Sovereign state of the have-nots

Rurrenabaque :: Bolivia

Even the rich people here are poor.

Places: La Paz, Tiwanaku & Rurrenabaque.

Coolest thing I did: Saw the inside of my nose and ears through a fibre optic camera in the ear, nose and throat specialist's office. And my nose isn't broken.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: I've just been told it's safe to swim with caimans (the other subspecies of alligator, along with "alligator"). That idea may take some getting used to.

So after visiting two doctors and racking up a medical bill around the order of $45 (which is actually less than my excess so it's not worth even claiming) it turns out my nose isn't actually broken after all. To find this out I had to get a taxi to Zona Sur, which is the poshest part of La Paz, but to tell the truth it's full of the same low rent mud-brick and concrete buildings as the rest of the city in most parts of it. The specialist lived in a medical centre in one of the better shopping centres in town, which would probably have been one of the worst shopping centres in town in Sydney. It was also the only part of town with such things as supermarkets, which is a novelty here. The reason, is because La Paz is full of povs.

Bolivia is the highest, poorest and most indigenous of all the countries in South America, and the flow of the poor rural population into La Paz is probably taking place at a far more rapid pace than anywhere else in the continent. A whole extra city, El Alto is growing up on the plateau above La Paz itself, and urban planning isn't a concept that is fairly heavily enforced. All those people have to do something to make a living, otherwise it wouldn't have been worth their time immigrating into the city from the provinces and walking the streets of downtown La Paz you get the feel for what those people do. The reason that there doesn't even seem to be 7-11 style corner shops, let alone supermarkets in the downtown is because every several metres there's an old woman in traditional costume manning a stall that sells some subsection of what you'd find in a convenience store. One may sell only bottles of Coke, another only Pringles, a third only batteries. It's highly inefficient, but you get the feeling you couldn't actually run a shop here because you'd be competing with labour costs of basically zero.

The roads are choked with minivans and clapped out Taragos, which are the primary form of transport in the larger urban area that makes up La Paz and El Alto. To run one of these all you need to seem to have is a driver and someone to sit in the passenger door yelling out where you're going - which also seems to be fairly fluid depending on where most of the existing passengers want to go. This job (which I guess you would call "conductor") seems to have no stereotype, as I saw old ladies in bowler hats, teen-aged girls in hoodies, middle aged punks and the rest of a diverse cross section of La Paz society taking up this place.

One thing that always seems confronting is to be approached by someone is a baseball cap and balaclava, however in La Paz that person most likely wants to polish your shoes. For some reason (the Lonely Planet cites stigma) the shoe shine boys and men mostly wear balaclavas, which I guess would come in handy if you also decided to take up armed robbery as a sideline.

So free of the medical profession I decided it was time to go and do some stuff, so I took a day trip back out towards Lake Titicaca to see Bolivia's most impressive ruins, Tiwanaku. This was a precursor civilisation to the Incas, but unlike many of the peoples conquered by them in Peru and Ecuador, Tiwanaku was in ruins long before the Inca arrived on the scene in Bolivia. If you've just come from Peru then the bits that have been excavated and restored probably won't impress you that much. If Machu Picchu is a 2 or 3 on the imagination-required scale then Tiwanaku would probably be an 8. There is ongoing work to excavate a step pyramid that dominates the site, but we were told that the bits that were excavated and restored in the 1960s and 70s were put together with very little scholarly research and probably look nothing at all like the original site (and probably were reconstructed using poorer levels of stone masonry than the Tiwanaku used themselves back in the day). There are some cool bits, like a lower chamber that is lined with stone heads, the best guess being this represented the underworld and the heads were the chiefs of peoples conquered by the Tiwanaku. One of two of them have strangely elongated heads, and some of the stones are carved with strangely straight (ie., machine cut) lines, hence many people have now added 2 and 2 and got the answer "aliens built it". What is it with pyramids and alien conspiracy theories? Can't people believe people are actually capable of this kind of thing without resorting to deus ex machina of aliens?

The protests inside La Paz itself continue, but the more disruptive transport workers seem to have either gotten sick of breathing in teargas, or (more likely) the current occupant of Palacio Quemado has caved into whatever it was they were demanding. Since 2005 Bolivia has been run by Evo Morales, the most indigenous President in South American (and possibly world) history, so it seems kind of strange every law he passes these days results in mass protests. His previous job was head of the coca growers union, and his early actions didn't exactly endear him to the occupants of the White House. He expelled the DEA and their coca eradication program, being of the opinion that cocaine was an Norte Americano problem and the growers in the foothills of the Andes in Bolivia shouldn't suffer as a result. I'm pretty much convinced that one side effect of that is Route 36.

Possibly the only openly run and operated cocaine bar in the world, Route 36 is a club that changes venues about every 6 months and sells grams of cocaine over the counter, allowing it's patrons to go ahead and snort as much as they want on the coffee tables in the bar. I'm convinced this is allowed to operate mostly because someone is bribing the police, the "cocaine" they sell is cut with what seems like 90% or so speed (judging by the patron's teeth grinding and inability to finish a sentence) and the patrons are almost exclusively gringos who are all basically junkies anyway, right? I'd say you'd have trouble running a place like that, even in a country with corruptible police if the society at large didn't blame the users rather than the suppliers.

Drugs also were involved in the rise of what was once La Paz' most notorious tourist attraction: the San Pedro prison. In 1995 an Englishman named Thomas McFadden was convicted for cocaine trafficking by a Bolivian court and ended up in San Pedro, smack bang in the middle of La Paz. It's apparently a bizarre world, where the inmates have to buy their own cell and pretty much keep bribing people to stay alive. After a rough start Mr McFadden managed to become a serious force inside the prison, bribing the guards to allow him to run tours for backpackers, one of whom was a budding Australian journalist called Rusty Young, who though the story so preposterous he spent months documenting it and used the material to write the hostel bookshelf staple Marching Powder. That was 2003 and that book pretty much made a tour to San Pedro an obligatory stop on the gringo trail through Bolivia. For years it was possible to bribe your way inside, take as much cocaine paste as you could buy (a steady stream of income for the inmates) and tell nudge-nudge wink-wink stories from the Darien Gap to Ushuaia, which fuelled even more intense interest. Then in 2009 a Youtube video of the tour, including cocaine use by the tourists became a talking point in the Bolivian media and a large scale clampdown on the guards and prisoners liberties pretty much put a stop to these illegal tours. That's the most plausible story I heard (another that seems common is of two Australian girls being raped in the goal, but that seems to be more rumour than anything else) and I wasn't even approached on the street by people trying to sell me a fake tour outside the prison, as used to be common even 12 months ago. Apparently Brad Pitt is funding a movie based on the book, so I'd expect it to all explode again when that comes out.

This morning saw me getting into a tiny turbo prop plane (about 16 seats) where I was able to see the pilots for a brief flight over the Andes and down into the jungle at Rurrenabaque. While the Amazon itself passes way up north, through Brazil, along the border with Colombia and Peru and up into Ecuador the Amazon basin covers something like a 1/3rd of the continent and much of the area covered by Bolivia is covered in jungle. Due to timing issues I never got into the jungle in any other country and that would mean I wouldn't get to take all those highly expensive anti-malarials I've been carrying since Sydney. Which I'm now doing and kind of make me feel like I've got malaria, but perhaps they're supposed to do that. It's got to be better than actual malaria. I'm disappearing into a high class ecolodge thing for the next 4 days so tales of swimming with the cousins of alligators to come.

Not so pretty any more

La Paz :: Bolivia

"After effects of tear gas" - last Google search on the hostel computer in La Paz

Places: La Paz, Yolosa & Huayna Potosi.

Coolest thing I did: Climbed my first mountain above the magic 6000m mark, which just beats out riding a mountain bike down the World's Most Dangerous Road.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The original Copacabana is the one on Lake Titicaca, even though the one in Brazil is far more famous.

Arriving in La Paz by night turned out to be a well worthwhile experience. The city started in the depths of the Choqueyapu River valley and has spent the last 400 or so years growing up the valley walls, so when you come in during darkness it's like a bowl of stars below. It's only when you look at the place the following morning that you see that most of those lights belong to a shambolic pile of red clay and mud brick houses that have been growing all around the city proper over the last century or so. Like the rest of South America, the rural poor have been coming to La Paz to make up for the lack of opportunities in their old villages and solving shortages of housing themselves, often with no planning. It's the same effect as Bogota or Medellin, only it feels much more compressed here, because the valley walls are so much closer.

Waking up on my first morning I was greeted to the sight of riot police blockading the end of the street and was told there was a protest heading down from Plaza Murillo, where the Palacio Quemado (so called because it has a habit of burning to the ground about once every 50 years or so) houses the President, and the police might try and stop them. I sat in the courtyard and heard the popping of fireworks, then teargas cannisters being fired, and then finally what I think they were telling me was dynamite, but that last one could be wrong. I ended up getting a bit bored, and needed money so ended up going past a few protests (yes, there's more than one going on at the same time) and saw that so long as they didn't break ranks the police pretty much left them alone. They almost seemed to be having a carnival, shown in my favourite photo from the protests: a clown juggling 3 empty teargas grenades in front of the police.

An Aussie mate of mine, Sam, who I met while he was stuck in Copacabana waiting for the roads to clear, got a whole lot closer, walking back to his hostel when the crowd started running towards him. They were all laughing, so he thought it was safe enough until he got a face full of smoke and ended up with a feeling like he'd just been rubbing chilli in his eyes. Kind of glad I've still never managed to be tear gassed. Touch wood.

What is there to do in La Paz? Well in La Paz itself it seems not that much. There's churches, presidential palaces and a tourist ghetto based around The Witches Market, which as far as I can tell sells nothing to do with witches, but lots of stuff made out of llama and alpaca wool, mostly with pictures of llamas and alpacas knitted into them. What most of the gringos seem to be doing around here is organising to do other stuff, just outside La Paz. If you're a backpacker, then you're almost certainly going to ride a mountain bike down the World's Most Dangerous Road (WMDR).

Since the 1930s the WMDR was simply called the Yungas Road, as it was the road that led from La Paz to the Yungas region and then from there onto Bolivia's chunk of the Amazon basin. During the 1930s Bolivia was fighting a war with Paraguay, only one of 4 countries Bolivia was destined to lose a war to since it's independence, robbing it of basically half it's territory. Anyway the Bolivians finished the road using captured Paraguayan soldiers, many of which obviously died in it's construction. It stretches from La Cumbre at 4700m and drops all the way down to Yolosa at 1100m, all over a rocky 64km which can be as narrow as 3.2m in places and has sheer cliffs off to one side, often with a 1000m drop over the edge. Due to these obvious design flaws people have been going off the edges in cars, trucks and buses in most of the intervening years, causing the Inter-American Development Bank to do a study and christen the road the WMDR. The idea was to use that name to raise money to built a much safer replacement, but that had the side effect of drawing tourists to see it. People have been going down it, especially on mountain bikes ever since, and that alone has killed about 30 people.

We didn't have a clear day, which was probably good to start with. The cloud masked just how deep some of the cliffs are, and I'm told also hid the carcasses of the various trucks and buses that have gone over the edge of the road during the last 80-odd years. The new road was finished about 5 years ago, so most of the traffic on the WMDR is now tourists, but it is a public road which people still do live on, so occasionally you will have cars coming around blind corners at you, just to make life interesting.

I went with the most famous of the tour companies Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking, who have a reputation for safety, top notch equipment and probably most importantly, have never had a fatality. I thought that last bit was worth the extra money. I've never ridden a proper downhill mountain bike before and found the whole thing very cool. They were dual suspension bikes with hydraulic disk brakes, meaning there was a bit of instruction at first on how they were meant to be handled. Basically you shouldn't be braking very often, as that deforms the bike and doesn't let the suspension do it's job, but when you do it's a case of light application on both front and rear brakes just before a corner or obstacle (like a gravel pit) and letting the bike roll through and do it's job. The bikes corner really smoothly over the roughest terrain and so long as you aren't actually sitting on the seat (which our guide, an Irishman called Paddy described as the "one night in prison syndrome") the ride was very comfortable.

The downhill is broken up into sections so the guides can tell you what is coming up next and to stop the group from stretching out too much. As you go along there is a guide taking pictures and videos for you, so you don't have to (though many of them were pretty damn blurry) and slow up the rest of the group. By the time you start the second quarter of the ride you're starting to really let the bike run and build up a bit of speed. Of course, this makes you a bit overconfident sometimes, and if you're like me you'd pretty much stopped breaking before corners by the time the second 1/3rd of the road starts.

This would be silly of you.

So at the spot we'd just been told a Frenchwoman went over the edge on a mountain bike some years ago I took a tight hairpin turn way too fast, went wide into the ditch on the wall side (thankfully not the cliff side!) and the bike got the serious wobbles. I panicked and hit the front break hard without touching the back break and the laws of Isaac Newton took over. I went right over the handlebars and had one of those moments like Wile E. Coyote has when he realises there's nothing under the cloud he's standing on and has a little sign reading "uh-oh".

That lasted until my momentum was stopped by the helmet, my shoulder and pretty much the entire right hand side of my face. I was a little in shock but managed to get back on the bike and ride back with the rest of the group, and it was only looking at the faces of other people looking at my face that I realised just how much gore there was on it. Paddy cleaned it up as best he could using surgical alcohol (which hurt more than the accident, I think) and I continued on, this time as one of the slowest in the group, right until the end.

Each of the companies ends at a different spot, and ours was in a wildlife sanctuary in the village of Yolosa. It started out as a place for animals (mostly monkeys) rescued from the illegal exotic animal trade but now has taken on epic proportions. Most of the animals appear so fearless of humans that they could never be released back into the wild, but it does bring in tourists and volunteers, mostly because monkeys are both cute and awesome. One little howler monkey took a shine to sitting on my head and wrapping his tail around my neck and after a while I just let him be and forgot he was even there most of the time. There's a few pictures of me floating around out there with a bashed in face and a monkey on my head.

The minibus used as a support vehicle then drives you back up the WMDR to La Paz, and by this time the clouds had cleared so you can see just how crazy the drops are. The driver stopped at the narrowest point (where Jeremy Clarkson had to reverse his Range Rover for those of you who have seen the Top Gear episode from Bolivia) and opened the door so we could take pictures over the edge. It was literally a 1000m drop right outside the door, a pretty scary sight. Still, there's no-one like the Bolivians to take an embarrassingly deadly piece of infrastructure and turn it into a tourist attraction.

So I probably should have gone directly to the doctor but my face was still all swollen up, and the British doctor in our group who had done his internship in ear, nose and throat told me they wouldn't be able to do much until that went down. Instead I'd already given a couple of Aussies (Dan & Dylan) I'd met in Huaraz carte blanche to book me on a trek with them the next day to climb Huayna Potosi, a mountain in the Cordillera Real so I had to be ready at 9am for that.

So overlooking the cityscape of La Paz are several snowcapped peaks and the one that most first timers like myself take on is Huayna Potosi. This is popular because it's a whole 88m above the magical 6000m mark, is the easiest 6000m climb in the world and is much less technical than the other slightly higher peaks in the area. I'd been planning to do this one to kind of make up for the failure to get a group together to do El Misti in Peru and when Dan organised the whole thing it turned out to be easier than I thought. They'd also independently met Jenny, a Swedish girl I'd gotten the bus from Puno to Copa with, and had an American mate Gabe who was also with them. John, an Irishman I'd been staying with in the hostel also turned out to be doing it on the same tour so there was 6 of us ready to go.

After a brief introduction on using ice axes, crampons (boot spikes) and the like to stop yourself from falling off the mountain and a night spent in front of the fire in what must be the world's nicest refuge it's time to start the climb from the road at 4750m (which is the highest I'd ever gone under my own steam before) to the first real refuge at 5300m, including the last 200m above the snow line. Now I've had my problems with the altitude in the past, but the thing that really got me this time was just how weak I felt walking up hill in that rapidly thinning mountain air. I think by the time we got to the refuge we were all complaining of headaches and some nausea, so even the best of us were a little bit in new territory.  It also turns out Gabe trained as a mountain EMT in the states, so had a hypochondriac level knowledge of the effects of altitude related sicknesses. One of the more common fatal sicknesses that take people at altitude is High altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), one of the main symptoms of which is a hacking cough. By that time we'd made a bit of a joke of it, referring to any symptom as The HAPE coming on. In all seriousness though, both the HAPE and it's nastier cousin, the HACE (which is where you brain basically implodes) can both be fatal and in extreme cases people need to be brought down to sea level and often put in the same kinds of hyperbaric chambers divers are cured of the Bends in.

Which is a worry in Bolivia, seeing as it has no sea level. Bolivia lost wars with Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay (seriously? Paraguay?) in it's early years, but none stung so much as it's loss to Chile during the War of the Pacific. It was the 1870s and the world had just gone crazy for nitrate, as it was being used in massive quantities in fertilizer and Bolivia and Peru were sitting on tonnes of it in the Atacama Desert and surrounds. Most of this was being mined by Chilean companies and a series of perceived threats to this business caused war to break out, resulting in Chile handing both Peru and Bolivia their metaphorical arses. As a result Peru lost some land, Bolivia became land locked and Chile became the world leader in nitrate mining. Just to add insult to injury the biggest yielding copper mine of all time, Chuquicamata and the currently biggest annual yielding copper mine, Escondida both ended up being found under land lost by Bolivia in this war. This still gets brought up every time the Bolivians and Chileans play each other at soccer.

So with the risk of HAPE seeming ever present we set out at 1.30am for the 5 hour climb to the top of the mountain. These climbs tend to be done in the dark for safety reasons, as the ice and snow is packed down hard in the night time cold and the spikes of your crampons will bite in that much harder. Once the sun hits the snow it starts to soften up and that's no longer true. The down side is it's about -20 when you start and you need to be roped together in 3s (2 of us and a guide) so two of you can arrest the fall of the third one should you go off the edge of the mountain. Myself and Irish John were roped to Mario, the head guide and we later on did wonder if either of us (my 80kg and his 90kg) would be able to stop the other from falling with only Mario's 60kg and 5 feet to stop us? Mario made us feel much safer, as he oozed experience and we mostly just trudged up the snow in the dark, one foot in front of the other, feeling ever weaker from the lack of oxygen in the air.

The last part of the climb is the one you want your wits about you, as it's the only really technical part. The ridge line is about 1 or 2metres wide in most places and rises like a razors edge up to the summit. On either side is a sheer drop of over 1000m so you need to do exactly what you're told, which means very slow going when you're dizzy from the exhaustion of walking uphill for 5 hours with about a 1/3rd of the oxygen you're used to. We were very lucky to arrive at the top just as the sun was breaking over the valley and we had a clear view right over La Paz towards the higher mountain, Illimani and over Lake Titicaca to Puno in Peru and beyond. Climbing that mountain is another step in my life's journey of That's The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done, but right at that point all I could really think was "I'm so wiped. How the hell am I going to get off this thing?".

It's a gruelling downhill slog back through the snow to the bottom refuge and I do wonder if I've ever actually been that tired before in my life. On my return to La Paz I managed a mega-grande Whopper meal and about 13 hours sleep and I'm still eating like I've got tapeworm two days later.

So you find me still becalmed in La Paz. I've been to the doctor recommended by the mountain biking company, had my face x-rayed and it turns out I've certainly fractured my nose. I'm off to a specialist today, hopefully so they can do some panel beating and get my face back into shape so I can move on and do other things. Right now I'm doing one appointment a day until they decide what to do with me. I'm in a bit of a robust discussion with my travel insurance as to whether me riding a mountain bike down something labelled the World's Most Dangerous Road is covered in my policy, but so far I've spent a grand total of $25 on doctor's appointments and x-rays, so it may not even be worth claiming if it doesn't even reach my excess. I've been told one of the groups protesting over pay and hours is the doctors, and I'm starting to see why, if that's the price they extort out of the gringos, then who knows what a local doctor gets paid?