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Our man in...
Hola amigoes! Como estas?
The early mid life/post university crisis bandwagon roles on in to a new town. I am now in Salta, northern Argentina and with so far being on the receiving end of only one pseudo friendly joke about "you stole our Malvinas" I think I am doing alright.
I remember being a little anxious about entering Bolivia for concern of being attacked by pan pipe hurling mobs of Peruvian farmers in the middle of the night. Not a problem as it turned out. The wee fun on the overnight bus journey were windows were coated in solid ice and at -15 and my MP3 player seized up in protest. I have a fairly lucid memory of counting down the minutes to sun rise, safely one of the coldest nights of my life.
Bolivia is a fairly, well, different and self contained country. It lives in its own world of beautiful organised chaos. Women wear bowler hats, cars have their own blessing festival every Saturday morning, miners drink 96% proof alcohol and there is no McDonalds. From Cuzco in Peru I have ploughed (not literally) through Copacabana (of not Barry Manilow fame), La Paz, the Amazon basin Pampas (like jungle but not quite), Potosi the world's highest city, Uyuni and its salt flats through coloured lakes in moon scape to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid land at Tupiza and now to Salta in Argentina.
Bolivia then. To use a bit of business speak it's fair to say it was "rewarding but challenging". Which translates in to English as eye opening experiences of landscapes, wildlife and urban environments but feeling a bit beat up and glad to leave. See, the thing is most of this country is at about 4,000m. Altitude makes you frequently nauseous and tired to different degrees but hey that wouldn't be a problem if the food wasn't quite probably the worst on earth; food poisoning three times in two weeks. The third time on the gastrinal merry-go-ground I think I began adopting a fairly philosophical attitude to life - except towards Bolivian spag bol. Roads in Bolivia are often dirt tracks and distances in a country twice the size of France became a little bigger than you expect. But it's ok because if you dodge the vomit of your neighbour there's plenty of dust to look at it...for six hours.
I'm happy with that rant. Here's the good side. Bolivia is a country less geared for tourism than pretty much any other which means you don't need to be lectured by hackneyed travel-bores about doing "real travelling". Bolivia's stunning environment and tensions between urban and traditional life are all around you. There is the Amazon basin more real than any zoo - yellow Monkeys, Aligators, Anacondas, Capybaras, Eagles and birds from Roald Dahl books. Endless snow capped volcanoes frame vast salt lakes, giant cactus's and fluorescent coloured lakes of arsenic. Surreal lunar landscapes transform in to a miniature of the wild west over four days of dirt tracks with not a sign of the 19th century in site. And temperatures to freeze the blood including a personal experience of what -25 feels like. Hmmm, how's the heat wave?
My body and my head are not getting on too well together. They struck a deal, the latter said to the former that you can have gourmet steak when I get to Argentina. Fair deal. The body also included a whole bottle of super tasty red and a bottle of beer. The scores were even the next day. Incidentally if you think having conversations between different parts of my anatomy is an indication of my mental state, you are probably right. It was always a precarious line I trod.
Bolivia wins the honorary Italian sponsored awards for the world's worst army. I'm a historian/nerd, trust me. Six wars in its first hundred years of independence fought variously with each of its five neighbours. It lost every one of them and half of all its land including the coast line. Every year the president of Bolivia meets that of Chile and asks for their coast back. Every year they are only offered in return minced meat for spaghetti that doesn't cause dysentery (sadly they turn it down). The last war they fought was against Paraguay for an area of land with oil. Paraguay won but then found that the land didn't have oil after all. The army are everywhere though; ever present and very much loved. They are good at something - 193 governments in 180 years.
Bolivia is poor. Really "poor". Milk a donkey for breakfast kind of "poor". Perhaps often you can choose to ignore it or rather disengage from it. But then, it's always there. Begging is endemic and usually by children but hey the adults get to work 12 hours a day in a mine with conditions dating to as recently as oh, about 1750. The problem is how to respond. What do you think? When a six year old comes on to your bus and signs a horrifically bad song or woman holds her hand out continually to you from the floor as you use an ATM or you are eating in a restaurant and children enter playing another hearty but out of tune Beatles song on a set of 10p plastic pan pipes what do you do? Do you think it quaint and indicative of a rich and varied culture? Do you think it brave? Do you pity them and smile or give money to brighten their day because that's how important you are? But then all of this is a misplaced western patronisation perhaps? Better is it to be irritated and annoyed at them? At least that way it's easy, I can work from a position of knowing exactly what my reaction is and what it means to them and me and I shalln't have to think anymore. A bit serious that but then Bolivia can be an intense experience in every way.
Off around the land of milk and honey now. I can faithfully report that the steaks are gratuitously good and that I am looking for a Che Guevara t-shirt to wear when I arrive at US immigration. New photos at www.statraveljournals.com/mrpaulmullens.com include an unusual kind of breakfast milk, an new premier league logo and what to do with a kilogram of live burning TNT. No crossing dressing sadly.
Hasta luego,
Paul.
KID, THE NEXT TIME I SAY LET'S GO SOME PLACE LIKE BOLIVIA, LET'S GO SOME PLACE LIKE BOLIVIA.
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