in anti-Morales territory
A couple of days ago we arrived in Bolivia from Paraguay in a little city called Villamonte, near the border in the southeast of the country.
As said before, few people travel through Paraguay and as everybody in Villamonte was staring at us with our large backpacks, it was pretty clear that even fewer people travel to the dry eastern part of Paraguay to cross the Bolivian border there. So we were the only tourists in town.
A new experience for us as even in dry east of Paraguay there were a couple of tourists around (three Australians and one Italian to be exact).
Together with this ´new´ experience we were very suprised by the fact that Villamonte looks like a pretty rich city, with beautiful buildings, green looking plaza´s and very well maintained roads.
The next day we moved on to the much bigger city Tarija (because there were no cash machines in Villamonte and the next bus would go three days later) and here we again saw a very well maintained and very nice looking city, dotted with trendy restaurants and nice plaza´s. Yesterday we moved on again, to Tupiza, a little town 3000 meters high in the mountains, and again the plaza looks marvellous.
All very different from Paraguay where you find every once nice plaza to be occupied by drunks, homeless and turned into a slump…
At first we didn´t get why these Bolivian cities were looking so good, as Bolivia is the poorest country of the continent, but then it became clear.
When we had a good look around Tarija we began to see grafitti everywhere proclaming independence for the eastern part of the country. So it is probably not only the northeastern part of Bolivia that is the rich part of the country and where they want to become an independent republic. The same seems to be true for the southeast.
I just have read that they have huge amounts of gas here and a couple of years ago president Morales (the first indigenous Bolivian president, from the poor west part of the country) nationalised the gas industry, and he now has plans to invest a big part of the gas earnings to the poor parts of the country.
Not a terrible bad idea it seems, it looks much like the way the Dutch government is spending the earnings of the Dutch gas reserves. But the rich in the east don´t want to give up their luxery lifes it seems…
Happily enough the most of the demonstrating (and sometimes even the fighting) to become an independent republic is only taking place in the northeast. That is why we won´t go there. But we still see a lot of soldiers here too, to prevent further problems with the independence movement…
Jannis.
Tags: Travel, Tag Index
jannisenmartine