Holiday in Cambodia

Siem Reap :: Cambodia

Things have changed since the Dead Kennedys sung that.

Places: Sihanoukville & Siem Reap.

Coolest thing I did: The much cooler-than-Angkor-Wat temple Bayon, with it's 216 benevolent looking faces.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Thailand and Cambodia fought several border skirmishes over control of a temple in 2008. You know tourist dollars and temples are intertwined pretty heavily if you're willing to exchange live fire over one.

So after the cracking pace set in the two weeks of Myanmar it was time to get off the plane and directly onto the beach in Sihanoukville, named after the twice King of Cambodia. It's Cambodia's only well known beach resort and it's moved well beyond it's backpacker roots. We met a slightly deranged looking bloke from the Faroe Islands who had been living in Cambodia for a decade and told us even two years ago the main street wasn't paved. Well the beach is still a long white sand marvel, lapped by the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand, but the back of the main beach from the old backpacker haunt of Serendipity Beach down the length of Ochheuteal Beach is now lined with basically undifferentiated beach bars selling the same mix of Khymer & Western food and selling the same beer for the same price. There is another long beach past the headland called Otres which has claimed the backpacker crown, but even that is pretty much built end to end with combination bungalows and beach bars.

Having said all that, it's still a very nice beach, and you don't have to walk far to find a stretch that doesn't have jet skis or flying boats buzzing you every 5 minutes or so. What I was most unprepared for was just how many middle class Cambodians come down to the beach themselves, even if they do have the bizarre habit of going into the water wearing all their clothes. We saw dudes in dress shirts and jeans coming out and walking up the beach dripping wet. What I will say is they've taken to smartphone cameras as strongly as the rest of us, and you can't get more than a few metres up the beach without some girl standing fully clothed up to her knees in the water taking a selfie. It's nice they can do that, because this is a generation that was born towards the end of the civil war and didn't know the craziness of it all. In case you need reminding you'll be pretty regularly be confronted on the beach by amputees begging for change, usually the result of the thousands of landmines planted and then forgotten about by both sides of the 3 decade long civil war. You simply wouldn't know looking at the country and the people today how truly brutal this country was for the longest time.

The thing you do when you're in Sihanoukville and you don't want to spend all day on the beach is to get on a boat and go to some nearby barely inhabited islands and go snorkelling. The coral and undersea life isn't going to knock the islands of Thailand off the diving map any time soon but the water is warm and clear and you can go through a half hour in the water chasing small fish about the coral pretty easily. The bulk of the day was spent on an island beach, deserted except for the 4 or 5 boat loads of people on similar day trips to us. It was here that our New Years Eve started to go wrong. Mark's ankle didn't survive the end of a beach volley ball game and by the time we got back to the mainland it was the size of a grapefruit. This meant our first brush with the local medical system for the trip.

The international clinic of choice for our Tuk Tuk driver thankfully took credit cards, but only had one wheelchair so Mark had to take it in turns with the girl from Brisbane who came in just before us with a knee stuffed up doing some sport that involved being towed behind a jetski I still don't fully understand the logistics of. Still $54 later Mark had two x-rays of his foot, pain killers, anti-inflammatories and prescription cream that smelled suspiciously like Dencorub. Of course we also found Mark really couldn't walk more than a few metres at a time before toppling over so instead of a big night in the beach bars we drank as much free beer jugs of beer as they'd give us a the function at our hotel and then moved onto duty free vodka as midnight approached. Around midnight the whole place sounds like a bad day in Baghdad circa 2003 with low altitude fireworks that at times sound like ordinance going off. Which, given the recent history of the county might actually be live rounds - lord knows how much live ammo they've still got left lying around the place. Anyway,  I know it was a big night for some as I was down the beach about midday the next day and one of the bars was still full of completely mong-ed out looking kids stretching the very last of what could only be some pretty heavy chemicals. By the time I passed by again about 2pm it was all over, even for them.

Due to my continuing attempts to nurse my belly back to some kind of health my own drinking abilities were not at their best. Despite coming closer to full meals almost as soon as we left Burma my first effort to get more than 4 beers down in one sitting resulted in first me being almost instantly drunk, but then queasy and sick in the street. Really, it was like being 16 again. Between my stomach and Mark's ankle Sihanoukville didn't turn out quite as Rock and Roll as we had anticipated.

So with Mark heading back to Australia and the joys of work I took a short flight to Siem Reap (translated: Defeat of Thailand), the town that owes it's entire existence to the tourist industry built up around having people visit Angkor Wat. If Sihanoukville had seemed normal when compared to Burma then Siem Reap is the on-the-map tourist town that jolted my system back into some kind of recognition. A mix of high quality Khmer food (which is strangely like Thai food but somehow not in a couple of crucial but indefinable ways) and good Western food had got me feeling quite human again and I've felt better than I have all trip. I'm back on full meals, beer and I'm not so tethered to the bathroom as has been recently true.

All that is good, because it allowed me to ditch any idea of getting chauffeured around in a Tuk Tuk or minibus all day, which would have been hell on my ego and allowed me to rent a bike from the guest house for $2 a day and ride around the temples of Angkor myself. The company that puts out the bikes (called White Bicycles) maintains them for local charities so the guest houses just provide space for the bike racks and pass the money on. Which is what I kept telling myself as I rode around on them all day, because the bikes can only be described as character building. Imagine a single speed bike with a self-correcting chain that comes off any time you don't pedal and a seat so hard you feel like orientation week in Long Bay Gaol and you start to get the idea. While the temples themselves are fairly spread out (well at least when compared to Bagan in Myanmar) the whole thing is built on a pancake flat plain so the lack of gears don't really kill you. It's more the traffic.

During the day there are tourists on pushbikes, driving or being driven on mopeds or motorbikes, tuk-tuks, cars, 4WDs, vans, jeeps, minibuses and full blown tour buses all sharing the same narrow, often poorly maintained roads. Which would be fine, except everyone drives and parks like a total dick. There's nothing to make your life flash before your eyes like a moped being overtaken by a van, being overtaken by a bus all barrelling towards you on a road that's half a lane each direction at best. Then you'll find just at the point you pass them some arsehole has parked his 4WD with the hazard lights on 3/4 in the road. You have to be serene and accepting, the alternative would be complete mental breakdown.

Luckily, the sights you came to see are worth it. Angkor Wat is only the biggest of the temples built on the plain during the Angkor empire, which dated from around the end of the Vikings until the Crusades and at the time were top dogs in South East Asia. Like Bagan, with which they overlap somewhat they were in the transition from the Hindu influence brought from Javanese influences to full blown Buddhism and like Bagan they too went a bit temple mad. While Angkor Wat is the single largest religious structure in the world, I found the city sized Angkor Thom far more impressive. Guarded by huge stone gates watched over by giant giant heads with a face on each side and surrounded by a moat there's a whole bunch of restored temples and stacks of assorted temple bits to look at inside. My favourite was the Bayon, which has 216 faces watching out from towers and stupas in every direction, all of which were described as benevolent by the Lonely Planet but I found more smug, or perhaps over confident. Like with all archaeology, most of what's told about Angkor veers pretty quickly into applied fiction writing but the consensus seems to be the faces all belong to the Angkor King that commissioned the temple. That could hardly be reassuring if you were a peasant working the fields nearby, having the hundreds of faces of the King staring "benevolently" down at you while you work. I suppose you'd hold off coveting your neighbour's wife or livestock, just in case the King could see you, which might have been an early version of the NSA.

It's interesting to ride around all day and realise that these Buddhists thought pretty big about building their religious monuments, when you consider most of this was being put up at a time that the big Gothic cathedrals of Europe were going up. You could quite comfortably fit Chartres Cathedral inside the gatehouse of Angkor Wat. Probably throw in Notre Dame too for the hell of it, and those absolutely dwarfed any building in Europe at the time.

The sandstone hasn't all survived the 1000 years intact as you would expect, but the carvings are being restored in places which brings up Ta Prohm. Now I've never actually seen Tomb Raider, and that was shown to be a bit of a problem for the Cambodians who point out at every turn which part of the temple was in which part of the movie and it becomes obvious you have no idea what they are talking about. I didn't even know Daniel Craig was one of the baddies in it, long before he became James Bond. These trips are always quite educational for the strangest reasons.

Ta Prohm, in start contrast to Angkor Wat, which has apparently been in constant use since it was built, has been reclaimed by the jungle, giving you all those cool photos of ancient temples with trees growing out of the top of them. You would like it to stay that way forever, however due to it's fame as being the only temple in a Hollywood movie, Ta Prohm is simply being loved to death and for safety reasons alone it's become a good idea to start propping up the crumbling walls and restoring some kind of structural soundness to the whole thing. When half of Russia and China descend on it in one morning, you can see why. There seems to be no limit to how many people are let onsite and with serious bottlenecks on any spot that is identifiable as somewhere Angelina Jolie stood while everyone has their picture taken. I'm not sure if the Russian women were all pouting in tribute, or if that's just how they normally pose when they have their picture taken.

So after two days of riding around temples it's time for me and bike #5 to part ways. We had our moments where I didn't think we'd make it, but I saw all the main temples in the end, and it allowed me to strut around them feeling vastly superior to anyone who showed up in a minivan. That alone was worth it. It's an early bus tomorrow back to Phnom Penh, an advertised six hours but from what I've seen so far some pointless milling around and then picking up people at the side of the road for no apparent reason will probably pad that out a fair bit.

Shan state of mind

Nyaungshwe :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Nyuangshwe (Lake Inle).

Coolest thing I did: Spend Christmas Day trekking through the hills on the way up to Lake Inle.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Kayan Lahwi ethnic women wear brass coils around their necks that cause their necks to appear really long, but apparently it's just a visual trick.

The reason you go to Kalaw in the first place is to replace the last couple of hours on the bus to get to Lake Inle with two days of walking to do the same thing. They call it a trek but it's pretty easy going - mostly you're walking on roads or well defined paths used by the local farmers. You see modern day trial types going about their work, growing stuff and living in woven bamboo huts and trying hard not to have their oxen ram you as you wander past. The first day is mostly rural scenes, which would be a bit of a letdown on their own,  but the valleys you pass through are surrounded by some picturesque (but in no way dramatic) mountains and cliffs. This first day was also Christmas Day so there was some joviality about the shed where they park the various groups of walkers overnight, well at least up until the 9pm curfew where everyone gets told to shut up shop and go to bed. Myanmar certain lives up to it’s reputation of non-existent nightlife at every turn. Tourists amusing each other with beer until the locals make them go to bed probably describes the whole thing. We had two young guides with us, Nye Nye who was kind of the responsible adult and her sidekick, whose name I forgot but that was probably because he had too many Christmas beers and ended up not being able to leave with our group and coming with the very last group a couple of hours later.

Nye Nye was an interesting young woman with passable but highly confusing English. I get the feeling she was much better at speaking English than listening to it, because you could ask her any question but the chances are you would get a long, but completely unrelated answer. I thought the point where here answer to the question of whether there were fish in the lake veering off into a barely understandable thesis on the future use of hydroelectricity in the area was one of her better efforts.

The last day starts in the morning fog but it doesn't take long to climb out of the valley above it into the sun and get a distant glimpse of Lake Inle. Despite it again being fairly flat and easy going the lack of good, solid meals due to the state of my stomach made it really push me and I was shattered by the time we got down to the shores for lunch. That made it nice to spend a couple of hours then running along the canals through towns on stilts that line them to make our way into Lake Inle proper. It is as stunning as you were led to believe and there are fishermen with nets and conical hats who have escaped a postcard right there waiting for you. That and a flotilla of other long-tailed boats ferrying tourists about to take pictures of things. Being the other major draw after Bagan you expect everyone who comes to one to also see the other, so it’s nice to have had a couple of quieter days to prepare by walking up.

My stomach took a particular turn for the worst during dinner on that first night in Nyuangshwe and I went back to the hotel room to recover. Sounds like I missed as big a night as it gets in Burma because Mark had apparently met the Dutch girls, a Swiss guy from our trek and this English couple somewhere and started heavily drinking with them. I know this because he comes back at about 10pm (which is when the last bar closed and they had to leave) in order to exchange antibiotics he'd been given by the English guy (an off duty Army medic) for the two half bottles of duty free we had left and then was off again until apparently they'd been angrily been ejected from the Dutch girls' hotel about midnight by the other guests. I was given 4 250mg tablets of two different substances with names ending in -cin and told that if the first two didn't fix it in 24 hours then I was to consider the other two as the nuclear option. It never came to that for me but as Mark's stomach also went wrong the day after he thought he'd give them a go, and his description of his stomach about an hour later was "dead" as in completely lacking feeling or even numbness.

My theory on why the nightlife will never take off in Myanmar under current conditions is the fact it's so expensive to keep places open after dark due to the completely unreliable electricity grid. Whether you're in downtown Yangon or rural Shan State if you have a business that caters to tourists you have your own generator and there has to be a point of diminishing returns on keeping your place open if the grid has gone out and you're customer's beer consumption is not keeping up with the price of diesel. One of the stranger things about the big cities like Yangon and Manadalay is simply how completely used to not having power at night everyone is.

So Lake Inle was as close as we (and most tourists) got to the ethnic enclaves that the central government in has been trying to keep in line since independence from the British over half a century ago. Like most British post-colonial nations the borders of Burma did not fall at all along neat ethnic lines and the first act on gaining their independence was for the various warlords and factions to rebel against the new central government and start a decades long bloody insurgency. This has left groups who straddle both sides of the Thai border and people who have been living as stateless people for nearly 50 years inside Thailand itself. This wasn't helped by this being some of the more rugged and hard to reach parts of the country, however in the last decade or so the Myanmar government has come to terms of some autonomy with most groups in the eastern half of the country, however they are still touchy about tourists visiting so much of it is off limits.

This may also have something to do with the fact the security situation was not at all helped by the fact the uncontrolled ethic enclaves were for a lot of the 70s, 80s and 90s the largest opium producing area on earth, part of the infamous Golden Triangle with northern Thailand and Laos. During the heroin peak of the 1970s a half Chinese/Shan warlord called Khun Sa was widely considered to be producing most of the heroin being consumed in the western world. At the end of the Chinese civil war the nationalist KMT troops who didn't get the privilege of fleeing the mainland for Taiwan with their leadership retreated into northern Burma, Laos and Vietnam and set up camp with the hope of regrouping and retaking China from Mao's communists. They needed money so took control of the existing opium trade and it was to one of these KMT troops and a Shan woman that Khun Sa was born. During the Vietnam war the Shan warlords found a new market for highly refined heroin with the American GIs, who promptly took the habit back to the States with them and setup the pipelines required to smuggle large quantities of the drug into the US. As time went on the original KMT troops got old and never took China from the communists, but the ethnic warlords had a ready source of funds to help arm themselves against the Burmese army. However, much like the narco-insurgencies of Colombia or Central America the cause tended to get taken over by the criminal element who liked the almost unlimited funds that come with selling drugs by the metric ton more. 

So our first act upon arriving for a hour and a half stop over in Bangkok airport en route to Cambodia was to destroy a couple of Burger King meals after two weeks of studiously avoiding any food that looked too Burmese. I don't know if that helped or hurt our cause but I've possibly never enjoyed a bacon double cheese burger so much. 

I'm not entirely sure if I'd recommend Myanmar to everyone as a travel destination, despite it's highly friendly people and some unique sights that are not yet feeling the full forces of tourism. If you hadn't been to somewhere like Thailand or Malayasia first then I'd be far more likely to say spend some time there as Burma is hard work, mostly due to the lack of tourist infrastructure. The idea of getting off the beaten track is all well and good, but two weeks of if can be quite a grind if you're also sick much of the time. My guess is that Myanmar will develop completely differently to other recently open to backpacker nations in South East Asia based completely on the fact we met only a handful of tourists younger than us. The average tourist was in their 50s, German and in a tour group, and even the independent, backpacker types we met were generally South East Asia veterans in their late 30s or early 40s looking for something completely different. It's unlikely to ever really get the 20 somethings while there is no nightlife to speak of and the vast majority of the key sights are Buddha related. This may change as the beaches open up (this is mostly limited by the still ongoing insurgency in Rakhine state in the country's west) and there is more trekking or outdoor sports allowed. I suspect they won't be serving Mekong buckets while you float around in inner tubes here any time soon. 

Crocodile hat for Xmas

Kalaw :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Nyaung U (Bagan) & Kalaw.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the sun rise over the Bagan plain from the top of Shwesandaw Paya in yet another crack of dawn photography moment on this trip.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The British installed a whole town of Indians (from India) in the Burmese hills and the result is quite good Nepalese food.

Bagan is probably the site most visited in Myanmar and this is the best view of what the future holds for mass tourism in the country. For the first time I felt myself hassled by hawkers and handing over what seemed like obscene amounts of money for things in a country so poor. Of course, you can’t get away with that without having something special, and Bagan more than lives up to the hype. Around the time the Crusades were happening on the other side of the world the local king had a conversion from a Hindu to a Buddhist and he and his descendants celebrated by going on a 200 year, 4000 plus temple building bender on the plain of Bagan. The biggest and most impressive have, or are being restored, but there’s still lots of little ruins dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see.

We hired bikes and did a massive day of riding between temples over Bagan’s mercifully flat terrain. All the primo temples are within easy riding distance of one another, there’s plenty of places to stop and have a bite to eat or drink along the way so you can pace it out however you want. The only downside is having to wear shoes, which means constantly having to take your shoes and socks off every time you stop and go into a temple, because Buddhists aren’t down with shoes. By about the 18^th time you’ve done it for the day you’re kind of over it.

The end of the day was spent on one of the very few temples you can climb that isn’t on the main road, which involved trudging your bike through a fair bit of thick sand. However compared to the main viewing spot where they ram whole busses full of Korean tourists onto it’s pain-to-get-to factor keeps the numbers well down. We had a fair bit of time to wait so I amused myself by letting the little boys selling postcards and copies of Burma Days by George Orwell try their spiel on me. That soon bored them so I helped them with their Japanese, so they can sell Japanese people more postcards. They had a book with Burmese to English translation and the career list was somewhat baffling: I’m not sure how often they were going to need the English words for “Horse and Buggy outfitter”.

So bike is probably the second best way to get around and see Bagan, the best you have to wait until sunrise for. Having not done my research I didn’t realise it costed $350USD (cash only) to take a hot air balloon over Bagan at sunrise, and that there would be a multi-day waiting list. I guess that will have to wait. Instead a taxi came and got us at about 5am and we drove out to Shwesandaw Paya to watch the sun rise. Devoid of it’s 1000s of people at sunrise (we could see it at sunset from where we were and it looked like there were people hanging off it) it’s one of the more central locations so you get a 360 view of the temples trailing off in all directions. As the sky lights up the dark pyramids rise up out of the mist and by the time the sun breaks the sky the temples are all glowing a stunning deep orange against the background of the mist shrouded mountains. When the hot air balloons then take off and move in a loose pattern between them it’s one of the more amazing sunrises I’ve ever seen.

Our only other day trip was out to Mt Popa, which is a temple dedicated to nat, which are spirits who the Burmese have believed in longer than they have Buddha. The temple is perched on a tall rocky spire and is reached by climbing hundreds of stairs, all barefoot of course. Not such an issue, except this was the first place in Myanmar I saw large amounts of monkeys, who like to chew things up, spit them out and throw the remains on the steps you are trying to walk up. From the very top you can see out across the valley on all sides, and I have a very cool picture of a big male monkey staring out over the valley thinking “One day this will all be mine”, a-la Planet of the Apes.

The bus ride between Bagan and Kalaw on the edge of the Shan State is 8 hours that could only really happen in poor Asia. They start off well, everyone having a ticket and a numbered seat, but you haven’t even left town before the locals are being sold cheaper tickets to squat in the seats that are empty for part of the journey, or more likely to sit in the aisle on kiddie stools, usually carrying all their personal belongings with them. The combination of winding roads, people who can’t see out the window and people who don’t travel in cars that much and you have the perfect recipe for a busload of people looking nauseated and holding a plastic bag of their own vomit. At least we didn’t attempt to have that double as accommodation on the night version of the bus.

Kalaw feels like a completely different country. Being up in the hills the air is noticeably thinner and the Himalayan feel is only accentuated by the fact the British built a hill station here and imported a whole bunch of Nepalese, Indian Muslims and Sikhs to man it. Their descendants are still here, so the people definitely have a Subcontiental feel about them. It was also possible to have a treat and dip into some Nepalese cuisine, which was so noticeably oil free after the Burmese curries.

Our Christmas eve was spent drinking beers in a small cafe overlooking the market with a couple of Dutch girls we'd been bumping into with some regularity along the way. One of them had bought 5 stuffed animal hats for some reason so we got quite a few thumbs up from onlookers as they walked past us, me resplendent in my stuffed elephant hat. The little boy who's parents ran the cafe was taken by the one that looked like a crocodile, so as soon as he had it on and spent the next half an hour pretending to be a crocodile it sort of had to become his. One thing that is a constant joy about travel in Myanmar is that people are almost universally extremely nice and helpful and always on the verge of laughing at whatever you're doing at the time. Like most countries where tourism is about to hit in a big way you know that can't last, but it's nice to be there at that moment in time.

Chick Monks

Nyaung U:: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Mandalay & Nyaung U (Bagan).

Coolest thing I did: In another sunset related moment witnessed one of the most commonly photographed scenes in Burma at U Bein's teak bridge.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Despite writing a book called The Road to Mandalay George Orwell never actually went there, though he was a colonial copper in Burma back in the 20s.

Early morning after the night bus found us in exotic Mandalay. Or rather, it might have if Mandalay seemed at all exotic. It’s most obvious feature is the giant fort the last King lived in, before the British showed up, razed its contents to the ground and replaced the middle with a parade ground. The walls and moat still remain, and today the middle of it is mostly made up for off-limits army barracks for the modern day Army of Myanmar. Except for the very middle bit, which the military junta decided to have reconstructed as a mock-up of the palace just before the British destroyed it. I'm usually more positive about this stuff, but it takes a good 20 odd minutes to walk to (assuming you haven’t already spent over an hour circling the thing looking for a gate foreigners are actually allowed to enter) and it’s not at all worth it.

As a result of the remains of this fort the rest of Mandalay is a strikingly painful place to get anywhere in. Most restaurants, shops, mechanics or whatever open out directly onto the street and most of them do things like unload all their stock blocking half the street and then drive off. The main roads are often 2 or 3 lanes in each direction so crossing is nerve-wracking to say the least, and as everyone drives everywhere because it is so not pedestrian friendly you also feel like you've just smoked 2 or 3 cigarettes by the corner. Cabs are cheap so after an afternoon we learned to not waste any more time that way.

To be fair, like much of poor Asia the very sight of rich white people voluntarily walking along the side of the road baffles the local mind. If you watch them, everyone here gets on the transportation ladder as soon as they can afford it – bicycle, moped, motorbike, truck with a tractor motor bolted to the front, car and so on. Only the absolute poorest people in the cities walk anywhere, and they’re usually begging and carrying all their belongings with them. What city council wastes money on footpaths as a public amenity when it’s a status symbol to not use them? 

So as far as tourist stuff goes, you aren't’t really supposed to stay in Mandalay, but rather go just outside it where there are a few rare gems. There seems to be a basic show-me-what-I’m-supposed-to-see trip every taxi driver who speaks any English will offer you. The bloke who picked us up from the bus station seemed alright, but he couldn't go so his less well spoken but highly amusing brother did it instead.

This is probably the first of two main experiences in Myanmar that will see you completely Buddha-ed out. During the day you see the pagoda encrusted hills of Sagaing, ruins of pagodas on the island of Inwa and countless other stops to see religious stuff. The stranger ones included the morning zoo that is watching 1000 monks at a monastery line up and eat breakfast together. While they were getting into to lines there was literally tourists coming right up to their faces with massive camera lenses and taking a countless photos. It was probably the first time I've thought tourism in Myanmar had reached too far at any point. On the plus side I also found out monks drink Shark energy drink for breakfast, the local knock-off of Red Bull. Even the novices who look about 6 years old. Must make focusing on memorising the scriptures later interesting.

One of the more interesting things about Burma in general is monks are simply part of the social fabric in a way they don't seem to be in other Buddhist countries. There are simply monks everywhere, sitting down to a meal, catching the commuter bus, taking photos on their camera phones of the same stuff you are. The distinctive, one garmet for all weather, purple robes are sprinkled into every crowd to the point you stop noticing them. There's also girl monks, who to my great disappointment are not referred to as chick monks, because you could totally shorten that to chipmunks. They wear pink, probably because when the monks are young and have their heads shaved it's hard to tell chick monks and dude monks apart.

I also liked an early stop to Mahamuni Paya still inside the city, where there’s a giant Buddha who the people just decided to honour by painting it’s reachable bits with gold leaf. There’s now about 6 inches thick of real gold all around the bottom now. While you do wonder how people get enough money in such a poor country to wack a bit more onto Buddha’s kneecap it is an impressive site. It’s probably a sacrilege to consider melting it down and using the money to pay for some roads or schools or something.

The end of the day involves making the trek across the world's longest teak footbridge in order to take pictures of people walking across it at sunset. In the best pictures those people would be peasants, monks and people on bicycles, but as this is one of the more famous sites of Burma what you really get is a crowd from the Chinese tour buses and lots of people with tripods and expensive cameras. What I found most interesting was most of them were standing on the bridge, making it had to take a picture of the bridge at sunset, but that kind of meant there wasn't many people standing in someone's cow paddock below the bridge with me getting better pictures.

There are fields either side of the bridge where guys in conical hats are ploughing nice neat rows in the rich soil and then going right ahead and flattening it out and doing it again. There were suspiciously few crops being planted, so I suspect they just get paid by the tourist boards to look rustic and keep pointlessly driving their bullocks back and forth all day. Who says repressive military regimes don't have an eye for a good postcard photo?

The next day was spent from sunrise to sunset taking the fast boat down the Irrawaddy River to Bagan. Again, I had visions in my head of sailing down through the jungle with tigers peaking out at us, but in reality what you get is the ultra wide, flat banks on both sides and the occasional glimpse of river life by those who still live on and by it. My guess at the reason on why this looks nothing like the Mandalay Bay casino in Vegas told me it was going to had a lot to do with the occasional barge coming past packed with giant logs. I'm not sure if they were teak (one of the reason the British came in the first place) and I'm not sure if the Irrawaddy ever was surrounded by forest or jungle but there certainly isn't any now. The afternoon stretched on and the beers started coming out and though I was a bit soft due to fairly severe food poisoning stalking me the whole time in Mandalay it was a much more enjoyable way to do it than sitting on a bus. 

A word on the Burmese food, because I ended up eating very little of it, due to the fact it was not long after arriving in Mandalay I ended up with some pretty strict food poisoning, including vomit inducing nausea whenever I smelt the local food. From what I had there seems to be one answer for any culinary decision to be made: more oil. The curries are quite tasty despite the oil, and we also had a pretty damn good Biryani at one point but in alltruth I had nearly nothing to do with Burmese food the whole time I was there, so my opinion of it is always going to be somewhat tainted by those bad experiences. 

So onto Bagan.

Golden Era

Mandalay :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Bangkok, Yangon & Mandalay.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the sun go down over the giant gold stupas of Shwedagon Paya.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The South East Asia (SEA) games happened to be on during our stay in Myanmar. I didn't even know there was such a thing. When Myanmar ended up in a 1 all tie with Thailand in the soccer the whole country had something to be universally happy about.

When you talk about the classic backpacker destinations around the world my generation would always have considered South East Asia to be the original and the best. Each and every place on the Banana Pancake Trail has its own backpacker slum full of cheap hostels and restaurants, but to get to any of them you pretty much have to go via Bangkok, and that made Khao San Road the quintessential example. That was then. I’ve been through the new Bangkok Airport probably half a dozen times since it was built in 2006 but I’ve not been into the city itself since 1998 and to say there’s been development would be a fairly epic understatement. I never went to the old Khao San Road, the tour I was on up to Chang Mai and around put me up in the Shangri-la (the joys of travel to a country in the midst of a currency collapse) and I had no need of it really. But to see it now, with it’s order, it’s paved roads and it’s complete lack of people who have taken too much in (in both sights and substances) wandering about made me think that scene has left.

Due to spending very little time here, really just to meet up with Mark before moving on to Burma (sorry Myanmar) we ended up staying at the very end of the airport train near the shopping district of Siam Square and I have to say this is not Bangkok as I remember it. You can walk for hours without reaching ground level, streets have 4 lanes in both directions and have to be crossed by overhead walkways and there are department stores and multi-level markets that go on forever. My first thought was simply who in this city has the money to buy all this stuff? I don’t think I ever saw a fat Thai person before now but I’m wondering if the fact you can now afford $3 ice mochaccino lattes from Starbucks can’t help explain it. In most Asian countries you visited it was always a small wealthy elite and then the rest of highly poor people, and that’s pretty much everyone you’d come in contact with. You were seen as this otherworldly source of external money so everyone wanted to know you. These days, whether it’s KL or Bangkok there’s a whole section of society that is pretty happy to ignore you, because they don’t see the need to pander to Westerners for their money – they do pretty well otherwise. Perhaps that’s progress.

My trip to Bangkok was fairly uneventful. For the last few weeks the news has been full of crowds of people besieging the Prime Minister’s house, complete with so much tear gas the streets of Bangkok are now shown as stock footage of riots being supressed by tear gas. Right up until I saw a picture of two elderly tourists walking past riot police in the Sydney Morning Herald under an article entitled “Should I got to Thailand for Christmas” I was even a little concerned. Turns out despite taking at taxi not 500m down the road from one of the main protest sites I didn’t see a single Police baton charge. The guys at work that gave me that big ziplock bag to put over my head to protect myself will be disappointed.

Mark’s trip, however was a little bit more eventful. On the ride out from the Airport at 1am the taxi driver kept falling asleep and drifting off onto the hard shoulder of the freeway so Mark made him get out and swap seats, so Mark could drive. He then woke the bloke up at random intervals to make sure they were still going the right way. Drove own Bangkok taxi on bucket list? Check.

While Burma was once a wholly-owned subsidiary of the British Empire it’s only in the old capital of Yangon (which the Brits called Rangoon) that shows the signs of it. The town’s main square is overlooked by both it’s democracy monument and the almost incongruous golden Sule Paya and is surrounded by old colonial buildings in various states of decay. What was most striking though is in a town where street paving with mismatched concrete is a lost art-form the lawn on the square is immaculate. It is still the haunt of the black market currency traders who were once the only way for tourists to get local currency but I suspect their numbers have been thinned by the arrival of ATMs that take Visa and Mastercard. I’d say it’s only a Buddhist acceptance of things is all that’s stopping the old illegal money changers from teaming up at night and pulling ATMs out of the wall for messing with their livelihood.

The highlight of Yangon is to go up to the Shwedagon Pagoda, though my attempts to pronounce that to the taxi driver started with confusion and then turned into amusement on his part. I’m not sure what the link is between Buddhism and gold is, but you certainly see a lot of it around the various temples and pagodas in Myanmar, but nothing like on the scale of Shwedagon. It’s in the order of 30m high and completely covered in beaten gold leaf. Despite it being the most popular attraction in the city and despite sunset being the best time to be there it’s still surprisingly peaceful to sit up there and what it turn from gold to orange as the light changes while purple robed monks climb up and clean it for the day. I guess it’s because even though Buddhism seems to have zero issue with combining commerce and religion in the same site they've managed to keep the hawkers out of the bits where actual worshipping goes on. What we couldn't get our head around is now a lot of the gold or bronze statues of Buddha show how enlightened they are by a glowing halo of multi coloured LEDs flashing around their head in sequence. I guess if there were various kinds of Buddha’s (Lying on Side Buddha, Cross Legged Serene Buddha) then this could only be Disco Buddha. 

We took a ferry over the Yangon river to see a bit of village life, not really sure what to expect. That turned out to involve paying a couple of trishaw (a bike with a sidecart) drivers to take us around for a few hours, a shrunken body of an abbot with a pretty solid looking gold death mask, a trip to the village grave site where a fresh hole had just been dug and then sitting out in a field in a makeshift bar drinking palm juice, eating dried fish and smoking something that looked like a rolled palm leaf filled with cardboard. The fact that we tried all these things caused great amusement to all the locals there showed it’s still novel enough and the trishaw driver that spoke good English was happy enough to discuss everything and anything. Unlike say Cuba, or China, no-one in Myanmar seemed at all worried about telling us their opinions on politics or anything else, and one of the highlights of the country is definitely how friendly the people are. This was probably the example where we spent the most time in one place talking. You also get a feel for it when you see the market stalls selling pictures of the 4 deities, Buddha, Jesus (due to a very enthusiastic missionary movement in the 1800s a surprisingly large number of Burmese are Baptists), Aung San Suu Kyi & Winnie the Pooh.

Apparently the delta region across the river from Yangon is about to undergo serious development in the wake of the cyclone a few years back, with the ferry being replaced by a bridge built by one of the South Korean conglomerates.  It won’t been too long after that before tour buses come over to replicas of these villages to see the local handicrafts and traditional dress no-one was worn for 100 years. So these things go. 

My people

Santiago :: Chile

So after a little over 6 months it's time to leave Sudamerica and rejoin The Real World.

Places: Santiago.

Coolest thing I did: Watched Chile beat Bolivia 2-0 in a qualifying game from the next World Cup. Not that I care that much but a bar full of people that happy can't help but make you forget the woes of the world.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: When you watch basketball in Spanish a 3-pointer is called a triple (trip-leh). The NBA playoffs are on TV here.

In one of these entries a while back in speculated that South America might have become my favourite part of the world to travel in and having had time to sit at the feet of a giant statue of the Virgin Mary and stare out oer Santiago de Chile and reflect I have to say that's no longer in doubt. Even though this is a continent where all the countries share a fairly common history & the people speak only two different main languages (I'm not arguing with any more know-it-all Americans about whether Quechua is a main language...) the countries and their people are so varied even the famously fragmented Europe seems a bit homogeneous in comparison. From the white sands of Colombia's Caribbean beaches to the icy winds of the Beagle Channel there have been so many highlights it's hard to even start working out what the best were. I know most of you will ask me what the highlight was, so don't been too offended when I give the standard answer "different places were the best for different reasons". It's so much easier here - you just always say the place you're in right at that moment is the best place and how much the people were dicks in any country bordering the one you're in. Actually, maybe it is like Europe...

So as promised I've spent my last weekend on this continent doing pretty much nothing touristy and instead wandering around, sitting in cafes/bars drinking coffee/beer and thinking about the trip, and trying hard not to think about the task of getting another job and house to live in. It was probably better I ended up somewhere familiar to decompress a bit, but I had forgotten Santiago was the first city I came to on this trip and I now know it feels like a much blander little sibling of Buenos Aires (though it would be madness to say that out loud here). What I've decided is that if I'm really honest about it the thing that has made this trip has been the wonderful bunch of strangers I've met and befriended over the last 6 months, most of whom I'll lose contact with because of my continuing refusal to join Facebook. You'll see.

From James of Perth, who I met on the first day (as he was on my flight and staying in the same first hostel), to Caryn (Americans spell Karen funny I guess) and the three Canadians who I spent my last days in the desert with I've met so many people in between to share different experiences and sections of the trip. Each and every one of these temporary allies and friends are true backpacker scum to the fullest, and despite cheap flights, ever improving luggage with wheels and the corporate franchising of hostels it warms my heart to see people still spending their younger years slinging a pair of backpacks over their shoulders and haggling with poor people over 15 cents worth of taxi ride. Sometime back in the 90s someone noticed the rise of ultra cheap, large scale DIY travel and coined the term Lonely Planet Generation, and even though hostelworld.com and friends are taking away some of The Bible's thunder the label still feels right. The same spirit that led people away from package holidays and resorts in the first place is not only still alive, but is honestly getting stronger.

Looking back now I admit one of my biggest worries coming on this trip was the fact I'd have to go back to dorms and the like in the most expensive countries and the kids would shun me due to the fact I'm still backpacking the world with an age that starts with a '3'. With hindsight this was silly. While the bulk of the budget travellers are still clueless 21 year olds (ah, those were the days...) there are enough of the rest of us, those that resisted the standard life path of marriage, crippling debt & kids long enough to keep doing this a little while longer. You tend to find each other, and the conversations are almost always far more interesting. I love the drop-outs, the early divorcees, those on a 'career break', the honeymooners who thought a month in dorms was a better use of money than a weekend in a suite, the eternal bachelors, the 30 something old-maids who got sick of listening to their friends talk about their babies' poo, the miners on their 4 weeks off, the North Americans brave enough to eschew a career, I love them all. Most people who don't quite make it into the standard life path seem to sit at home and get depressed about it, it's the ones out here that think "the hell with that" and instead decide to go and spend some time and money on having some of the best experiences of their lives. That's what this is all about.

Don't get me wrong, some of the people I admire most in the world have stable careers, loving spouses or significant others, wonderful kids & mortgages with so many zeroes I gasp so hard I let out a little bit of wee but that's not all where I am in my own life so it's not always easy to relate.

I know there are people out there, usually the ones that volunteered, did a home-stay or spent a month in one place learning Spanish who will tell you the highlight of their trip was "getting to know the locals". While many might call me cynical (gasp! I hear...) I kind of think that's bollocks. While you can kind of meet and greet with the locals, and it's always nice to get to know them a little better if you keep talking to the same ones for a longer period of time, at the end of the day you aren't really going to understand them, and not just because you're native language probably isn't Spanish or Portuguese. Nearly everyone you meet out here is going to be poorer than you, have had a much harder life and probably holds a little bit of resentment towards your luck of being born in the West, even if they don't show it. The people in many of the countries here are warm and friendly, but that happens with the novelty of people coming from other parts of the world to visit.

However, that doesn't matter all that much because you'll be spending most of your time talking to other tourists or backpackers (I refuse to use the term "traveller" any more as I've gotten sick of the self importance of people who apply it to themselves) and quite often sharing an experience that is new for both or all of you. The amount of times I've heard someone blather on about how they hate spending all their time with other travellers (with no obvious sense of irony) and just thought "bullshit". We stay in hostels full of Westerners, talk in our own language (or English) and have that same discussion about where everyone is going and where they've been that everyone claims to hate because we're all on the other side of the world and we all need a bit of familiarity when everything around you is so strange. I've stopped thinking that's something to be avoided and started thinking that's something to be embraced. While you should take any opportunity to try and converse with someone who lives in the country (and even befriend them) with both hands the reality is the kinds of people you find who have the courage to leave their own country and go somewhere else with no planning and very little money are the kinds of people you should be happy to spend some time with. They can't help but be a little bit interesting, even if they all speak English.

Like all of them though, you also know you aren't like the hippies who drove Kombi vans from Germany to Afghanistan in the 60s and seriously thought they were dropping out of square society forever. We know we're all going to have to go back to The Real World and do things like earn money, quite often to fund the next bout of travel (it's a bit like crack, really, only you're less likely to lose all your teeth). You know that when you get back most people will ask about your trip and you generally only have like 3 mins to talk to them about 6 months and then it's back to what they're been doing. However you do meet the other backpacker tragics out there in The Real World too, you tend to smell it on them. Well that and they also tend to be the people who wear North Face fleeces into the office.

So tomorrow I'm back on a plane - 14 and a bit hours in one sitting due to the fact Qantas have added their own planes to the route since I got here and don't stop in New Zealand on the way. Part of me is already planning to come back and fill in some of the gaps of places I managed to not see here this time. Why is it that travel can only beget more travel?

(as a side note for some reason it really annoys me that the spell checker in Google Chrome doesn't think "beget" is a word...)

Blank Canvas

Calama :: Chile

If Salvador Dali’s mind was a place, this would be it.

Places: Uyuni, Salar de Uyuni, Southwest Loop, San Pedro de Atacama & Calama.

Coolest thing I did: Took lots of silly and inappropriate photos on the salt flats as you can only really do on a surface where perspective is non-existent.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Andean people had their own set of constellations (aside from the Greek Zodiac) which were based on the dark spaces between the stars rather than on the stars themselves. The celestial llama does actually look a bit like a llama.

The country between Potosi and Uyuni in Bolivia starts to resemble Northern Argentina very quickly once you’ve left town, reminding you just how close the borders of all 4 countries (along with Chile and Peru) are together. At the still torn up end of the rapidly improving road (the Lonely Planet predicted 6 hours but due to brand new asphalt the trip is now down to 4 and a half hours and shrinking) lies the frontier town of Uyuni, the last stop inside Bolivia before Chile and a place totally geared up for one thing – to allow tourists to go and look at the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s biggest salt flats (or as I saw it spelled in La Paz, salt flasts). It’s wide streets betray an optimistic future, while the roughly built houses give a closer picture of reality. The very new hotel we stayed in was obviously an owner-architect job, with staircases and walkways set up in such a way to require you to go down stairs and across a void before going up a level, reminding me a lot of a Escher painting.

The way to get to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile from Uyuni is to get on a 4WD tour for 3 days that takes you over the salt flat and then out into the desert on the way down to the border. Along the way you’ll see seven coloured mountains, desert, geyser fields, red lakes, green lakes and lots of bright pink flamingos, and spend some time in some very natural looking hot springs. It’s the crazy clash of unnatural colours that leads people to constantly describe everything as “surreal”, even though it really does lack the melting clocks and incongruous fish that you need to make something truly surreal. So I’m going to do my best to make no more Salvador Dali allusions for the rest of this entry.

The salt flats start about half an hour outside Uyuni and despite all that’s been written about them and no matter how many pictures you see of them, nothing really prepares you for just how out of wack your perception of distance and perspective goes when you’re faced with so much white all the way to the horizon. It fools camera autofocus pretty well, so you get time to spend ages lining people up to make it look like they are eating a tiny 4WD, holding the next person on their palm or (as the group I was with got creative in a toilet humour kind of way) tiny people being farted out of someone’s bare arse or being wee-ed on by a giant. The photo I liked best was the Matrix style kung fu kick the two girls in our jeep did, which managed to make it look like they were kicking each other in the face even though they were metres apart.

We stopped for lunch at the hotel made out of salt, which is probably really bad for the area but also highly cool and took our first set of photos on ground that had been tracked over by 4WDs and Jeeps almost constantly, so it was good to get away from there and out into the more remote bit of the salar, where the ground is crystallised into almost perfectly regular hexagons in all directions, some natural consequence of how salt water solidifies played out on a massive scale. With the sun low on the horizon you get a reddish hue on everything and the salt crystals sparkle in the light, giving in an almost computer-rendered un-realness. You drive towards the mountains in the distance but it seems to take an endless amount of time for them to get any closer, because you have no foreground to judge distance with.

During these tours you can expect to be really cold most of the time, with the days being short and the desert night being brutal. The accommodation is really basic so I probably spent the nights sleeping in more clothes than I have anywhere else on this trip. You can also expect to be routinely Bolivia-ed (much like being Argentina-ed, but the Bolivians seem to take an unnatural pride in just how thoroughly and unexpectedly they can screw a bit more money out of you), like when we were slugged with a $25 park entry fee we weren’t warned about. Fine, except when you’re expecting to be in Chile the next day you don’t always carry a large amount of Bolivianos with you. It’s not like you can’t afford it, but why there’s always surprise hidden costs when things are so cheap blows the mind. We were Bolivia-ed for a 15 Boliviano exit fee from the country (about $2) which seemed to just go into the border guards pockets, and because the woman at the tour office had taken $10 off us for a transfer into Chile that everyone seemed to have forgotten about we almost had to pay for that twice. Luckily we made the driver of our 4WD call Uyuni, confirm again we’d payed and then front the money out of his own pocket with the hope of getting the money back from the tour company on the way back. Bolivia is full of cool stuff to see but dealing with the Bolivians tends to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

This is the crazy thing about the country. You could travel the whole thing by only dealing with gringos, as there is almost a parallel tourist infrastructure overlayed over the top of the country which is run by ex-pats. These tour companies, transport lines and hostels tell you all the costs up front, provide English speakers to guide you and most importantly are highly reliable. Nearly every one of these companies has a Bolivian run equivalent (or in many cases imitator) where you can expect to be thoroughly Bolivia-ed at some point in your dealings with them.  You may want to support local business, but that is almost certainly going to have your tour cancel without telling you or have you sailing down the World’s Most Dangerous Road on a bike with suspect breaks. Read into this what you will.

I had originally decided not to do the North of Chile at any point on this trip but I was glad to pass by the perfect snow covered volcano cone that marks the border and find myself on a paved dual carriage way marked with readable road signs. It’s stark how big a change you’re confronted with by going from South America’s poorest country to its richest. It’s a border crossing the Bolivians think shouldn’t exist, with the Atacama being one of the prizes the Chilean’s won off Bolivia in the 1800s War of the Pacific, turning Bolivia into a land-locked basket case (though to be fair, Bolivia would still have it if they didn’t suck so much at wars) and when they region stopped making Chileans rich from nitrate mining and went on to making them rich from copper mining that only rubbed salt into the wounds. I don’t like making generalisations about a whole people, but mentioning Chile to Bolivians tends to turn them into surly, angry arseholes. They still seem to blame Chile for their poverty to a certain degree.

San Pedro de Atacama is the first town of consequence over the border and despite there being no paved roads you can tell almost immediately you’re no longer in Bolivia. The menus are about 3 or 4 times expensive, hostel beds are maybe triple the price and the streets aren’t paved with garbage and wee. SPdA is a nice little town to spend a few days exploring the surrounding countryside, and despite not feeling the need to see salt flats, geysers or flamingos again, there was a still a lot of unique things Bolivia didn’t have to keep you interested.  We spent a day riding mountain bikes out to Laguna Cejar (thank God the desert is totally flat!), which is so dense with salt that you float effortlessly in it, much like the Dead Sea. What is different is there’s a two inch layer of freezing cold water that sits on top of the lake, under which is bath warm water that seems  to be the bit that makes you float. You can actually see the line where the thin water on top hits the thinner, saltier warmer water, but it also means that when you put your feet up for the classic floating effortlessly photo you have to do so with most of your body in freezing cold water. It was pleasant to be at neck height (so your shoulders were warm but your neck was cold) but you kind of had to psyche yourself up and count to 3 before you let your ankles float to the surface, you squealed like a little girl, your picture got taken and then you forced your feet back under to the warmth. It was a very different experience, floating in the water, looking out to perfectly flat land in all directions bumping up against the snow capped peaks of extinct volcanoes on all sides.

The other big day trip was out to the Moon Valley and the Mars Valley, both named because their landscape looks like you’d imagine the surface of those celestial bodies to look like. The Mars Valley is also blessed with a high black sand dune which attracts people wanting to do a bit of sand-boarding, but after two other goes at sand-boarding on this trip I didn’t really feel I needed to spend the money on a 3^rd. Instead it was nice to sit on a ridge out overlooking the Moon Valley and watch the mountain range that includes the volcanoes light up red once the sun had set.

The Atacama desert is blessed with some of the clearest sky in the world, and over 320 cloudless days a year, so it’s become ground zero for land based telescopes. Several agencies are building a radio-telescope array that is going to dwarf anything else on the planet and many others already exist. This also makes it a good place for us tourists to go out and gaze into a telescope at night. The company we went with had invested in building an observatory with a moving dome and 150x computer controlled telescope so we got to take it in turns gazing at mars, the moon and big clusters of stars, including the cluster of millions of stars that live inside the Southern Cross, but which are basically invisible to the naked eye. My favourite was looking at Saturn with it’s rings and three of it’s moons visible, which almost looked fake the view was so perfect. It was interesting to have the guide explain how to use the Southern Cross to local south no matter what time of night it was, something the Canadians and Americans in the group might not find interesting or useful but I kind of did.

The trip from Uyuni and all the stuff around SPdA marks the last full week of my 6 and a bit month tour of South America and I felt like I unintentionally saved some of the highlights for last. I’m writing this in a café in the Calama airport, about an hour’s drive from SPdA and I have a couple more hours to wait for an afternoon flight back to Santiago, where I began the trip all those months ago. I’ve already got myself booked into a nice hotel for 3 days and the end of the trip is more real by the fact I now know every bus, plane and bed I’m going to be in until I land in Sydney next Tuesday afternoon (it’s already Friday!). I plan on doing basically nothing touristy this time in Santiago, and instead trying to get myself into a head space where I can contemplate returning to The Real World. 

Open Veins

Potosi :: Bolivia

It's dark, and hot as hell.

Places: Sucre & Potosi.

Coolest thing I did: Went on one of those tours that are only possible in the 3rd world. There's very few places at home you could handle dynamite with no formal training at all.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: La Paz isn't actually Bolivia's capital. They just moved the government there and no-one seemed to care. Perhaps we could do the same to Canberra.

My arrival to Sucre was marked by marching. The taxi driver was forced to take a pretty circular route to get into the middle of town mostly due to the fact the streets around the main square were clogged by children dressed up in military costumes marching about. I later found out from the Dutch woman who made me my lunch that marching is not optional, the day I arrived it was the primary school kids, the next day the high schoolers and the day after all people in public employment. Failure to march gets you docked 3 days pay. There's nothing like patriotism that run so deep it has to be enforced by diktat.

The old colonial heart of Sucre doesn't feel at all like Bolivia - the streets are laid out in a regular grid, the streets are lined with old colonial houses or white washed churches and the parks are well kept. If it wasn't all the kids dressed as adorable little revolutionaries causing gridlock for the whole time I was there I would even go as far to say that stuff seems to work in a very un-Bolivian way in Sucre. If I was a local and I wanted my kids to have a good future I'd get them to take an apprenticeship in white washing churches - there seems to be no end of work. The thing about Sucre is there really isn't that much to do in town (you can go out of town and look at a quarry full of dinosaur prints if that tickles your taco), you mostly just mooch about the place, drink passable coffee and watch the world go by. I spent most of my only afternoon there in a cafe that looks out over the city drinking a lot of coffee and contemplating the world.

So why is Sucre such a nice, un-Bolivian city? The answer lay 3 hours to the west, in a town called Potosi, which for a very long time could have been considered the beating heart of the Spanish Empire. On the bus in from Sucre you can't help but notice a massive multicoloured mountain dwarfing the city, Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) which was the cause of so much joy to it's Spanish discoverers and so much misery to just about everyone who came after them. For nearly 400 years people have been mining Cerro Rico for silver, and that silver funded Western Europe's rise to total dominance over the rest of the world. One of it's immediate effects was to make Sucre and Potosi fairly independent from the rest of Spanish Peru, and laid the foundation for Bolivia to steak it's claim as a separate country to Peru after independence, even if Lima had ruled all of Bolivia back when the Spaniards were in charge.

That wealth built all the stately buildings in Sucre, after all it's not by chance that all the alter pieces, bloody crucified Jesuses and serene Marys are all decked out in silver in some way. Potosi however, the source of all the wealth didn't seem to develop along the same well planned lines as Sucre, with the streets all jumbled together and the occasional oversized church erected to increase the prestige of one of the new rich fashioned from silver money. However, in truth most people remained poor, with nearly all of the silver being  stamped into coins, packed into trunks and making the voyage over the sea to the Spanish treasury (well those that didn't get waylaid by British and Dutch pirates).

There are very few estimates of how much silver from Potosi made it's way to Spain, but due to Spain being a fading empire much of that silver eventually went to fund the Industrial Revolution in England, setting the stage for the British to rule a full quarter of the Earth's surface. What is sure, however, was the Spanish were true to form in wanting to get that silver out of Latin America at the lowest cost possible. They press ganged the native into mining for them, and when they turned out to be a bit rebellious to go down mines that collapsed with dangerous regularly they imported African slaves to do the work. That also turned out to be a tough strategy to work out, seeing as most of the Africans were used to hot weather and living at sea level and Potosi is freezing cold and at 4000+m above sea level. Working under extreme altitude sickness tended to mean the slaves died at a fairly unprofitable rate, meaning the Spanish had to resort to tactics like holding whole villages hostage to get the natives to work down the mines. There was no attempt to build local industry, like happened in British North America, this was pure extraction.

Just to show how rich the veins of silver in Potosi were, there are still large co-operatives of miners tunnelling there way into what has to be an anthill of tunnels trying to extract what's left. To go and visit one of these co-operative mines is really the only reason you'd find yourself in Potosi as a tourist. They deck you out in gum boots, waterproofs and a helmet with a head torch and then it's off to the miners' market to buy gifts for the miners you are going to encounter on the way down into the hill. What do you get the miner that has everything? Apparently coca leaves (as they don't eat during an 8 hour shift), juice and water (because it's up to 50 degrees down there), 96% ethanol (which they drink) and dynamite (wait, what?). Apparently anyone who wants it can go to the market and buy sticks of dynamite, complete with blasting caps. That probably explains some of the louder bangs I was hearing during the street protests in La Paz.

Metaphors about the mines being like Hell continue to this day, but going through the entry into the mines, all stained red with iron oxide you can see how highly superstitious people managed to consider themselves on their way into the underworld to steal all Satan's wealth. They call him Tio, and at the entry to the mine you find a cow's skull where you can make an offering to Tio, so he won't collapse the mine on you and let you take his silver. He seems to like coca leaves. It reminded me of the sacrifices to Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of narcotrafficantes in Mexico. I guess you make your own traditions sometimes.

The mining tours, it must be said, are only something that could exist somewhere like Bolivia. It's totally unsafe, with you having to press up against the wall when 2 ton rail carts come screaming around the corner with no breaks, you have to climb down steep shafts on your hands and knees, you have just a bandanna tied around your mouth to stop you from breathing in too much of the dust that kills miners of silicosis after about a 20 year working life and there are people working with jackhammers and dynamite somewhere around you, you're not just sure where. It would probably make the brain of the average OH&S officer in Australia split in half in a bloody mess.

You just can't really explain how hard the lives these guys live is down there. Breaking rocks with sledge hammers and carting out the debris in the hope that after processing it will contain minerals worth selling. The grade of silver left in Cerro Rico isn't really good enough for jewellery they told me, and most of it goes off to East Asia to be turned into bits of mobile phone. It's processed with such nice stuff as arsenic and cyanide (they stopped with mercury a little while ago now...) so working above ground in the processing plants probably won't do much more for your life expectancy than working underground. I'm not exactly sure I understood how these so-called co-operatives distribute the wealth they find, but it seems like some miners get paid better than the man driving a taxi or working in a kitchen and some don't. The conditions are not the kind of thing you'd find in the west - Australia's miners now seem to operate solely by chopping entire mountains down to get at the stuff inside, which is much safer for the workers, who are also famously well paid. They tell me they yield about 4 usable tonnes of stuff (not all of it silver) from the 90 tonnes of rock they pull out of the mountain every day, which probably explains why no big global mining company has had any reason to chop Cerro Rico down once and for all for what little goodies remain at it's core.

One thing that stands out here is El Presidente Evo Morales isn't exactly a popular figure, either with the conservatives of Sucre or the miners of Potosi. The former tended to do very well out of the old regimes that entrenched the gains of the small middle and upper classes while keeping the poor down, and the latter are quite pissed off that this man that looks just like them, who came to the mines and promised them the conditions would improve long before he was elected to high office. If you add the road blocks, the protests and so on you do wonder how long this guy can manage to stay in charge. What does strike me however, that unlike Cuba or the pre-revolutionary Middle East is that the Bolivians will proclaim quite loudly in the street they don't like him - that lack of fear does make you think that there is a chance he could be replaced by boring, democratic means.

So today is a bit quiet about town because it's one of the 3 days a year that the miners take their families up to the mines to see whole llamas sacrificed (apparently llama foetuses are more regular sacrifices, but a whole llama is a bit deal) in order to bring new riches to them and their families. I'm really tight on time now so I'm hopping a bus at midday to Uyuni, my last real stop in Bolivia before going across the salt flats and desert to get back into Chile, to the town of San Pedro de Atacama. I've booked a flight back to Santiago next Friday (6 days time!) and then the trip is basically over. I've been promised that these salt flats are something else, so hopefully I've saved the best until last.

Cause and Effect

Sucre :: Bolivia

Man, do I now hate sand flies.

Places: Rurrenabaque, Madidi National Park, La Paz & Sucre.

Coolest thing I did: Went fishing for piranhas with chunks of steak. Only Ricardo the Guide caught one though.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Bolivians seem to love putting a statue of a military figure in every free town square, round about or supermarket forecourt. Which is strange seeing as they don't seem to have ever won a war. Ever.

I would like to start by sending out a big thanks to everyone who responded to the recent bloody pictures of my face with "when are you going to shave and get a haircut?". I now wonder if I lose a limb I'm going to get "man you look pale. Get some sun!". It's becoming apparent that the locals agree with you. I think my favourite "get a haircut" reference of the week was being called Karl Marx after a bar fight (due to the fact the only thing left from my bike crash is a persistent black eye). I'd shave, but it gives the police manning the road blocks a big laugh to see my passport photo from 10 years ago vs. me now. I couldn't take that away from them.

After a relaxing night in the town of Rurrenabaque I got on a South East Asian style long tail boat and was taken 5 hours up river to the ultra posh Chalalan Lodge, an "eco" resort owned by the local people who happened to be living in the Madidi National Park when it was declared a national park and wisely decided to go for the high end tourist to cash in on their luck. They've built a pipeline of new guides, giving them training on English, how to behave around rich white people, what to show rich white people in the jungle and stuff like that. Our guide Richard (because apparently Americans have trouble with saying "Ricardo", which sounds like bollocks to me) has been doing it for about a decade and seemed to have a very good knack for pointing out stuff around us as we walked and boated about the place, even if he did have a pretty lazy pace of speech and was not a many of many words. The Canadians I was with chose to take offence to this, but I kind of liked his lack of enthusiasm - it was mildly refreshing.

The eco lodge itself has running water, showers where you can use soap and all the mod-cons, so I'm not sure what exactly makes it "eco", but it was a very nice place to chill out in a hammock, eat decent food (except for the beef that was inexplicably the only thing the chef charred to rubber every time) and go swimming in the lake which also houses quite a few caimans (caimen?). You have to wash your insect repellent off before taking a swim because apparently DEET is somehow poisonous to basically everything it touches, which means if you sit on the dock like me taking in the view for about half an hour you're going to get bitten to hell by sand flies and end up with hundreds of little bite marks all over you. Gay as. I only took a couple of swims, and was told that if I wanted to actually see the caimans I had to swim either very late at dusk or at night, but to be honest I just didn't want to get bitten any more. Instead I spent most evenings reading The Girl Who Played With Fire. It took me like 3 days. I'm not sure who Stieg Larsson was in life, but those books are like crack. For those who can get over the bits where his Swedish obsession with violent sex comes out a little bit too graphically.

So you spend your days either in boats or walking through the jungle, both during the day and at night to try and learn a bit about the ecosystem around you. From Ricardo's explanations it seems to me that everything has the basic purpose in life of being food for something else, a massive chain of cause and effect. The girls would say "ah, that's pretty" to a butterfly and Ricardo would go "frogs eat those" or some such. Realist, that man.

So the highlights for me were the tiny little coloured frogs that were all deadly poison, the metre long snake that crossed our path by accident, the two separate stampedes of wild pigs that we could hear coming just in the nick of time to get out of the trail and watch them blur past (the biggest was well over 100 pigs) and nearly tripping over a 1.5m black caiman in the dark. Oh, and of course the monkeys. There's several species of small faced monkeys living in the Madidi NP and since the locals stopped eating them for bush meat they tend to be fairly un-bothered by people at all. Probably the highlight was a whole bunch of little yellow and little brown monkeys (the second ones called cappuccinos, I guess for their brown fur and white faces) coming right down into the lodge and eating all the mandarins from the tree outside the kitchen. They also tried the grapefruits but apparently find them a bit acidic so mostly throw them on the ground. Which meant you had to be careful where you stood and took your pictures just in case you got hit with a falling citrus of some kind.

We spent one morning in a leaky boat (I had to bail while Ricardo rowed) fishing for piranhas with chunks of steak, on loose hand lines with no sinkers. This meant you basically could feel the fish nibbling on the meat (because they have small mouths) but you had to be very good at timing when to yank on your line to hook one, and I mostly came up with a bare hook. Apparently a whole school of them can finish off a calf so fast it looks like the water around it is boiling, but on their own a single piranha isn't that scary looking. Of course, I didn't go swimming in that particular lake. Ricardo managed to hook us a fish so we could have our picture taken with it's sharp teeth sticking out, which was kind of cool but would have been better if it was one I'd caught myself.

I think my man crush on Ricardo really came into it's own on Sunday night, which was when the staff treat the guests to some of their local music and dancing. No-one dresses up, you drink some concoction of milk, cinnamon and rum and the dancing is just silly. You know when kids dance by just doing bits of every move they know? Well it was just like that. The music was drums and pan pipes which alternated between passable and terrible depending on the seemingly endless song and it seemed mostly so the trainee guides could try and seduce the single gringas. Richard basically spent the night sitting on a bar stool getting smashed on beers. When I was dancing with the girl who cooked our food and she looked like she'd rather be anywhere else I kind of thought I'd rather be sitting on a bar stool getting smashed on beers too.

Apparently my description of the evening was racist, but I'm not sure how. I described it as that bit at the end of Return of the Jedi when the ewoks are all playing music and dancing to celebrate the Death Star being destroyed. Because that's what it looked like.

So the Lodge itself is a model for getting the locals to have a steak in keeping the National Park in good condition, as everyone is an owner, guide or supplier to the Lodge in the village and keeping it pristine is their livelihood. There are other lodges and tours, but all are based outside the Park and have to boat in every day, whereas we were able to finish dinner, grab our flashlights and go looking for tarantulas to take photos of. That was kind of cool. You also get woken up on clear days by howler monkeys re-establishing their territory vocally, but we only heard that one day because it's the tail end of the wet season on the jungle side of the Andes and it rained most mornings.

The best alternative trip I heard about is run by a totally unlicensed Israeli army veteran (aren't they all?) who takes people out to the jungle to hunt all their own food, build their own rafts for transport and their own huts to live in. That would explain the massive amounts of Israeli's I was seeing around town in Rurre, probably the first big concentration I've seen in all of Bolivia. The Bolivians are slightly miffed about the whole thing, but I guess you don't mess with a bloke who regularly kills caimen for food with a bunch of tourists helping out.

My trip out to the jungle was always going to be a little borderline, time-wise mostly because this is Bolivia. I'd been told the last night bus for Sucre in the south leaves La Paz at 8pm so it was awesome to get to the airport in Rurre and find that there was no plane waiting for us. Luckily we were only two hours delayed (not two days) getting onto that 18 seat Fairchild turbo prop and had a fairly quick 30 min flight back to La Paz. It was crazy to have the plane climb pretty much straight up from the jungle (120m above sea level) and basically just make it high enough to get over the ridgeline of the mountains before dropping only like 5 mins to land in La Paz (somewhere in the order of 3,800m above sea level). Lucky for me I did manage to still have time to hop a night bus and this morning I arrived in the old (well technically current) capital of Bolivia, Sucre.

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?