Life As Canvas

From a bus in Bolivia, looking out at the small chaos of the streets, the carts of food on bikes, latin music blasting from the taxi nearby, young ladies with babies slung to their backs, markets of fruit and skinned meat, construction in the middle of the street and Jesus stickers about everywhere, I felt like I was back in Mexico again, which was a pleasant sort of disoriented nostalgia.

Bolivia is lively chaos from the low sultry jungle to the tippy top of the civilized world. We flew from beautiful Argentina where poverty is guilded by European facades and pretend luxury falls short of its promises to Santa Cruz, Bolivia where nothing is hidden at all. To my utter and predictable delight, Bolivians have a raging sweet tooth and the streets of Santa Cruz were lined with ice cream and cakes.

Two days later on the bus to Potosí, the highest city in the world (3,967 meters), we wondered at what we saw. Lush fields lit by warm evening light like quilts lined the road and whenever we stopped women in skirts and bowler hats with colorful bundles on their backs sold corn, strange drinks in plastic bags, and other goodies to the Bolivians aboard. The fields then turned to canyon walls and we snaked up the road, dodging kids on bikes in the mud, landslides from recent heavy rainfall, gaping holes in the road that would quickly have brought us to our death, farmers and vagrants, cows, goats, pigs, llamas.

I fell asleep and then awoke with a start, looking out the front window to see the edge of the dirt road stop, followed by blackness. My belly lurched as I felt the bus swoop to the side and realized we’d just missed sliding off the dirt into nothingness. Later I woke up again and noticed the drivers trading places… one took over while the other went to sleep in the luggage compartment. Some people got off to pee in the bushes and I rubbed my eyes sleepily, watching a pig nose through some garbage on the side of the road. Home felt so far away from this weird, magical world.

Potosí itself is a wonder, and one to be earned.

13,015 feet above the sea, about 2,000 feet above Mt. Hood, my lungs struggled, my diaphragm spasming. I felt like a poor, struggling fish out of her bowl. From the hotel to the market – three blocks uphill – I had to stop to pant for a while. But once acclimatized, we toured the silver mines which once brought great wealth to this part of the world, or at least the Spanish Conquistadores, hungry for easy riches and quick to employ Inca and African slaves to get it. 8 million people died working there over 250 years.

The mines still function today, and are still dangerous. It wasn’t until after we took the tour that we were told a Japanese tourist fell 70 meters down a mine shaft to his gruesome death only a few years before. Workers range from 12 to 40-something years old and are happy to do the sweaty, heavy work for 100 Bolivianos a day (about 12 dollars). Life in the mine is mostly one thing… dark. And it’s like the mines you see in movies with carts going by on tracks and sounds of picks clinking into stone and far off explosions shaking the walls. To calm the nerves, stand the heat, and keep their mouths occupied, workers chew on coca leaves, which are completely legal in Bolivia as long as they’re not made into cocaine. We bought some as gifts to the miners before our tour and chewed on a few to see what they might to. My cheek turned numb.

Our guide lights some dynamite with his cigarette.

Miners drag the one-ton cart back into the tunnels.

Our next adventure was a three-day 4wd trip through the desert to the Salar de Uyuni, the largest (and of course, highest) salt flat in the world. The first two days were mostly spent cramped in the back of the car, bumping along the road for three or four hours at a time. Sometimes the driver let us out for photos for 10 to 30 minute intervals.

Laguna Verde was one of our short stops. It had a strange soap-like foam around the edge from the natural chemicals in the ground.

We ate llama meat and chicken that had been in the car the whole time but so far, so good, belly-wise. All of this rear-numbing time trying to occupy ourselves with ipods and conversation ended with the third day, which made the whole trip worth while.

We stopped in a little village to buy some touristy things and then off into the Salar we went, our tires squishing through the water on the surface, a great whiteness stretching out before us.

In some places it was dry and sharp, the salt forming perfect square crystals. In other spots, an inch of water covered the white mass, making a mirror of the world and erasing the horizon.

The light blue of the sky stretched on until it hit distant mountains and, where there were no mountains, seemed never to stop. Here, men work piling the salt into cones for 10 hours a day. Paid by the ton, they make about 30 Bolivianos a day, which pans out to about $3.75. They wear ski masks to avoid cooking in the sun, its rays already intense in the high altitude bounce off the white salt and burn any color of skin in sight.

While we wandered around taking pictures of this strange other-planet-like land, one of the workers waved us over and asked if we’d like to take a picture. “What have you got?” He asked, “Do you have any Bolivianos to give me? Do you have any presents?” He asked Cyril if he could have his hat, even though he was already wearing one. Then he asked me for my watch. “Por favor, señorita.” He pleaded, adding I could buy a better one in town later. We refused but shook his hand and made our way back to the truck to wait for the sunset, one of the most colorful I’ve seen.

Now we’re in La Paz, ready to embark on a new adventure tomorrow… our biggest yet. But I’ll save that for the next entry.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.