La Paz Bolivia
October 29, 2001
Dear Emily,
I hope all is well and that you enjoyed my previous letter from Bolivia, particularly that truly uplifting 4x4 journey we made in the High Andean Altiplano in the Bolivian south-west. (I still can’t believe how narrowly we avoided being taken hostage along with all those other travellers right at the end.) *
Since then, we have continued traversing mainly northwards up the west side of the country. Bolivia remains one of our absolute favourite countries to visit, but I thought I’d now tell you about some of its trickier aspects and also the side visit we made into northern Chile.
Since arriving here, we have both succumbed to regular bouts of gripy tummy and diarrhoea, courtesy of the staple food that Bolivians feed tourists: chicken that has been cooked, stored at room temperature for 3 days, then partially reheated to lukewarm to serve. Worse, however, whilst on the Altiplano, I had my first ever case of full-on food poisoning (incidentally, not from chicken), severely and repeatedly explosive from both ends.
Conditions were basic, to say the least: we were staying at altitude in the most basic of mud-brick, earth-floored, cramped, mixed-sex dormitory accommodations with no lighting, no heating, no electricity, no shower, no sink and a toilet flushed with a cut-down carton dipped into a water barrel. I woke everyone repeatedly during the night as I struggled out from under my pile of blankets, raced across the darkness to the creaking dormitory door, let myself into the sub-zero temperatures outside, and darted into the adjacent, unlit, unheated toilet. Once there, I had to make an instant decision as to which end would benefit from the toilet and which would get the floor. Then it was time to get down on hands and knees and, in my desperately weakened state, clean up the floor, before crawling back to bed in anticipation of the next episode a few minutes later. It was vile, and only stopped next morning when (highly unusually) I accepted a tablet from a fellow traveller, a tablet that I later found out comprised a low concentration of arsenic.
We have also experienced a couple of thefts. The first, in the town of Oruro, was very strange: every last pair of my holey, post-food-poisoning knickers was stolen from the washing line on our hostel roof. We made some investigations and discovered the culprit to be the young boy of the house, who’d extracted them from amongst all my other hand-washed clothes drying on the line and taken them in, thinking they must belong to his grandmother! I’m not sure if he or I was most embarrassed. Soon after, still in Oruro, there was the infuriating actual theft of our Bolivian guide book from a telephone booth just after we’d jostled and queued for 45 minutes to make a 3 minute phone call costing £5.
The altitude is a constant risk in west Bolivia and the High Andes and you never know when its effects will strike. We are currently in La Paz – Bolivia’s capital city and highest capital in the world – recovering from three nights we have just spent in the tiny roadside hamlet of Chucuyo (altitude 4300 m), just over the border into northern Chile’s stunning Lauca National Park.
We had taken the once-a-day public bus from Oruro towards Arica, in Chile. The border crossing was stressful: whilst the Bolivian exit guards were fine, the Chilean entry guards were slow, inefficient and disorganised and then went on to confiscate the 6 oranges and 2 bananas that we had with us and were relying on for vitamins. We continued on our way, passing through a spectacular landscape almost wholly devoid of habitation, when suddenly the bus driver pulled over and motioned for us to get off beside a handful of isolated, run-down dwellings literally in the middle of nowhere. This, apparently, was our destination: Chucuyo. We reluctantly disembarked and waited, full of misgivings, as the driver unloaded our large rucksacks from the belly of the bus. We had never seen a place so tiny and desolate, so remote and lifeless. We were the only people who had got off the bus and there was still just time to jump back on before it left (it being the only bus that day). But we held fast and, as it pulled away and left us behind, we both felt a grim flutter of trepidation in the pits of our stomachs.
Unsure what to do next, we started randomly knocking on doors and soon a door was opened: there were actually inhabitants. It seemed, however, that there was no guest accommodation. A woman in her 60s, called Matilde, seeing that we were stranded, then indicated that she had some informal accommodation at the back of her concrete house-cum-restaurant: six rustic, handmade beds (two bunks and two singles) crammed into a dark concrete room with one tiny shuttered window and a doorway just 1½ m high. We could stay there. Imagine our relief! The facilities were basic – two outdoor toilets flushed using a bucket from a large water barrel and shared by everyone (and it seemed ‘everyone’ comprised quite a few people after all, from Matilde right down to a woolly-hatted, curious lad of 2), plus an outdoor tap for drinking water (which we sterilised with iodine) that was nightly wrapped in alpaca fur and blankets so that the water would freeze a little less deeply and flow again by late morning – frozen water pipes were a novelty for us for 3 nights; for them, a hardship they would continue to endure every single night of their lives. Yet – and this was another novelty for us after most of two weeks without electricity or lighting – there was an electric light bulb, bare but working, hanging from the ceiling of our cell!
The day-to-night temperature swing must easily have been 35 or 40 degrees C, from a daytime peak of around 30 degrees C (and serious sunburn risk given the thin air at that altitude) to well sub-zero at night. In bed, there were alpaca furs lining the slats below the mattresses, and I wore a vest, long-sleeved T-shirt, thick fleece jumper, thick trousers with my woolly hat wrapped over my thighs, 2 pairs of thick socks with my feet then pushed inside another fleece jumper, and fleece gloves, then squeezed myself into my hooded 3-season “mummy” sleeping bag, and wriggled 3 thick Andean blankets over the top of everything. I could barely move, slept intermittently, stayed only just warm enough, and had to keep my drinking water bottle in with me to stop it from freezing.
On our first evening, for tea, we ate cold tins of vegetables in our room as we weren’t sure whether 'Restaurant Doña Mati' in the front part of Matilde’s house was actually doing business. But we needed to eke out our meagre rations so enquired the next day and found ourselves enjoying a hot evening meal of alpaca steak (from their own herd), “grade 2” rice (I know the grade because the sacks had been used, along with alpaca furs, to provide cushioning on the hard plastic-and-metal chairs) and vegetables (well, fried onions, but onions are vegetables). We had enjoyable company from a couple of men of the house. Our Spanish quickly failed, so we got out a few photos of our house, town and typical British countryside, and received handshakes all round as they inspected photos of our parents.
The restaurant interior was that typical, guileless, South American combination of charmingly unattractive practicality and tasteless, plastic kitsch: numerous bulging bundles and boxes crowded the concrete floor, two or three small tables and mis-matching chairs were squeezed in wherever they fit, a metal sugar bowl decorated with elephants and the English words ‘Love in the Rain’ had been specially placed on our table, and – around the walls – there were Chilean flags in the form of plastic bunting, a topless-model calendar, two big, boxed, gaudy dolls (one porcelain, one plastic) and a boxed, flat-plastic-moulded Father Christmas. We ate there again on our third night: alpaca steak, grade 2 rice and fried onions – they didn’t have anything else.
Matilde and another friendly woman in the hamlet baked bread, so that kept us fed in the daytimes. Matilde theoretically sold other provisions although her shelf was always empty. On our second day, we asked if she sold anything to go with the bread and, after 20 minutes of scouring every hut in the hamlet, she returned with two tins of tuna. On our last full day, a single packet of ‘Old England Toffee’ (‘made in Chile to a classic Devonshire recipe’) appeared on her shelf. We snapped it up immediately.
What really surprised me was how I struggled with the altitude. We’d ascended slowly and spent the previous three weeks at 3000-3700 m, so I wasn’t expecting to notice much effect from a further 600 m ascent. I hadn’t really thought too much about the fact that, even two nights before ascending to Chucuyo, I hadn’t been sleeping well and had been waking with a thumping headache, constricted nasal passages, morning nose bleed and notable loss of energy, to add to my gippy tummy. On arrival at Chucuyo, the symptoms continued without relent and I found myself taking nearly 2 hours to stagger just 2 miles in the countryside outside Chucuyo with Dave. I was light-headed, panting furiously, simply unable to get enough air into my lungs, continually needing rest stops. I barely noticed the magnificent twin peaks of the dormant volcanoes Parinacota and Pomerape, hallmark of the National Park, or the herd of wild vicuñas that we startled. When the throbbing headache, constant breathlessness and increasingly fitful sleep continued into a fourth day, I finally made the link to altitude sickness and took Diamox. It was not particularly effective – possibly a slight increase in energy next day, but still that headache and dizziness, and now with tingling in my fingers and intense heartburn (not something I’d ever had before, although the Old England Toffee was mint-flavoured, which I tried to imagine was helping).
I opted out of walking on our final full day in Chucuyo, realising that the views from our doorway were so stunning that I really didn’t need to walk anywhere (and also that, suffering acute mountain sickness and not being in a position to descend, I at least needed to rest). I sat in the sun and did repairs (gluing and sewing), read a bit, admired the view, then, moving slowly, had a cold strip wash in our room using a flannel and our fold-up bowl which I had left in the sun for a couple of hours to take the icy chill off the water.
As the sun began to drop, I watched llamas, alpacas and sheep return homeward for the night and begin to cluster around the single-stone-thickness, gappy dry stone walls, typical of the Andes, and wondered when the domestic dogs would start making for their outdoor beds of heaped alpaca fur. I wondered if Chucuyo could ever get enough people together for a game of football (even 5-a-side) on the llama field, where they’d erected a couple of goalposts and laughingly joked about their estadio (stadium). Dave, suffering a little from the altitude, had spent the afternoon walking a few miles each way to see if he could find a shower at the refugio (mountain refuge) towards the next village, but it was all closed up, so he too ended up with a cold strip wash in our room.
On our final morning, we managed to pack quickly and decided to sit out by the roadside and enjoy the fine views of Volcán Parinacota and Volcán Pomerape, even though we were 1½ hours early for the once-a-day bus back to Bolivia and, like most South American buses, it would probably be late. However, after a relatively short wait, the bus suddenly appeared over the horizon and we flagged it down. It was almost an hour early: we would have missed it had we not fortuitously been out waiting so early.
We climbed aboard and noticed that the clock on the bus (our first clock in days) was an hour ahead of our watches. Only then did we realise that we should have put our watches forward an hour when we crossed over the border into Chile. (And who would have guessed to put your watch forward when heading west? Maybe long, skinny Chile was on daylight saving time to benefit the Chileans further south, but blobby Bolivia doesn’t bother.)
It had certainly been an interesting and eye-opening interlude over in Chile. Perhaps we will head to Peru next.
Best wishes,
Amanda.
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* I hope to put this up as a later blog – it really was a magnificent and other-worldly few days in the Bolivian mountains, and we had a very lucky escape at the end.
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