Travel

Don’t ask (it’s forbidden to know) what end

The gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don’t play with Babylonian Fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be.
Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one Which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian Sea on the rocks placed opposite; Be wise, drink your wine, and scale back your long hopes
To a short period. While we speak, envious time will have already fled
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

Horace, Odes

EL TREN DE LA MUERTE pulled in at a border post not far from the town of Quijarro on the Bolivian border and we crossed by foot into Brazil at the city of Corumba. Any minimal Spanish we’d picked up in Peru and Bolivia was going to be useless for the next couple of weeks; we‟d entered Portuguese-speaking country.

Brazil is absolutely enormous and it dominates South America. Take a look at it on a map: it covers nearly half of the continent. It’s the fifth largest country in the world by land-mass, and it‟s the fifth most populous country in the world. It shares borders with almost every country in South America, being bordered by Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana to the north; by Colombia to the north-west; by Bolivia and Peru to the west; by Argentina and Paraguay to the southwest; and to the south by Uruguay. Bar the odd French-speaking nation, Brazil is the only country on the continent that doesn’t speak Spanish as an official language, all due to its colonial history: Brazil became a Portuguese colony in 1500, following the landing of Pedro Álvares Cabral, and eventually won its independence in 1822.

Brazil is often described as a true melting pot and a quick breakdown of its citizens explains why: as at the last official census, Brazilians were 49.4% White, 42.3% Pardo (people with a mixed white, black and Amerindian ancestry), 7.4% Black, 0.5% Asian, and 0.4% Amerindian. Most Brazilians can trace their ancestry to the country’s indigenous people, the Portuguese settlers and African slaves. Due to huge waves of immigration in the last century or so, by people in search of the good life, Brazil can claim such little known facts as the largest Lebanese community in the world, the largest Italian community outside Italy, and the largest Japanese population outside of Japan.

Our first impressions of Brazil weren’t glowing; we were skanked by the taxi driver taking us to the border control station in Corumba, charging us 30USD for a journey that should have cost no more than 10USD. Things here were immediately more expensive than in Bolivia and there were hardly any ATMs anywhere. The global credit crunch may have been in full swing but when it came to choosing which bank’s ATM to use, I wasn’t worried about the bank’s creditworthiness, so much as I was worried about the safety and security of the network the ATM relied upon. It was 26 December and we were racing to reach Rio for New Year’s Eve, so we decided to hop on the bus to the next major town eastwards, six hours away, Campo Grande, the largest town in the Pantanal, a famously inhospitable jungle region.

After the serious disappointment of Huayna Potosi, we went back to La Paz for an almighty drinking session. Bolivian lager and rum make for excellent session drinks.

As with Cusco, Bob featured heavily in the playlists of La Paz. We started in a sprawling bar called Mongos, with huge fires and generous spirit measures (i.e. none!). We asked a taxi-driver where the best club in town was; “Donde este la bueno discotheque?” He took us to the local Hard Rock! To be fair though, it wasn’t that bad! We got completely hammered and danced like idiots. The place was filled with locals and travellers alike all intent on getting spangled. We got dragged off by some local girls to a random bar on the third floor of a housing block where we danced until dawn. Unfortunately, whilst a great night, it also meant we missed our bus to our next stop, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. After a day spent recuperating, we made sure we caught the bus the next day, which took about 20 hours and arrived in the bus station at around 3am. Not wanting to wake up our hosts, we stayed in the bus station where the rains came down in sheets until 6am and where we met an interesting young woman called Heidi, who was a soldier in the Bolivian Army. She seemed concerned that we had no Spanish and ostensibly nowhere to go. She laid out her travelling blanket and shared her food with us. She stayed chatting until sunrise having fun with our Spanish phrasebook, with mutual butchering of each other’s language; lovely woman.

Santa Cruz de la Sierra is a major city in the prefecture of Santa Cruz in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia. It’s vastly different to the western and southern highlands of Bolivia, with its lush vegetation, humidity, and abundance of palm trees; a welcome change. The two halves of Bolivia are almost two different countries. In Santa Cruz, there’s none of the postcard Bolivian women in ponchos and bowler hats; instead it’s urbane and modern. It was like being back in Lima.

We were staying with the family of a friend of ours from London, Paula Aviles. They didn’t know us, nor could we communicate, but their hospitality and warmth was tremendous. After three weeks of travelling, it was great to be staying in a house and amongst a family. There was Senora Chela Aviles, her son Freddy and his wife, and two young kids, Juset and Jonathan – all of them extremely welcoming and immensely kind.

Freddy, a medical student, took us out on our first night in Santa Cruz and, being the perfect host, promptly invited a bevy of his beautiful lady-friends to come out with us. Again, communication was difficult (damn our lack of Spanish again! “Donde esta los banos?” might help with calls of nature but doesn‟t really cut it when talking with women) but Giomara, Vanessa, Carlita, Diana, Bianca, and Monica were excellent company both in the pub and on the dancefloor. We started in the Praca de 24 September district and ended up in the downtown Santa Cruz district rich in nightlife. It was a bit like how I imagine Miami or LA to be with heavy doses of The Fast and the Furious thrown in: souped up cars with throbbing sub-woofers, sultry, sticky evenings, super-hot girls dressed up to the max and serious amounts of attitude – really good fun. For a fairly conservative country, the strong sexual vibe the girls throw out here is slightly incongruous. The dancing in the clubs is highly charged as well but, strangely, interaction between men and women is relatively chaste. I‟ve grown very fond of the music I‟ve come across on this trip and, in Santa Cruz, I discovered a real like for reggae-thon, a mix of hip-hop, house music and, I suppose, salsa. It‟s very fast and involves a lot of hip and ass wiggling (Beyonce and Shakira-style – I‟m not too good at it yet but practice will make perfect! We weren‟t too sure (damn our Spanish yet again!) but it looked like we were staying in Santa Cruz for Christmas.

The next day, Christmas Eve, we met Freddy and the girls again and went for lunch at a typically Santa Cruz experience, a parillada barbecue specialising in nose to tail eating; we ate steak, chorizo, liver, kidney, intestine, udder and tripe all with a very fiery, piquant sauce – delicious! I would find that this type of eating is popular all through Brazil and Argentina.

That night, we went with la familia Aviles to Freddy‟s tio‟s (uncle) house for a midnight feast. Eating at this time of night is a Bolivian Christmas tradition and we were overwhelmed and incredibly thankful to be welcomed into the heart of a family who didn‟t really know us on Christmas night of all nights. Muchas gracias to the Aviles family! It was my first ever Christmas away from my family; I missed them and I called them from a street phone. It was good to talk to them; they were in high spirits and were out delivering presents.

The next day, we waved goodbye to the Aviles family as we embarked on the train eastbound to the Brazilian border at Quijarro, on a train affectionately known as El Tren de le Muerte or the Train of Death, named so, not because it‟s particularly dangerous, but, thankfully, because it‟s incredibly slow (it would take about 17 hours) and very, very bumpy. We were in the rear carriage with probably the loudest Australians ever. The journey was like being in the Wild West. When you walk from carriage to carriage, in between, you can stand on the connecting part watching as the track and the Bolivian countryside sped past.

From La Paz, our next stop was the Salt Flats in the south of Bolivia. We were joined by Emma and Joe from the Wild Rover on the bus down to the jump-off town of Uyuni. The bus was overnight but sleep was a distant possibility. The journey was around eight hours but the last six were easily the bumpiest I‟ve ever experienced; it was like being on a bucking bronco ride. I couldn’t be sure, because it was pitch black outside, but it must have been the rockiest dirt track in the country.

We arrived in Uyuni at around 6am and we were exhausted. Even so we were refreshed by the sheer outback look and feel of the place with dusty, sandy roads revolving primarily around one main street. We found the travel agent for our three day trip to the Salar de Uyuni, the legendary Bolivian Salt Flats; the biggest salt plains in the world. Our contact was a classic looking Bolivian old woman with two or three teeth left. She introduced us to Alejandro, our guide and protector for the next few days. Alejandro, at well over six feet tall, was easily the biggest Bolivian I‟d seen so far. He was quiet most of the time, and very good natured. He almost always wore classic dark aviator sunglasses and had a frontier look to him. He was also an extremely fast driver. One of the concerns of travellers going to the Salar de Uyuni is that some of the drivers are drunks; hopefully, Alejandro wasn‟t! Unfortunately, he didn‟t have much English. Luckily, Joe had some Spanish, becoming our de facto translator and was banished to the front seat as his reward.

Despite assurances from every operator that, were the maximum capacity of six for the trip not be met, we would just go as a group of four, we trawled the streets for additions to our party. We were told that an Australian couple was late and that we were waiting for them. Eventually, a Dutch couple, Michel and Leonie, got into the 4×4 and they promptly asked us if we were Australian!

The Salt Flats are part of the Bolivian desert and, immediately on leaving Uyuni, we were straight into huge landscapes and mighty vistas with mountains far off on the distant horizon. We raced to a locomotive graveyard where we stood on rusting old trains; a totally surreal place, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Our next stop was the Salar de Uyuni itself, an absolutely mind-blowing landscape and the closest thing I‟ve ever experienced as to the Sublime. These are the largest Salt Flats in the world, at more than 10,000 square km. By way of brief history, 40,000 years ago, the area was part of Lake Minchin, a pre-historic lake which dried to leave two smaller, modern lakes and two salt flats, one of which is Uyuni. The Salar de Uyuni has an estimated 10 billion tons of salt of which only 25,000 tons are extracted annually. The Flats are pure white, and, during the dry season, crusty to the crunch underfoot. It‟s like a thick, impossibly large layer of rock salt and is „cracked‟ into almost hexagonal „tiles‟ about the size of a book. I‟ve never been able to have such a panoramic view of a landscape. The terrain is almost completely flat meaning that the horizon is incomprehensibly distant. Some mountains are just about visible to the west; I‟m guessing they were the feet of the Andes. This flatness combined with the whiteness of the ground and the brilliance of the intensely azure sky means you can have some great fun with the use of perspective in photographs. You can make yourself look the same size as a small object (like the height of a can of Coke) with some clever positioning and with the camera placed really close to the ground. We had lunch on the Isle de Pescado or the Island of Fish, a huge „iceberg‟-like natural structure of coral that stands incongruously, improbably alone in the middle of this astonishing terrain.

The whole place is like driving on Star War‟s Tattooine; totally otherworldly and exhilarating. The Flats had a powerful impact on me, the kind of feeling I get when in true wildernesses. We drove through the Salar de Uyuni for hours (it‟s such a massive space) and stayed the night in a spartan village. We were sharing the house with a family and we were in a barracks-like annex at the back. The conditions were basic with cold running water and a narrow bed each, but it felt exactly right; we needed nothing else. We ate like kings for supper; Alejandro rustled up some delicious fried chicken and some sopa verduras (Andean vegetable soup), with enormous, chunky chips. We got to know the others: Leonie and Michel Van Lieshout were really lovely people; they were on a three-month honeymoon making their way south to Chile via the Salt Flats; we couldn’t help but notice that the Dutch speak incredibly good English, probably better than most English people. Joe was in IT consultancy in London and took regular extended holidays; this time he wanted to explore Bolivia over the course of a month. Emma was a student who was six months into a huge year-long round-the-world trip. We washed the meal down with mugs of hot coca tea. That night was so cold. I went outside where the wind-chill factor made it feel below freezing; I have never seen so many stars in the night sky; thousands and thousands of fiercely burning stars; a sight I‟ll never forget, seared on my memory.

It was an early start the next day to drive further south-west towards the volcanoes that populate this part of the desert. As with the Salt Flats, the landscapes and the skies seemed so exceptionally vast; I‟m not sure what causes this perception. We saw a volcano smoking in the distance around the Bolivian-Chilean border and, remarkably, a young man cycling through the desert with his backpack on the back of his bike. What the fuck was he doing here?! The sun was at its midday strongest and there was nothing of navigable note to guide him. Alejandro slowed to check with the man that he had enough water and gave him rough directions to the nearest town and we waved him good luck. It mustn‟t be that infrequent an occurrence to see a cyclist in the middle of the Bolivian desert with no visible civilisation in sight.

We saw several huge lakes with various minerals in huge quantities giving their waters brilliant colours such as coppery greens, rusty reds and deep cobalt blues. At one lake, we saw a huge flock of pink flamingos just lolling in the water; a beautiful, utterly random and unanticipated sight. What do they feed on? What can live in this shallow body of water in the middle of a huge desert? Hmmm…a flock of flamingos of course! We ate a fine lunch on the shore of that lake gently pickling under the strong sun, munching on Bolivian sour apples. I looked around and had a feeling that I‟d not enjoy a lunch like this again for a long time. We‟d spend most of that day driving around that vast landscape gentling tracing an anti-clockwise circle back towards Uyuni, our starting point. I‟d grown to love long distance car and bus journeys; I enjoyed long bus trips and now, just sitting in the back of a battered but perfectly functional 4×4, gave you time to think. Something about the starkly beautiful and faintly supernatural desert was conducive to thought; I‟d stare out of the window and think about everything from where I was going with my life to my travelling experiences so far and to evolving thoughts on my own beliefs.

One topic we discussed was the nature of love; specifically on the theory of whether there really is “the One”, a preordained match. Both of us had had mild crushes on the Inca Trail trip and we were in the mood to ponder the question. The opposing theory would be that there wasn’t a “the One”, and that there are in fact countless possible, compatible partners with whom you could fall in love. I thought there might be a middle way between these two opposing views. The basis is “attraction”; attraction in the widest sense. Attraction could be between anybody. It‟s between people who are drawn to each other. This ‘being drawn to’ doesn’t happen between one person and too many other people; it’s too dependent on mutuality and like-mindedness to be. It’s also not necessarily sexual. For example, a girl could have a best friend (might also be a girl), who she’s drawn to (i.e. attracted to) but not necessarily want to have sex with, perhaps because they’re both heterosexual. Whilst, they exhibit all the signs of attraction (they’re happier in each other‟s company, they yearn for the other when they’re separated) they’re just clearly not each other’s future love-match because they‟re not sexually attracted to each other. Anyway, over the course of your life, you’ve met probably about 5-10 people to whom you’re attracted to as a person and to whom you’re also sexually attracted to. Any of these 5-10 people could develop into your future love-match. Therefore, there does not need to be a “the One”, just several possibilities who could develop into, well you know! If so, then neither do we have to believe in the „many fish‟ scenario. It‟s all theoretical of course; it could be a third way for the sake of finding middle ground. Perhaps it‟s just best to plump for one side. Sorry dear reader, I told you that you start to think random stuff!

Another thought: we‟d also noticed how much more receptive we‟d become to new things, new people and new experiences. We‟d already met so many great people in such a short space of time and we wondered whether that was because the number of interesting people we‟d met had simply increased on the road or if instead it was because we had become more open, and less judgmental, towards new people. It wasn‟t difficult to at least correlate this feeling with our current happier and freer states of mind. It became a recurring thought, along with the determination to retain this attitude when we returned home. I began to wonder about the extent to which your environment impacts on your state of mind. Clearly, being taken out of your normal surroundings (work, friends, family, societal expectations etc.) is a mentally liberating experience. It‟s probably this „freeing‟ property that enables this increased receptivity. A related state of mind was the increase of the “Yes” function whereby because of this increased openness, you‟re just more inclined to say “Yes” a lot more, especially to things you‟d normally “Um” and “Ah” about and say “Maybe” to things you‟d normally just dismiss. I‟d see it in myself and almost every traveller I‟d meet. To the guy we‟d just met in a market, “Fancy coming to Uyuni tomorrow?” “Yes why not!” Or to some random traveller you’ve just met over breakfast, “Fancy a morning of sightseeing round galleries and museums then a walk for four hours round the city?” “Sure thing, sounds great!”; “Fancy a three day detour that wasn‟t in your plans to see something you‟ve never heard of?” “Absolutely! Sign me up! It could be the time of my life!” It‟s just a “Yes, Yes, Yes” mentality when travelling; a state of being that‟s just joyful. Anyway, enough of my journal ramblings for now!

That evening, we pulled up to about 3,900m into one of the most otherworldly places I‟d ever seen; rocky, mountainous and, once the sun fell, incredibly cold. In the wind, it must have been about minus 20 degrees Celsius. I walked by myself in a straight line in this treeless, flat hinterland and, after twenty minutes, I couldn‟t have been more alone; I was literally on the other side of the world. That night, we all drank some vodka that we‟d brought with us and chatted by the fire until the early hours.

After just a few hours sleep, we were back on the road at 5am whilst it was still dark. We sped off to a collection of volcanic geysers where we peered into a steaming mud-hole which was so hot compared to the freezing air around it. I‟d heard that some of these geysers had been man-made for the burgeoning tourist interest in them. I got close enough to feel the heat from a live geyser and to feel the bubbling, grey mud sliding underneath me.

We drove off to a nearby rock pool where we were going to enjoy breakfast. It looked busier here, with more tourist groups. It seemed like the idea was to jump into this open-air pool heated by volcanic activity and enjoy our first bath since we‟d arrived in South America. The trouble was that it was still ball-shrivellingly cold and, despite the first beams of sunlight appearing, no-one wanted to get down to their smalls. Grant thought about it for a second and just jumped in. Of course, I couldn‟t let him just be the only one in, so I was next. It was glorious! The water was warm and soft and the surroundings were just magnificent; a slowly emerging sunrise atop a mountainous backdrop; it was an expansive and almost unbridled wilderness; it was easily the most memorable bath I‟d ever had. It was memorable for Grant in a different way when he received the sight of another man‟s early morning semi-glory just inches from his face!

As with the Inca Trail, bowel movements had been a running joke throughout the Salar de Uyuni trip so far because facilities were so sparse that, even if you didn‟t really need to go, you went anyway to avoid pain and embarrassment down the line. That morning we knew that we wouldn‟t have the chance to go for the next six hours so we decided to give it a go despite not really needing to. Alejandro was about to leave so we ran to the banos which were really just holes in the ground (with sand and shit at the bottom about two metres below); each hole separated by a thin wall. I hadn’t really mastered this technique yet; I don’t think that men’s leg muscles are used to the squatting position. My legs started wobbling almost immediately; I mean this is actually a stress position used by interrogators! I needed the wall behind me as a support. The fact that Grant and I could talk to each other over the partition during the act was even funnier; we were trying to make each other laugh so that the other might fall down the hole!

We dropped Michel and Leonie at the Chilean border near San Pedro from where they would head to Valparaiso to continue their honeymoon. It took us six hours of straight driving to get back to Uyuni where we said goodbye to Emma, Joe and the fantastic Alejandro and jumped on the overnight bus back to La Paz via Oruro.

We had decided to climb Huayna Potosi.

“They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!””

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

FROM PUNO, WE JUMPED on a bus eastwards towards La Paz in Bolivia. The border crossing from Peru to Bolivia was an unexpected eye-opener. Our bus had just tourists on board and the actual point of crossing itself was six hours‟ drive from any form of civilisation on either side at the border. On the Peruvian side, an American couple got into a heated argument with some workers at a currency exchange; they felt their travellers‟ checks had been short-changed and the language barrier was just making people angrier. The American woman was screaming, “Thieves! They stole my money!” The team of Peruvian cashiers just shrugged i.e. “This crazy Gringo doesn‟t understand the exchange rate/doesn‟t understand the commission charge/didn‟t count her money properly etc.!” Take your pick! The police got involved and took the locals‟ side. Grant and I just looked at each other and thought 30USD just wasn‟t worth arguing about; we were in a town in the middle of nowhere where the few people that live here are going to look after each other; you‟re not going to get „justice‟ here even if you are in the right. We got our exit stamps, with Grant having to pay a 5 USD „fee‟ for his Peruvian visa being slightly illegible, and walked through „no-man‟s land‟ through a huge arch to the Bolivian lines and boarded our bus again towards Copacabana. The bus was about to drive off when a girl ran beside it waving her arms; it was lucky for this girl that she wasn‟t a minute later or she‟d have been stranded without her belongings in a godforsaken border town with little visible signs of law. She explained that, as an American passport-holder, she‟d had to pay 134 US dollars for a Bolivian visa. She didn‟t know about the cost beforehand and didn‟t have it on her so she had to change some travellers‟ cheques at heavily discounted prices. What do you do in a place like that?! We wondered what the US had done to Bolivia to warrant Bolivia charging US citizens 134USD for a visa that cost me and Grant nothing. No matter; we had arrived in Bolivia.

Bolivia is a landlocked country with all the accompanying insecurity that must entail (although, somewhat incredibly, Bolivia has a navy which operates on landlocked Lake Titicaca!); it‟s surrounded by Peru to the west, by Chile to the south-west, by Paraguay and Argentina to the south, and by Brazil to the east and to the north. At just over 9m people, it‟s not that populous a country, with around 30% Quechua-speaking and around 25% Aymara-speaking Amerindians, 30% mestizo, and 15% whites.

After a brief stop-over in Copacabana on the Bolivian shores of Lake Titicaca, our bus came into La Paz in the late afternoon from high above the city. From this mountain approach, we saw just how massive La Paz really was; it seemed to sprawl out forever. On the recommendation of our friend Emma from the Inca Trail, we stayed at the Wild Rover hostel, housed in an imposing building that was rumoured to have once been a Presidential residence. From being the finest house in the land to now serving as a series of dormitories packing in a disparate and desperate group of travellers; what a stunning collapse in social status! It was our first time in a dormitory and, in our room of six, we met Emma, a girl from Sydney, who wanted to come with us to Uyuni and the Salt Flats to the south. She‟d actually met us the previous night when she‟d been woken up by Grant‟s incessant snoring. She didn‟t have earplugs; an amateur mistake! The Wild Rover turned out to be a party hostel; the bar was always full of Brits and Irish people just getting drunk and staying together. What‟s the point of coming out to the other side of the world and just doing exactly what you normally do every weekend? At least go and have a wander outside; you never know what you might find!

La Paz is the administrative capital of Bolivia. At around 3,600m above sea level, it‟s the highest capital city in the world; the altitude making its steep streets hard to climb. Despite familiar things like banks and cars, it really is another world over here and, consequently, a totally invigorating place. La Paz is incredibly poor, even more so than the Peruvian towns we saw, such as Juliaca. Night-time sees dozens of people opening up and sifting through rubbish bags left on the street while feral dogs roam the streets. I remember sitting in a gorgeously rundown bar, Sol y Luna, and, every now and again, I‟d glance out of the window. Each time, different people would be rooting through an enormous pile of rubbish bags. I think they were collecting cans perhaps for aluminium plants to melt down or maybe they were searching for food. Despite this extreme poverty, La Paz has a great deal of charm; from its old world cafes to its many hidden courtyards, great bars and, particularly in the administrative centre around the Plaza Murillo, beautiful colonial buildings. The pace of life is frenetic, with crazy drivers, furious markets and men of all ages urinating in the street in broad daylight! It‟s exactly the kind of place that you look for when travelling; it‟s so far removed from London in every respect that it‟s a tonic. We spent hours just wandering the streets and soaking up the bustle. The centre of La Paz is built around a major road, Avenida Mariscal Santa Cruz, which was similar to the bottom of a valley, with the city being built on the steep slopes on both sides of this road. We found ourselves a „local‟, a café called Angelo Colonial on Linares just off the famed Witches‟ Market; a place with great coffee, superb soups and salads and quirkily decorated with armour, rifles and huge candlesticks. The Witches‟ Market itself, just off Sagarnaga, was mainly geared towards tourists, with „interesting‟ t-shirts (Che Guevara slogans spliced with The Simpsons) and folksy mementos. It was here that I first began to love the pipe music so deeply associated with the Bolivian and Peruvian highlands. It‟s wistful and restorative, melodic and mournful; it goes with Bolivia like bowler hats and cigars.

Following the Rough Guide, Grant and I went in search of an authentic Bolivian experience and hunted for „whiskerias‟, which are Bolivian drinking dens serving only hard liquor and beer. The Guide suggests that these places are men dominated and are not recommended for women. We kept asking people where the whiskerias were and their directions took us further and further off the beaten track. Some people looked at us like we were deviants (we later found out that people thought we were asking for hostess-type strip bars). So when we finally found a whiskeria, an opening without a door and steps leading to a grotty basement, we were a bit apprehensive about how we‟d be received. There was a bit of a Wild West saloon moment when we first walked in; the bow-tied waiters gave us an appraising look but, as soon as we ordered big whiskeys and beers to chase with, it was all fine. We ordered “Dos whiskeys por favor Senor!” with appropriate levels of expressive and passionate intonation, of course! To be fair, we probably looked a bit like plums with me wearing a tight, bright, purple t-shirt and Grant wearing similarly tight clothes in a place where style came a firm second to functionality. Our waiter must have thought we were just complete pussies because he brought us small coca-colas to mix with our whiskeys; which of course we declined! “No Senor! No coca-cola gracias!”

We only drink it neat of course! To our mock surprise and puzzlement, a woman came in and plonked herself down with a group of guys but, apart from a few initial glances, the whiskeria got back to the serious business of drinking and chatting. We tried to make conversation with some of the guys in there but our lack of Spanish was becoming increasingly frustrating. As travellers, we wanted to get involved with local people all the way along our trip; unfortunately, there was a lesson learned for the next trip: get to grips with the language before going. We got pretty hammered in there and it was great fun. We rounded off the night dancing to a local pipe band in a random bar. The Bolivians have their priorities right.