Latinalicious: The South America Diaries

by Becky Wicks

  Anyway, last night as we bundled into our beds at yet another hostel of questionable hygiene in the middle of nowhere, I noticed he had seven books on his dresser. Seven! As we all started reading, I commented that he needed a Kindle, preferably one with a nifty light on it like mine, at which point he glared at me as though I were insane and replied with something along the lines of, ‘We don’t all need modern gadgets, you know, some of us like to actually hold a real book.’

  Shortly after, the electricity died and I was the only one who could carry on reading. I felt quite smug about that. Even though I was still deaf and hungry, thanks to another largely inedible dinner by Ilda of neon pink Frankfurt sausages spliced into three fronds, surrounded by minced beef and sauerkraut all piled onto sopping, uncooked French fries, I went to sleep happy. Oh, by the way, to follow that dinner we had some sort of unset flan of an indefinable flavour in tiny metal bowls. I’m starting to enjoy meal times here in Bolivia, if only for the fact that I’m getting thinner with each one.

  As we drove across the park, we tried our best to finagle some information out of the mute, Coke-swigging Santos and he eventually told us how some of the salts and minerals found in the area are used as the main components in laundry detergent and also as the shiny coating you see on porcelain units, like toilets and sinks. Interesting. When we stopped at Laguna Kollpa, a lake rich in sodium carbonate minerals, we learned how the Incas used deposits from it as shampoo. There were woven bags of white and grey powder everywhere, for export to Chile — they buy a lot of it, apparently. A guide from another jeep hopped out and started scooping vast amounts of the stuff from a pile into plastic bags, probably for his own use. I wouldn’t have minded trying it. I didn’t have a container, though.

  Santos also told us, a bit more willingly, how since the age of fourteen he’s trekked from his tiny village south of Tupiza into Argentina with llama wool draped across the back of donkeys, just to make money. He makes this seven-day journey once a year during November, when the border is open to Bolivians due to an Argentinean holiday. Hearing this made me quite glad I didn’t bother questioning the suspicious pricing methods for these adventure tours back at the hostel. I mean, no foreigner likes to feel ripped off but, really, if I’d been hurried into the blistering desert with a herd of donkeys at fourteen I’d probably be working with more of a ‘screw the over-privileged, let’s milk them for all they’re worth’ mindset, too.

  Next to blow my mind: Laguna Colorada. This is one of the most impressive sights you’ll see on the salt flats tour in Bolivia. It’s a shockingly bright red lake over 4300 metres above sea level, so-coloured by sediments and the pigmentation of algae. When we arrived, we were accompanied by a fierce wind, the kind that stings your eyes and deafens you, if you’re not deaf already.

  Andean, Chilean and rare James’s flamingos were feeding on the borax islands, seemingly oblivious to the gale. I diligently stuffed my cheeks with more coca leaves, battling to take a decent photo in what had become a veritable dust tornado. The fact that I could only hear out of one ear totally threw me off balance, too.

  About that: ever since the ear plug got stuck, little bits of the silicone have taken to springing up in my ear unannounced, so I think my canal is actually fixing itself. The human body is a remarkable thing! I’m still deaf but, at this rate, maybe I won’t have to head to some backstreet Bolivian ear doctor for a probing when I get back to Tupiza, which is nice.

  Unfortunately I could still hear Santos’s heinous music in my good ear when I headed back to the jeep early to escape the wind. I’ve been meaning to come back to this. I think it’s called Cochabamba. It has to be the most soul-splintering music in God’s galaxy and I don’t say this lightly. Imagine a cross between a Jewish wedding, an unsigned 80s synthesised disco act and the sort of tune you might hear pounding out of an empty nightclub somewhere weird, like Kazakhstan. There seems to be only one tune that plays on repeat in the entire genre of Cochabamba, although occasionally you can detect a slight adjustment in vocal arrangement (usually nasal off-key singing), which is how you know the song has changed. Listening to it feels a lot like being stuck in a bad kid’s cartoon, or a jingly Nintendo game where the cheat mode’s on and you can’t die.

  Santos would sneak this hideous music on whenever we were off seeing the sights, and had we not brought our own tunes to plug in through the speakers I’ve no doubt we would’ve had to endure four straight days of Bolivian musical torture. The French-Italian would have been begging for some Maroon Five. Go ahead and look some of this Cochabamba stuff up on YouTube if you think I’m being unreasonable. And then picture being stuck in a jeep with it for nine hours with an annoying French-Italian and some kissy-kissy Belgians as you trundle along through the bumpy wilderness, getting a numb bum.

  If you need to soothe that bum, you should probably have a dip in the thermal pool at Laguna Polques, which was a nice pit stop yesterday. Situated in what feels like the middle of nowhere, it’s the perfect place to bask in the sunshine while gazing out at flamingos in the hot healing waters. We ate our lunch in what looked like a classroom nearby and Ilda cooked cauliflower florets and flat flaps of beef that looked like skinned elephant’s ears in the adjoining kitchen.

  ‘You have a weird imagination,’ the French-Italian stated in disdain when I made this elephant ear observation, before putting down his cutlery and abandoning the meat. I felt quite smug about that, too.

  A word of warning. At Polques I was charged three bolivianos to use yet another insalubrious cesspit in disguise as a toilet, which upset me greatly. Even India doesn’t do toilets as repugnant as this one. A bored teen looked me up and down as he counted out my change and went back to studying his phone, while the shit-smeared hole in the floor I was expected to crouch over went on festering in its own stench. Pee in the bush if you’re desperate here. Or in the thermal pool; no one will know.

  On we bumped, to the skyrocketing geysers. These boiling mud pools and fumeroles, which we got to stop at on day three, were amazingly scary. Each perniciously frothing pit spat at us with the ferocity of a giant mutant camel and, combined, they made up my favourite sight on the whole trip. For about an hour we were free to walk around bubbling brown pools and stroll through clouds of noxious sulphur fumes at our leisure. The loved-up Belgians must have taken at least 900 photos of themselves smooching against spitting fountains and the French-Italian did a great job of wandering off on purpose into a fog of steam when I suggested a group photo. He really does try to do everything in his power to annoy me.

  A few years ago, when I went to Rotorua’s Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Wonderland in New Zealand, I was comforted by the number of cautionary ropes and hazard signs around springs of cyanide, expansive simmering waters and ominous volcanic craters. Here in Bolivia, there’s no bothering with any of that. At any one point you’re two steps away from falling to your doom and boiling alive while everyone takes photos from the perimeters; the prospect of which, to me, was actually only slightly more frightening than the thought of falling into that toilet at Polques. Exhilarating, though!

  Several people got sick during the third day and night … including the French-Italian, after a session drinking Fernet with another tour group in the salt hostel. I felt smug again when he told me he had a headache on the way to Salar de Uyuni, although the more the morning went on, the more I actually felt sorry for him. Drinking at high altitude is never wise and Fernet is the kind of bitter, leafy-tasting spirit that recurs on you in sicky burps when you’d really rather it didn’t.

  Early morning on Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni.

  But back to the salt hostel for a moment. The tour guides will have you believe that there’s only one and that it’s very special and that the price of the tour is higher than others because it includes a stay here, but in actual fact, there are several salt hostels in the park. It’s true that everything in them is made of salt, though, even the bed frames are giant, compressed blocks of the stuff. I licked a wall, just
to make sure. I wouldn’t recommend you do it, however: I felt a bit sick afterwards. I felt even more sick when I went to line up for a wash (the first proper wash in three days) and heard a German couple having sex in the shower.

  Anyway, our final destination, Salar de Uyuni was well worth the wait, worth getting up at 4 a.m. for, and it made a suitably showbiz finale as we sipped coffee, watching the sun rise over its sparkly white surface. As the world’s largest salt flat (and ex-prehistoric lake) at 10,582 square kilometres, the sheer scale of it is mindboggling. It totally blew me away with its nether-worldly sheen and, as predicted, it was way more impressive than the Salinas Grandes in Argentina.

  The salt at Salar de Uyuni, as well as holding seventy per cent of the world’s lithium reserves, is over ten metres thick in the centre, and in the wet season the whole thing is covered with a thin sheet of water that you can drive across. During this time, people say it reflects the sky and makes you feel like you’re driving in the clouds. I kind of wish we could have seen it like that, but cruising along I noticed how the salt flew up around our wheels and sparkled in trails, like a troupe of drag queens might have brushed across it in Rio Carnival costumes shedding glitter, and it was mesmerising all the same.

  We stopped to take photos for at least an hour. I wandered away from the smooching Belgians and the French-Italian at one point, and I wondered at how the salt caught the light in heavenly droplets; miniature sunbeams piercing the earth like pinpricks. I sat for a while among the huge hexagonal flats, all with puffy edges as though someone had been cementing tiles together, painstakingly, day in, day out, for centuries. And, in spite of my semi-deaf condition, I felt suddenly overcome by a sense of contentment.

  It’s so white out here, so pure that you half expect to see Jesus walking towards you from infinity. I would have believed I was in heaven itself … if it wasn’t for that fucking Cochabamba music, which Santos suddenly decided to crank up from his place in the jeep. I swear, the sound of that was probably what caused the lake to recoil and dry up in the first place.

  Having snapped the hell out of the flats, with hundreds of trick photos on digital cameras to prove we were really there, we piled back into the jeep and began the long drive to Uyuni city.

  ‘I’m going to put a good song on now,’ said the French-Italian over the Cochabamba, reaching for my iPod between Santos and Ilda.

  ‘No problem,’ I told him, snatching it before he could so much as touch it. ‘But let’s listen to the Maroon Five album all the way through first, shall we?’

  30/10

  Horsing around …

  When I was fourteen I landed my first job earning £1.50 an hour in the local Spalding chippie. My shifts were Saturdays and Thursday nights after school. Everything went well until one day when an old man came in and asked for a fried egg with his haddock and chips. I panicked. I had no idea how to fry an egg. No one had ever asked me for one and no one had ever shown me how to fry one, so I told him we didn’t have any.

  When he’d finished his meal sans eggs and left, my boss called me downstairs. He was not pleased.

  ‘Why did ye tell tha’ man we’ve go’ no eggs?’ he asked, pointing to the store room. ‘He always ’as eggs. We’ve got tons of ’em out back.’

  Of course, I didn’t want to admit I’d reached the mighty age of fourteen without ever frying an egg for myself, so I did what any other embarrassed schoolgirl would do in the face of an angry man: I burst into tears. I think that was when he realised he’d hired a child.

  However stressful my job was at such a young age, it was nothing compared to what our horse riding guide Juan Luis has had to endure. For the past two days, Juan Luis has accompanied myself and a group of four other girls (two Australian, one German, one Austrian) on our horse trek through the valleys surrounding Tupiza.

  Trotting through dust clouds and sporadic fields of green encircled by perpendicular scarlet cliffs, Juan Luis, now just sixteen, told how he started leading horse tours at the age of seven. At that age, he says, he was working with his father, but when he got to fourteen he was taking groups of up to ten adults across the valley all by himself.

  Imagine leading tourists on horseback when you’re seven. How can you even stay in the saddle when you’re only as big as the saddle yourself? The story was not unlike that of Daniel at Estancia Los Potreros (who was put on a horse as a baby), or Santos with his llama skins. But looking at this waif-like schoolboy in front of us in his Adidas jacket and baseball cap, denim legs wrapped round his rather unruly pony, it was like watching a scene from a cowboy movie before the kid grows up to be a jaw-droppingly handsome horse-whispering/herding champion with an insatiable appetite for women in jodhpurs with foreign accents.

  Aaah … he has so much ahead of him. But yet so much to learn. Juan Luis, like so many landlocked Bolivians, has never even seen the sea. I should mention here that Bolivia is in a bit of a state. They’ve had over 190 different governments in the years since claiming independence from Spain almost 190 years ago and it’s never really had much independence at that. In 1883, it lost its part of the Pacific coast to Chile, who nabbed the Atacama Desert while they were at it, making the most of the nitrate there. Brazil took the rubber-producing Acre region of the Amazon and, as recently as 1935, Paraguay laid claim to the fertile, forested territory of Chaco. War and corruption have taken their toll on poor Bolivia, but luckily its most recent leader is much-loved.

  Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, pushed through a groundbreaking constitution in 2009, giving new hope to the indigenous majority. He is constantly working to manage the country’s untapped reserves, like lithium — evidence of which we saw on the salt flats, and eco-tourism opportunities are on the rise, especially in the Rurrenabaque area. Mention Evo Morales to any Bolivian and chances are they will hail the skies as though he is some sort of God.

  So … my bum-cheeks had barely recovered from the jeep and there I was, about to endure a full two days on horseback. It was an interesting journey back to Tupiza from Salar de Uyuni the previous day, too, not least because we deposited the Belgians and the French-Italian at some crappy looking hostel in Uyuni city (which is a total dump, by the way, don’t stay there, ever) and then stopped to collect a family of four with two babies and another older woman to share the jeep ride back with us.

  After five long hours with my iPod on full blast in my ears to drown out more Cochabamba music, and staring in disappointment at miles and miles of plastic bags clinging like flags to desert shrubs and cacti constituting what has to be the biggest open rubbish dump in the world, we stopped and dropped them all off round the corner from the hostel. I watched Santos take their money and pocket it slyly. I contemplated telling the hostel managers that their driver has a side business at their expense, but then I remembered a young Santos was shifting llama fur on the back of donkeys across the desert when kids in other places had been stomping their feet in Toys‘R’Us, and decided not to say a word.

  It was just before the riding tour, during breakfast at a little cafe opposite the hostel, that my ear unblocked a little more, too. Not fully, mind you, I’m still about thirty per cent hard of hearing, but it cleared enough to restore balance. Breakfast, by the way, was a semi-soft roll with a fried egg in it. I think we must have caught the roll in the two-second window they all seem to enjoy here between being squishy, doughy balls of joy, and door stops.

  A hungover teen, perhaps Juan Luis’s friend or brother, met us in the lobby shortly afterwards, clad in a baggy jumper and tracksuit bottoms. He refused to speak, as many teens do, but pointed the way to our bus stop, at which we had to clamber on board a local bus to the paddock to meet our horses.

  There was no mention of any helmets, although we were given some cowgirl-befitting hats before we each hoisted ourselves aboard our respective equine rides and Juan Luis cantered up to greet us. Unlike at Estancia Los Potreros, there was no checking if our stirrups were adjusted correctly, no stopping to double
check the girth, or even asking if we could ride, for that matter, but I suppose as this is Bolivia, there are different rules. Or perhaps none at all. Oh, also unlike at Estancia Los Potreros, there was no mid-morning coffee break with biscuits and absolutely no mention of fine Argentinean wine. We got no food all day. Apparently we were supposed to bring our own, but Mrs Spanglish had neglected to tell me this.

  We trekked for about seven hours the first day, stopping only for lunch on a grassy playing field in the shade of even more huge copper-coloured cliffs. The girls shared their melon and papaya with me and I contributed some Vegemite and crackers, so I was able to climb back on my horse, a dusty red mare called Colorado, with a relatively full stomach. The sky remained cloudy, so my hopes of a day bouncing rays off my pasty white arms were dashed, but on reflection it was probably a good thing. I’ve heard of people doing this tour in forty-degree heat, which wouldn’t have been fun at all.

  It was a fairly relaxing journey, just taking in the scenery, trotting through tiny Bolivian villages with mud houses sitting in crumbling clumps behind donkey paddocks and goats clattering on tin roofs. At around 5 p.m. we stopped at our overnight camp — the most random house I’ve ever seen (with the exception perhaps of a guerilla pop-up Ramadan house in Dubai, which was truly marvellous). This house appeared to be half finished and furnished sparsely with the Bolivian equivalent of IKEA. Except for one room with a few beds in it, which we were to share, other huge rooms had maybe one wooden chair in them, meaning our voices echoed about the place every time we spoke.

  It was like one of those houses you visit in dreams — you know, with doors that go nowhere and windows with views of walls, and it was all set against a backdrop of those towering russet cliffs. Our host for the night, a chatty Bolivian lady, just twenty-six years old with an enormous eighteen-month old baby strapped to her bosom, showed us up to our room and proudly opened the door onto the ‘balcony’. This balcony was in fact a ledge above the front door, strong enough to hold those brave enough to sit on it, with no barrier, some ten feet above the ground.