From Harsh Sun to Pouring Rain
11 November 2005 (Friday) – La Paz, Bolivia
I had checked out of my hostel, left my backpack in the storage and headed out for my usual breakfast of salteña and fruit juice by the market. But gosh, today’s weather was just so hot. I soon had no choice but to return back to the hostel and apply sun-block over my face. La Paz’s weather is really crazy. One day it is extremely hot, and the next, it rains cats and dogs.
Yesterday, I was supposed to meet Alexis, a guy whom I had contacted through Hospitality Club, in the late afternoon. However, repeated calls to his cellular phone yielded just a message. I believed his phone had run out of batteries. In a way, I was glad I did not meet him yesterday. Otherwise, I would have missed the session with Maestro Crespo.
Anyway, today, he wrote to me telling me that he would like to invite me to watch a celebration at the school he is working at, there would be folkloric dances from all over Bolivia… TOMORROW. Argh, I had already bought a ticket for Cochabamba leaving TONIGHT.
As I really wanted to watch this celebration, I decided… why not, I would stay another day. I walked to the bus terminal, had the ticket changed and returned to my hostel to re-check-in. We made an appointment to meet at Plaza San Francisco tomorrow morning. Great!
Meanwhile, as my curiosity of coca leaves had understandably grown due to the fortune-telling session of yesterday, I headed to Museo de la Coca, a tiny little museum about coca leaves. We were issued notebooks of our preferred language and told to read them as we walk from panels to panels to view the corresponding photos.
Wow, coca leaves have been in used by the people of this land for 4,500 years, as traces of the leaves were found in mummies from 2,500 BC to 1,800 BC. It was later condemned by clergymen after the Spanish conquests. They called the plant a Devil’s plant, in their attempt to try and convert the indigenous people to Catholicism.
But, it was later discovered that chewing coca leaves increased the output from silver miners (they could just last much longer hours). When Potosi was as important a city as many European cities of its times, due to its riches from silver mining, the Spanish conquerors decided to unban coca leaves and let them be used by these Indian slaves who work in infernal conditions. Of course, the Spanish controlled them carefully and at one point, the value of coca leaves was equal to the price of 450kg of gold!
Later, the anaesthetic effects of coca leaves were discovered by the Western World (although well-known by pre-Inca civilisations centuries ago who used them to perform skull trepanations – drilling a hole through the skull to perform brain surgery), so it became the fashion drug. Cocaine, a derivative from coca leaves, was later fashionably used in French wine and the most famous brand in the world – Coca Cola as an energy-booster.
Yatiri (a witch-doctor) is a person who reads coca leaves as he introduces himself to the spirits and observes the past, present, future, health and illness of the person who consults him. Unfortunately, there are not many people who knows how to read coca leaves anymore. (Boy, am I lucky to have found Maestro Crespo!) Coca leaves are the divine connection between the Andean Gods and the earthly world. Much like a type of wine that people sip in churches to be connected with the Western God.
So, coca was used by the Western world, in mines and by the spiritual world.
Later, United Nations claimed that coca leaves was the cause of poverty in Bolivia and Peru, thereby creating a law that prohibited it.
Naturally, cocaine soon became a societal problem with drug addicts all over the world as well. For example, according to the museum, United States has 5% population but consumes 50% of cocaine that exists in the world.
Fittingly, there was an extract from Bolivian writer Antonio Diaz Villemal, who wrote ‘Legends from My Land’:
“I shall give you a gift for your brothers
Climb up to that mountain
Where you shall find a small plant
One with much strength
Guard the leaves with much care
And when you feel the sting of pain in your heart
Hunger in your body
And darkness in your mind.
Take them in your mouth
And softly draw up its spirit
Which is part of mine
You will find love for your pain,
Food for your body
And light for your mind.
Furthermore, watch the leaves dance with the wind
And you will find answers to your queries
But if you torturer, who comes from the north,
The white conquerer, the gold seeker should touch it
He will find in it only poison for his body
And madness for his mind,
For his heart so callous as his steel and iron garment
And when the coca, which is how you will call it,
Attempts to soften his feelings,
It will only shatter him as ice crystals
Born in the clouds, crack the rocks and demolish mountains.”
Apparently, now there are 36 countries who have rights to produce cocaine (presumably for medical purposes) but Peru and Bolivia were not amongst them.
All thoroughly interesting…
By the time I left the museum, I had no choice but to head back to my hostel yet another time, to pile on more clothes. I just realised I am wearing my alpaca sweater from Bolivia, my woolly hat from Venezuela, my gloves from Colombia, my thick purple scarf from Chile, my thinner orange scarf from Ecuador! Wait, I am missing something from Peru. Well, my finger puppets of a llama and a condor would have to do. Wow… I couldn’t be more Pan-American.
At about 8+pm, when I had just, by pure chance, returned home, the sky opened up and poured torrential rain! Gosh, one really needs to be prepared from solar to rain attacks here all in one day in La Paz!
Tags: 09) Bolivian Rhapsody, La Paz
swesn
May 28th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Dear Trish, I Really enjoyed reading your travel posts! I’m planning for a holiday to South America later this year and am very interested to visit a witch doctor in La Paz. Is it possible to ask you the contact details for Maestro Crespo so I can try to make an appointment with him first? Hope you’re having a great week! Many thanks, Rena 🙂