a banana on a rickety little bench on the side of the road. The jolly old señora told me to come back tomorrow, she'd be there every day. Impressions are limited at the moment, but I have detected a surprising friendliness and cheerfulness among the people of La Paz. In my experiences of Bolivia before that, there was a definite sense of grumpiness and resentment among some, certainly not all, of the people.
Current Location: La Paz
Current Music: Neil Young - Revolution Blues
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03:55 pm
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Upward Behind the Onstreaming It Mooned
Bolivians have a strange fervour for parades and processions. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every day I've been in Potosí, and Uyuni before that, there has been a musical march, comprised of either adults or children or both. This succession of parades appears to have reached a climax today; I had thought that they were slowly winding down from the August 6th Liberation Day celebrations, but apparently today is yet another day of festivities, something called the 'Mini Chullito' (Chullito is the name of the festival that will take place here at the end of the month). The marching bands passed me by wherever I was, blaring their pointless, irritating music. But the people appear to enjoy themselves, and I'm the outsider here, so I won't criticise things too much.
Anyway, one of the reasons I was so incurious about today's festivities, was that my time and attention has been given over to Jean Luis Borges, who I started reading with intense fascination last night, despite my tired and hungover state. Borges didn't write novels, and his short fictions are something different from usual short stories. These fictions are always metaphysical and paradoxical, deeply mysterious, and fascinating. Borges was a man of enormous erudition, and was intoxicated by the mysteries of the universe and mankind's many attempts to solve it - the metaphysical, philosophical and theological systems - while remaining sceptical towards these systems. Rather than for their truth value, Borges admired these systems for their aesthetic brilliance. He was a pure intellecutual, and his strange intellect was excited primarily by the bizarre and the profound, the numinous and the paradoxical. He was fascinated by Nietzsche's concept of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, the idea that the universe repeats itself infinitely across time, in precisely the same way; by the notion that time itself is a hallucination and there may be only one eternal moment, revealed to us at death; by the possibility that I am only the dream of another, or that all things are my dream. In each of his works, short though they are, Borges fashions a universe, extrapolating on one aspect of reality to demented yet ingenious conclusions, or exploring the infinitely rich possibilities of what we can never fully grasp, the inhuman mystery of our universe. I've only read a portion of the fictions in Borges collection 'Labyrinths', but I suspect I've found a new author to be hooked on, someone utterly strange and singular. I get from his bizarre creations the same effect that attracted me to study philosophy in the first place; a fix of astonishment, an intoxication of awe. The interest I have in philosophy isn't so much concerned with the 'love of wisdom' that is the translation of the discipline's name, but with a passion for amazement. It's good to be amazed at least once per day, and if you're into that kind of thing, I can recommend the peculiar Mr. Borges as a good place to get your kicks.
Eleven hours on a bus to La Paz tonight. I anticipate hardship, probably some euphoria as well. I'm partly dreading (that's too strong a word, but they're playing music in here and I can't think of a better one) my expected arrival tomorrow morning in the Bolivian capital. I dislike the sense of disorientation and unfamiliarity that arises on landing in a new place, particularly a large city. I think that's one of the reasons I usually travel more slowly than most; I'm not happy until I get used to a place well enough to know my way around, and that usually takes a day or two, and then I stay there and enjoy things for a while, preferring not to have to readjust myself to disorientation too soon. But I've heard many good things about La Paz, and indeed there's a lot I want to see and do while I'm there. Besides, I shouldn't be overly lonely, as some of the other travellers I've met recently are also making their way capitalwards, including Peter, a Kiwi I met here in Potosí, with whom I plan to attend a Bolivian wrestling event. Well, why not?
Here, I'll sign out with a quotation of which Borges was fond, from the poet Novalis (whom I know nothing about), so that maybe someone else will get high for a while on the giddying plane of infinite possibility:
"The greatest of sorcerers would be the one who would cast a spell on himself to the degree of taking his phantasmagoria for autonomous apparitions. Might that not be our case?"
Current Location: Potosí
Current Music: Joy Division - Isolation
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07:25 pm
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I Was Looking For a Job and Then I Found a Job (Leprechaun in Bolivia)
I am now gainfully employed. Actually, I don't start work for a couple of weeks yet, but I showed up for my 'interview' this morning - half an hour early, as I was informed - and was told that I could start working for Koala Tours when Michelle, the English girl currently there, leaves at the end of August. I met Wilbur, the boss, and Juan and Pedro, two of the guides, both, I think, former miners. (I asked Wilbur how a purebred Bolivian ended up with a name like his, and he explained to me that lots of European and American names became popular in the seventies because of the rise of rock'n'roll. Wilbur - rock'n'roll, man! Hardcore!) We laughed and joked in the office, along with Michelle, and Wilbur told me which date to show up on, and that I could stay in his house for as long as I was working for him, where he lives with his mother (who is a real Jesus-freak, they warned me, so I'd have to perform certain semblances of virtue while under her gaze). The lads commented on my height, predictably enough, and then someone mentioned that didn't they believe in Leprechauns in Ireland. There was a pregnant pause as the irony rapidly crystallised, and then my new nickname was born.
With me thus christened, we left Michelle in the office and the three lads took me out to eat with them in a nearby market. They ordered plates of 'macho picallo'; everything in Bolivia is macho. Macho macho man, I want to be a macho man. I liked the people straight off, and there's a real 'buen honda' (good vibe, mas o menos) in the office each time I've been there, particularly this morning. I'm looking forward to the experience. I won't be able to save a penny on the wages I'll make there, but no doubt I'll have a lot of fun, learn a thing or two, deepen my understanding of something or other, and perk up my Spanish. Pay enough, says I.
I've been feeling fairly retarded today. The reason is because I destroyed half of my remaining brain cells last night in a titanic bender. I wanted to verify the claim I had heard that the ninety-six percent alcohol that the miners drink doesn't give you a hangover, precisely because of its strength; it's all the chemicals and other crap in the beer wine and whiskey that fucks you up the next day. I carried out this experiment by drinking the stuff 'til I was blind. I mean, I was really, totally wired, then sloppy, then violently and repeatedly sick. It was a good night. I had met Clive and Sam, father and son, and Peter, a Kiwi director of music videos I've been hanging around with over the last few days (I had had an argument with the latter that turned nasty and personal the first time I met him, and thought he was a bit of a cunt, but now I like him and find him interesting. I'm starting to meet the intersting folk again). I ordered a coffee and poured some of the foul piss into it, no doubt corrupting young Sam's tender innocent mind a little further (I was referred to as the 'mad Irishman' by his father at one stage last night). Very soon I was plastered and talking bollox at ninety-miles an hour to every bastard I met. Me and Peter left the café for a nearby pub, an appealing place with graffiti-strewn walls. There, I met a load of people and afterwards forgot them completely, so that I introduced myself anew to some people I was hanging around with today, that I'd already talked the ear off for an hour the previous night. But I stayed up with a philosophical porteña, who I insisted four times was actually an Israeli. So I wasn't exactly at my best when I had to show up in Koala Tours this morning. I was sticky and feeling dirty, having left it too late for a shower, and I chose to wear my torn-to-fuck jeans - wear and tear, not a fashion statement, though they do look fairly sharp - over my hippyish Thai fisherman's pants, which haven't been washed in a stinking amount of time. So, as I said, I wasn't at my best. But I wasn't hungover, and nor have I been all day, just tired and dehydrated. And retarded.
Later, myself, Charo (the Buenos Aires girl), Peter and a Brazilian guy took a bus out of town to the hot-springs. It was glorious, glorious. First of all, the large, artificial lagoon was located in a beautiful location, up on a hill surrounded by majestic and jagged mountains. Then there was the water itself, which was gorgeously warm, not hot, and deep enough to dive jump and somersault into. We had a great laugh up there; an Irishman, an Argentinian, a New Zealander and a Brazilian sharing a fine experience - that's the beauty of travelling.
Now I'm back in Potosí. Since the job has been confirmed, and I've exactly two weeks left before I begin (I want to return here two days before the two day training-in by Michelle to witness the annual festival that goes down beginning on the 25th), I'm now planning to peg it around Bolivia and see a few places before I'm more tied down. I was planning to go to Sucre, but seeing as that's only three hours from here, I'll leave it until the job starts, when I'll have my weekends free to travel. Or to go up to the hotsprings and recover from hangovers. Or non-hangovers. Now, though, I plan to head for La Paz, the capital, tomorrow night, a full night's journey from here by bus.
I got a Jorge Luis Borges book in a swap with Peter last night, Borges being Argentina's most renowned author, a warped experimentalist, something like a highbrow Phillip K. Dick. I've barely read a word since coming to Bolivia. I've been too active; I hit Bolivia like a bullet from a gun, with all that energy I stored up over my recovery period in Argentina, and reading has taken a back seat. Also there's been the drinking and the consequent tiredness, hangovers and retardation. (I've been struggling through an Umberto Eco novel, but I just don't have it in me. I thought I was fairly articulate, possessed of a large enough vocabulary. But on practically every page of this book is at least one, usually more, words that I don't have a clue as to what they mean. It's humbling. Then there are the Latin, Italian or French lines that the elitist swine chose to leave untranslated. No, I can't be bothered with 'The Island of the Day Before' at the moment.) Maybe it will be a good idea to try and rekindle some of those dulling brain-embers this evening with a quiet night in a cosy little café somewhere, exploring the universe of Mr. Borges. But it ain't going to happen, is it?
Current Location: Potosí
Current Music: AC-DC - Back in Black
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06:01 pm
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Only If You Have a Morbid Fear of Death (The Dark Satanic Mines)
My my, such a busy time of it up here. I'm in Potosi, as I have mentioned, the highest city on planet earth, at an altitude of 4,100 metres. This is a city with a very rich history (in more ways than one), and was made a UNESCO world heritage site on account of its past grandeur and historical significance. It's hard to believe, but this Bolivian city used to be one of the richest and most celebrated in the world. There's one, massive reason for that; the 'Cerro Rico', the Rich Hill looming over the city that used to be practically gushing silver. The Spanish came along and exploited the opulent mountain for all it was worth, turning Potosí into the richest city in South America and the glory-piece of the continent's economy. But it wasn't easy to get all that silver out - conditions were nothing short of shocking, and an estimated eight million slaves - that's the same number as Jews that died in the Holocaust - were killed while exploiting the mountain's precious innards. Many of the slaves were Africans, many more were of the indiginous population of South America, who the Spaniards basically shat on for all the time they reigned here as colonial masters. At one time, Potosí was the ultimate boom town, but eventually the majority of the silver had been extracted, and the formerly glorious city faded in wealth, esteem and renown.
But the thing is, the Cerro Rico hasn't yet given up all its treasures; there are still minerals down there, and the mountain is still being mined, with mining remaining as Potosí's chief industry. Yet conditions have barely improved since the colonial days; miners expect to die a shocking ten years after they begin working down there. It's no longer slave labour; the miners have formed a Cooperative, and the system works in such a way that every miner earns according to the amount of silver (there's still some down there), zinc, tin, lead, or whatever other mineral he finds. It's frighteningly dangerous work, with terrible air that causes a type of pneumonia within years, and other kinds of poison, as well as dreadful safety practices. Medieval working conditions, is the only way to describe what Potosì's miners continue to work in.
Yesterday I visited the old mint, a collosal building that's been preserved as one of Bolivia's finest museums. Most interesting to me were the paintings from indiginous people, exactly imitating European styles (and in some cases, actual paintings) of colonial times, though the artists couldn't take credit for their work as they were illiterate and therefore unable to write their names on the paintings. I went to the museum alone, for the other members of the Salar de Uyuni tour group I'd been hanging around with had all agreed to take one of the tours of the Cerro Rico mines in the afternoon. I had gone to the tour agency with them, but after some agonising, had decided that I didn't want to do it. Claustraphobics were warned that the tour would consist of crawling through dark, narrow places, with bad air that made for difficult breathing. This would have scared me anyway, being a lifelong claustraphobe, but on top of the trouble I've been having with my lungs - which still leaves me struggling to breath at times, particularly at this altitude, particularly at night - I opted out of descending into the dark veins of the Cerro Rico mine. But it was a tough decision, as it sounded like such a fascinating, once-in-a-lifetime experience. But after the museum tour, something in me hardened and convinced me to go for it, to brave the claustraphobia and book the tour. So I did, for this morning.
I had to rise early for the trip, and when I got to the office I found Clive and Sam, the father and son from the Uyuni trip, were there too, along with a couple of dozen others who were eager to witness the reality of a Bolivian silver mine. We were divided into groups of six or seven according to our languages, and set off on buses to a place where we were given mining suits, helmets and headtorches, and then on to the 'miner's market'. On this street, I learned to my astonishment, anybody, anybody at all could buy all the dynamite they wanted. It's the only place in the world where it's legal to buy dynamite. This naturally made me wonder about the possibilities for mayhem and destruction afforded by this legal singularity. If I were some lone nutcase, what would be to stop me from buying a haversack full of dynamite, and then blowing up some big important building? Nothing at all, apparently. And I learned that something similar had indeed occured, very recently; a group of teenaged English tourists bought a heap of dynamite, then proceeeded to blow up a hostel in Uyuni. They were thrown into jail, but allowed free several days later after paying a few grand in bail, no doubt to return home boasting the wildest travelling tale told for many a mile. Bolivia - it's fucking crazy here. Imagine what the consequences would be if you were to blow up a hostel in Europe. A lot more than a couple of days in jail and a fine, that's for sure.
Also on sale in the miner's market was alcohol; not only whiskey, vodka, beer etc., but pure, undiluted alcohol. Well, ninety-six percent is close enough to purity, as far as I'm concerned. 'Mucho gusto' it ridiculously said on the plastic bottle, 'good taste' (the bottle looked for all the world like a container for paintstripper or petrol). We were all treated to a sup each; eyes watered; throats blazed; stomachs recoiled in horror; I bought a bottle. I unwittingly did my part to cement the dubious national stereotype of the Irish, as I don't think anyone else purchased any of this vilest of liquids, which the miners drink (to excess) because their lives are shit, and they're going to die soon anyway. Bolivia's, I have learned, is a very hard-drinking society. Every social occassion is accompanied by ruthless, nihilistic drinking, harder and faster than the kind of drinking, even, that's carried on back home, or in any of the other places I've been. Salúd.
We bought some gifts for the miners at the market and boarded the buses again. We were only metres into the mineshaft when the ceiling swooped so low that I had to crouch, and the walls got narrower and narrower. I was already finding it uncomfortable to breath through the bandana I had wrapped around my face to protect me from the noxious dust in the foul air. Dread rose inside me, in my body and my mind. Fear, irrational fear at least (of which claustraphobia is obviously one variety), can best be fought through rationality, through using "mind over matter", as Clive advised me on our way into the Dark Satanic Mines. I knew this, and I tried to calm myself with rational responses whenever the panic started to rise and send my thoughts veering towards catastophe. I got the fear under control, more or less, and tried to 'enjoy' the experience. We descended deeper and deeper, at times having to crawl through narrow, low passages, our helmets cracking against the jagged rock above. Sometimes we would all have to stand off to the sides of the tracks to let carts roll past, full of minerals and piloted by miners who all had lumps of coca the size of pool balls bulging from one cheek and the shadow of Death falling over their grimy frames. Apparently, one of coca-chewing's effects is to make respiration easier, so I had a fairly sizeable ball of my own that I masticated away on all the while. (I've got some of the stuff in my mouth right now - I find its alertness-increasing effect to be beneficial to decent writing.)
Our guide, Pedro, informed us of the details of the nigtmarish past and present of the mines, and eventually we reached one of the mine's most interesting features; a shrine to the Devil, who the miners pray to, for they work in Hell. Bolivia has been Christianised since the Spaniards came and took over, but the older gods live on, and it's surely this impurity of the faith that here permits Christianity to tolerate the worshipping of Satan, its great enemy, the embodiment of everything the religion opposes. I can't think of any other instance of Christian peoples worshipping the Devil. In the Cerro Rico, one of the Devil's other names is 'El Tío', 'Uncle', and the miners offer alcohol, cigarettes and coca leaves to his shrine in the hope that he will repay them by proffering up a rich harvest of his subterranean treasures. On Fridays they host a ritual in his honour, which begins with the offering of gifts to him, and then turns into another bout of annihilating binge drinking and smoking. The miners begin by drinking the ninety-six percent alcohol straight, believing that purity of drink will make for purity of silver or other minerals. Later in the party-mass they mix it, probably because even their hardened bodies and torched pallates and superstitions couldn't tolerate too much of this awful stuff without it being weakened.
As we progressed on the tour of the mines, I had several, increasingly unpleasant moments of near-panic, when breathing was difficult and I felt godawfully trapped, so deep and dark beneath the ground. I was tense, enduring rather than enjoying the experience; I wasn't having a great time of it. We came to a point in the shaft where a girl who had already done the tour once before warned me that things became more intense. I told her I was already feeling claustraphobic, and she reckoned I should turn back. I didn't need her to tell me; I was in a bad way by this stage, even if I wasn't showing it, and I asked the guide if I could return. I had been trying to combat the rising panic with rational thought, but it got harder and harder as my breathing became more strained and less oxygen fed my brain, making it harder to think clearly. On top of this, it was now uncomfortably hot down there. Pedro called one of the other guides to accompany me back. I had gone on the tour with a highly recommended tour company, and luckily for me, they were well used to dealing with this kind of thing. Ronaldo, the young miner who would bring me back up the mineshaft, knew to assure and distract me with pleasant, friendly conversation, and for this I was very thankful to him. I eventually made my way back out to the now-blinding light of day. I didn't miss much of the tour, only a few minutes, and I was glad enough that I'd managed to stay under there for as long as I did - more than an hour, for sure. After that, I watched as some of the others detonated the dynamite they had bought at the miner's market, blowing up Barbie dolls and posing for photos with the lit fuse inching towards the explosives. All in all, I'm glad I took the trip, and managed to face my fears, even if not one hundred per-cent.
There's one other big development I haven't mentioned yet: it seems I may have a job lined up here in Potosí. When I went in to book my mine tour, I got talking to the friendly English girl who worked there. I asked her how long she had been working for the company (it's strange to see a gringa employed out here), and she said only a few weeks, and that she would be leaving soon to get back to her real, forward-moving life of some kind of financial work in the States. "This is just my temporary break from reality", she explained. In turn, I explained that I was sort of trying to make a permanent break from reality, because I reckoned it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. At once she said, "Do you want to take my job?", and at once I replied that I did. She looked at me for a moment and then said, "Seriously?" Seriously, I said. We talked about it for a bit and it sounded like a very nice opportunity. The pay would be more-or-less crap but I'd get free board and good food in the fancy gringo restaurant next door, and the wages were more than enough to take care of the rest, which consisted of plentiful parties and opportunities to get to know the community better. She assured me it was almost a guarantee that I could have the job when she left at the end of the month. Her boss, whom she really respects, is looking for a replacement. We were both pleased to say we'd meet to talk about it again, this time hopefully along with the boss. But when I dropped into the office today after the tour, they were both there, but he said he was too busy at the moment to conduct my 'interview'. He suggested tomorrow morning, and still not having switched into the potential employee, job-seeking mode, I told him it couldn't be too early, as I was planning on getting plastered on rubbing alcohol with some people I'd met on the tour. Maybe I've blown it, but at least he told me to come around at ten, anyway. I left the office a bit puzzled, with the boss's seeming lack of enthusiasm at odds in my mind with Michelle, the English girl´s, assurances that the job was practically mine. But as I was walking away she followed me out for a moment and explained what was up; it was still likely that I could work there, it's just that the boss was kind of hoping to replace Michelle with another girl. Typical. There wasn't a whole lot I could do about my failings on that account, I explained to her, but we'd see how it went in the morning. But I would like to get the job; it would surely help me along with the Spanish (I've been hanging around with too many gringos for my liking lately, and getting lazy with the studying); and would be an interesting and novel way to spend a month or two while I partying hard and planning my next move.
Current Location: Potosí
Current Music: The Verve - A New Decade
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03:36 pm
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Mine Eyes Have Seen Such Wonders
I'll begin with the predictable part. Because, you do know what I'm going to say, don't you? But say it I must - the tour of the Salar de Uyuni and its surrounding areas was incredible, amazing, fanatastic; take down all those positive adjectives and plunk them into a big soup; terrific, tremendous, stupendous. Marvellous, unparallelled, unimaginable. Now give it a big stir...
I met the rest of the group on the first morning, after rising early to make sure I found somewhere to drink a murderous amount of black coffee to promote excitement and enthusiasm for the trip; I had been somewhat glum the evening before, and worried that lethargy and depression would ruin the coming days for me. In the tour office, I became acquainted with Clive and Sam, a father and son from England but living in Wales (seperately, as I would learn along the way). Clive was in his forties, on a year-long trip after having quit his job in pharmaceutical marketing. Sam, his thirteen year-old son, had flown out to join him for a month or two of his summer holidays. Then there were three girls of about my own age, two friends from Denmark and a German. All three had boyfriends back home.
We loaded our gear onto the 4-WD jeep and met our driver, Carlos, a young man who spoke no English (as we had already expected). I was fizzling with eager joy as we set out on our first leg of the tour, leaving behind the remote, tourist-based town of Uyuni towards the nearby Salar, the Salt Plains. We soon left the red dust and came to the shore of a vast sea of glaring white; the world's largest salt plain, left behind after a massive ancient salt lake dried up. The salt taken from this inexhaustible resource plays a significant role in the Bolivian economy. On the plain's fringes we found the salt processing operations, where rows of hundreds of pyramids of salt were lined up, waiting to be collected and delivered to the national and international markets. When we got out of the jeep, the impression of being on a great desert of snow was enhanced by the crunching sound of the salt beneath our feet. The ground was literally made of salt, going forty centimetres deep, and was somehow always renewed by the mountains and the rain (here, as he would often be, our guide was vague and hard to comprehend, and our middling Spanish was no help.) We drove on further to the old Salt Hotel, which it is now illegal to use for accomodation, but which has been preserved as a museum. The whole building is made of salt. No, I could not resist licking the walls. Outside, Sam cupped his hands and drank a mouthful of water from a puddle in the ground, and so I had to do the same. It was saltier than any sea I've ever swam in; I had to spit it out at once and later on my lips were bleeding.
We drove on. I sat in the front, as I would for the entire trip. From behind me, Clive remarked, "Now we're going out into nowhere". And indeed that was the impression as we left behind the small portion of the colossal Salar used to exploit the salt, and into the white infinity. Only the distant mountains and volcanoes on the horizon broke the striking blue and white empty symmetry of land and sky. Our next stop was the 'Isla del Pescado', the Island of the Fish, an impossibly erratic 'island' made of combined volcanic rock and coral, that rose with defiant incongruity out of the middle of the featureless expanse of the Salar. All across the island sprouted huge, bulbous, phallic cacti, the largest towering at twelve metres, and the sight of the island brought a smile to my face. It's very existence had something comical about it; it was not only otherworldly, but reminiscent of the colourful, curvy, bulbous designs of cartoons and video games; Sonic the Hedgehog came to mind, as did the Tellytubbies. We disembarked on the far side of the Incawasi (the island's other name, meaning 'House of the Incas', in reference to the members of the great Inca civilisation who once, apparently, dwelt in caves on the island), where the wind was broken by the erratic formation. We climbed and explored the island for a while. At the summit, there was a shrine that had been erected only a few days before for the traditional holy day of reverence to Pachamama, the Earth Mother, a deity who features heavily in Bolivian religious life (the lads who I went camping with would always pour some of their drink or San Pedro onto the ground as an offering to Pachamama). There were all kinds of things placed on the shrine; cigarrete packets, lip-balm, business cards, playing cards. We ate a fine lunch of soup, llama steak and salad at the foot of the island, then went for a while out onto the plains to take some trippy photographs, playing with the lack of a sense of distance to create illusory images of people balancing on Coke bottles, or holding a tiny friend in the palm of a hand, like Gulliver observing a Lilliputian.
Afterwards, we continued on, out of the Salar, back into the equally barren red dust land. On the way we saw llamas and picunas (a similar but smaller, cuter, undomesticated creature of the Andean region). By early evening we had arrived at the tiny, dusty village of San Juan de Rosario, where we were to spend the night. Just outside the village was the Necropolis, the City of the Dead, an eerie and singular cemetary, in which the graves were mounds of volcanic rock, hollowed out on the inside to bury the deceased of a people that lived in the region long ago. Before entering the Necropolis, Carlos gave us a brief and baffling history of the cemetary; he said that the people buried here lived countless years ago, from the time 'before the sun', and died out when the sun arrived, as they were not accustomed to life with light and heat. All utterly senseless, but never mind; the Necropolis was eerie and fascinating. Many of the volcanic graves, or 'Chullpas', had an opening on one side, and when you climbed up to peer inside, you found skulls and skeletons, the latter sometimes fully formed, and often accompanied by pots, clothing and other items to accompany the dead into the next world. One of the skeletons, who looked like it would have stood at only about four feet high, was crouched up with his knees under his chin, and one hand to his mouth, as if he was anxiously chewing on his nails. We returned to our lodging for the night, but I was having a fine day and was feeling very curious about much of what we had seen, particularly the Necropolis, and frustrated by our guides mad explanations. So I visited a tiny but very informative museum, where all of my questions were answered and I learned a great deal about the history, geography and customs of the region and the town itself, and about the various civilisations who had flourished and waned there. Most fascinating to me were the religious beliefs and practices which pre-existed the Spanish colonisation that began in the sixteenth century, but which continue to exist, now merged with and modified by the Christian faith brought to South America by its new rulers. (The persisting widespread reverence for Pachamama is one expression of this older form of religiousness).
I liked the group I was with, and the chemistry within it, and we dined that night and stayed up for a while drinking wine that one of the girls had brought. The power was to go out at ten, so that was our bedtime. But I lay in my sleeping bag in the darkness, beneath my blankets, with a mind that raced and a heart that thumped. Hours passed; I couldn't sleep. Troubling thoughts began to swirl around me in the dark bedroom, like the spirits of the skeletons whos bones I had observed in the City of the Dead...
I was back in Dublin, at a party. The house was full of old friends, most of whom were now strangers, and other people I didn't know. Also present was 'Obeja Negro', the Black Sheep, also called Aldrin, who I had befriended and gotten high with in Tupiza. I sat in a chair and watched him mingling, laughing, chatting with a friend of mine. Then he asked, how do I even know you?, and his face suddenly grew alarmed and confused. I left the party and boarded a night-train. In the carriage, I sat in darkness facing the large front window, with other passengers of whom I could only make out the silhouttes. It was as if we were in a darkened cinema. The train driver sat ahead of me, and he remained motionless and I could only see his back, a dark shadow. Outside the window, the wind howled and rain pelted down. The passengers, me included, emitted a collective gasp of alarm when the train suddenly lurched down and to the right, like a sharp turn on a rollercoaster. But it was only a dip and bend in the track and we were all relieved to find ourselves on level ground again, driving straight on through the storm. But then I saw ahead of us the headlights of a jeep pointed straight for us like lances through the darkness. It was the same jeep that we had driven across the Salar de Uyuni, and it wasn't slowing down or turning as we hurtled inexorably towards it. Nobody else seemed to notice. I cried out and held tightly to the sides of my seat as we smashed headlong into the vehicle, demolishing it and sending its crushed shell hurtling off to one side of the tracks. The force of the impact hadn't injured any of the train passengers, though it had halted the train. In fact, no-one even seemed to notice what had just happened. "It was a suicide!", I shouted in fear and confusion. There was a general, good-natured chuckle, and I became more bewildered. "I'm serious!", I cried, desperately. Remaining totally impassive, the driver shifted gears and set the train into motion again, and we left behind the carcass of the crushed jeep.
I awoke the next morning, before the others, filled with a sense of dread. I wrote down my dream in the dawn light in the kitchen, and the associations came tumbling forth. My friend's brother drives trains for the Dublin area light rail service that runs through the city centre and along the coast, from Glenleary to Howth. From time to time he is given periods of leave to recover from the trauma of seeing a person throwing themselves onto the track into the path of the speeding train. Recently, the mother of my former girlfriend of three years flung herself from the desolate cliffs of Howth, having sunk ever deeper into the unfathomable loneliness of madness in her last years. Ireland has one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, despite the massive economic boom and unprecedented prosperity it has enjoyed in the last decade or so. I hear stories from back home of young men, some of them from the same school where I was educated, taking their own lives. Then there was an English girl I had met in Thailand. We spent every day for several weeks together, and though it ended in drunkenness, violence and tears of rage in a hotel-cell in seedy Bangkok, we had been in love. This girl is now dead, I'm almost certain, and by her own hand.
I was frightened as we set out on the second day of that tour, haunted by that dream and the memories and fears it brought to the surface. I was frightened for the future, for where this road would end. I saw dark clouds gathering over Ireland, all of Europe ever-more troubled, the earth itself nervously reaching for its Prozac, its Valium, its telephone, its guns. Look: you can see us on the CCTV monitors - but we're not waving, we're drowning.
But the wonders that the day held in store for us, along with bucketfuls of coffee and amiable company, dispelled most of the darkness inside me by afternoon. We were not in the White Infinity any more, we were on Mars. Though I was feverish and troubled throughout the morning and compelled to scribble down my thoughts every chance I got, I did manage to appreciate the weird and splendid lava rock formations we visited; areas of unthinkable rock shapes and craters around which you could climb and leap. We drove past an active volcano, out into the desert. We saw a lone Andean fox, the 'zorro Andino', who was not remotely shy of our jeepful of curious gawkers, because, as Carlos explained, tourists had been feeding the foxes they encountered with biscuits and chocolate for long enough now for the creature to see the jeeps as a source of benefit. We came to the first of several lagoons we would visit on the tour. By now I had cheered up considerably. We put on our layers and left the car, trundled down the hill to the icy periphery of the lagoon, to admire the hundreds of pink flamingos that awaited us there. They were both beautiful and dignified, and comical and clumsily endearing. Sometimes they would try to run on the ice, only to stay in one place, as if on a treadmill, their spindly, skinny legs rotating furiously. Some of them would make an effort to fly, a skill the flamingos don't appear to be particularly adept at. They would run for a few metres, tense with concentration, then leap into the air, only to glide for a few seconds, falling so their drooping bellies would graze the ice or the water. The girls loved them, and fell around laughing at the bird's antics, particularly the ones who walked hunched, prudently over the ice, giving the impression of grumpy old humpbacked men.
We drove on along with the convoy of jeeps from other tour companies who were making the same exact tour as we were, and whom we would see again and again at the many stops along the way. There was one pretty girl I kept seeing, and she would smile at me and I at her, and I kept thinking I should go and talk to her, but I never did, and then I didn't see her any more. I remembered that line from Keroac; "The saddest two words in the English language are 'too late'". We had ascended considerably since leaving the already altitudinous Uyuni, and by now the wind was infernal and unrelenting. But we stopped for lunch at a cosy, large and isolated cafeteria, busy and buzzing with all the other groups stopping along with us. The food was good once again, but most memorable was the conversational event that took place at the table where our group sat to dine. I had been talking with Carlos, our driver, asking him about his working life, his family, his aspirations, and I knew that he had a wife in Uyuni. One of the girls remarked on how she had seen him kissing someone at the lodging we had stayed in the previous night (Carlos didn't eat with us - guides and drivers always seem to eat seperately from tourists). When it came out that he was married, the girls were all indignant, but I in turn became indignant at them. I said that it was totally understandable for someone like Carlos, who works almost every day of his life, and only sees his wife one night in a week, to seek comfort from the hardship of his existence elsewhere. This was the spark that ignited a vigorous and fiery debate, in which I found myself alone, waving my fork defensively at the outraged ladies, the sole apologist for this kind of infidelity. I was having a great time. But when they were really coming hard at me, I turned for support to my fellow males - Clive and Sam, each one sitting at opposite heads of the table. I asked if I was the only one who thought like this, but when I looked at Clive he was obviously uncomfortable, muttering something neutral and staring intently at the cutlery in his hands. I spun my head questioningly towards Sam, who I realised was too young to be conscripted into this kind of battle, but I was too worked up by the fury of the debate to refrain. He seemed to sink into the table, sliding forwards and down with head in hands, and said, "How about we talk about the weather?" It was only afterwards that I learned that Sam's mother and Clive were divorced, and that the latter's marketing job had him away from home, often in foreign countries, for much of the time while he was doing that kind of work.
Our next stop was the Arbol Piedra, the Stone Tree, a famously unearthly rock in the desert, with other weird volcanic formations around it - geological lunacy. As we left the car, all looking towards the Stone Tree, one of the girls remarked that "it doesn't look as much like it as it did in the photograph"; a fine and bizarre sentence that could only have been uttered in our topsy-turvy age. On, then, to the 'Laguna Colorada', the Red Lagoon, which was actually more pink than red (apparently its colour alters with variations in the weather), but very lovely nonetheless. Sandstorms blew across its strangely coloured water, and flocks of flamingos fished and loitered in the harsh wind.
Not far from the Laguna was our dwelling for the night, a surprisingly inviting looking long building with bedrooms and a common area that we would dine in, along with several other groups. This, the second night of the tour, was the one we had been warned would get very, very cold. There was talk of temperatures dropping to minus twenty. I feared for my lungs, and along with the others had brought along a multitude of layers to get me through the night. We had a dinner of spaghetti bolognese, then cracked out a few more bottles of vino. It was a fine night, the conversation flowed and there was a happy communal spirit in the air as we braved the elements together. All six of us were to sleep in one room that night. We were relieved to find that the cold, although it was biting, wasn't the Siberian nightmare we had feared. The power was to be cut at half past nine, and most of the travellers went to bed early in preperation for the five a.m. rise we would be making in the morning. But before that, a group of us left the shelter of the lodging, walked sufficiently far enough away from its light, and then cut our torches, looked up, and saw the most magnificently starry sky I've ever beheld. You could clearly see the luminous streak of the Milky Way arcing across the sky, and falling stars were not infrequent. I didn't know any constellations, but there was awed talk of the Southern Cross by those more knowledgeable than I.
When the others went to bed, I stayed up talking with Maria, polishing off the wine, knowing I should rest but not feeling tired. I tried it on with her, foolishly, knowing full well that it wasn't going to happen (she had clearly said that both she and her boyfriend had remained faithful through the four years of their relationship), and that it would only cause awkwardness for the remainder of the trip, as well as spoiling an otherwise highly pleasant night of friendship and conversation. I don't know why I do these things; always the self-sabotage. But I try not to get too frustrated by it all any more, just to laugh at human (and my) irrationality and strangeness. Anyway, Maria just let it go and we stayed up for a while longer, admiring the glory of the night sky out the window and talking about all sorts.
It was after midnight when we retired, but once again I couldn't sleep. I was cold, but not too cold; the sleeping bag I had hired from the tour company was a fair match for the severity of the elements at 4300 metres. But I tossed and turned, my mind racing, and the hours passed. Then something dreadful happened. I rolled over onto my stomach, and all of a sudden I was in a coffin, underground; I wheezed for air but it was like trying to suck thick syrup through the thinnest of straws. With rising panic, I tore off my hat, my scarf, pulled down the zips on my sleeping bag, struggling to get to the air. I could breath now, but with difficulty, and the sense of claustraphobia remained, threatening to overwhelm. I felt that my lungs were being crushed, and my impulse was to leap from the bed and run out into the freezing night. But even that probably wouldn't help, I thought, as I was now lying normally, unconstrained by too many layers, and I still suffered this claustraphobia reaching towards terror. The spectre of madness arose; I didn't know what was going on, and I imagined now a form of claustraphobia that arose even when I wasn't in an enclosed space, a panic that could strike anywhere, and from which there was no escape, seeing as there was no perceivable cause. Oxygen-starved, my brain threw up nightmarish and extreme scenarios, and I had to fight to keep a rational perspective on things amidst the great discomfort. I thought my lungs must have had something to do with it, and they probably had, but I was relieved when the others rose (I was first up in the whole building again), to find that one of the girls had also suffered this suffocation panic. Apparently, it's one of the common effects of being at a high altitude.
Without having slept, I felt surprisingly alert and energetic when we set out so early in the toe-hurting cold of the Andean pre-dawn. The reason for our early rise was that we had to see the geysers spraying their sulphorous fumes while it was still dark, when they were more visible. The geysers were awesome (Americans have ruined that word for us; we must fight to take it back). The impression was of hell breaking through the crust of this remote part of the earth, belching forth its black and stinking mud, perpetually exhaling great grey clouds of volcanic gas that were blown rapidly across the dark icy landscape. We all bailed back into the car and reached the hot springs just as dawn was breaking. It was still freezing cold, and I scratched my chin and pondered for a moment, then concluded that having recently recovered (and not even completely) from pneumonia and bronchitis, it probably wouldn't be a very good idea to strip off in sub-zero temperatures and bath in the admittedly invitingly hot waters, and then getting out again and into the bitter icy air, and having to dry myself off and dress before I turned into an iceicle. Our group consisted of three males and three females, and, shamefully, all of the latter contingent braved the cold and enjoyed the hot springs, while we men contented ourselves to stand by the edge of the pool, dressed up like yetis, sadistically awaiting the inevitable moment when the ladies would have to leave the comfort of the thirty degree water and suffer intense cold for a minute or so. We never lived it down.
After breakfast we set off again. The third and final day of the trip would be the least inspiring, as we would have to cover a lot of ground in the jeep to get back to Uyuni in time. Moreover, my exhaustion was now hitting me, my enthusiasm had waned considerably, and I enjoyed less than fully the couple of stops we made on the way. Carlos, I'm sure, had been partying hard the night before. In the morning he was chirpy, chattier than usual, but by early afternoon he was surly, likely in the throes of a hangover. I tried to sleep in the car, but couldn't, and I regretted having already booked a bus out of Uyuni that evening, an hour or so after we were scheduled to return. Worst of all was the fact that Carlos had only three cassettes with him, and he played them all the time, and each of them was terrible. By day three, with no sleep, this was torture. There was one tape of Bolivian music, crap but amusing the first couple of times you hear it. The songs included one that went 'Macho macho macho!', and another that had the inspiring refrain of 'Oyee, cerveza!' (cerveza meaning beer), and yet another that went 'Derecha, izquierda (left, right) un, dos, tres!'. Having heard that tape (dozens of times), I started to entertain doubts regarding the intelligence level of the Bolivian population. Other than the dodgy Bolivian music there was a greatest hits of Modern Talking - even now I'm hearing 'Boys Boys Boys' in my nightmares. Worst of all was the fact that Carlos was evidently a fan of the film 'Titanic'. Celine Dion's heart went on and on until I wasn't the only one who would have rejoiced to see the organ in question torn out and shoved up Miss Dion's chart-topping arse.
For lunch, we stopped off at Villamar, a tiny, grumpy village with sand roads. The 'plaza' was marginally larger than the average Western sitting room, and when I inquired of a passing woman as to what type of bird was depicted in the statue in front of the dwarfish belltower, and she said it was a condor, the national emblem of Bolivia, I couldn't help but laugh - I was sure the thing was a chicken or a hen. It was August 6th, Bolivia's Independence Day, so there were already signs of drunkenness on the dust-blown streets. Tourists were invisible here; nobody looked at us, let alone offered us a smile. So many Salar de Uyuni trippers must pass through that dimunitive village every day, the inhabitants indifference is now absolute.
I felt a little better after lunch, and we got through a few hours chatting away in the jeep. We visited the 'Valley of Rocks', another natural, unlikely adventure playground of bizarre volcanic rocks. Carlos told us that one formation was supposed to resemble a puma, and another a llama. None of us could see those, but Sam spotted Jabba the Hutt and I pointed out the sinister rabbit from 'Donnie Darko'. Our final stop was the 'Cemetary of Trains', just outside of Uyuni. It was a nice way to end the tour; all that rusted, decaying man-made machinery was refreshing after the glut of natural splendours we had enjoyed over the past three days. It was an atmospheric and eerie place, with the desert wind whistling between the bones of skeletal old locomotives and steam engines. Some of them had graffiti scrawled on their rusted shells with chalk; "Somerset - Birthplace of legends", lingers in my mind.
Uyuni seemed deserted when we arrived back. We said our goodbyes in a grim twilight, but I knew I would see the group again soon, for we were all Potosi-bound, only I was leaving that evening while the others were to rest for the night in Uyuni. I had dinner in town, then walked to the bus terminal, where drunks loitered and cursed, some of them the bus drivers, their work not even finished for the night.
Luckily, however, my driver was not drunk. I'm in Potosi now. I got there late at night, relieved to find that it wasn't as cold as I'd have thought, and I checked into the first place that would open its doors to me and slept long and deep. That was two nights ago. I met the group again last night. We had a sumptous dinner at an upmarket gringo restaurant. Historically, Potosi is one of the most fascinating cities in the world, and one of the most tragic, too. But that's another story. I'm off now to explore this, the highest city in the world. I'll tell you about it all next time.
Current Location: Potosi
Current Music: Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
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05:48 pm
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Come With Us to All Alone
Okay, now it´s all sorted out. I joined up with a group of five other tourists and we will set out in the morning on a three day, two night tour of the Salt Plains and the surrounding areas. Touch wood, but I think I got lucky; two of the girls in the group had had this tour company recommended to them beforehand by lads who had taken a trip with them, and so it shouldn't turn into one of those dodgy, nightmare stories I've been hearing so many of lately. The guy in the tour office gave me the rundown of all the places we´ll be visiting; the Salt Flats themselves, of course; coloured lagoons; volcanoes, and all kinds of weird and trippy landscapes that have been described as ´Daliesque´. And apparently we´ll be seeing three different types of flamingo. Sounds like I won't be needing the San Pedro this time; in these parts of Bolivia, it appears, the land does the hallucinating itself. I've also arranged to take a bus to Potosi, the world´s highest city, an hour or two after we arrive back in Uyuni in the evening in four days time. That means I´ll be out of touch between now and then. Be nice to me, though, whoever might be reading this, and send me some emails so I´ll have some warm friendly letters to look forward to when I arrive in the freezing city of Potosi. I haven't been keeping up as much as I should with my correspondence, but it's only because I've been so busy and because maintaining this journal is fairly time consuming.
On this Salar de Uyuni tour, it´s going to get very, very cold. Siberia cold. I´ve just bought myself a nice alpaca fur jumper and a pair of gloves. There's talk of nights in very basic village guesthouses with no heating, where the temperatures drop to minus twenty. I got a bit frustrated yet again that I won't have a camera to record what will undoubtedly be some of the most amazing scenery I´ll ever witness. But instead of taking pictures, perhaps I´ll write about what I see while everyone else is taking their snaps. Like they did in the old days.
We are leaving, we are gone.
Current Location: Uyuni
Current Music: Bob Dylan: To Ramona
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02:19 pm
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Are You Ready For the Country?
Phew. A tense time of it I had there for a while. It went like this: the afternoon I got back from the camping trip, I had arranged to meet up later with Aldrin, who was going to put me up for the night because I was running low on cash. I knew I couldn't take out any money with my bankcard in Tupiza, but I had a traveller's cheque for one hundred dollars. I decided to take the cheaper night-train to Uyuni - that's where I am now - the following night. So I bought a bottle of wine to drink later with Aldrin, leaving me with enough for the ticket and a measly three Bolivianos to spare - approximately forty cent. Before looking for Aldrin, I went to cash the traveller's cheque to put my mind at ease. But the lady in the 'casa de cambio' looked at the cheque and told me she was sorry but she couldn't accept it, as it was too old and tawdry. I explained to her that that shouldn't be any kind of a problem at all, that a cheque was a cheque and I'd been travelling for nearly a year and a half so it was bound to be a bit dog-eared. She was sympathetic, and explained that although I was not wrong, the fact was that Bolivia is backwards and ignorant in this sense, and so she would have a problem exchanging the cheque in La Paz, the capital.
I became worried. I tried a few hotels, to see if they would cash it for me, but it was the same story everywhere. Not knowing what to do, I went looking for Aldrin's house, but was unable to find it. I returned to the Valle Hermoso hostel, where I had stayed for nine nights, and explained my plight to Freddy, the irritating receptionist who kept calling me Robert Redford. I was fairly sure that if I could get to Uyuni there would be an ATM that would accept my card - though I wasn't even certain about that, and it made me more anxious. I told Freddy that I was homeless for the night. 'Si, es una problema muy grande', he said. And he just sat there. I was getting very frustrated, tired as I was from our rough night sleeping under the stars in the canyon and stressed out by my money-trouble, and I asked him if he couldn't let me stay there for just one night for free, seeing as I had given him plenty of business. He himmed and hawed about it, and I wanted to crack him in the head. But then one of the female employees came in, maybe his sister, and heard what was going on. She was more sympathetic, and told me I could of course stay the night, as long as I didn't drink (I had opened the bottle of wine in the meantime, probably to calm my nerves, and this reinforced the family's impression of me as an out of control drunk). I was shown to the my room - an empty dormitory with ten vacant beds. That bastard Freddy really was a stingy prick. But at least human (and feminine) kindness won out in the end and I didn't have to sleep rough, which no doubt would have exacerbated my lung problems, which haven't gone away fully, no doubt in part due to the altitudes up here on the high plains.
I bought my train ticket first thing in the morning, and got a bank official to call and confirm that my ATM card would be accepted in Uyuni. Then I had to worry about food. Three Bolivianos got me some bread and fruit, which I had to ration throughout the day. I feared hunger - it's a fear I've never been able to shake,even though I know that hunger is only a physical sensation, and not dangerous at all (unless of course it is extreme and prolonged). Some people fear loneliness, some fear boredom, some fear silence; I fear being hungry. Anyway, I managed to remain cheerful and decided to pass my last day in Tupiza by wandering out into the countryside again, to find a remote place to lie in the sun and relish the silence. I did a lot of writing out there. Going out there all those times was a form of meditation; the silence cleared the mind, the beauty and tranquility soothed. I was happy.
I collected my bags and boarded the train, regretting that the darkness of the night obstructed me from viewing the no-doubt spectacular countryside between Tupiza and Uyuni. I read a bit, then listened to music and drank my bottle of wine from the night before and became ecstatic. Bright Eyes' album 'I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning', I've long since discovered, is the perfect travelling album. Then it was a Bob Dylan marathon. I turned off the music, took out my notebook, and wrote ecstatically, feverishly, until the lights in our carriage went out. I had written some things that I think are actually quite good, and I wrote a letter to a girl that I'll more than likely never send. Then I finished the wine, and felt that pain, that panic, that I've always felt when the drink, the drugs, the supplies dry up. Once I start I don't want to stop, and the end of things, the end of the night, always makes me suffer. It's a pain I don't see too often in others, this horror at the finishing of the wine or whatever it is. I took some coca leaves from my pouch as a substitute, a leaf that increases awareness and diminishes hunger and tiredness. All the Bolivians on the warm, cheerful economy train-carriage were masticating on the leaves, all those old women with their black trilbies travelling with lots of heavy sacks of who-knows-what to trade in Uyuni. A different stimulant for every country - chai in India, mate in Argentina, and now coca leaves in Bolivia (by the way, they're not addictive or dangerous in any way; it's only their infamous derivative, cocaine, that causes problems). Then I played some more music, and then something troubling happened; I became sated, bored with my ecstacy. How many times had I done this, taken these night journeys with the music and the awe and exaltation and reverence for life, and where was it all leading? Grim broodings, but I put it down to the comedown from the wine and music high and tried to keep my joy-embers smouldering.
I arrived in Uyuni at about one A.M., and went straight to the bank machine, which I was relieved to find was obliging, for at this point I had exactly zero Bolivianos to my name. I found a hotel, with a room so cold I could see my breath, and slept. I couldn't sleep so I necked a couple of Valium I had left over from a night in Tupiza. But today I've been feeling tense, despite a good night's sleep, and I put it down to the tablets. They're a bad idea, and I'm going to knock them on the head right away, before I start taking them twenty-four-seven like I did back in Thailand.
Uyuni is tiny, with one main street, actually a succession of plazas with a clock tower on one and a church in another. The main reason for the present existence of this town, it appears, is to cater to tourists who want to take a trip around the renowned Salar de Uyuni, the great salt flats of the Southwest of Bolivia. That's why I'm here, too. You try not to be a tourist, you try to be a traveller, or even better, just someone, somewhere. But sometimes it just makes more sense to sign up for a tour and get to see or do what you otherwise wouldn't be able to. But I'll have to be careful; despite the town's diminutive size, there are no less than sixty tour companies offering the Salar de Uyuni tour, and many of them are getting dreadful reputations. I spoke to a girl in Tupiza who had a particularly dodgy experience; her driver on the four-day tour turned up stupendously drunk on the second morning, and the situation was so bad that the girl and the rest of the group abandoned the driver in the middle of the desert, effectively stealing the car to continue the tour themselves. The food was terrible, the accomodation appalling, and they were only able to get a fifty percent refund on returning to Uyuni. Like I said, I'll have to be careful.
Current Location: Uyuni
Current Music: Neil Young - Old Man
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01:34 pm
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Words Between the Lines of Age
I mentioned before about the enormous cactus plants that punctuate the countryside around Tupiza. Well, as it turns out, those cacti are none other than the San Pedro plant, one of the three most well-known plants from which mescaline is derived (the other two being Peruvian Torch and Peyote). San Pedro has traditionally been used by shamans in Bolivia and other parts of the Andes mountains region. Let me tell you what it's like to take San Pedro.
It started out yesterday morning, with me listening to Neil Young's song 'There's a World' while hurriedly packing my bag for the hiking and camping trip I had planned to take with the local bunch of lads I'd befriended over several drunken nights. For the first time I really noticed the words of the song, what he was trying to get at; the opening line is "There's a world you're living in; noone else plays your part". The music is epic and orchestral. Later come the lines that would play on my mind most over the coming day; "In the mountains, in the cities, you can see the dream. Look around you; has it found you? Is it what it seems?" This is a song in which an expression is attempted of the sense of awe and bewilderment that arises when you comtemplate the very fact of your existence, or of existence itself. Pondering over this song, about where Neil Young was as person when he created it, what was going on in his mind, I set off to meet the lads.
I called into the house of the oldest of the group, a thirty-something visual erratic in Tupiza; his skin is white, not merely pale, and he has blue eyes. His parents came from Ireland and the States, and now he lives here with his gorgeous Tupizan girlfriend, in a pleasingly squalid upper story of a house. He speaks English too, which is also rare in this town. Soon the others joined us; three more guys I knew, one of them named Aldrin, who has dreadlocks and is great fun. Basically these lads are slacker-hippy-punk drinker types with a rugged, shamanic aspect, and are all very friendly and welcoming. I instinctively trust them; that's one thing about Bolivia, I don't feel that same sense of distance, of seperation, and even of superiority (and I'm not saying the latter was justifiable) that I felt in Asia. The lads I met here don't like working and do as little of it as possible, and they appear genuinely not to care for money. The reason I got to know them is that my binge over several nights coincided with a five day alcoholic debauch they had been embarking on, so we met in the bar a few nights in a row. When I asked the Irish-American what the five-day celebration was in aid of, he just shrugged and said, "We had money, so we went out drinking".
We rounded up supplies and set off. I had explained to them that I needed to be very careful to keep warm, so as not to cause a regression to my illness, so they loaned me some blankets and a thermal body suit, which I took along with heaps of my own clothes, just to be safe. "No te preoccupas", they kept telling me; "Don't you worry".
We took a bus to the police checkpoint at the edge of town, and started walking along the traintracks. The initial plan was to hitchike with the miners who would be heading towards a place the lads swore was more beautiful than anywhere else they had ever seen, thirty kilometres away. This would have meant walking home the full distance today, a prospect which I dreaded somewhat. But we were too late to find any miners going to work (there are zinc, copper, silver and even gold deposits around Tupiza, among many other minerals). So we walked about ten kilometres along the track, out into that stunning countryside that takes my breath away daily. We stopped to rest along the way, and sat around in the shade. The bottle of San Pedro was taken out, and we all drank a cup each of the foul tasting yellow liquid. The Irish-American had chopped down one of the cacti and prepared the substance the previous day - he explained the process to me later, and it certainly involves a considerable amount of work. This was at about one in the afternoon. After drinking the San Pedro we walked on some more, until we moved away from the tracks and came to a huge portal, an opening between two giant rock faces, one of the 'doors' to the Cabaldra, the system of canyons through which minor rivers flow during the wet season, or used to flow, centuries or millenia ago, to join up with the main Rio Tupiza.
I expressed my wonder at the grandeur of the portal to Aldrin, who laughed and said this was just the beginning, we were going deep inside. These boys have been taking San Pedro for many years, and also exploring their glorious countryside, so they know many wonderful places that the guided tours don't or can't go to. In we went. The mescalin was coming on slowly, with hallucinations of a mild nature and an encroaching dreamlike feeling. But at this stage I wasn't even concentrating on the drug's effects; the canyon into which we penetrated was like nothing I had ever seen. At some parts it was so narrow that we had to squeeze through, or climb up steep stony inclines grasping each others arms in a human chain. Then the canyon would open up into great clearings, with the otherworldly rock formations sprouting and bulging and twisting out and up and down in all conceivable and inconceivable shapes. The ground we walked over dazzled with colourful stones. One of the lads reached down and picked some up and held them before me, saying "Did you realise we've been walking over crystals?" And sure enough, little crystals were in his hand, and when I inspected, I found they were everywhere. Someone suggested that crystals had healing properties. I had heard enough of this type of thing from deluded commercial-New Age victims in India, and I contested the claim. But Aldrin suggested that, when you consider it, these stones have been formed over millions of years, and in some sense, must contain a dense concentration of energy. Explained this way, and far from the ugly, commodified world of New Ageism and the Market, this seemed reasonable and thought provoking. After all, New Ageism, disgusting as it can be, is based on the worthwhile idea of reviving ancient wisdom, practices and ways of relating to the world, for contemporary Western people. The problem is that much of it has been hopelessly debased and commodified. But the tradition of embibing San Pedro, and the Shamanic usage of the plant, is one such ancient system, and now I was getting to experience it firsthand, with a regular bunch of men who did it because they liked it, and because the plant was readily available where they lived, and because people here have been doing it for a long long time. They asked nothing of me, they cared not for tourism, for anything other than good times and friendship. It's always a good feeling to be outside the ever spreading global net of the Market, and of tourism, which is essentially the commodification of experience.
After snaking through the cadalbra for some time, we arrived at a viewpoint that looked out over a vista that astounded me. I know I've been saying that kind of thing a lot recently, but in all honesty, this was really like a vision of heaven, with great multicoloured mountains, plains, pillars and spikes of rock, and in the distance, the valley of the Tupiza river, which doesn't have much water at this time of year. It all stretched below us, with ravens circling in the distance and dust storms whipping up arbitrarily from the valley and the plains. After admiring that wonderful view for a while, we set off again. It was tough going with all the gear, and we stopped regularly to rest. By now the San Pedro was riding high on me. That strange, unearthly world I was going ever deeper into was coming alive. The rocks and the stony ground sparkled with an infinity of colours; plants pulsed and danced. It genuinely began to feel as if the canyon itself, the rock and the earth, were a living, conscious presence, which was aware of me just as I was aware of it. The environment felt as if it were watching over me with an ancient gaze, partly beneficient and partly indifferent to me and my fleeting little existence, a nothing, a speck in the wind next to these unfathomably old and majestic presences.
Modern psychologists would label this sense of inanimate or otherwise uninterested things or persons as being concerned with oneself, denigratingly, as 'ideas (or problems) of reference'. But other modes of thinking and sensing would call it, perhaps, 'being in commune with nature'. In fact, modern researchers, as well as anthropologists and other groups, have argued that for drugs such as San Pedro, consumed for spiritual or religious purposes, should be known as 'enthogens'. This word essentially means 'making manifest the divine' (which includes the divine within). They argue that the popular conception of these substances becomes unfairly marred by labels like 'hallucinogens' and 'psychedelics', which have, for many people, negative connotations (for example, with 'undesireable' countercultures; and for the word 'psychedelic', its closeness to words like 'psychosis' may give the substances an unjustified reputation). You can interpret the phrase 'making manifest the divine' however you like, not necessarily in a conventionally theistic way, but it certainly makes sense to me to deem a substance like San Pedro as being something that stimulates a greatly intensified appreciation of the grandeur and mystery of the external and internal worlds. There are those who would say that we shouldn't need substances for this kind of appreciation, but the blunt truth is that I, and many other people these days, do. Our minds have been dulled or rendered chaotic and unfocused by the often senseless, extreme cultures we've been raised in, and many of us are seriously out of touch with many things that have hitherto been deemed highly important. Besides, practically every civilisation and religious tradition in history has integrated entheogens into their communal and spiritual life, from the peyote-consuming shamanic culture of Native America, to the wine and dance orgies of the cult of Dionysus in ancient Greece.
From the moment we had entered through the portal into the passageway deep into the canyon, I felt repeated pangs of regret that I didn't have a camera to take pictures of this, perhaps the most wondrous manifestation of nature I had seen on all of my long travels. I tried to forget about it and just savour the splendour, which was becoming ever more intensely enhanced by the rising power of the San Pedro. I consoled myself my thinking that at least I'd be able to write about it, but I knew my words would never be nimble enough, or even plentiful enough, to do even meagre justice to what I beheld. This caused me to reflect on descriptive writing in general, and how, though I can't back this up properly at the moment, it appears that descriptive writing was far more rigourous, detailed and extensive in the past than it is in contemporary literature. Now we have cameras, and images are everywhere, so perhaps we have less need of faithfully and meticulously painting word pictures with beautiful, awe-inspiring or ultra-real sentences. Those old writers who I frankly find boring and sententious at times - I am a child of this image-saturated postmodern age after all - perhaps they were the equivalent, in their own times, of 5 Megapixel digital cameras. Maybe this is one instance of technology making us lazy, or at least rendering redundant a talent we used to possess - like the lost talents of the shamans and mystics and medicine men who were so in tune with their natural environment that they felt like true sons of the earth, possessed of a profound intuitive understanding, which perhaps sometimes passed into the realm of what we would denote as the supernatural.
But we walked on further, the hallucinations grew stronger and more impressive, and as I looked around me, still awestruck, it occured to me that this obsession of mine with recording everything, this lamenting over the absence of a camera to capture this unparralleled strangeness, was another manifestation of that old neurosis, that old compulsion that we all share in this age; the anxious yearning to make, if not permanent, than at least less fleeting, everything that becomes of us and which we witness. If none of this is being recorded by some great digital system in the Great Beyond, and it all only happens once, then what does it amount to? "There's a world you're living in; noone else plays your part". But what are you going to do with it, with your uniqueness and your ecstacies and your experiences? Is it all to be lost? And so there I was, wanting to preserve, to share, to pass on, to evacuate my experience so it doesn't all disappear when I die, or get distorted and submerged in the murky waters of memory, which is an unreliable, capricious and ever vanishing thing. And as I looked at those unfathomably ancient canyon walls, the rocks and crags that had been formed over millenia and probably had been there for millions of years, I felt the impression that the landscape itself was mocking me, but mocking me in a friendly, paternal way, for my crazed compulsion to create something that would last. Nothing I could ever do would last for even the smallest fraction of the time that that uncanny, silent and living world has lain there.
We came to the place where we would sleep out for the night. We had no tent, but the others went to gather firewood while I lay in a clearing between the rock walls that would protect us from the worst of the cold, and gazed up at the most brilliant starry sky I've ever seen. Of course, it was rendered more spectacular by the effects of the San Pedro, which by now was at its maximum potency, roughly ten hours after I had consumed it. But there were continuos meteorites, some blazing stars that dominated patches of sky, and a dense blanket of faraway sparkles of raging fire and gas, many of which, I always remember, are likely to have perished eons ago, but only appear to exist to us because their light takes so long to reach us. Ghost stars. Phantoms. It was silent there, and I knew I was surrounded by some kinds of presences. I could no longer hear the banter of the others; I was alone. Every tiny sound I heard was amplified; the flutter of a bird's wings as it swooped past; the tumbling of a pebble down the hill I was resting my head against. I understand fully why these types of substances have been used for millenia as a way to heighten human sensitivity to nature, to beauty, and to mystery.
We stayed up for much of the night, sitting around the fire drinking wine, roasting apples and sharing the few pieces of bread we had left. When the San Pedro had finally worn off and the wine was gone, I felt that greedy, restless discontentment that has plauged me for so long, that aversion to discomfort and an apprehension about having to set off on a long walk in the morning without food or money. (I have about five euro left here, but Aldrin told me I could stay with him in his family's house for a few nights, and I'll work something out, maybe find somewhere to cash my final traveller's cheque.) I sometimes wish I didn't have these needs for comforts, that I was more of an outdoor type, but mostly it's just something I accept. Besides, as it turned out, it wasn't too bad at all. The fire kept us warm and I probably managed an hour or two of sleep. Then we walked home in the warm morning sunlight, and when we got into town I paid a couple of Bolivianos to use the hot shower in the hotel I had been staying in, and then went and assuaged my ravenous hunger with one of those three course almuerzos that cost about seventy euro cent.
I'm undecided about what to do. I've been considering sticking around here for a while if I can find some work with a hotel or tourist company, which I'm told is a possibility, because I love the ambience here and I've made some friends (and because I suspect those walks out to the nearby countryside to relish the silence could be something I'd like to do many times more). But then there's Uyuni, and then there's that need to move, to see all those wonderful sounding places before time or money or life runs out. Everything's always running out. But don't worry, just run faster.
Current Location: Tupiza
Current Music: Neil Young - There's a World
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10:58 am
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To Keep Away My Loneliness
It´s getting hard to find the time to write, but I want to write because so much has been going on and I´ve been having such an incredible time. Tupiza; dusty, windswept and sunny Tupiza is one of my favourite places to have visited in all my travels.
So the other night, I went out to the club Divergente, had a terrific night, and managed not to get as catastrophically drunk as I had every night prior to that. Just a few beers. A crazy group of local lads remembered me from the night before, when I had gone spinning and crashing through the place, howling and puking like I was possessed by some rabid demon. I got the feeling that this outrageous display had raised me in their estimation, and sure enough, that night I found myself with a new group of friends. I danced all night, and kissed a pretty Kiwi girl who´s name was Pretty (recently there had been another fleeting encounter with a mad girl whose name was Marisa Chaos - maybe there is some semblance of symmetry to the seeming randomness of the universe). I agreed that I would accompany her on the four day tour of the Salt Plains of Uyuni that she and her Estonian friend were embarking on early the next morning. When I returned to my hotel at around four, I asked the receptionist, the one who keeps calling me Robert Redford, if he would wake me up in time to check out and join Miss Pretty for the tour (my alarm clock has been smashed many times and is now, I think, truly dead, never to be resurrected again). He assured me it would be no problem at all. I awoke the next morning with the sun high in the sky, and when I slouched down the stairs to check the time, I found I was too late for the tour; the receptionist had completely forgotten all about it, the bollox. It could have been beautiful.
This missed opportunity cast a mild shadow of melancholy over the day - yesterday. I brooded on life´s missed connections and the arbitrariness of what becomes of us. So much for symmetry. But I did what I had done the previous day; I walked out of town to that dramatic, rocky, mountainous landscape, and I found a place to lie down and gaze up at the sky. It was beautiful, I stayed there for hours, letting the sun warm my face and relishing a silence that I have never found anywhere to be as deep and soul-reviving as it is out there between the bare hills of the altiplano. Occassionally a raven would soar high in the sky, or some strange small green birds would swoop down from the hill behind me chirping and skimming over the scraggy ground. Clouds high up in the sky made dramatic designs; the sky as cinema, as art. Later I went walking. I saw an old woman herding goats, more ravens, crags and canyons that I would have explored only for my body being too stiff and tired from the carousing and lack of sleep.
I returned to town feeling exhausted, and stopped in at a ´heladeria´, an ice-cream parlour, for a quick and delicious refreshment, intending to head home for a siesta. But some tall, non-local hippy types walked by the window, and one of them waved in at me, holding up a bottle of wine and gesturing for me to join them. I had seen these guys before, selling handicrafts on the plaza in the evenings. They were taller and lighter of skin than typical Bolivians, with long hair and one had a pointed beard. I had initially taken them for Europeans who had gotten sidetracked and were now living the wandering, bohemian life in its purest form. But they were actually from Uruguay, Buenos Aires, and, I think, Mexico. We drank the wine and bought some more, everyone in high spirits. Then we went around to the feria, the busy street fair that went on for two days. There was a tremendous crowd out enjoying the fair and the atmosphere was great. We drank, we played pool on tables they had set out on the street. We played table football, we joked and laughed with groups of kids, we tried our luck repeatedly on the shooting galleries. To use a phrase from my verdant homeland (and from a Pogues song), I was happy as a horse in shite. The lads introduced me to coca leaves, which are used throughout Bolivia to reduce hunger, fatigue and altitude sickness. You take a handful of the leaves and put them in your mouth, then bite off a piece of this chalky, grey little stone-like thing, which can either be salty or sweet. Then you keep chewing it for half an hour or so before spitting it out. It´s true that it abates hunger; I hadn´t eaten anything since my almuerzo at midday, but I felt no pangs of hunger at all.
At one point two of the lads went home, having had enough of drinking and merriment, but I wanted to check out a party in a club called the Acropolis which I had seen posters for. The porteño guy came along with me, but it wasn´t really worth our while. The club was like a vast underground airplane hangar, and almost pitch black. And the crowd were mainly teenagers, hundreds of them, dancing in groups to the dodgy techno and slowly walking away whenever me and my friend approached. So out we went, walked back to the plaza where I met a couple of the crazy lads from the Divergente. They were drinking some foul fernet concoction, but I was sated and only had a sip. But we stayed out on the benches talking for a while, and agreed to meet up again today, at noon.
So that´s what I´ve been up to. I was planning on leaving Tupiza tonight on a night train to Uyuni, where I´m going to take the apparently unmissable four-day tour of the Salt Plains, which everyone says consists of some of the most surreal, stunning and hullucinatory landscapes on the planet.
Oh, I've just remembered something funny. When we were at the feria yesterday, one of the travelling handicrafts guys I was with asked me where I was staying, and when I told him, he said "Ah, yeah, you´re the kid who pissed out the window." This is a small town indeed. I´m tumbling headlong into a bad reputation. Mind you, the old woman in the hostel who had repeatedly seen me collapse in an alcoholic stupor, and berated me for my debauched ways, appears to have forgiven me. I´ve always been polite with her, when we´re not engaged in drunken arguments (me being the drunken one, of course), and this morning I chatted with her in the kitchen for a few minutes. She appeared very concerned about my errant ways, and related in an evangelical tone her life story. She told me she used to be an alcoholic, until she found God in the early nineties, and since then she hasn't touched a drop. Yeah, fair play to her I suppose, but isn´t it just replacing one crutch with another? Maybe there is a God, but I´m fairly sure there isn´t, and I don´t need one anyway. There´s a lyric from a Bright Eyes song I´ve always loved that I´m now reminded of; "I have my drugs and I have my woman to keep away my loneliness. My parents they have their religion but sleep in seperate houses." Anyway, the old woman told me how important it was to read the Bible, the word of God, who is the Father of all the world, and insisted on lending me her copy of the holy book. "Okay, but later, later", I said, not wanting to be rude. I like her.
Current Location: Tupiza
Current Music: Bob Dylan - Brand New Leopardskin Pillbox Hat
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07:43 pm
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"Next Time I Say Let´s Go Some Place Like Bolivia, Let´s Go Some Place Like Bolivia"
Last night I bought my carton of white wine and sat down up in the TV room of the hostel to watch ´Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid´, which the hostel rents out to customers for a few Bolivianos. I had never seen the film before, and all I´ll say is that if you haven´t seen it either, you really should try to. It was terrific, original, and very funny, with great performances from Paul Newman and Robert Redford (now I know why the hostel manager keeps calling me by the latter name). There was some choice dialogue, particularly apt for my situation in this country. At one point, Butch suggests going to Bolivia to escape the posse that´s been pursuing them relentlessly. "What´s Bolivia?", asks Sundance. Butch nonchalantly replies, "Bolivia is a country, Kid, in Central or South America, I´m not sure which." Truth be told, before I began my travels, I probably would have been hard pressed to tell you where Bolivia was, and countries like Laos and Cambodia too. Travelling is a fine way to dispell one´s ignorance. But back to the film: ´Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid´ is one of those perfectly realised buddy movies, which include ´Withnail and I´, ´Midnight Cowboy´, and ´Sideways´. Classics one and all. But the thing about the film was that I kept thinking, ´What terriric scenery´, but then I would remember that all I had to do was wait until sunrise and look out from the hostel rooftop, or even better, venture a little out of town to explore the same kind of rocky, dusty magnificence I saw in the film.
After the film and the wine were finished, I left the hostel, but not before having a fiery drunken argument with the old woman who co-runs the place, who by now considers me a raging and deranged alcoholic. It was Friday night, so I wanted to take advantage of the fact that Tupiza´s very few bars and karaoke bars and discos were open, as they stay shut on weekdays. As soon as I entered ´Divergente´ (´Fun People´), a large, dark and attractive bar-cum-disco with plenty of seating, some mad old codger at the bar bought me a drink. I haven´t got a clue what it was, but I don´t think I drank anything else for the rest of the night, and half an hour later I was totally plastered. I mean I was properly, unable-to-walk-straight drunk. I was the only gringo there, and I sat with some cool local lads and their girls, probably talking utter bollox, but they didn´t seem to mind. Then I deemed it prudent to spiral towards the toilet and throw up violently. I thought that might sober me up a touch, but it wasn´t to be. I walked back into the bar, crashing through people´s tables and issuing a slurred apology to the room in general. I left the Divergente and decided to check in on D-B´s, the only other nightlife option in the vicinity. I knocked on the door, then found myself unable to stop spinning around and finally falling back several yards from the door, so that when the lady opened it up, I was sprawled out on the ground, trying to smile up at her like it was nothing to be concerned about, and I wasn´t as bad as I looked. Obviously I wasn´t permitted to enter that establishment, and so home to bed it was. I don´t know what it is that´s causing my drunkenness to assume such titanic proportions here in Bolivia. Any of my friends will tell you I can hold my drink with the best of them, but up here I become obliterated like I scarcely remember ever having been before. My working hypothesis is that it´s the altitude; Bolivia, you must understand, is a country in which much of the land is very high above sea level. Here you have the world´s highest cities, the world´s highest lake, and all kinds of the world´s highest things. I recall someone or other commenting that the booze goes to your head quicker when you´re higher up.
And then there was today. I awoke without not knowing what time it was, as usual, and noted that I didn´t feel too hungover, despite the previous night´s excesses. Perhaps I was still a little drunk. I breakfasted on street food, cheerfully chatting with all and sundry, playing marbles with some kids on the street, and then resolved to visit ´El Canyon´, another feature of the nearby landscape that Frank had recommended to me as a great place where you can climb through a narrow and ascending crag between rusty hills. I started walking, but by the time I got out of town I was feeling totally drained, and the prospect of climbing through the canyon and then walking all the way back started to appear very unappealing. I was hot and my brain felt slow and lethargic. But then I was out away from the town, away from everything and everyone, and I was suddenly aware of the silence, the exquisite silence of the altiplano. There were rocky hills around me, so the wind didn´t disturb me, and the sun shone brightly in an unblemished sky. Almost without consciously deciding to, I lay down in the dust and stones at the foot of one of the hills, calm yet intoxicated by the silence, broken only by the occassional buzz of an insect and with the gentlest, almost imperceptible of breezes carresing my supine body while it was being warmed by the generous sun. I listened, and I heard nothing, or almost nothing, and I felt tremendously peaceful, out there all on my own, with such austere beauty all around me. I dozed off, and it was such a strange feeling to wake up and find myself lying on the dusty plains, with cacti and red hills looming over me. I lay there, basking in the sunlight, daydreaming of all sorts of things, and drifted happily in and out of sleep. I must have been there for some hours; the sun was just about to sink behind a hill when I finally decided I should gather up my jacket and bag and walk back into town.
When I reached the town, I found that one whole street had been cordoned off, so that a vibrant street fair could take place. There were ferris wheels and rides for children, air-rifle shooting galleries, magicians, traditional dancing, vendors selling homemade cakes and sweets, and families, youths and the elderly all out enjoying the festivities. I understand it´s anoter feast day in honour of a Catholic saint. I stuck around for a while, and met that great couple with the beautiful baby daughter who had invited me to their house yesterday. Then I went to the ´Garage Cafe´ to drink coffee and read a pamphlet I had bought recounting the biography of Che Guevera. It´s getting easier to read Spanish each time I try, and I like the feeling it gives me.
Life is good for me now. Gone the hate, gone the frustration and the boredom, gone the sickness and gone the rigorous antisociability. I´m feeling outgoing and friendly now, most likely because I´m so happy and excited about being here in Bolivia, in Tupiza. Since Frank left, I haven´t really spoken to many other travellers, as I eat in the local places where the meals are much cheaper, and I drink with the locals. I will end this evening´s musings with a quotation sent to me by the venerable Mr. David Banim, which sums up fairly much how I´ve been looking at my life of late: "He who loves not women,wine and song, remains a fool his whole life long."
Current Location: Tupiza
Current Music: Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head
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07:30 pm
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Far From the Twisted Reach of Crazy Sorrow.
For travelers, Tupiza is mainly a transitional town. Some stop for a day or two to explore the spectacular surroundings and enjoy the small town ambience (although it´s not that small; there are 25,000 people living here. A few days ago I climbed up the nearby viewing point, on which a white statue of Christ looks down protectively over the town - a common feature in Spanish speaking countries, the most famous example being the enormous ´Christ the Redeemer´ in Rio - and I saw that the town stretched out beyond the few dusty streets radiating from the pleasant and colourful central plaza. Most of the houses are ramshackle dwellings, mudbrick with corrugated steel roofs.) But I´ve been happy to stick around for a little longer. Slow and easy, my friends. I haven´t really been hanging around with other gringos here, as the locals are an amiable bunch. It really makes the difference to know the language of the country you´re travelling in, especially in little, out of the way places like Tupiza. If I was in a similar town in India or Thailand or Cambodia, I´d probably get bored and lonely very quickly.
Unfortunately, I can´t seem to find Sylvia, the girl I met the other night, but I´ve been happy to wander, exploring the town. There was a big twice-weekly ´feria´ yesterday, a long street market where were sold clothes, watches, pirate DVDs and all the usual, as well as plenty of street food. I´ve mostly been living off of street food; freshly squeezed orange juice; tamalas; bread; cakes; ´saltenias´ (like a local version of Argentina´s empanadas), and all kinds of stuff. Then I´ll have lunch or dinner in one of the basic, unpretentious local eateries, where the prices are drastically lower than in the gringo restaurants. After dinner, in the evenings, I stroll over to my favourite little cafe and cake shop for a coffee and a slice of lemon pie. It´s a bright and simple room, and the woman who owns it, who I´ve become friendly with, plays great music from the CD collection that she and her husband have accumulated. They´re big jazz fans, and also appreciate other decent European and Northamerican music. To tell the truth, from what I´ve heard of it, Bolivian music isn´t up to much, which puts it in marked contrast with the Argentinian music, contemporary and traditional. Tonight when I went into the cafe the lady was playing Bob Dylan. She explained that she couldn´t understand many of the words, and I told her she was missing out. Oh, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free...
Last night I was practically the only customer in the cafe, and I chatted with Beatrice, the proprieter, for hours. She enlightened me to many aspects of social and political life in this country that I had been ignorant of. I asked her what she thought of Evo Morales, the new socialist president and the first indiginous person to attain to that title. A former coca farmer who´s first act as president was to nationalise Bolivia´s extensive gas reserves and who promises genuine changes that will favour the poor, indiginous majority of the land, I had imagined Morales was generally considered something of a hero, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But it´s never that simple, and Beatrice complained that, for her, the ominous factor of Morales´ presidency is that he is exacerbating the racism that already exists in the country. There are two types of people here, she explained; the indiginous people, the ´negroes´, and the persons, like Beatrice and her family, of European descent, who are called ´blancos´ because their skin is whiter than the others. Generally, the blancos are the ones with the power, who get decent education and join the professions. This means, of course, that there is much resentment against them from the indiginous people, who Morales is now empowering. But, although I don´t know if her case is representative, Beatrice for one works in a regular job, running a small cafe in Tupiza, while her husband works in the zinc mines. Granted, their three children are doing very well for themselves academically; the middle son is studying medicine; the youngest is already a talented artist - the creme coloured walls of the cafe are adorned with striking framed sketches, paintings, and gorgeous woodcarvings of elves and gnomes and other mythological creatures. And the oldest, the daughter, is studying psychoanalysis in La Paz. When I told Beatrice that I had attained a Masters in the same subject, she insisted I contact her daughter when I got to the capital, and she would be happy to show me around, and perhaps we could become friends. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I suspected she was perhaps trying to set me up with her daughter, who she assured me was single. When she showed me a photograph of the girl, it was an effort to retain a reasonably neutral expression - the girl was stunning. We live in hope.
After that, I went home, hoping to watch ´Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid´, the DVD of which my hostel rents out to guests to watch on the TV upstairs. But I was too late, so I contented myself to drinking a carton of wine I had bought earlier, and watching a Spanish language music video station. I haven´t read a word since coming here, which is okay because I did nothing other than read when I was in Salta. Anyway, I became fairly drunk, and decided to neck a few valium I had picked up with some Irish lads who have been knocking them back every day (I know I´ve upset people before with talk of my chemical dalliances, but don´t be worrying, I´m only messing around from time to time. I ain´t no addict.) At some point, and for reasons unknown, I decided that I would piss out the window, and I did so - this was particularly foolish because the bathroom was just outside the TV room. A few minutes later, the old woman who co-owns the hotel barged in, raving at me saying ´Urino! Urino abajo´ and such things. I knew I had been stung, even though the street outside had looked relatively deserted. I couldn´t possibly admit to such senseless behaviour, so I reacted with feigned indignation, insisting that I had merely poured water out the window, because it was ´bad´ (clearly I was clutching at straws there). The old woman threatened worse trouble, saying she would call the men up, so I calmed down and said I just wanted to finish my wine and watch some more telly, and she eventually abated. To my relief, she left, muttering outraged curses at me as she did so. A couple of valium and some more wine later, I must have passed out. The next thing I knew, the old woman was back in the room, wagging her finger and screeching that the TV room was supposed to have been vacated at midnight, several hours previously. I stood up, totally perplexed but still feigning ignorance. As I stepped towards her to try to emphasise some point I probably didn´t even understand, I lost my footing and tripped headfirst over the couch, falling flat on my face. At that point, I conceded that she had won whatever argument it was that we had been having. To bed, to bed.
Today was good, though. I got talking to a young guy in the market and he brought me back to his house, a predictably basic and dusty abode off the main roads. His young wife was there (I was older than both of them), and their absolutely adorable little girl, who they were bringing to the hospital later on. The couple were into similar music to me, and were both studying to be teachers, and I was amused to see that the wife had the name ´Ozzy´ (as in Osbourne) tatooed across her knuckles, while the husband wore a Kurt Cobain t-shirt and torn jeans. Hard to picture them as teachers, but they were very friendly and fun people, and the domestic ambience in their house, with that wonderful little girl, lifted my spirits even higher. But I got really tired in the afternoon, and slept for several hours. This seems to be happening a lot. Perhaps I´m unconsciously adapting to the Spanish and Latino habit of taking siestas in the afternoon.
Current Location: Tipuza
Current Music: Bob Dylan - Mr. Tambourine Man (Even though it´s overplayed, it still amazes)
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03:38 pm
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A Right Pain in the Balls
So much to write about, so much adventure and mayhem in the last few days. Let me say this: Bolivia, even with the little I´ve seen of it, is amazing. I am amazed. I´ve been doing exactly what I wanted to do after my lenghty convalescence period in Argentina; getting out there and doing things, and having a lot of fun. And yesterday, getting very, very drunk. Very drunk. A couple of hours ago I was walking down the road and a bloke in a car called to me with unmistakeable anger in his voice. He told me that he was the taxi driver who took me home from San Antonio last night, and apparently I didn´t have a penny on me and I just went up to my hostel bedroom and collapsed into sleep. I assume I had told him I´d get him the money from the hostel and come back down, but I must have forgotten. I´m telling you, I could barely walk last night. Funny enough, though, I don´t feel too hungover this morning. Maybe it´s because I drank nothing but beer. Usually I mix all kinds of drinks and then wake up wanting to cut my wrists because it appears preferable than getting through the day.
But I´ll get back onto what exactly it was that had me partying so hard later. First, let me tell you about what I did the day before. Along with Frank, an Englishman I like very much because he´s not afraid to make outrageously misogynistic and otherwise un-PC comments in any company, and Danny, another decent English guy, I took a one-day ´triathlon´ tour of the landscapes surrounding Tupiza. I will say, without a syllable of exaggeration, that what we saw out there was among the most astonishing natural scenery I´ve ever come witnessed. It´s only since arriving in Bolivia that I´ve started to miss my camera; those jagged canyons and improbable, huge clusters of sharp, rust-coloured spikes of rock that rose among the multi-coloured hills of the wild and rugged altiplano were something else; I really wanted to take pictures just to give people a taste of how amazing it all was.
The tour was called the ´triathlon´ because it was done partly in a jeep, partly on horseback and then the last leg was on bicycles. The jeep took us to some impressive canyons and outlandish natural features. I remember one was called ´La Puerta del Diablo´, the Devil´s Door. It was a huge portal in a huge flat and upright slab of red rock. But it was when we mounted the horses that the real fun began. We had a horse each, and were given a twenty second lesson on how to actually ride the animals; to stop or slow them down, you tug on the reins around their neck; to tell them to get moving you make a puckering, kissing sound, and to make them gallop you kick their side with your heel. I was expecting a relaxed, easy trot, maybe even with a guide walking alongside holding a rope so the horses didn´t get too uppity. Nothing of the sort. We started slowly enough, walking along the railway track (trains only run in the morning and evening, as I was told by the twelve-year old Miguel, the charming lad and adept horseman who accompanied us on the horseback part of our tour). But then we took a turn and headed out into the scraggy plains, passing those striking rock hills and outcroppings that made me wish I had the geological knowledge that would make these bizarre features comprehensible. It was then that we began to gallop, and I tell you now it was frightening, though only at the beginning. But it was exhilarating, too, obviously - seldom in my life have I felt a rush like that of hanging on for dear life, bounding across the plains through such dramatic landscapes. I couldn´t stop myself from letting out wild whoops and roars of joy. But then it started to get very painful, for all of us (with the possible exception of Miguel). Our arses took a walloping that made it uncomfortable even to sit in a restaraunt many hours later. Worse, if you´re a man and you´re bouncing up and down on the back of a horse while it´s galloping, your balls are going to get seriously crushed. Lewd jokes abounded about the unforseen necessity of emptying ones testicles prior to making like Clint Eastwood on the high plains. It reminds me of that Smiths lyric: "The pain was enough to make a shy bald Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder." Moreover, possibly because I had overeaten or else because I´m out of shape from my inactive recovery period, I got evil cramps in my stomach when the galloping started. Then, to make it worse, the reins were burning my calves, and even through my trousers, I still got cuts and large rashes that sting even now, two days later. But for all the pain, it was such terrific fun. I was on a high that lasted all day after that. We dismounted at one point and I explored a narrow, jagged canyon that went deep into the rock. There were parts where I had to climb, or jump down from rocks. I was as happy as a kid in an adventure playground. I think the narrow canyon went on considerably further, but after about half an hour I had to turn back to rejoin the others, who I suppose were too bolloxed from the horseriding to be up for climbing through a cragged passage through the mountains.
We were given an ample and tasty lunch, the highlight of which was the tamalas, a local speciality, yellow-coloured balls of maize with dried llama meat inside. Not bad. You can buy them at the market for one Boliviano each, which is so cheap that I won´t even bother trying to work out how much it is in Euros. For the last leg of the trip, we drove in the jeep to the top of a mountain, which I think was at an altitude of 4,000 metres above sea level (Tupiza itself is about 3,000). Much of Bolivia is at tremendous altitudes. At the summit, yet again, the panorama was breathtaking. In the distance I could see what looked very much like a city made of rusty brown rock, improbably straight vertical formations like skyscrapers, erratic in a landscape that manages to be both sparse, and diverse and erratic, simultaneously. Then it was down the mountain on the bikes, freewheeling all the way and once more hanging on for dear life, trying not to look over the precipice that yawned below at certain points along the winding, gravel road. It was another arse-terroriser, and because it was so painful to sit on the saddle I spent most of the descent standing up, so that my legs were like jelly near the end. When we got to lower, flatter ground, just a few kilometres outside the city, I was happily surprised to see a few llamas, or alpacas, I´m not sure, wandering across the road. Those animals are something of a symbol of South America, particularly, I believe, of Bolivia. You can have llama steak in the restaurants here. I´ll have to try it.
When we got back to the office I was utterly shattered. We all sat there, unable to move, hurting everywhere. But I had a big silly grin on my face that didn´t go away for a long time. All I could do after it was lie in bed for an hour or so and listen to some soothing country music. It was a fantastic day, which ended with me and Frank going for a big meal and then drinking Sangria with some Irish lads (I was only kidding about the culchees; the majority of them are grand. Plus, like the Brits, the Irish are endowed with perhaps the best, wickedest sense of humour in the English speaking world. Aussies only tell fart-jokes, while Amercicans can be humourless and way too politically correct, or else they just find imbecilic, vulgar ´humour´ amusing - though there are plenty of exceptions and I´ve met some of them. And then there´s the Simpsons, of course, which was the funniest thing ever, bar none, even though they let it get continue after it got crap and now it should be put down like a sick old dog. Though I´ll be curious to see if they make a good job of the film.)
And then there was yesterday. I had plans to do various things, but I stopped off in a little clothes shop about midday, the kind of bargain-basement place where they just have piles and piles of desultory garments in baskets and overflowing from shelves. I bought myself a very long, black jacket that, although it´s probably meant to be worn by a woman, and the sleeves are way too short for me, I think is the mutt´s nuts indeed. Anyway, I got talking to the people in the shop, including a pretty girl who didn´t work there but was just hanging around because her friends work there. Before I knew it, they were giving me plastic cups of wine and we all started getting merry. I like how Bolivians drink; very very quickly. Then they closed up shop and we had a meal across the road, and they told me we were all off to an area called, I think, San Antonio. Yesterday was a holy day known as Santiago that they celebrate here, it seems, by getting totally blitzed all day long. So off we went in a taxi, and we sat outside drinking beer after beer after beer. The craic was mighty, as they say in the Emerald Isle. A band was playing and people were dancing nearby, but we just set on the step in the sunshine, laughing and drinking. The plot thickened when the owner of the shop, who I´d say is in his forties, repeatedly tried to grope me while I pushed him away. The girl, Sylvia, told me to just tell him I was ´un hombre verdadero´, which literally translates as something like ´a real man´, but means straight. Then the girl was telling me that I had beautiful blueish-green eyes, which the Bolivians find irresistible because such coloured eyes are not to be found in this country, and so what could I do but kiss her. Somewhere in the ensuing drunkenness she vanished, as she had to go home, but I hope to see her again. I awoke this morning, and I had to lay there for about half an hour trying to piece together what had happened. I found I phone number I had scribbled in appalling handwriting the night before, and I presumed it was Sylvia´s, but when I rang it I found I was mistaken. I can´t think for the life of me who´s number it was. People kept giving me gifts yesterday; colourful pouches to hang around your neck and, bizarrely, a set of earrings that I had complimented Sylvia on. I don´t know what the hell she expects me to do with them. Near the end of the night I ended up in a shop, above which the family who owned it were living, and I talked and laughed for a while with the five sisters and another jubilant couple who had come in to join us. Such good people. After that, I think, I went and made a total arse of myself by dancing like a maniac while the band played (I think they were a military band). Then, as I recall (which I don´t, really), I lost the others and realised I had to get a taxi home. I tried to walk to the road but was totally incapable of keeping in a straight line. I banged into walls, I did u-turns and didn´t notice for minutes that I was walking the wrong way, I stumbled into ditches. After that, I remember nothing, but this morning´s encounter with the irate taxi driver helped me to fill in some of the blanks. Alcohol, I´m told, goes to your head a lot quicker when you´re at a high altitude.
In other news, I got my hair cut the other day for the first time in a year and a half. I tried to tell the barber that I still wanted it somewhat long, but could he just chop of a few inches. Needless to say, though, he took off a lot more than I had envisioned, so now I´m looking reasonably respectable (and younger too, I´m told). I also washed my jeans that I had worn every day since arriving in South America, including those fever-soaked days and nights in bed. It had occured to me that I was well on the way to becoming a rodent, and so I thought I should take action.
Current Location: Tupiza
Current Music: Neil Young - Harvest
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12:34 pm
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High Plains Drifting
So now I am in Bolivia, at last. It feels good to be back on the road. I arrived at the border after a sleepless overnight journey, where I waited until it opened with a hundred or so shabbily-clothed Bolivians and Argentinians in the cold. No doubt there was some contraband smuggling activity going on. Then it was across to the Bolivian border town of Villazón, where I immediately boarded another bus that would take me to Tipuza, where I am now. I passed the three hours of the journey looking out the window, transfixed, almost hypnotised by the strange, desolate landscape of the Bolivian ´altiplano´, the high-plains. There was almost nothing there, save for large cacti, parched earth and clouds of dust that blew between the craggy rust-coloured hills and canyons. Dustland. The altiplano is unfarmable and largely uninhabitable, too, with scarcely a tree in sight, but endowed with very dramatic scenery. There was only one thing I could possibly be reminded of by a landscape like that: the Wild West, the cinematic American West of cowboys and drifters and the badlands.
This impression was only reinforced when I arrived in Tupiza itself (Tupiza, a few kilometres outside of which perished Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), after the bus had sidled up with the river that runs into the town alongside the railway track. Tupiza is known as a city, but it´s tiny, seeming like only a small village surviving amidst the brown and red, rugged hills that crouch over it on all sides. The streets were largely deserted yesterday, a Sunday, but even today it feels like there are only a few dozen cars in the whole of Tipuza. For the first time here since Asia, I´m drawing attention to myself due to my height; a greater percentage of Bolivians claim indigenous heritage than in any other country in South America, so the European influences are less thickly spread, including in the physical stature of its inhabitants. Old women wear shawls spread across their shoulders, forming a downward-facing triangle on their chests, and black trilby-like hats. Easy knowing I´m back in the Third World, in a poor country; street-food vendors are to be found everywhere, selling delicious snacks and drinks at rock-bottom prices. Everything is very cheap here, naturally, about half the cost of things in Argentina. The ´almuerzos´, the set-lunches enjoyed in eateries throughout the country, are particularly good value. Yesterday afternoon, just after arriving here, I entered a busy looking restaurant and found that there was no menu; the waiter simply asked me; "¿Un almuerzo, señor?" The lunch was a three course feast, consisting of a salad and a plate of insipid corn of some kind, followed by a big bowl of tasty soup (rice and chips soup, a novelty for me), with a main course of ´lomo´, a regular steak, as far as I could tell, served with potatoes and vegetables, and a banana for dessert. And it all cost just a little over one euro.
After my hearty lunch yesterday, I slept for hours, rising only to eat again, with Frank, an Englishman I met back in Salta, who it turns out is staying in the same hostel as I am once again. After dinner I slept again - I was really exhausted, and it was pleasant to have a large, comfortable single room all to myself, after the dormitories of Argentina (and for only half the price). But now I´m awake and refreshed. The sun is shining high in the cloudless sky, and I´ve got plenty of things to do and to organise today to keep me busy. Having spent so long in rest and recovery recently, I´m full of energy and eager to see and do as much as I can here in Bolivia. Tomorrow I´m hoping to explore some of the surrounding area with Frank and whoever else we can rope in, no doubt with Ennio Morricone music playing in my head all the while. ´Doodledoodledoo, mwaa mwaa mwaa.´
Current Location: Tipuza
Current Music: Cat Stevens - The Wind
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02:06 pm
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Strange News From Another Star
I got to taste the Argentinian and Saltesian nightlife one last time last night, before I break for the border town of La Quaica at midnight tonight. I was supposed to be going out with Andrés and his friends; we had agreed to meet at half past twelve in a pub where live Folklorica is performed - that´s the time when pubs in famously drunken Ireland close at, even on weekends. But he had to cancel and I resigned myself to a night in, until a bunch of girls from the hostel asked me if I´d like to join them as they were heading out. It was enjoyable, in part because of the amusing linguistic complexity of the setup, with some people who spoke French and a little English but no Spanish; others, like me, who spoke English and Spanish but no French; one girl who only spoke French, and a sparky Welsh girl conducting it all with aplomb, speaking fluently in all three languages. I knew I shouldn´t drink on the antibiotics, but I thought one beer wouldn´t kill me. So I drank six of them, reasoning thus: ´six beers´ is a linguistic mirage, when you think about it, with no substantial existence of its own; after all, who has ever actually seen ´six´ beers, or ´six´ of anything? You only ever see six single beers, six ´one beer´s, and therefore, ´six´ is composed of a certain quantity of ones and nothing more - six is an illusion. So I drank six beers. It´s at times like that that I feel grateful for the mental training I underwent while studying philosophy.
No, I´m just kidding, I only had the one, and delicious it was indeed, my first in a few weeks. Then it was back home, to bed, and up again this morning to check out. I´ve been to the bus terminal to buy my ticket for tonight. But that´s not all I´ve been up to; I´ve also been following up on some tips and exploring the internet, finding out what various friends, most of whom I´ve become more or less estranged from, have been up to while I´ve been journeying. Everybody´s been very busy, very active and productive, it appears. I´ve seen videos and listened to music and been impressed by all, and I´ve seen how everyone seems to have significantly expanded their social horizons by way of cyberspace´s networking websites that have shot to immense popularity in recent years; Bebo, Myspace, Facebook. All of these discoveries combined to bring on a wave of ambivalent, complex and bittersweet emotion. Seeing how social they all seem to have become, reprised this haunting worry I´ve had that, while most others seem to connect with more people as they grow older, I seem to shed them, and I have these disturbing visions of drifting on in this way until I´m some angry, disconnected loner. But maybe I just haven´t been sleeping enough, it´s rarely quite as bad as it seems in these cases, is it? But at the same time, it was genuinely heartening to see what the old crew have been getting up to, what they appear to be in the process of making of themselves. It´s just that this, too, resurrects old fears, the kind that have no respect for the distances between continents and the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, concerning my own progress and acheivements, or maybe lack of.
But no, I´m not going to go too far down that road again. I´ve gotten very good at just being here, lately, without distracting myself too much by gazing anxiously into the future. It´s just a strange day, that´s all.
Current Location: Salta
Current Music: Gliding Gun - Freaks and Queens
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