Miss Maps Goes Solo

The bus ride over the border and into Bolivia was pretty straightforward. At immigration I asked for 30 days and got it, Jus asked for 90 days and got it, Pip asked for 90 days and got 30. It seems to depend on what mood they´re in and they love the power. The road hugged the edge of Lake Titicaca the whole way down, very picturesque.

Copacabana is said to be the folklore capital of Bolivia. There´s all sorts of crazy legends about the lake and the Catholic stuff is pretty big here too. The Brazilian Copacabana is named after this one because of the important Catholic shrine here. It´s a pretty, albeit run down little town at a very high altitude, the summit reaches 4200m. Initially we checked into a pretty basic hostel (non-flushing toilets) but when we realised it was costing us 60p per night we upgraded to one with private bathroom and a view of the lake all for 1.20GBP! This place is frighteningly cheap.

One of the first differences we noticed was that all the cars, trucks and buses were elaborately decorated with fresh flowers.

At first I thought it was a wedding and peered through the window as they drove past, oops. Then I realised they all had it. We discovered that people from all over Bolivia drive their cars up here to get them blessed outside the church (they even slosh holy water on the engines), crazy. This is a very religious country. Getting into the spirit, Jus and Pip asked a couple of nuns for a blessing as they´ve been quite poorly recently. It just so happened that mass that night included a blessing for health. Off they trotted in the best clothes they could find in their backpacks. I couldn´t cope with sitting through mass, it feels wrong as a non-believer, but I crept in at the end to watch them up at the front, covered in a cloth, being blessed. On the way out some guy dipped a carnation into a bowl of holy water and dripped it on my head, shoulders and hand.

We just happened to have rolled into town in time for the fiesta of abundance. This was wonderful. Everyone buys miniatures of what they want to achieve in the future and takes them up to the summit for a ceremony. We decided to make our own but the streets were lined with stalls selling the funniest things. Favourites were miniature wads of dollars or little houses and cars. It got pretty surreal though, some stalls sold little piles of bricks, sacks of coca leaves, mini tins of evaporated milk, ceramic bulls, all sorts. At the summit we observed how the locals did it then took part ourselves, we were the only gringos there. We bought our square foot of earth, flower petals and streamers to decorate it and beer to splash around. An old guy who seemed to be somehow in charge but was totally legless, gave us a certificate for our patch of earth then began the ritual. He said lots of very serious sounding stuff we couldn´t understand while splashing beer on our decorated miniatures then threw some beer over the edge and on to the lake below. He then took a pretty serious gulp of it himself as we watched on in bewilderment. This went on for quite a while, he even splashed some beer on my head at one point but he definitely drank more than he splashed. After he´d wobbled off to initiate someone else´s ceremony we did a bit of beer slooshing and well wishing ourselves and even slooshed on to some other people´s plots to wish them good luck.

It was a unique experience, great to get involved and no-one seemed to mind our presence, although they seemed a bit confused by our miniatures, we´d gone a bit Blue Peter, an empty toilet roll was used.

We found it hard to drag ourselves away from this little town, especially knowing we were headed for the big brash capital of La Paz.

I think Bolivia is the poorest, least developed country in South America. How then, can it have such a lovely, non-threatening capital? Compared to the likes of Guatemala and Nicaragua´s capitals it´s a dream. OK, it´s big and ugly in places. It´s set in a crater and the buildings cling all the way up the sides of it, especially the slums. It´s full-on, busy, loud and with horrendous traffic but it has a nice personality. The police and military presence is massive and they look terrifying. Some are done up like full on riot police, most of them have tear gas guns and canisters in their vests. Political uprisings aren´t uncommon and they like tear gas to disperse any rowdy crowds. However, this is a very good time to be here. In Copacabana we watched the brand new President on TV doing his first speech. This wouldn´t normally be big news, they get a new President almost every year but this guy is indigenous (the first ever in South America) and apparently not corrupt, yet. Bolivians are very happy right now. Imagine our surprise then when, innocently standing in the square, chatting to some friends and watching a military flag ceremony, 3 official looking vehicles screech to a halt in front of us and out hops el Presidente and about 15 bodyguards! We were dumbfounded. He waved at the cheering passers by (including us) and ran into the Presidential Place which we were unknowingly standing in front of.

Good god, how many crazy, wonderful experiences is this trip going to contain? I think I might pop.

So now we´re hanging in La Paz. I had a wonderful day of retail therapy followed by a hairdresser appointment (yes, the black is back). We´ve got some official stuff to do like flights and post and the girls will probably do this crazy bike ride down the most dangerous road in the world (I won´t be), then we´ll head south to the salt flats.

That´s going to be another crazy experience, I think I need to lie down.

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Bolivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.