Bolivia Part Dos (Two)

10/09/2016: The good thing about being on superlongholibags is that our stress levels have plummeted. We don't work for two of the world's greatest idiots (I'm not saying we ever did, just celebrating the fact that we don't) and instead of whining in chorus about how frustrating our days have been, we now grumble about how we haven't eaten Japanese food in a while, or how the Fanta tastes a bit different. We're essentially a pair of douchebags and we only kind of know it. Although we tend to agree on most things, one thing Pól and I disagree quite a bit over is money. If you’ll remember, cheapduck2016  likes to save her pennies. Impatience sometimes gets the better of me; this afternoon for example it was hot, Pól was waiting outside the shop, so I kindly left the 70 pesos owed to me as change to the lady who'd just sold me bread and cheese as she was faffing around in her coin tray and Pól was getting impatient (70 Chilean pesos is about 10 euro cents). “It all adds up,” I whined at Pól, who told me that in that case I can keep hold of all the coins from now on because they break his pockets and he left his sewing kit in Spain. He also had to put his hands firmly on my shoulders and escort me out of the one off-licence in San Pedro de Atacama (that's in Chile) because the lardy, whiskered, thief-in-a-tabard behind the counter refused to return the money for the beer bottles we’d 'rented’ the day before. In many countries in South America, you pay a lot for a bottle of they can take 500 pesos for every beer they sell to tourists who don't know the system. I told her as much politely at first, then increasingly less so as she shrugged her shoulders and wobbled her jowls and repeatedly told me not to inflate her balls (I’m happy to have gone through this experience if only to learn this brilliant Chilean phrase). I guess the 1000 pesos we paid for those bottles is a gringo tax for being tourists in a town made for, and possibly tired of, tourists. If I ever get the chance though, I'll be back to San Pedro to set up a second off-licence, break the monopoly, and stop the petty thievery. You can inflate your prices, but you will never take our money for bottle rental!

Unlike Chile, Bolivia is a relatively cheap country and in Potosí we stayed in a great hostel (Casa Blanca : free veggie soup!) and did a tour of the mine. The price was minimal (80BOB / 10€), our guide, Alejandro, deserved more. The tour of the mine itself was terrifying and thrilling and dark and exhausting. Captain Safety (aka Pól) couldn't keep up with the number of health and safety violations, dropped his clip-board down a hole and lost his pen. We abseiled into the abyss, climbed crab-style up vertical tunnels, heard the not-distant-enough explosions of dynamite, all the while following a chain-smoking Alejandro, who explained to us in his self-taught English that he hopes his children's generation will have other ways to make money other than the mine. Miners can earn up to 200BOB (26€) per day extracting silver, zinc and tin from the increasingly unstable mountain which, at many times more than a non-miner’s salary, is why so many people do it, despite the dangers. Alejandro's father had died in the mine and he told us that miners don't make it home from work every week, while others suffer and die from respiratory problems caused by the oxygen-poor, dust-filled air. The mountain is so full of tunnels it's like a giant Swiss cheese,i f Swiss cheese ate the mice and not the other way around. Inside the Swiss cheese are statues made by the cooperatives working in the mines of a giant-penised “Tío” (a native god), who watches over the miners and protects them, sometimes. Alejandro stopped at each of the Tíos, gave them some coca leaves and a cigarette, poured some 96% alcohol on the ground, which he then also swigged. Despite, or perhaps because of all the fags and the booze, Alejandro had a constant smile on his face even though, and he repeated this point, the futures of his friends and family were not great. Before descending into the mine each group buy s gifts for the miners: tobacco, coca leaves, dynamite, and our group distributed these to every worker we met. Some spoke to us, said hi and thank you, others just stared at us sadly and dully: we were no novelty for them the way they were for us. I’ll never forget the expression on one miner's face when Alejandro beckoned him from his work area. He lumbered out of the shadows and stood in front of us, shoulders hunched, eyes down, and it wasn't so much that he looked exhausted, more that he was a living embodiment of the meaning the word. Thanks to Facebook, I know a tonne of people we met have gone down those mines and all were probably just as horrified by the working conditions as we were. And just like me they’ll have taken their horror away with them when they moved on to another country and forgotten about their guide and his family. Just like I will no doubt do.

From Potosí we went on to Uyuni, the salt flats, and the surrounding national park. At over 4,000 metres above sea level we suffered cold nights and laboured breathing (from the altitude). I was also suffering from Gringo Fatigue* which I recovered from well in San Pedro, until I finished my beer and tried to return the bottle to the shop.

Most people do a 3-day tour, so that’s what we did: starting in the small town of Uyuni (its existence now depends on tourism) you and your group (we were with a Dutch guy, a pair of Aussies and Facundo, the dullest Argentinian in the entire world) are driven hundreds of kilometres, stopping first in the Train Cemetery (monument to Uyuni 's historical importance as a trading post/memento mori/adult playground) then on through the salt flats. The scenery in the salt flats is incredible: at times you see nothing but white and blue (salt and sky). It's like a Star Wars set -Hoth without the bumps (thanks to Pól for the help with that reference). Despite being on a route followed by hundreds of people every day, the salt flats (salt-topped-thick-enough-to-drive-on lakes) are vast enough for your driver to park up in the middle of nowhere, usher you out of the car and watch you look around, awestruck, contemplating your own insignificance, for half a minute until you pull out your phone for photo time. Every group stops to take their “funny” (pronounced “fanny”) photos, as the landscape (or lack of it?) makes it easy to play tricks with perspective. Some groups come prepared with props (Pringles cans worth their weight in gold, rubber ducks, dildos). We forgot to take anything but still got some decent pics with an umbrella and a bottle of rum. The results aren't the fanniest photos, but we had lots of fun fannying (funnying?) around for an hour or so, until it was car time again.

Our driver, Rober’ (not Robert, Rober’) gave us information about the sights as we passed them. He told us that millions of years ago the whole salar (salt flat) was covered by the Atlantic Ocean, before the land rose out of the sea, losing the water but retaining the salt. Rober’ was our driver, our cook, our guide and our keeper, so the wisest thing was to be nice to him. Unfortunately, some of the side effects of Gringo Fatigue involve getting ratty when someone nails the door to your bathroom closed because you don't want to pay extra to use it and I may have snapped at him when he showed indifference to our travel buddy's sleeping bag having been leaked on during the drive. The first night was OK: we weren't too cold, some of us still had enough money to pay for the extremely pricey wine and share it with those who couldn't afford a bathroom, and we went to bed with full bellies. On the second night, however, pretty much the opposite was true. After the coldest, hungriest night, we were up at 04:30 on Rober’s orders because we had a lot to do before getting to the Chilean border before 10:00 to catch our transfer back to Alderon (the most earth-like planet in the Star Wars universe). “It's OK if we get there a little later, isn't it?’ I had piped up ignorantly, hoping to not have to get up before sunrise. 

The boiling pits where incompetent drivers are disposed of.

Antonio shows us some coca leaves. They taste awful.

Turns out relations between Bolivia and its (her?) westerly neighbour are so sour the border closes at ten and if you don't make it, you're stuck on Tatooine (really trying to make the Star Wars thing work) until the next morning when the wormhole reopens.

So we were awake and dressed in 17 layers each while the temperature outside was -15°C and the temperature inside our sleeping shack was -15°C and Rober’ was nowhere to be seen. He finally appeared at 06:00, threw our stuff on the roof of the 4x4, hurried us in, turned on the heating and apologised profusely as he drove us into the sunrise (only joking: there was no heating in the car, he asked us not to talk so as not to steam up the windows, and the only thing he was sorry for was that he'd missed breakfast). Rober’ is lucky. The country we drove through while we were under his watch for 48 hours was absolutely incredible: coloured lagoons filled with (really quite stinky) flamingos, mountains with visible layers of different colours, and expanses of silent wilderness are too distracting and beautiful to be mentally writing letters of complaint (and I tried).

On the final morning we visited an area covered in geysers spewing sulphur and bubbling grey mud. They looked like death jacuzzis. Rober’ warned us not to get too close as the nearest hospital was 500km away and didn't go anywhere near them himself, which was wise as I think more than one of us would have been tempted to give him a push. Next there was a quick stop at some thermal springs, an even quicker breakfast stop, and we made it to the border with Chile with ten minutes to spare, which meant I was a panicky puddle on the floor of the 4x4 (I'd have happily been there at 04:30). We payed our exit fee, got our exit stamps, said tally ho to Bolivia, growled goodbye to Rober’, before descending 2000 metres into San Pedro on the first tarmac-covered roads we’d seen in days.

*Gringo Fatigue

(noun)

1. Tiredness from being in a foreign country and having the feeling everyone is trying to squeeze more money out of you by inflating prices and acting indignant if you try to bargain.
2. Tiredness from dealing with foreigners who dander through your country, take photos of themselves in it, then bargain over everything and huff and puff when you add on a small percentage, but end up buying the Pringles anyway.