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.

Tupiza, Tarija and the mouth of hell"

From Uyuni, I travelled on to Tupiza and then to Tarija with an ex-English teacher, Stewart, with whom I spent a happy week. Tupiza is a small dusty village that sits in a narrow valley, surrounded by interesting rock formations and canyons. I visited these on a large, black mare flecked with grey that knew the path so well that it wouldn´t obey my futile tugs to right and left, only obeying its master, a taciturn fifteen year old boy, who could send it into a gallop with a smacking of his lips. The problem was that the horse only knew two speeds, a stupefying plod that made you feel like a corpse lolling back and forth, and a gallop that forced me to grip the saddle with both hands and had a deleterious effect on my posterior. After the first hair-raising sprint, I resolved to just plod along, but the boredom overcame me again and again, with the result that I was never truly in control.

"Control" was an important theme for Stewart who was interested in Eastern spirituality and was reading a book called the "Bhagavad Gita". Wheras western philosophy treats the body and the mind as separate entities, eastern philosophy establishes no distinction between the mind and the universe. Drinking wine, cracking open peanut shells and playing backgammon, we discussed his philosophy. He believes that humans can achieve enlightenment, that an immutable core lies at the core of every individual (and therefore "the bourne from which no traveller returns" does not mark the end) and that you can choose to influence your environment in any instance. He contests that you can choose to roll a double four in backgammon; he himself admitted that this implies that he rejects reason and the enlightenment. What confused me was why he chose to reject reason in this case, and accept it in every other. During the time I spent with him, he never once walked towards oncoming traffic or threw himself off a building.

The city of Tarija is prim and wealthy. Tree lined flowerbeds line the streets and palm trees dot the central square. People there are whiter than they are in the rest of Bolivia, perhaps because many Andalucians emigrated to this area. As we ate empanadas and chicken in Plaza Sucre, we would watch the local bad boy set making circles of the plaza, boys hanging on to tailfins and music ripping through the soft night air. Despite the hulking hummers, though, child beggars wander the streets with a plaintive air, calling you "tio malo" if you don´t give them some money. On our second day in Tarija we visited a bodega in nearby, Valle de la Concepcion where we were taught to swill the wine, smell it and savour it by a camp Bolivian teenager. All his advice fell on dead ears. Even the most expensive wine was acid and astringent
, leaving your mouth and throat burning. This was made up for though, by another nearby bodega where a solid, self-styled campesino, called Jesus sold us a fantastic bottle of wine and showed us around his wine cellar.

From Tarija, Stewart and I went our separate ways, he to Bermejo and I to Potosi, the highest city of its size in the world. On the bus, I was squeezed against the window next to a huge indigenous woman whose layer upon layer of clothing must have hidden obesity (I have yet to discover how these women become fat on a diet of vegetable stew and the odd slice of llama). Potosi is a city of contradictions. The intricate stonework of the colonial mansions and the sumptuous churches belie the poverty of the tens of thousands of workers who made that wealth possible and continue to toil in terrible conditions, extracting silver, iron, lead and zinc. The cathedral´s adobe wals were washed away by heavy rains to be replaced by huge concrete slabs and the biggest bell in Bolivia, the core of which is made of gold. All this work was performed by slaves. Cerro Rico, where the metals are extracted, can be seen from all over town, an orange monolith cut into terraces so that lorries can beetle their way up the steep slopes. I was persuaded to take a tour of the mines on my first day in Potosi. We first visited the miners shop, where we were entreated to buy coca, drinks and explosives for the miners. The history of mining in Potosi explains why these humble gifts are so important.

The mine was originally owned by two powerful Spanish families who forced the miners to work as serfs. With the 1952 revolution, the mines of Potosi were nationalised, the workers were granted life and health insurance and education was provided for their children. In the years leading up to 1985, the price of tin fell and the cooperatives were formed; ten or more miners would approach the state and buy a concesion, giving them exclusive rights over a particular section of the mine. Despite the word "cooperative", the mining of today is a very individualistic business. The miners are not told where to work, they return only 30% of their profits to the cooperative and they have to buy all their own equipment. Ironically, the Iraq war increased the price of basic metals, enticing the young men of Potosi back down the mines where they worked up to 24 hours a day, conscious that their good luck could turn at any moment. The guide also let us try a liquour called quitasuenos (literally, take away you dreams) that the miners drink to dull the torment of a life spent underground in terrible conditions. It is 95% alcohol. They also make offerings of quitasuenos to the two spirits that preside over the mine, Tio and Cochamama (mother earth); inside the mine we saw a sculpture of the Tio, a red, devilish creature with a gaping mouth ready to receive the sacrificial offerings of the miners in return for their life and health (as the guide told us, Cerro Rico is a swiss cheese of winding tunnels and an article published today in the local newspaper suggested that the upper section of the hill has become structurally unstable). God does not exist in what a sixteenth century chronicler described as "the mouth of hell".

We then went to a processing plant where the silver is separated from the waste rock, before descending into the mine itself. The guide confided to us that much of the metal that is extracted nowadays is plena basura (complete rubbish). When the spanish first began digging holes into Cerro Rico, they found veins of silver that ascended up the rock like the trunk of a tree, splitting off into smaller veins. As Niall Ferguson recently explained in his "Ascent of money", the Spanish mined so much pure quality silver that they reduced the price of the metal on the international market. With the passage of time, the quality of the silver has been gradually decreasing and the miners have diversified into tin and other metals. A kilo of poor quality silver can sell for as little as 10bs. When you reflect that a safety helmet costs around 40bs, the mining seems barely profitable.

We entered the narrow entrance to the mine standing up, but were soon crouching down and shuffling through low, dark passages past carts and sweating miners stripped to the waist. In the light of our headlamps, we could distinctly see particles of dust, like snow round a streetlamp. On the walls hung thin, delicate strands of crystals that the guide explained to us were aspestos. The life expectancy of a miner in Cerro Rico is 45-50 years (even Glasgow doesn´t compare). As we delved down further into the mountain, passing from level to level, the passages became ever lower and narrower, forcing us to crawl, breathing in dust and touching walls smeared with stinking sulphurous deposits. The water bottle in my belt dug into my stomach and the fetid air meant that my breathing was laboured despite the red bandana that covered my face. At one point, we stopped in a low cavern to watch a miner at work. He was rythmically knocking a hole into the rock with a hammer ready for a stick of dynamite. In the gloom, we could make out his naked, muscular torsoe. He answered our questions with difficulty, in a hoarse, rasping voice that seemed barely human.

Like many miners, he left Cerro Rico in the 90s, couldn´t accomodate to life in the open air and crawled back down the narrow shafts. He was in his thirties, but seemed far older, with cheeks inflated with coca and sunken eyes. He was in the process of mining a sliver of a vein of silver, barely 2mm wide. Despite the fact that he had been working continuously for a month, he hadn´t yet blown out enough silver to sell. Miners who belong to the cooperatives may work up to 24 hours a day. They can´t urinate onto the rock because it releases methane, so they pee into their trousers instead. By thirty, a miner is considered done. Conditions have not improved yet under "Evo". To the sound of hammer beating against spike, we crawled back up again towards the light.

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?

You can see the hash coming from the volcano

The last week has been a hectic blur of bus journeys, screaming kids, glimmering salt lakes and pink flamingoes, towering rocks and cavernous hollows. I began in San Pedro de Atacama, and believing that I only had a week before my train left Calama (Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia), I rushed around Salta, only to return today to the news that the last train left in 2007. I´m not having much luck with my travel arrangements.

The week started in San Pedro de Atacam, a natural oasis town of green trees sitting in a huge bowl between towering mountains to the west and the high, antiplano to the east, a small spot of green in one of the driest regions on earth. The town has a feeling of it with narrow, atmospheric streets with low adobe houses and walls topped off with sticks. They were so low that in the fading light of my first night, I felt that I could look over like a giant to the dry, shimmering plain beyond. Like Chalten, though, San Pedro has become a huge tourist destination and its native charm is somewhat eclipsed by the tour agencies on every corner and the artesania shops that occupy some of the oldest houses.

My stay here began badly as I got stuck in a small hole of a hostel, lorded over by a huge fat chilean with dumpling eyes swimming in fat. There was a guy staying in my room with thick, black curly hair and an impish smile who claimed that he had slept with a girl from every South American country except Bolivia and Paraguay, but vowed to battle on to complete the circuit. Anyway, when checking out, he was told that he couldn´t leave his mochila in the hostel and he couldn´t speak to his German friend in the hostel. This sent him into a spasm of rage, his German friend lost his typical Aryan restraint and called the owner a fat bastard and the greasy haired proprietor raised himself from his chair for the first time that day to tower over the Israeli, his paunch a good metre from his spinal cord.

Thankfully, the excursions went better. The second day I was there, I dragged myself out of bed to see the shooting geysers at 4AM, my head aching and banging against a rattling window. Some of the fumaroles gave off just steam, other geysers spat boiling water like oil from a pan, and others had been covered with beautiful, intricate patterns of mineral deposits, shining silver, green and ochre in the slanting rays of the early morning. When we arrived, the temperature was a chilly 12 below, a good incentive to get as close to the geysers as possible. At four that afternoon, I hit sandsurfing with two Japanese girls from my hostel who carried an electronic dictionary and estimated my age at twenty-five, much to my chagrin. Our guide was a slim chilian, a skater by profession who had been forced to guide because he had damaged his foot. His eyes were very blood-shot and he hid them behind big, red, plastic glasses. The sandunes were located in an incredible valley, Valle de la Muerte, a barren inlet surrounded by triangular mountains, piled one behind the other like sharks´teeth. I showed little aptitude for the sandsurfing, could not go five metres without falling over and got thoroughly impregnated with sand, but loved it nevertheless, even more so because we were left to it rather than being given lengthy explanations like other groups. Hurrying as the sun began to set, we toured the Valle de la Luna, visiting chiselled mountains of rock contracting with creaks as the sun descended, others that bristled with thousands of tiny creases running down the rock from sharp points and still another that looked like a surging waves of steps in the dying light. We were also hurried to the Tres Marias (three pillars of rock eroded into lunar shapes) the Amphiteatro (a mass of rock that looked like an accordion) and a huge sand dune, but the real highlight was seeing the sun set from a ridge, surrounded by active and extinct volcanos, the dying day slowly splitting the uniform blue of the sky into dark purple, blood red, orange, yellow, green and infinite shades of blue. After smoking a joint, the guide tried to explain to us the formation of the volcanos; "You see the hash from the volcano". Ten goes later and he was still staying "hash". "Hobbies" might have provoked similar problems".

I then travelled across a salt lake spotted with pink flamingoes and had my bag searched by masked officials before reaching Salta, a city that I would recommend to anyone thinking of coming to Argentina. It is the most visually beautiful city that I have visited, is cheaper than the rest of the country, is a lively university city and is surrounded on all sides by incredible scenery. Cachi and Cafayate are separated to the south by a dramatic gorge, while to the north, the multi-coloured, rippling Quebrada de Humahuaca winds its way through Purmamarca and Tilcara to the remote Iruya. I visited Pumamarca and Iruya, the former a tiny, dusty village surrounded by vivid, multi-coloured rock and mountains that descend from a ridge before fracturing again and again into hundred of ever thinner pieces of rock, exactly like the wide root system of a tree.The colour of the rock nearest to the town is a deep red, like Ibizan earth. Different strata of soft rock run through it, coloured chalk, a dark sickly green and a deep purple. In some places, it looks as if funeral monuments have been carved into the rock, while in others, bulging, bulbous bubbles of rock have solidified to form smooth, modernist sculptures that seem to twist and writhe.

The road north to the cheap Iruya (you can get a dormitory bed in Iruya for 10 pesos, less than two pounds) zigzags crazily across the mountain, forcing the bus driver to perform switchbacks that leave the front bumper hanging over the edge. But it is worth it. The landscape here defies all superlatives. From a viewing point, we could see a huge mountain sweeping down from above us, before suddenly crumbling into a gorge. The cut was not exact, however, because huge spurs penetrated into the valley, themselves eroded into thin, tapering spikes descending from a common centre. Fertile fields above are separated by a drop of some hundreds of feet from a dry river bed where a few donkeys plodded langorously along. It was a landscape fit for the dinosaur.

Everyone is smoking weed here, except me of course, and a bubbling Frenchman in Salta said he would bring us some Coke if we wanted. He has also been using prostitutes all over South America because they are so chep and because he doesn´t believe it is possible to meet a good women out on the open road. The Belgians who I shared a room with in Iruya were also into their grass, including other things, notably tennis. They declared that Tipsarevic was a presumptuous yuppy from new Belgrade, rejected my suggestion that Djokovic was arrogant and criticised Federer and Nadal as boring machines.

People in Northern Argentina are racially different from their counterparts in Buenos Aires or Patagonia, far similar in appearance to Bolivians, (the same may be the case for the people in the far north of Chile that was wrested from Peru during the War of the Pacific). In general, they are shorter and thicker set, their skin and hair is darker and their cheekbones are higher, accentuating their large noses and full lips. Their faces seem to be rounder. Furthermore, despite all the tourism in Salta, people in some of the outlying regions are poor. Jujuy bus station was dirty and slightly menacing, peopled by hawkers selling fruit jelly and barefoot children with mud-smeared faces and rags of clothes, throwing themselves on the pity of passers-by. People also seem to be ruder that in other areas of Argentina. Few people know how the queue, when I got up on a bus to give my seat to a pregnant woman, she did not thank me, and one of the bus porters was a monster. His voice was so high that he couldn´t speak properly, just like the German man in the famous Boomeran YouTube clip, but he made up for his defect by being an insolent bastard. When I approached him, he demanded money for dragging my bag two metres and when I told him that I didn´t have any, he threw it back into the hold.

Yet in the tiny village of San Isidro, some old people live as their anscestors must have hudreds of years ago. They grow their own crops, wash their clothes in the river and rear cattle for the slaughter. As I approached San Isidro during a hike, I small a tiny, wrinkled stick of a woman bent over and hacking away at a dry plant with an axe. When I returned down the path some twenty minutes later, she had hauled the bundle of sticks onto her fragile back and was walking across some stepping stones, struggling to protect her feet from the surging water.

A journey to spiritual enlightenment

From Mendoza, I crossed the border back into Chile, armed with Kafka´s "The Trial", a book that left me a little cold, and not in a good, chilling sense. Because of the crazy road system, I had to retrace my steps back to Santiago, passing through Puente del Inca for the third time, and eating salted, greasy chips in the huge bus terminal in the Chilean capital.

I have realised that I haven´t yet mentioned the food and drink on offer here in South America. There is a huge array of things on offer, many of which revolve around char-grilled meat. You have the tradtional, lomo, which is just a beaf steak, or can branch out and try the lomo a lo pobre, or poor man´s steak. A poor man would die for this steak, a huge slab of meat with a sloppy egg on top. This has been a favourite for the last few weeks. Down in Patagonia, restauranteurs specialise in lamb burgers, while in Bolson and Bariloche, I had the best ice-cream that I had ever tasted, dark, bitter chocolate interspersed with pieces of real orange and tart, refreshing grapefruit that tasted as if you were eating the real thing. Around Valpo, they go for their fish dishes, sopa de mariscos and reineta a la salsa margarita, being just a couple of the wonders on offer, the latter a delicate white fish bathed in an intolerably rich, creamy sauce. On every street corner in Santiago, streetvendors cry out in front of temporary stands piled high with caramel nuts and offer a strange peach drink, with sweetcorn at the bottom, too sweet to be recommended, while in the restaurants you are always given an appetiser of bread and a tangy tomato sauce, full of coriander. Wholemeal bread has yet to come to South America. They subsist instead on crumbly white bread filled with small holes, served on its own, or filled with hard pieces of fat. And then there are the empanadas, cornish pasty type confections filled with meat or cheese and ham. They are far bigger in Chile than in Argentina. The South Americans also maintain a fatuous distinction between the medialuna and the croissant, the former a very small, sweet pastry and the latter, a normal croissant as a European would understand it. Cakes they have inherited from the Germans and call them kuchen. When they try to create a native variety, it inevitably ends in an ugly mountain of whipped cream. Under the stars of the Andes and served by a local of indigenous blood, I ate a fantastic sandwich filled with steak, tomato salsa, lettuce, cheese and ham. On this trip up the Elqui valley, I tried Cazuela con ave for the first time, a steaming, refreshing soup served in a small, deep bowl, packed full of chicken, vegetables and coriander.

Pisco sour is a drink served in Chile and Peru and consists of the spirit, Pisco, lemon juice and sugar. Often it is topped off with frothed eggwhite and a sprinkling of sugar around the rim of the glass. One of the reasons for going to the Elqui valley was to see one of the Pisco factories that harvest the grapes hanging languidly from the vines and turn them into this strange concoction. The valley is spectacular for its contrasts; between the lush valley floor and the barren mountain sides, the bright green vines and the thousands of towering cactic, the sweltering hot days and the cold, clear nights. Such a climate is perfect for growing grapes, and also for viewing the stars. Many international organisations have taken advantage of this fact and have built huge observatories in the area. I took a tour to the Mamalluco observatory from Vicuna, a charming small village hidden between the folds of the hills, with low adobe houses and gardens where orange and lemon trees spring forth, the fruit almost indecently ripe. The tour to the observatory was spectacular, if a little marred by two screaming children (memory of your own childhood fades fast). The guide taught us how to locate the Cruz del Sur (cross of the south), an imperfect figure formed of five stars. If you measure four and a half metres following the line that connects the head and foot of the cross and then trace this virtual line vertically downwards, you will have reached due south. You must not confuse the cruz del sur with the Cruz falso, though, which will lead the unsuspecting traveller astray.

Yesterday, I ventured up the Valle Cochiguaz after poking my head into Pisco Elqui, a tiny village that seemed to have been lulled to sleep by the peaceful atmosphere of the valley. Almost no-one was around and I had to resort to asking directions to a cafe in a cerveceria where two fat men were repairing a toilet on the floor. The cerveceria alone was open for business. The settlements in the Valle Cochiguaz were established by hippies in the 1960s who believed that the age of Aquarius had shifted the centre of the world´s energy away from the Himalayas and towards this small tributary of the Rio Elqui. Significantly, the river in the Cochiguaz valley is not called the Rio Cochiguaz, but the Rio Magico. The valley looked strangely bleak in the grey light, but became more interesting further up as the rock changed colour from grey to a dark purple and the ubiquitous alamo trees reared up next to the river. Weeping willows, trumpet like flowers and thick undergrowth followed the line of the river and stopped abruptly at the valley sides, where tawny srcub and bulging cacti took over, clinging to the steep valley sides. I passed hundreds of bushes on the side of the road which must have evolved to conserve their leaves in this harshe, arid environment. Long, sharp thorns as big as my index finger (and I have a big index finger) spiralled out between the leaves, to deter the hardy, speculative goats that swarmed around (they make another local dish, by the way). Never trust the Rough Guide. The place where I had intended to stay didn´t exist, so I continued on up the dusty track, passing my first new-age hotel (surely it should be called dark age) which offered to unlock your bodies physical and mental energy through massage, reflexology, connection with the earth (I feel like writing galvanism) and magnetic therapy. Maybe a little like shock-therapy, or api-therapy, a treatment where you are repeatadly stung by bees in order to cure numerous ailments. You can fork out over a hundred dollars for this therapy in Alcohuaz at the upper end of the Elqui valley.

In the dirk back yard, concentric circles had been daubed in white paint, suggesting some rite. After hitching a ride on the back of a capricious horse with some gauchos, I finally reached my destination, a small hamlet whose doors shook in the howling wind. Cotton like buds had been blown off near-by bushes and were swirling through the air. After settling in, I set off in search of the Piedra del guanaco. It stands alone in an isolated field, guarded by Alsation dogs which threatened to make it an expensive trip. There are three different symbols scraped into the granite rock of the piedra, all of them stick-like. One is a strange symbol which looks like an upturned table with circular knobs, the second is the guanaco and the third is an impressionistic drawing of a snake (Inca). If I hadn´t known that the animals represented on the rock were supposed to be guanaco, I would have said they looked like deer (cue Karl Pilkington comment from podcast with Ricky Gervais). A sign to the left of the Piedra announced that that this was a Centro Magnetico, or Magnetic centre. The 60s have a lot to answer for. Incidentally, I see that Hazel Blears is being touted as the Labour Party´s Margaret Thatcher. If so, God help the Labour party.

Bikes and wines

The last three days have been spent in Mendoza, a city in the West of Argentina which is famed for its red wine, Malbec in particular. The city was built on a fault line and was completely razed to the ground in the early twentieth century. Because of that, the roads are wide and lined with trees to prevent debris from falling buildings from damaging other buildings. On my first night in Mendoza, I was sitting near the central square drinking coffee when my chair started to rock back and foreward, as if someone had grabbed the back legs and had started to shake them. I looked down at the ground, bemused, and then at two old men sitting beside me who explained that it had been a small terremoto, or earthquake.

I had been told that Mendoza was a beautiful city, large and chilled out. I didn´t like it nearly as much as some of the other places I have visited. The wide roads seem to serve only to carry thousands of cars, making the city noisy and polluted. Plus, on the side of every road runs a deep ditch filled with stinking, fetid water. It also has the worst supermarket in the world, but more of that later.

The climatic conditions around Mendoza are perfect for the production of red wine. Almost no rain falls, preventing the grapes from being afflicted by the diseases that are associated with humidity. The long, hot days make the grapes big and juicy, with a high sugar content. This translates into very strong, bold red wines with an alcohol content of twelve to fourteen percent. Like every other gringo, I hired a bike on my second day and toured some of the vineyards in Maipu. I soon realised why the bikes had only cost 40 pesos for the whole day. The handlebars creaked, my right brake didn´t work and my rock-hard saddle kept slipping down, making it ever hard to peddle. Combine that with lorries and copious amounts of wine, and you might have had an explosive mix. Luckily, I am still here to write this blog. Despite all the hype, the wine was underwhelming, and I have since found out from a man in the hostel that the wine is superior in the region of Lujan de Cuyo. Despite being aged for two years in oak casks, the wine was acid and astringent, leaving tannins burning in your throat for several minutes after the tasting. Far better was the lunch that I had with two Frenchman from Paris and the liquour and chocolate store. In a tiny kitchen, on a road a few miles from civilisation, two cute, bashful women make a crazy array of flavoured liquours, from chocolate and dulce to leche to grapefruit. All the fruit liquours are made using the fruit that grows in the beautiful garden adjacent to the kitchen.

I took a bus back to Mendoza and saw an amazing advert on the side of a bus, featuring David Nalbandian and pain relief tablets. He was shown in battle garb, a metal helmet, a chainmail vest and a leather skirt hiding his podge. In his left hand, he clutched a spear and he was staring out from the bus intently, taking himself far too seriously.

The most interesting experience I had in Mendoza was in a supermarket, a huge Carrefour just a few blocks from the hostel. I had finished my wine tour and was lusting after a green Thai curry, with sweet coconut milk and handfuls of coriander. I hobbled over to the vegetable section in my new flip-flops and picked out two shrivelled, dessicated green peppers (red peppers were nowhere to be seen), a courgette, two chillies, a clove of garlic and two onions. I couldn´t find any ginger, so I went over to the women at the scales. She barked back at me that they only had powdered ginger, and that I would have to place each separate item I had picked out in a separate plastic bag. My vegetables now covered in metres of plastic, and some tasteless ginger and paprika shoved into a bag, I went back to the scales. The woman took one look at my things and declared that I couldn´t have the chillies, the courgette, the ginger or the paprika because they didn´t come to fifty grams. Those are the rules, she said, despite my protestations and those of an old local man to my right. Not once did she look at me, but continued to serve other customers with flashing arms, barking out replies through her slit of a mouth. Apparently you can´t eat if you are alone in Mendoza. I looked for some chicken, but they didn´t have any. Local argentines battled for asado beef, while bored looking cleaners swung their mops from side to side. So bored were they that the mop heads never actually touched the floor. I dropped the basket off in the wine section and beat a speedy retreat. If a country can´t organise a supermarket, how can it organise an economy. That said, the company is French, so maybe blame can be apportioned elsewhere...

Tomorrow, I go to La Serena in Chile and the Elqui Valley, complete with Pisco and hippies. My trip has suddenly started to revolve around alcohol.