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 I arrived in La Paz on Friday night and sprang for a bedroom with a private bath. I had been sick with a cold since Peru and needed the luxury to recuperate. It only cost me an extra 30 Bolivianos (about four dollars U.S.) and the promise of a hot shower sounded like heaven. That promise was spoiled when it was “Bolivian hot” which wouldn’t even qualify as lukewarm in the States.
I arrived in La Paz on Friday night and sprang for a bedroom with a private bath. I had been sick with a cold since Peru and needed the luxury to recuperate. It only cost me an extra 30 Bolivianos (about four dollars U.S.) and the promise of a hot shower sounded like heaven. That promise was spoiled when it was “Bolivian hot” which wouldn’t even qualify as lukewarm in the States.
Determined not to let a little sniffle and cough spoil my trip, I awoke early on Saturday to explore. I began in the crowded back alleys of the Mercado Negro (black market) where two pickpockets targeted my shoulder bag. With long blonde hair, freckles and a big red beard I must have stood out like a polar bear in the desert. The men carried yellow flowers as a cover and watched me closely as I hiked up hill sniffling and out of breath. I found myself caught suddenly in a human traffic jam. The men moved in quickly pushing against me, pretending to be a part of the cluster. I covered my pockets, pulled my bag close to my chest and squeezed my way through as fast as possible. I later discovered a small slit in my bag, just large enough for a human hand. Luckily nothing was missing.
Sullen and grumpy, I decided to drink away my cold. I spent the night at a bar mingling with three Irish girls I had been bumping into since Lima, but had yet to officially meet. Although the conversation did wonders for my mood, I can’t say the beer and cigarettes did the same for my cold.
To my surprise, I awoke on Sunday to packed streets and tight security. It was the inauguration of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president; historic for both Bolivia and all of South America. He was elected on a socialist, anti-United States platform that promised to reinvigorate Bolivia’s coca leaf industry and denounced capitalism and the Bush administration. I felt slightly self-conscious joining the celebration, but I figured that if I ran into any trouble my pale skin and blonde locks could easily pass for Canadian.
The inauguration was a cluster of people and a string of political speeches that my limited Spanish failed to fully understand. I learned a lot about him from signs and fliers that depicted Evo alongside Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and hailed him as a true people’s president. A Chilean tourist who spoke some English taught me more about Evo’s background, his anti-U.S. campaign, the significance of an indigenous person being elected and, as some would say, “Ending 450 years of colonial rule.”
After the official inauguration, the sun fell and the party began. Thousands paraded through the streets late into the night drinking, singing, dancing and cheering as fireworks exploded above our heads like a million shooting stars falling to the earth. And there I was, “el gringo numero uno,” smack dab in the middle of history with a big, dumb smile on my face taking it all in. "This is the good life," I thought.
The next day I attempted to board an overnight bus to Uyuni, a town in southern Bolivia where the promise of scenic beauty and the world’s largest salt flats awaited. Upon arriving to the station my bus was inexplicably canceled. Not given any reason, I was simply handed a refund and turned away. I bumped into the Irish girls who had Uyuni tickets with another company and suggested I give them a try. Unfortunately the bus was sold out and I was forced to stay one more night in La Paz.
Twenty-four hours later I boarded what I thought was the more reliable of the bus companies, but the bus didn’t move. After half an hour or so of waiting without explanation, the tourist police boarded the bus and interrogated two men sitting across the aisle from me. After asking them a dozen questions and even requesting one of them to sing the national anthem, the police escorted the two men off the bus. According to the Bolivian man seated next to me, the men were “banditos,” thieves from Peru set on robbing the bus after dark, in the middle of the Bolivian country. We wiped away the sweat of too close a call as the bus finally pulled out of the station.
At some point in the middle of the night the roads turned into dirt and then mud in the pouring rain. I woke at six in the morning, the bus was stopped and I feared the worst. "A flat tire," I thought, "or stuck in the mud," considering that we were not only driving across dirt roads in torrential downpour but also through large streams and tiny rivers. I remembered the Chilean tourist telling me that one of Evo’s promises was to pave all of Bolivia’s roads. "If only he had been elected a few years earlier," I thought. Turns out he lost a close vote in the last election. Bad timing, I guess.
As it turns out, the bus was not quite broken down. It had just found a new driving routine that went as follows: drive for two minutes, pull over while the three man crew jump out and fill buckets and plastic bottles with water from the nearby puddles and streams, pour the water into the engine, drive for two minutes more and then start the process all over again. This went on for over an hour until we came to a tiny village 100 kilometers from nowhere that consisted of a restaurant, an inn with no vacancy and a few empty buildings that looked more like ruins than a village.
The crew pulled out the mangled—probably prehistoric—radiator and set to work on fixing it while the bus unloaded. We walked across a channel of mud that separated the bus from the restaurant. Bolivian mud is like clay: heavy, sticky and unrelenting. It builds up on your boots until you feel the weight of it sucking you to the ground with twice the force of gravity. Then it stays put; no amount of stomping or scraping can completely remove it.
The restaurant served breakfast: instant coffee and bread. A typical South American breakfast, but after the night we had, it didn’t even begin to crack the bad moods and bad health many of us were in. The waiter scoffed at one woman’s request for cream and marmalade.
Most of the 40 passengers slept on the bus and pouted while about a third of us made the best of a bad situation. We gathered together on a patch of pavement between the bus and restaurant that was like an island in a sea of mud. The population of our island was made up of two Argentine guys, an Israeli guy, a Dutch guy, a German girl, an Italian man, a couple from New Zealand, a Swedish couple, a Korean guy, an English girl and myself, the lone American.
We quickly discovered that the restaurant sold beer and that the Swede had a guitar he didn’t know how to play. We started drinking while the Argentines entertained us with native folk songs. They were fantastic and set a jovial mood. We drank away the day, chatting, bonding and trying to hitch rides with the occasional passing truck driver—with no luck. We represented the world in a social circle of songs and stories, coca leaves and matte, while the bus crew repaired the radiator with what could amount to chewing gum and shoelaces.
Despite my lingering cold, I took my turn at the guitar, playing Neil Young, Radiohead, The Beatles and anything I could think of that 13 people from nine different countries and five different continents could all sing along to. In the end, it was my rendition of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” that brought out the rock star in everyone, climaxing with all of us singing at the top of our lungs and cheering so loudly it must have pissed off every upset sleeper on the bus.
Two days after the inauguration of a president who claimed that “the worst enemy of humanity is capitalism,” thirteen representatives of the world were brought together in a tiny village in southern Bolivia by an American rock song; a song that would not have reached so many different people without the power of capitalism distributing it to the world market. I don’t think any of us saw the irony in the situation; we just made the best of it. Perhaps it’s more a testament to the power of music than to the power of globalization; it’s probably both. It’s a shame that globalization is so good at feeding world culture with art, music and education while at the same time killing indigenous culture with corporate marketing, expansion and world trade.
At three in the afternoon, drunk and exhausted, we were off again and without further complication we arrived at Uyuni only fourteen hours late.
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