Get Down, Get Out

Ger and I crossed the border from Argentina into Bolivia the day before my birthday. The twin towns of La Quiaca (Arg) and Villazon (Bol) exist at their present size largely because the border between two coutries is stuck in the middle. Crossing over I immediately noticed a difference. Not the same as crossing from France , where everyone rides around on bikes wearing stripy t-shirts with onions around their necks, into Germany, where everyone jumps about in lederhosen getting plastered from 5 litre metal mugs of beer. The main difference here was the dust and dirt. It was everywhere. It seemed as if the buildings and cars were made of it, like the town was suspended in a cloud of dust. The mangy dogs too, seeming to be the product of some folk incantation over a small pile of chewed up meat, looked as if they’d just sprung up from the dust in the street. Don’t get me wrong – I’m no Howard Hughes with tissue boxes for shoes, but this place made me want to wash my hands just looking at it. I would not be spending my birthday here. A few minutes poking around at the bus station and we found a bus to take us to Tarija, a much nicer town to the north in the wine region. The only catch was that we would have to wait 9 hours. This would mean a meal or two and somewhere nice to sit and read and talk to kill the time. Although of reasonable size, Villazon seemed to be rather short of decent places in which to do this. First and foremost we needed cash and found an ATM after a couple of minutes. At first I had a little trouble getting my card in the slot and after struggling with it a man appeared in the vestibule and offered to help. With his slightly thinner card he was able to wedge open the slot enough for mine to get in. While thanking him I noticed that he was wearing a revolver on his belt and had a shotgun slung over his shoulder – by far the most well armed bank employee I’ve yet encountered. Walking around the town I noticed one of Bolivia’s more obvious differences – the women. Many of them were sat at stalls or walking around with large mysterious loads tied to their backs with a blanket. Sometimes the load was a baby, sometimes merchandise for a stall and a baby. Their garb of many skirts and many cardigans along with their heavily tanned skin made their age and body weight almost impossible to calculate. Without exception every woman I saw who was dressed this way also wore a bowler hat and had her hair plaited in pigtails, making them look old and young at the same time.
I turned 26 on the bus. It is probably the bumpiest ride I’ve had so far. Logic dictates that the worst roads get the worst buses and this thought was never far from my mind. For seven hours we made our way through mountains on switch back roads. Bolivia is very mountainous and excluding lake Titicaca, has no coastline. It is the fifth largest country in South America but was once much larger. It has suffered war and downright cruelty from it’s neighbours over the years. Like the one with Chile, where a large stretch of Bolivian land was annexed for mineral deposits. This, sadly, was also Bolivia’s only coastline and the country suffered trade problems and has remained landlocked ever since. There were similar problems with Paraguay and Bolivia is left today with the parts of the continent that no one else seems to want. The view from my window was fantastic, I imagined – it was the middle of the night and visibility was all of a few feet. Once again Ger and I were the only non-nationals aboard. Not that this mattered much. The others seemed to have an easier time sleeping, though, and I wondered what their secret was. Maybe they were just pretending to sleep, like I had been. I vowed to keep my spirits up for as long as possible least of all for the day that was in it, but mostly because this last year of travelling has taught me the power of negative thinking. Inch by bump we climbed and then descended and after one of many micro-naps I awoke to see the golden wafered tapestry of Tarija spread out before me in the darkness. This must have been how ruddy, weather-beaten pilots felt in the olden days. Struggling through fumes, darkness and the violence of their conveyance to eventually be offered salvation on a golden platter. It was definitely the case for me. I’d been holding it for ages and the relief I experienced in the bus station toilet can only have equalled that of Lindberg as he stretched his long legs on terra firma once more.
Tarija was just waking up when we got off the bus. The immediate area around the bus station was already buzzing frenetically with the comings and goings of passengers and guys trying valiantly to load ridiculously large objects, like beds, on top of buses. Several bowler-hat-granny-girls with heavy loads negotiated their way through pockets of loading activity while men, presumably their husbands, followed close behind, carrying nothing. Ger and I watched all this as we sipped coffee and ate pastels (deep fried pastry filled with cheese – not crayons). The coffee was surprisingly fresh and tasty and along with the pastels made a great birthday breakfast. The night’s sleeplessness was beginnig to assert itself, however and I went next door to phone a hotel somewhere in town. I consulted the guide book and after deciding on a nice sounding place, dialled the number. When the person on the other end answered with the usual pleasantries I launched into my prepared script which politely asked if a double room was available. By sentence two I was interrupted. The man on the other end repeated something several times in an angry voice and then hung up. Hotels are different in Bolivia, I thought. At this point my brain translated what he’d been saying, “This is not a hotel”. I realised I’d dialled the wrong number. It was 6.30 am on a Saturday and I’d just got some ordinary bloke out of bed. I carefully dialled a second time and arranged for a room. Ger and I flopped for a couple of hours and woke up a little after noon very rested and very hungry. A birthday lunch with no expense spared was the order of the day. Tarija, it seemed, had other ideas. We later read that the townspeople “take siesta very seriously” and walking around the empty parched streets, it was easy to imagine them all sleeping aggressively, face down, scowling into their pillows. Since the town has something of an affluent set, who fancy themselves as more Buenos Aires than Bolivia, we eventually found a couple of nice places willing to cater to such wankers…and us.
A couple of days later and we were on a plane to La Paz. One of Bolivia’s many superlatives, La Paz is the world’s highest capital city. At a whopping 366o metres the city packs a punch – altitude sickness. This is a condition brought on by the thin atmosphere at altitudes above 2700 metres. I was well above the cut off point and since I had flown in, rather than ascending gradually by bus, the full whack came upon me suddenly. Shortly after checking into a place in the city I felt nausea and weakness wrap themselves around me like an icy hand. Soon I was vomiting, from both ends, and wondering why I had left safe, level Ireland in the first place. Flying to La Paz had been necessary, though. A planned meeting with Ger’s friend in Peru meant that time was short. Bussing it to La Paz would have taken too long and may have crippled me. I didn’t have long to suffer, luckily, as the next day we were flying to Rurrenabaque, set at a delightful 400 metres. With Ger’s help packing and walking (she remained unaffected) we got to the airport. In what seemed like a cosmic joke on my condition, our plane was tiny. I’ve heard engineers describe basic plane design as a cigar tube with wings. This twin prop relic was very close to that description. We ascended shakily through thick cloud. With me crammed into one of the tiny seats the plane looked and felt like it had been made for children.
After an hour, through clearer skies, I saw the gap in the jungle that would be our landing spot – quite literally an airfield. The tour company through which I had booked a jungle excursion were nowhere to be found at the airport/shed. Ger and I made our way into town and found the situation was very much in our favour. Rurrenabaque sits on the river Beni surrounded by rainforest and is on the edge of Bolivia’s most popular national park. Dozens of tour companies line it’s streets offering trips upriver to stay in the national park, hike around forest, look for wildlife and find out about the plants and animals there. We signed up with Anaconda Adventure for a reasonable $30 per day, about half what the no-shows had wanted, for a 3 day excursion. The next day we boarded a motorized canoe that carried about 15 of us up the Beni to our camping spot. Upon arriving, our guide unpacked a bunch of mosquitoe nets and we busied ourselves attaching these to our bedposts with 75% of the required amount of string. Meanwhile our cook began preparing a delicious lunch. After eating, our guide brought us on a walk of several hours through the jungle. His name, although I can’t remember it, was very similar to Ronaldo and he had grown up in this environment, some miles to the north. I found over the next few days that he really knew the place like the back of his hand and every plant and animal we saw was a story waiting to be told. It made a welcome difference from the guides we’d had on a similar trek in Thailand, who, although competent and helpful told us very little. Ronaldo, by comparison was a National Geographic. On one of the days he brought us to a tree which he claimed contained poisonous sap – a defence mechanism not disimilar to the aliens in Aliens. Up to this point I thought the only way a tree could kill was by falling on you. As a boy Ronaldo’s moron of an older brother had taken some of this sap and tipped his arrows with it in order to hunt…turtles. As well as being ninjas, turtles have their own in-built defense mechanism. Being covered with what National Geographic would call a shell, they are virtually arrow proof. Not easily discouraged the brother took aim, fired and by ricochet, shot young Ronaldo in the leg. Thankfully he was saved by his quick thinking father and the sap of a more benevolent tree. He still has the scar and he showed it to us later.
Ronaldo showed us more delights of the jungle like edible, sweet tasting grubs, tree vines that dispense fresh drinking water and tarantulas. Like most animals in the ‘evil’ category I assumed tarantulas would be waiting to pounce every way we turned. Not so. They are a little harder to find. Ronaldo eventually found one of their burrows. With much coaxing using a thin stick and alot of cigarette smoke, a large hairy and very stoned tarantula emerged. In this state of inebriation, according to Ronaldo, it was safe to hold the spider. He demonstrated this by nonchalantly placing it on his face. The photo I took of this was a near replica of one I’d seen in an encyclopedia as a child and had believed up to this point to be photo-trickery. One of Ronaldo’s jungle jokes was to stop the party in mid walk and hunker down giving us the shush signal. After a few seconds of total silence he would turn to us and, pointing in the direction of some rustling, whisper “Jaguar”. Knowing he didn’t mean the car, I was naturally frightened and then relieved to see a few seconds later that the approaching animal was another guide. Ronaldo found this very funny and tried it on everyone, several times. Jaguars are very solitary and nocturnal and avoid humans like the plague we are. Seeing one in the wild is about as common as seeing David Attenburrough on your bus to work.
Our bus back to La Paz was a longer, bumpier but far far cheaper affair than the plane to Rurre. Gav, a fellow jaguar hunter, Ger and I squeezed into the springy seats and for good measure a few too many people squeezed aboard the bus too and the ride began. I was a little more excited than at the start of most journeys. This bus ride would take in The World’s Most Dangerous Road – a narrow, switch back path all the way up to La Paz with a menacing sheer drop on one side. Ger was a little scared and my philosophy that we had no way of preventing an accident and that we’d more than likely be killed straight away didn’t seem to comfort her, no matter how many times I pointed it out. Gav had already mountain biked down said death road and had no shortage of detailed descriptions of just how scary and dangerous it was. I’m glad he did since I ended up missing out on the whole thing. The road itself was 14 hours from our starting point in Rurre and by the time we reached it it was dark and I was asleep. I awoke from time to time as the driver beeped over and over. There are many blind corners along the road so drivers need to use their horns to alert anyone coming the other way. As I crankily tried to get back to sleep I reflected that they should call it The World’s Horniest Road.

Chile and Argentina are seperated by The Andes Mountains. They are a stark, imposing but ruggedly beautiful feature to look at. On a southbound bus Ger and I had conquered jet-lag, Mount Villarica and the taste of UHT milk with some gusto to spare. Our destination today would be the city of Bariloche, Argentina. Our carrier was the imaginitively named Buses Jac and although we were comfortable we could not relax fully. This was not a direct service. As our bus pulled into the terminal in Osorno I instantly recalled my conversation with John, a fellow amateur mountaineer, the previous night. “Osorno´s a dive”, he said, “There´s nothing to do and the hostels are rotten. Don´t stay if you can help it.” And help it I would. The place, by the looks of it, had all the personality of a ham sandwich. The bus station was a calm enough place. I had been expecting hordes of accommodation touts and shine-box tommies. No such crowd greeted us and I was free to explore the 20 or so bus companies unmolested. After two or three fruitless inquiries I found a desk with daily departures to Bariloche – conveniently timed to leave one hour before the earliest bus from Pucon arrived. After some grilling the lady attested from behind her glass screen that the next possible bus was hers, the following day. It seemed Ger and I would be spending the night after all. On the upside, I had discovered a passtime for tourists – asking about bus schedules – but take it from me, this is a very boring thing to do. It was while contemplating the next dismal installment in my life that I noticed something. Some girls from our Pucon bus were grouped excitedly around a different counter. The lady I was dealing with was now asking a little impatiently if I´d be buying a ticket. She noticed that I had noticed something and I did not fail to notice her change of expression as I stepped away and said I would return in a minute. 5 minutes later Ger and I were kicking back as our new bus sped us to the Argentine border. Competition among the bus companies is cut throat and you can´t always trust what they say. That lying bitch would have to try harder next time.
The city of Bariloche sits lakeside surrounded by snowy purple mountains. The architecture is quite distinctive and you could think you´ve stepped off the bus in Switzerland if it wasn´t for all the Spanish writing and cigarette adds everywhere. We made our way to Hostal 1004. It´s a warm, comfortable place to kick off your boots. The laid back staff blend in commando-style with the travellers – natural smiles and no stuffy ‘I work here’ bullshit. By ´commando-style´ I´m not suggesting they wore no underpants. I´m pretty sure they did. From 1004´s tenth floor perch we had an unparallelled view of the lake and the reflected Andean peaks – the perfect add for a business I was thinking about starting, Andy´s Mountains. Bariloche is famous for two things: ski slopes and high quality chocolate. Since these were all but non-existent in New Zealand, Ger and I were more than eager to dig in. Finding chocolate and snowboard rentals proved easy and tasty. A short bus ride the next morning and we were at Catedral slopes for a day of snowboarding. This was not our first attempt.
A month earlier in New Zealand Ger and I joined our old flatmates, Tyron and Fiona, in the town of Methven near Christchurch. They now worked on a ski slope at Mount Hutt. To the other people I know who have learned to ski or snowboard, it’s been a pricey exercise. Not when your friends are Ty and Fi. From the minute we arrived at their cabin they set us up in their camper van, saving us checking into a costly hostel. Fiona took us up the mountain for our first day, showing us along the way the best hitchhiking spots. There was the option of taking the world´s slowest bus. It climbs the two thousand metres on unsealed road at the pace of a chess match. If you ever got stuck behind the funeral procession of a 200 kilo man you may understand the velocity I´m talking about. Oh and it was $20 per day for the privilege. Now where did I put my thumb? After getting us signed up and helping us fit our various gear Fi gave us a good intro to the basics. Our instructor arrived soon after and we began the lessons. The snow was pretty good that first day and all our falling as we negotiated the novice slope was well padded. Alot of the mishaps were due to an inability to change direction and the profusion of tiny skiing children. One of the rules of snowboarding is that your board will go straight for the thing you´re looking at, though you mean to avoid it. People always talk about how they envy skiing five year-olds as they seem to have the whole thing sussed. I had no time for such sentiments, just hoping not to cut any of them in half. I didn´t manage to end any short lives that day but I earned the hatred a few parents. Day 2 is normally when the previous day’s tomfoolery starts to take shape and you feel like you´re getting somewhere. Unfortunately for Ger and I 2005 has been one of the region´s worst years for snow and all we found on successive days at the slope were hard icy runs and hard icy falls. It was too much stick and not enough carrot for me and I left Mount Hutt with a fairly thorough knowledge of putting on boots and boards but sadly not much else. Anyway I still felt cooler than the skiiers. Their one piece jumpsuits reminded me of Moonraker and watching them walk around like the John Wayne Robocop in their plastic boots took my mind off the bumps and knocks. The baggy clothes and super padded boots that snow boarders wear at least resemble actual clothes and it´s kind of like dipping into a giants wardrobe for a day.
Ty and Fi´s help was not wasted on us. I could see that they got fairly good in a short time and that with the right conditions so could I. Stepping off the bus at Catedral I was immediately impressed with the size and complexity of the operation: an array of clockwork wheel houses propelling chair lifts and gondolas of every size to snowy, forested heights. At the feet of all this perpetual motion stood pretty Swiss pavillions, each one a purveyor of something tasty or stylish or fun. Snowboards, chocolate, huge jackets. The only smudge in the portrait, albeit a necessary one, was the ATM on wheels – guarded, as is common in these parts, by a man with an uzi. Not here for the snow, are you mate? The most interesting structure in my country is a gigantic metal spike that, given it´s muti-million euro price tag and completion several years after the millenium it commemorates, has managed to get stuck firmly in the paw of all who gaze upon it. It also has no secondary purpose – observation deck, museum, suicide point. It´s just a fucking spike. What joy to stand there and appreciate the difference. The map of the various lifts Ger and I would have to take was no less impressive. With all it´s interconnected transports snaking through favourably rendered alpine terrain it looked more like something from my childhood: An adventure map of Colonel Valiant´s Mountaintop Ultra Defense Command (figures sold seperately). We made our way to the top of what proved to be a wide, forgiving and thankfully childfree slope. What a difference: to fall and feel nothing; to see a slope clear of kids and lawsuits; to finally get from top to bottom and feel like we belonged on the slope. Despite a couple of setbacks I spent that day and the next honing the fundamentals. Run by run I built on what I´d learned. Tackling halfpipes and 100 foot ramps would probably be a bit premature. Poor Ger took a wrong turn on day two and ended up on 2 hour trip down the mountain. Alot of flat ground and mucky patches. Great if you have poles to push you along but if you´re snowboarding it´s the equivalent of running in soup.
We spent nearly a week in Bariloche. The atmosphere at our hostel meant alot of new friends. I´ve come to despise the solitary travelling one does when staying in hotels. In some countries they´re as cheap as hostels and this may seem great if you’re a couple and want privacy. You lose out, though. In hostels you get to trade stories and advice about places on the backpacker trail and the opportunity to cook your own meals can be a welcome break from constant cafe and restaurant eating (and you’ll get a gold star from your cardiologist). The staff at hostels are often travellers themselves and can give great insider advice about the country. One of the staff at 1004, an eager guitarist, included me in a three-way guitar session. Apart from the band I was in at home, I´ve never been much for multiple partners but this threesome went well. With the other guests looking on excitedly we played with each other for nearly two hours. At some points feverishly, at others calm and unhurried, like we had all night to finish. With encouragement and sometimes applause from our audience we continued. Some of them filmed us in action and seemed quite pleased watching it days later. What I´m trying to say is that you just don´t get to do that kind of thing in a normal hotel. Someone could be doing it in the next room and you probably wouldn´t know. Privacy is over-rated. Argentina was probably the easiest country to travel in. The best buses, the nicest food, the livliest hostels hands down. I know travelling isn´t supposed to be about comfort and convenience all the time but it´s important to enjoy them while you can. There´s no way of knowing when you’re going to be stuck with another hellish road, stone age toilet, 10 hour wait with no book or whatever. The easy times make the hard seem like a distant memory and the hard times, for all their roughness make the easy so much more enjoyable.
(ie – It’s about to get rough)

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