Bolivia, a whole new country

Burn the Mayor!

We’d heard on the South American travellers’ jungle drums (www.bbc.co.uk/news) that just before we’d reached Puno the citizens, sick of the blatantly corrupt administration in their little town had formed a mob, flaming pitchforks and viciously sharp torches in hand and dragged their mayor from the council house. They then set about burning him alive… to death on the steps outside. Looking around at the seemingly calm, almost docile people sat on the street, finger puppets laid out on blankets in front of them we realised that it was time to move on.

The word from the bus ticket salespeople was that if we thought things were a little rough in Peru, just wait till we got to Bolivia. The workers were barricading the access routes through the border, piling dead cars on the streets and generally causing a nuisance of themselves. I was impressed at the way the people had pulled together in a time of trouble to tell the Government that they just wouldn’t put up with their shenanigans. It reminded me of the riots in Cochabamba a few years before when the president thought it would be a good idea to sell the water authorities off to some American company who immediately tripled the rates. Still, for us this was not good. We had tacked a trip to Bolivia on to the end of John and Judiths trip so they could see more than the culture in Peru. As it was, the timing was fine tuned… with riots, burning Mayors and roadblocks on the cards it looked like we would have to get hyper-organised to get them back to the airport in Lima to catch their flight home.

In a tour office in Puno, after Judith had been shopping with Amanda, secreting various finger puppetry about her person, we booked a bus to the capital on a day when we were assured there would be a lull in the “troubles”. This would give them about 24 hours grace should anything go wrong. Confident in Johns Spanish just in case they needed to procure a donkey for any stage of their return journey, we all went to bed, dreaming of wicker men on wicker islands, burning for the harvest in the centre of an enormous sacred blue lake at twilight.

Being blackmailed through the border!

True to the tour offices work the following day, we came across no trouble at all on our trip to the border. Judiths first crossing in South America went with no problems and, prepared by the “book” we all sat on the left of the bus to get the best views of the stunning Lake Titicaka as we trundled through the spiky brown countryside into Copacabana.

Border crossings can vary. Amanda and I had one aim and that was to receive the legal 90 day visa into the country. 30 were just not going to be enough. The guy wanted 50 Bolivars from each of us. We knew it was free. We checked with the bus company rep and he said it was free. After much debate (he assured us it would cost over 100 in La Paz) and brief arguments from Amanda (under no circumstances were we going to give this dude any money) we left, 30 day visa stamp and no qualms about not having paid. Only the future would tell if we were to remain fugitives in small, wet, mozzie ridden huts in the Amazon.

We knew we were in Bolivia straight away, everything was a little cheaper (which means super-duper cheap). They still sold the essential finger puppets on half the market stalls (which meant there was no need for Judith to stock up before we left Peru). We were met from the bus by a hopefull looking tout with a minibus who offered to take us to the cheapest, best hotel in the known universe. Piling in we drove for approximately 100 metres before he parked outside the place. Bit of a waste of petrol but as far as he was concerned we were a captive audience after he’d locked the doors. We weren’t disappointed with the hotel, it was very cheap, at least after I’d spent five minutes bashing the concierge down to the price we’d been promised at the bus stop, in a beautiful setting, had hot water and they did the most incredible all-you-can-eat breakfasts we’d ever seen. The kind that mean you don’t have to eat anything else till the next day… and late at that!

Wandering around the little town we took in the lake shore, a pleasant promenade lined with shops and restaurants, boats and bead sellers. The beach here was named before its more famous namesake in Rio, Brazil. That glorious stretch of white sand was actually named Copacabana after this dirty lake shore that no-one has heard of. Strange how things happen… We walked through the markets where John bought a dozen CD’s for about 20p. I distinctly heard him mutter something about “Well if she can buy all those bloody finger puppets”. There seemed to be a festive feel to the place. A party atmosphere was definitely in the air. When we eventually wandered into the main square at around midday we found out why.

The sacred blessing of motor vehicles.

I’d read about this before in “the book”, but after all the goings on to get us here it had slipped my mind, now it was all coming back to me. Copacabana was the place where they blessed the cars… Lined up outside what was an impressively large white cathedral for such a small place were dozens of vehicles of all types, vans, utes, buses, station wagons, you name it, garlanded and draped in flowers, trinkets, symbols of all kinds and colours. Loud music played from a dozen stereo’s and car boom boxes, all distinctly Bolivian, and bad. The air was full of smoke from the myriad of incense sticks and burners stuck beneath the windscreen wipers and hanging from the windows. Most strange of all was the whiff of beer that pervaded the air, as if a bomb had exploded in the local brewery, showering the square with a hoppy brown rain. The whole scene was like a mad, psychedelic stock car race. As cars drove away, presumably safer for their blessing, others vied for the empty parking space.

Spot the holy beer.

This was Christianity mixing with Shamanism at its most surreal. We found one of the priests performing the blessing on a clapped out Ford that looked as if faith was all that was keeping it together for the last twenty years. They were using the beer as a substitute for holy water, splashing it liberally over the engine, wheels and bonnets of the blessed cars, chanting in some strange tongue and waving sticks of incense in the air. Clearly there was some stubborn bad spirit in this one’s carburettor that needed some serious shifting. I didn’t get to see this particular blessing for much longer, a space had just opened up a little further down the queue and a local bus company owner was trying to beat the competition by manoeuvring his entire fleet into it. I nearly got my feet crushed in their religious fervour.

Ever seen over 100 types of potato?

Exploring the square further we meandered slowly past the inevitable market stalls selling religious tat, saint Winifred key rings, Our lady of the sock drawer pendants, and of course finger puppets shaped like everyone’s favourite biblical characters. We walked around the cathedral, flanked on all sides by the old and infirm begging for a penny, then continued to the centre of the square where the local farmers were having a produce day. On display around the central fountain were at least 100 different types of potato, mixed liberally with other tubers of all varieties. Each was displayed in its own little carefully woven pot, with a hand-written label (in their best handwriting) on top. The proud green fingered growers sat nearby, weaving something or talking to their neighbour about the benefits of sheep dung over llama manure as a fertiliser for this type of vegetable or that variety of potato. As long as I live, I swear I will never see that many species of the common spud in one place. We all assume that they all look pretty much the same, maybe the occasional variation in colour from one to the other. The truth is far more incredible. I feel blessed to have been a witness to it.

Altogether, the main square in Copacabana that day was like an alternate reality. Everywhere we turned something twice as strange as the last thing was happening, All to the soundtrack of deafening music played from ceiling high speakers somewhere in the potato festival in the middle of it all. A little bemused by how curioser and curioser this was all getting, we all decided that we were no longer on the same planet as Kansas, we were in fact possibly travelling in a different reality altogether. Bolivia had surpassed all our expectations for cultural oddities already, and we’d only just got off the bus.