Sucre and the Shanghai of the Americas, La Paz

Today I saw the first cloud that I have seen in Bolivia, a cauliflower cumuluous cloud, scudding across the sky. That was before I went to a local bar to see Man United humiliated by a Barcelona side who make an art out of keeping the ball.

Two days ago, though, I was in Sucre, a pretty city of gleaming white colonial buildings that was named Bolivia´s capital in the new constitution. It is the most European city that I have visited, with wide sweeping streets and simple, yet elegant neoclassical facades. When I arrived, the city was in the grip of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the revolution of Charcas, or as the press in Sucre tried to claim, the first spark of Latin American independence. For the two days that I was there, a neverending parade of dignitaries, soldiers, musicians and citizens piled down the central street, Avenida Arce to the booming of a brass band. Sitting in cafes bordering the street, the windows and light fittings would literally shake with the reverberations of the drums outside. The church of San Francisco stood immediatly outside my hostel, and it is reputed that it was here that the bell first struck to call the people of South America to freedom. A dignitary gave a speech calling on the people of Bolivia to unite together to create a strong nation (The Bolivian moto is Union y Fuerza). Yet these celebrations showed what a divided, disunited country Bolivia is, despite the goodwill of the thousands of people who lined the streets to see the local chess and football club pass by. Morales decided to hold the bicentenary in a small village over a hundred kilometres from Sucre in a deliberate affront to the capital. Last year on the 25 May, a group of campesinos affiliated to MAS (Morales´s party, Movimiento al Socialismo) marched into the central square of Sucre and were promptly attacked by some Sucre residents who beat them, stripped them of their clothes and gave Sucre the reputation of being a racist city. Morales has also undermined the basic legal right to presumption of innocence by issuing a decree stating that the goods and property of people implicated in terrorism would be immediatly confiscated. He is not popular in Sucre, where a taxi driver told me that he was a mentiroso, a liar.

Tiring of the incessant street parades, I moved on to La Paz on a freezing bus, wearing only a tee-shirt and jumper. At first, La Paz seemed to be just like any other big city; busy, polluted and noisy. But the city revered by Ernesto Guevara de la Serna as the Shanghai of the Americas soon began to work its charm. Many of the old colonial buildings have been knocked down and rebuilt, but behind the church of San Francisco, narrow, cobbled alleyways still wend their way up the hillside towards El Alto, the fastest growing city in Bolivia, whose houses twinkle round the rim of the canyon at night. Poverty is as evident here as elsewhere in Bolivia. After drinking a coffee at the bourgeois Cafe Berlin on my first morning in La Paz, I passed a small indigenous women who had crouched down in a busy street to pee into a drain. She seemed to feel no shame or embarrasment at suffering this indignity. In the central square, pigeons flocked around a man holding seed in his hands and an old hunchbacked man stared plaintively into a shop window at a watch that he would never be able to afford. A plaque on the wall commemorated the people who were shot dead in this square by the government of Sanchez Lozada before it fled on mass to the USA.

The central artery for traffic in La Paz is El Paseo, more like a motorway than a central street. Colectivos stop every few yards so that a ticket seller can lean out of the window and holler the destinations in a piercing, machine gun spanish that I, at least, cannot understand. The mercado de hechinceria (witches market) consists of a long line of stalls on a shaded, cobbled street where old indigenous women sell dried llama foetuses (for good luck), animal amulets and plates of offerings to pachamama, which contain piles of coca leaves and fake money. Aphrodisiacs crowd the shelves. The owners of these stalls sit on the pavements in their black and grey protruding hats, so drowned in petticoats and shawls that they look like squat mushrooms, their legs and arms nowhere to be seen. High above was the central produce market selling everything, from beds and electronics to dried, stinking fish and cows innards. These markets are always fascinating because of the density of the stalls and due to the incredible sense of activity and vitality that they exude. On every corner sits a women selling freshly squeezed fruit juice and popcorn. The comedores, or eating halls are built of corrugated iron. Inside, small, dark men bend over their steaming soup, ladled out from huge vats by rotund women. There was even a pet section, assuming of course that the white rabbits and budgies were not being fattened up for tomorrow´s lunch.

La Paz has a big drug scene and while eating lunch in a cuban restaurant below a looming portrait of Che, two greasy Bolivians who I hadn´t spoken to up to that point slipped me a post-it note with a telephone number on and explained that I could ring it at any time to buy weed or coke. My brush with drugs continued as I visited the fascinating coca museum and later when I was led to the notorious route 36 by two of the guys in my hostel. Our taxi driver knocked on an iron gate that seemed to lead to an ordinary house and it was opened by a guard who scanned the street sheepishly before ushering us in and patting us down. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and people were ordering lines of coke from the bar, which came on top of CD cases. As the other guys snorted away, I sank into a chair, feeling somewhat out of place.