Bolivia, an Italian and some serious salt

I am now in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in South America which has been subject to more revolutionary upheavals than any other. For the last week I have been travelling with an Italian from Milan, Alberto, a bearded, hook-nosed clone of Adam Sandler. Like all Italians, he is in the habit of "hablarse a codos" (to rabbit away) and ends every sentence with a rising "eh", raising his shoulders and putting his hands together like a beggar. The biggest difference between Bolivia and Chile has been the buses. In the border town of Ollague, we left our comfortable Chilean bus and boarded a tall, rusting hulk filled to the brim with Bolivians and their bags, boxes and other belongings. To reach our seats we had to climb over legs and arms, and when the bus finally stuttered into motion, potatos started to rain down from the overhead departments. Pictures on the outside of the bus taunted us, showing air conditioning, drinks, food and comfortable seats. Needless to say, I didn´t get much sleep. I had a similar experience travelling South-East from Uyuni to Tupiza. After crawling for two hours along a rocky excuse for a road, we stopped in a small town with a damn for a "pequeno descanso" (small break). Two hours later, I was still sitting on the side of the road playing backgammon and waiting for the driver to fill up the bus. I had a far better experience on the bus to Tupiza. The comfy seats just about made up for the danger of the journey; in some places, the bus was crawling along the ledge of a mountain, barely wide enough to accomodate both wheels. As we rounded the hairpin bends, the front edge of the bus hung tantalizingly over the edge, and the people in the front seats with it. I read in the newspaper today that a trucker had died on the "Paso de Jama", the road that I will take from Tarija to Potosi. It is locally known as "Paso de la muerte)

I haven´t yet bored of oggling the old women here in Bolivia. There are small, stunted and surprisingly rotund, clad in the traditional blouse and petticoat in whose deep recesses they pocket their change. Tall, protruding bowler hats perch on top of their heads, attached around their knecks with an elastic cord and they sport thick, alpaca stockings which keep out the freezing wind of the Antiplano. They often carry striped sacks on their backs, filled either with food or with tiny infants whose tiny hands poke out from the folds of cloth. Some look like witches about to catch a spell, while the taller women look like the nobility of some alien race.
In Uyuni, we saw ample evidence of superstition. Before embarking on our Uyuni trip, Alberto and I made a tour of the market, passing tables loaded with brightly coloured fruit and a meat hook from which a flayed cow was hanging. The thick crowds outside hid the most interesting thing, though. A small, fat man stood next to a steaming vat of putrid liquid, stirring it with a spoon and shouting repeatedly "que mas contiene" (what else does it contain). The vat was thick with seaweed, medicinal wood and the head of a small crocodile. He claimed that this concoction could cure dolor de huesos and an infinite number of other ailments. Another man extolled the virtues of a saint who could be contacted, for a small fee of course.

Uyuni is a small, dusty and ugly town, lost in the immensity of the desert plain. On the first night we ate at a local comedor for ten bolivianos (around one pound), enjoying a soup of quinoa and vegetables, meat and rice. The great attraction of Uyuni is that it is the starting point for the Salar de Uyuni tour which encompasses the biggest salt flats in the world, numerous lakes spotted with pink flamingoes, hard volcanic rock twisted into improbable shapes (such as a tree) and steaming geysers. The salt flats were undoubtedly the highlight for me. My legs tucked up beneath me in a Toyota 4x4, I looked out of the window over miles of glistening white salt, piled up in places into mountains of hard crystals and twelve metres deep in the centre. Our guide told us that a sea had once covered this area. It receded and left a lake, which then dried to leave huge salt deposits. The salar was magical in the evening as the sun began to dip below the surrounding mountains, casting pink rays over the perfect, geometrical panes of salt. On the second day of the tour, we saw a mountain of seven colours, the different shades of red and green bleeding down the rock, and on the third day, after surviving a night where the temperature dropped to -7C, we bathed in a steaming pool fed by geysers and wandered round the Valle de las rocas. Wind and rain have sculpted the rock into birds, cowboy hats and holes, while huge boulders balance on tiny ledges, ready to be pushed on to a passing foe.

On the way back towards Uyuni, we passed a small village, hidden under the shadow of the rocas and barely perceptible just a few miles away. Around the village, llamas drank in the brooks and field upon field gleamed with golden sheaves of quinoa. Quinoa is supposedly a supergrain, similar in texture to cous-cous, and it commands such a high price that many farmers have stopped rearing llamas and have begun cultivating the crop. I mention it because the husk of the quinoa plant is used to make a powder that is added to coca leaves, which releases the alkaloids contained in the coca (among them, tiny amounts of cocaine). Coca leaves have been chewed since time immemorial in the Andean countries to combat altitude sickness and to alleviate hunger and fatigue. The spanish conquistadores first banned coca before they realised that it made their workers more productive during their forty hour shifts. Therafter, it became compulsory. Alberto and I bought a big bag of coca and put it to good use once we climbed over 4000m and my head began to throb with the increased pressure. You take around ten coca leaves, roll them into a ball and slowly chew them until they are moist. The green gunge is then placed between the top lip and the gum and sucked. The quinoa powder is applied using a wooden utensil to avoid direct contact with the skin.

Evo Morales began life as a llama herder and came to power largely because he vowed to protect coca producers in Bolivia against the pressure of the United States, which considers coca production in Bolivia to be fuelling the global trade in cocaine. Many steps are needed to turn coca leaves into cocaine, and I certainly never felt a high when sucking the coca leaves, only a slight numbness in my tongue (Coca was formerly used as a commercial anaesthetic).

Everywhere you go in Bolivia, you see the "Evo" daubed on the walls, along with "Vote si por la nueva constitucion" (vote for the new constitution) which, among other things, establishes Sucre as the official capital of Bolivia and allows Morales to rule for a further two terms. He is a man who polarises opinion. I asked the owner of the hostel in Tupiza whether he likes Morales. He pulled a face and declared brusquely, "Me gustaria quitarle la cabeza" ("I would like to take his head off) Like the famous Peruvian novelist, Maria Vargas Llosa, he believes that by emphasising his Amerindian heritage, he increases tension in a largely mestizo (mixed blood) South America. Today I have been reading articles about Morales in a Tarijan daily which are surprisingly explicit in their criticism of the President given that he is pursuing a case against anther paper for defamation. One article begins;

"In these times, it is worth asking oneself where resides the spirit of the Bolivian people to vigorously oppose a regime based on deception, demagogy and lies. For the current government to cling to power, it only needed to loan our sovereignty to the Venezuelan petrol-empire and make us believe that it was liberating the people after five hundred years of exploitation".

Yesterday, I read an article claiming that the previous government of Lozada had fleed to the united states to escape punishment for their involvement in the "Black October" of 2003 in which over seventy protestors were killed in a riot that would lead to the overthrow of his government. Today, the matter doesn´t seem so clear, though. Some influential figures have stated that if Lozada is to be tried, so should Morales who armed the crowd with Molotov cocktails. The judiciary is not independent in Bolivia. Under political pressure, the President of the Supreme Court of Justice has been removed. The government has no qualms about resorting to summary justice. Several weeks ago, three alleged terrorists were killed in their beds in the city of Santa Cruz because they had allegedly been planning to assasinate the President. The security cameras were cut by the police and the "terrorists" were shot in the back. (Reichstag fire, anyone). Lastly, a prominent indigenous leader recently had his back reduced to bleeding shreds because he opposed the changes that Morales is introducing. Those who persecuted this act of barbarism have not been caught. I am sure that little of this news is published in Britain. Morales is championed on the left as part of a broad movement in South America to liberate the indigenous, but at what cost?