Goodbye To My El Dorado

And good bye to this collection of pacenos at the El Dorado hotel who have looked after me, helped me, worried about me, when I have been absent, and allowed me in fractionally to the fraternity that is the real Bolivia. They are all equally and indivisibly great.

Roxana and Mayra

Marcia

Alex

Maria Elena

Last Walk On El Prado

It is the action street. The busy crowded mess of  micro taxis juggling for position and street vendors every twenty yards. It is chaotic, perilous, certainly when an attempt is made to cross it; polluted from the discharge of ill  maintained exhausts, noisy and not so very clean and yet it is one of the most captivating streets I have walked along in my life.

It is probably the widest thoroughfare in the largest city in Bolivia and yet it is a village. I have walked along it many times during my stay here. It is the walkway between my hotel and the tourist streets that begin at Sagarnaga. I see the same people every day in the same positions. Begging in the same way or selling the same things.

I could not leave Bolivia without walking along it one more time, up one side and down the other, but then I decided to cheat. My friend had taken me for a ride in a micro taxi, the small buses, that are crammed with people during every run they make. Labels on the windows say where the bus is heading. You shout and wave your hand to jump on and shout and stand up to get off.
I decided to try a journey by myself.
My journey cost 1 Boliviana. I paid more because I did not have small enough change. I shouted stop, at the San Cristoforo church, and I got off and walked down El Prado back to my hotel.

These are some of the people that I saw.

Rosenda is a beggar from El Alto. She comes to the Prado every day and sits outside Alexander Coffee. Every day we play the same game. I give her money and ask if I can take her photo. She says yes. She has my money in her hand, has inspected it and is smiling, and just as I am about to take her photo she dives inside her hat. Now when she sees me coming she shouts, ' photo', and laughs.

Carmelo. The biro salesman. I buy pens from him whenever I pass. He is 49 and looks 104. He worked in a factory in La Paz but was injured and cannot work there any more. He will get a pension of £25 a month when he is 64, but until then he is working as a street vendor. The life expectancy for men in La Paz is 65. I did not tell him that. 

Davide shining even more shoes.

The Municipal Police. These prescient guardians, aware that this is the spot on the Prada crime is going to occur, are always here at the end of the central reservation, and they are always chatting.

The political protestors. I have never seen them, but they never move their tents. 

Exuberant Santos, the peeler, shaker and maker of orange fruit drinks. I never buy anything from her and she still smiles at me and shouts, buenas.

Ori, or that is how it sounds, and her shy sister. Cheese sellers from the Altiplano who bring their cheese to the Prado to sell. I cannot pass her without her asking me to buy cheese. I say no and she says to me, cows' milk, very good for you. Same conversation, same structure, every day.

I do not know if I will come back to Bolivia. I believe I might. It has had a profound effect upon me. One that I never expected. Bolivians are like a mass of the inexperienced struggling against the political odds. It seems as a society they have been doing it their own way for years. The indigenous keeping themselves to themselves, keeping to the land and the fields. The middle classes playing against world power players like the United States, and not always faring that well. It is a society overtly in evolution. Tourism is an unexploited virginal resource. Never again I believe will I visit somewhere with this degree of originality, and I have no doubt about it, where ever I wander in this world these are people I will never forget.

To The Valley of Las Animas With A Good Man.

They call it the Valley Of Souls, La Valle de las Animas, but it can only in reality be the valley of lost souls as only the lost would wander here. They arrive with the winds and are heard at night, calling and lamenting, their sound held in the rocks.

On the day that I tried to walk in to the valley a river had burst bringing down ground which meant I could not see the entire expanse of this valley of the lost. 

I had seen a painting of it. In my first days in La Paz I had been introduced to an artist. The valley was one of the places that inspired him to paint and he allowed me to quickly photograph an example of his work. The photograph was taken too quickly to be of much assistance in clearly representing the inner valley but it gives me an idea of what I did not see.

On any other day in any other country in any other place I would have been disappointed, but I could not be for I was travelling with a good man. A taxi driver. You know the kind, the unreliable and violent. One of the bunch that were going to rape and abduct me, according to the fables of those who have never been to Bolivia. This man, Gabriel Dennys Molina Perez was not of that type.

Gabriel was 36 years old. He talked to me about Bolivia. He told me there had been progress in Bolivia in recent years. He believed that the centre of the government was doing good things but that this good core were surrounded by helpers and assistants who were robbing the people. He had worked for the government as an engineer, receiving 7000 Bolivianas a month, ( £700). This was good money but year after year the government made more and more deductions from his money until in the end he was left with only 1500 Bolivians. He could not live on this money and so he left engineering.

This is a typically Bolivian biography so it cannot end without a visit to the Virgen of Copacobana. By the time he visited the Virgen , Gabriel's aunt had lent him money for one taxi. Within months of visiting the Virgen he had money for another. Within another short period of time following his visit, he had opened a workshop selling tracksuits, ( one of which he was wearing). The business is a success and he now employs eight employees. 

He is I believe a good man. Not only because he had attached a badge of the Virgen of Copacabana to his dashboard but because of the way he behaved with me. 

He pointed out every mountain, every flower and river, giving me its name. He took me through the small pueblitos of  Ovejuyo and Chasquipampa, writing down their names and the names of the flowers and the mountains so I would not forget them. He took time on the high unsafe roads,  even though in his house his wife children and twelve relatives were starting their sunday lunch. 

He explained about the practice of the villagers in the small villages to all participate and help each other if there was a problem with any one piece of land. A piece of information that allowed me to make sense of what exactly the group of Aymara were doing with pick axes and forks on a distant hill.

The true indicator of the goodness within Gabriel was that he was prepared to stick with Bolivia and give it a chance. He believed if he worked hard he would succeed in spite of the corruption and the difficulties of his life. He had friends working in the United States who were earning much more money than he was. He had been told if he would just leave Bolivia he would earn more and could send money home to his family. What good was that he told me if I do not see my kids every day?

I love Bolivia, he said, and after two weeks here, I could understand why. 

Witches, Yatiri, And Contenting The Spirits

Witchcraft in Bolivia is a practical solution to adjusting bad luck, contenting the spirits and accessing all dimensions of an otherwise partially lived life.
There is nothing frightening within it. Nothing of the night. Even though those who act as trainers and guides to the Yatiri ( the wise men or women of the Aymara), the rarely found Ch'amakani, are known as ' someone who has or owns the darkness'.

After only a short time in Bolivia, the activity of witches, las brujas, on the streets, placating the discontented spirits with platitudes of offerings burnt on a fire of parlosanto, becomes something expected. When such activity was pointed out to me by my taxi driver as we descended from the heights of El Alto after my flight back to La Paz from Oyuni, I just nodded as I glanced towards the unfolding ceremony. What should have been mesmeric had been transformed within ten days of me experiencing Bolivia into something commonplace.

The witches on that occasion were on the hard shoulder of the closest thing to a motorway La Paz has. It was dusk and a series of low fires were burning close to a small thicket of trees. The wood is haunted my taxi driver told me. The witches have to go there.

The Witches Market in La Paz is situated on a cobbled street behind the very grand San Cristoforo Church.

In Bolivia as Juan had told me, pagan rituals and catholic ceremony go hand in hand. On Sundays the Yatiri are available on the steps outside the Catholic Churches to allow those who do not completely trust in the hand of God to seek advice, make an offering; content the spirits that may otherwise interfere in a life. Hedging their bets is I imagine how the Aymara see it.

The market is at first glance indistinguishable from the the stalls of Artesania selling textiles and woollen Llamas that children may play with. The businesses run one in to the other, the change from retail to hechiceria lacking subtlety as the soft children's toys with ribbons around their neck are replaced by suspended llama foetuses, aborted, during what is the trial of a pregnancy a llama endures, and then dried.

A  foetus aborted at almost full term will bring the greatest luck. If buried within the foundations of a house, the house and all within it will be blessed. How horrendous, I told a witch, how are there any llamas left alive in Bolivia? Because they carry four or five foetus she told me. A llama cannot carry to full term all foetus created, abortion of many are intended. It is the way of the spirits.

What do you want to buy she asked me. What about something for good luck I suggested. There is only good luck here she told me. Here only good things are sold. Nothing here can ever do any harm, all things are for good. She pointed at her shelves crammed with carved offerings. Choose something she said. I will bless it, but you must keep it with you.

She meant I had to literally keep my charm in my pocket for as long as I wished my luck to last.

Bearing in mind that every one who comes to this market fervently believes in the power of the carved charms and the prepared offerings ready to be purchased and taken home and burnt, the market is an incredibly optimistic place. It is like fairground confession. I saw people walk in with concerned expressions and having made their purchase leave relaxed.

The witches and Yatiri are like community counsellors, they are known to sort out problems. Business relationships can be readjusted, marriages tweaked, a worn out sex life renewed. The witches and the Yatiri have the secrets in herbs and oils and carvings. Fire is an intrinsic part of the ritual. Remember the market only sells the component parts of the solution, it is the use of parlosanto a wonderously scented wood, that disperses the fragrance of incense, and the act of offering following invocation of a God or a discontented spirit that does the trick.

The witches of La Paz are not as presented in our western fairytales and the wise men soothsayers are not as I would have predicted. None like to be photographed. The witch I was buying from said I could take a photograph of her working but not of her face. Her daughter a trainee witch was much more amenable. She smiled broadly as she was photographed and went on to suggest oils and carvings that would solve any problem my life could possibly have within it.

I liked the Yatiri most, they exude the most delicious power. An almost malevolence. They are even more recalcitrant when it comes to people stealing their image with a digital camera. Perhaps they do believe the act of photography is tantamount to theft of their soul, or perhaps they would prefer to be paid. I did not enquire. I stood twenty yards away, and watched as this wise Yatiri pushed coca leaves in to his mouth.

Whatever a person's view of incantations and enchantment, El Mercado de las Brujas is an experience. I loved its strikingly unusual nature, without comparison in the majority of Western Europe but perhaps discoverable in the Eastern part. It is an essential part of Bolivian life. Without the pilgrimages from the rural communities to purchase the offerings that can only be bought in this street, crops and harvests would fail. Houses would not be built. There would be no point in selling or buying anything or getting out of bed. The government believes it has power and it has. Democratically elected it has the endorsement of the majority of the people. What however is that compared to the mind altering power of the Yatiri and the Witches.  

For Jorge Luis Marquez Romero

Read this please , it may be in Spanish and dependent upon my competency at loading images in to this blog it may be sideways on, but read it nevertheless.
Why?
Because it was the wish of Jorge Luis Marquez Romero that a story he had written be read.
I imagine in his brief lifetime he had not expressed many if any desires to anyone, which makes it even more valuable that you take the time to endeavour to read his words.

Jorge was a Lustrabota , one of the shoe shine boys of La Paz. He died soaked in rain, frozen on the streets of La Paz, in December 2013 and was buried on Christmas Day 2013. He was 17 years old. Jorge was an orphan abandoned by his extended family as a child and forced to exist on the streets of La Paz alone. It is extraordinary that he made it to the age of 17.

I do not believe he would have lived as long as he did without the efforts of one extraordinary women  Isabel Oroza the director of a charitable foundation, Arte y Culturas Bolivianas, set up to help those who shine shoes on the street.  Hormigon Armado, (reinforced concrete) is the magazine of the Lustrabotas, produced and printed by Isabel Oroza in her overcrowded work space.

If the boys agree to attend  classes on a Saturday in Sopachaci in La Paz, they receive a quota of 

newspapers to sell and they are entitled to keep the proceeds of their sales from every newspaper sold. Jorge's story was published in the 2014 Jan/ Feb edition, Issue 46.

Isabel Oroza's foundation has similarities in motive to The Big Issue in the UK but from my perspective, the outsider looking in, it is more purposeful and constructive. 

The newspaper was set up upon the proceeds of Villa Serena a restaurant in the Sopocachi district of La Paz. The newspaper headquarters are in the same building as the restaurant. The paper is now self funding as a result of revenue from advertising and through the help of volunteers. The classrooms the boys attend are also in the same building, but it is Isabel Oroza's hope that one day, the foundation will have entirely separate premises.

Boys as young as five and adults in their forties work as shoe shine boys. Those who sit on the street and clean the shoes of others are stigmatised in La Paz. The older shoe shiners may  not have told anyone other than their immediate family that shoe shining is their occupation. In brief, those who sit on the street and clean a pair of shoes for three boliviana a pair are ashamed and because of this they mask themselves to conceal their identity. A balaclava and a baseball hat being the uniform of those who clean paceno shoes.

 My hotel is near El Prado a central walkway in La Paz. After a matter of days spent on the street my boots are so shiny I could, if it was a moonlit night, catch the curve of the moon on my toes. These are the boys, or indeed men I have met.

Davide. Aged 15. He has been shining shoes for 7 years. It is his wish to be an auto engineer. He showed me a paper in his pocket which was his college enrolment form. He has to earn 450 Boliviana a month to pay the course fee, and he is paying it. He has no parents. He lives and sleeps on the streets.

Aurelio. Aged 29. He has been shining shoes for 15 years. It is my occupation he says. If he did not wear his mask I would say in the manner of his pronouncement, he was proud of his work, but he does not allow himself that sentiment. It is clear to me it is because others denigrate the occupation that he has. Aurelio proudly told me that he speaks three languages, Aymara, Chechuan and Spanish. If he cleans 80 pairs of shoes a day at 3 bolivianas, life is good. That adds up to £2.40 for his labor.

He told me that he has a small apartment on the highest slopes of La Paz, in which he lives with his wife and child. In a quieter voice he told me that none of his neighbours know the kind of work that he does.

Jorge. He has been shining shoes for 5 years. He is now 14. The day that I met him he was selling Hormigon Armada. When he is not selling the newspaper he is shining shoes. I did not ask him why

he did not wear a balaclava. I imagine it is self evident; if you begin shoe shining at age 9 you have no sensibility of shame. He lives with his mum in El Alto, the city near the airport. He did not mention his father. He told me he had two small brothers and so he needs to work. There is no money for school so he stopped attending.

In 2011 Luis Revilla, the mayor of La Paz, declared shoe shining, ' a cornerstone of the city's economy, and a dignified job'. The saturday classes Isabel Oroza provides deal with sexual health, human rights, and self respect. Isabel Oroza is reported as saying about the instruction of the shoe shiners, ' We teach them the three R's, responsibility, respect, and that respect breeds respect '.

Perhaps for Jorge times are changing. Perhaps as a result of the combined forces of charity and political intervention, he will never wear a mask.

Let's Talk About Coca

The US are at war with Bolivia over its production of coca, blaming the billion dollar cocaine trade in the US; cocaine wars; drug addiction and the death of US citizens who abuse cocaine on the massive production of coca in the North and centre of Bolivia.

The US want Bolivia to cease coca production. They see no good in the substance, on the contrary they demonise it.

Evo Morales is not interested in complying with US demands for enforced eradication of coca crops, whereby crops are burned by soldiers against the wishes of the largely impoverished campesino growers. Neither will he agree to the fumigation of coca crops with pesticides that destroy the plant due, representatives of the present government suggest, to the risks to the local population and the environment. In 2008 Evo Morales kicked the US Drug Enforcement Agency out of Bolivia and relationships have been poor between the two nations ever since.

Nowadays the benefits of coca produced in Bolivia are reaped by the pharmaceutical companies who by means of bio chemistry manage to harvest in mass form the anaesthetic properties of the coca leaf,  by foreigners who control the multi billion dollar illegal cocaine industry, and by Coca- Cola Inc, who transform the leaf in to one of the most sought after beverages in the world.

I have spent only two weeks in Bolivia and it is obvious to me in this short time that the US will never succeed in reducing the production of coca in Bolivia using their present methods. Evo Morales was after all the head of a union representing cocaleros, ( coca producers). He is not going to agree to oppression of the very people he grew up with, worked with, and acted as advocate for before he achieved political power. He presently negotiates annually with the cocaleros to set a maximum for production per annum of coca but he does this for the needs of Bolivia, not as an act of compliance to demands made by the US.

The other fundamental reason why the US will not get their way is because of the way coca is regarded in Bolivia. It is seen as life giving, good for health and moreover good for the soul. It is used for divination and restoration of health, as well as for medication, energy, as a sweet and as a toothpaste. It is the only substance known to alleviate symptoms of altitude sickness. Chewing the coca leaf is essential to existing at 4000 metres. It eliminates nausea, dizziness and the intense headaches associated with coping with the thin de-oxygenated air of the Andes.

It is also sacred. It is as much a part of Bolivian culture as is Pachamama. Ironically the attitude of the US to the eradication of coca production has increased the protectiveness of Bolivians to the coca harvest. Business is up for those in coca. 92% of the male population of Bolivia chew coca three times a day, at least, as do 82% of women. The chewed leaves release alkaloids in to the mouth that increase energy, sharpen awareness and induce a mild euphoria. Bolivians see coca as as harmless as Costa see coffee.

An indication of the attitude of Bolivian society to the coca leaf is seen by the impossibility of getting an appointment with the Yatiri, the medicine man of  the Aymara. He is available for consultation in La Paz, down a  narrow alley way at the side of the coca museum. His presence is known because of the pan of burning embers which represents his offering to the Aymara Gods. Unlike your average consultant in the NHS, his consulting rooms are blessed.

I wanted to go in. I wanted to meet the man who is vaguely evident in the background of the next photograph but he was fully booked. I had no chance of him taking three coca leaves from a pile in front of him and throwing them in four directions. ( I did not know how that was mathematically possible.) To read the happenings of the world above, the world below, the past and the future. It is possible for a Yatiri in one reading to observe the past, present, health, and illness of the person in front of him. Those seeking to eradicate coca from Bolivian society need to reflect on this ritual and the embedded significance of the plant to those who are Bolivian , who not only grow it, but chew on it and depend upon it as a support in their every day meagre existence.

Salar de Uyuni

In the very South of Bolivia lies the Salar de Uyuni; the largest salt desert on earth. I was beginning to doubt the superlatives as everything I have seen in Bolivia is the highest, or the greatest, the grandest or the largest. It however turns out to be true the Salar is the biggest salt desert this planet possesses and what is more it is a place that deserves every superlative cast upon it from the mouths of those who stand upon its edge.

The impoverished towns that appear on the track leading to the salt deserve nothing but diminutives. They are end of the line places. Destinations on a train line that a train no longer runs to.

Colchani and Uyuni have no streets, let alone street lights. Adobe clad houses with windows often secured behind grills stand along side the dusty streets, frequently rutted from a deluge of rain. If it is some sort of cosmic diversion to juxtapose this;

with this:

there is no humour in it. Beauty and poverty in alignment do not make easy viewing.

There had been incessant rain throughout the night prior to my arrival in the Salar. The white hard salt normally lying in dry honeycombs was converted in to a sea across which four by four

vehicles were obliged to crawl, carrying an army of adventurers onwards towards the higher parts of the desert and an under construction salt hotel.

One hour of journey to arrive in a place that resembled an art house remake of Mad Max.

Surreality at every aspect. A lost sky. Lost ground. No division of elements here, all swirling in a celestial mix that was confounding.

The most intense confusion for the brain occurring at the part of the desert known as the Mirror of Reflections. A part of the desert in which the vibrancy of salt crystallising under a thin sheet of water converts a base element in to glass.

The sky and the earth perfectly reflected one within the other. A symmetry of land and cloud.

The sky held in salt and those who stand against it levitated, to hover suspended in another sphere.

The irony of this disorientating place which takes the mind and throws it upside down, until it is frankly impossible to tell where air begins and land ends, is that it holds the key to an environmentally sustainable future for mankind. Vast reserves of lithium lie beneath the salt.

Auto industry giants want to buy the Salar to divide it up and begin lithium mining. Evo Morales will not let them. If however the world's demand for eco- vehicles, principally hybrid and electric cars, continues to rise, the world's existing supply of lithium  will be outstripped by 2015; imagine the pressure then upon Evo Morales and his government to rip apart the crust of the Salar.

You could not write a better plot. One of the most impoverished countries on earth in possession of 50% of the planet's lithium reserves. What does Evo Morales need for Bolivia, what will he ultimately sell? With his firmly anti - capitalist rhetoric I would not presume to hazard a guess. I can only be grateful that my life allowed a journey to the centre of this heaven on earth well before global power play between grand and lesser nations caused the Mirror of Reflections to break.