NEW TRAVEL JOURNAL: BOLIVIA
BOLIVIA
“For kilometres and kilometres, all you see is a flat white expanse with the Andes in the far distance. During the rainy season, from November to March, water accumulates on the surface and reflects the sky. The horizon disappears and it feels as if you’re flying through the clouds.”
While their children were growing up, Vivian and Hanlie Gericke explored much of southern Africa. When they retired in 2016, they decided it was time for a new adventure, so they shipped their trusty Land Rover to South America! After overlanding through Patagonia, they flew back several times to explore more of the continent. In this instalment, they travel through Bolivia.
From your geography class at school, you might remember that La Paz is the highest capital city in the world. It straddles altitudes of between 4 050 m on the Altiplano (Andean Plateau) where the airport is located, and 3 100 m down in the city centre – the difference in altitude is almost the height of Table Mountain!
The topography of La Paz makes road transport difficult: Even though the streets are tarred, they’re incredibly steep. The people who live on the Altiplano used to take hours to reach the city centre and back up in the evenings. Nowadays a cable car network, the longest in the world, transports residents. Tickets are dirt cheap and you get a bird’s-eye view of the whole city.
Every day is market day in La Paz. The Witches’ Market will make your hair stand on end as dried animals and parts thereof are sold with the promise of increased libido, solving marital problems or cursing someone. Then there’s the enormous El Alto Market, perched on the rim of the Altiplano, where you can buy almost anything, including all the parts for a car that you can assemble yourself!
Just like its capital, Bolivia is a country of extremes. The geography can be divided into three zones: the high Andes along the western border, with many peaks above 6 000 m; the dry Altiplano that lies between 3 500 m and 4 000 m; and the Amazon below, at barely 130 m above sea level. Such a range of altitudes gives rise to a huge variety of plants, animals and bird species – and some amazing landscapes.
The population is just as diverse, with almost 12 million people and 37 official languages (Spanish is the predominant language). In the cities, people walk around with smartphones, while in other more rural parts, the descendants of the Inca Empire still follow age-old traditions.
Helmets please – we’re going down!
The mountain slopes north and north-east of La Paz are ideal for downhill biking. We went on a cycling adventure down the infamous Death Road with Gravity Tours ( gravitybolivia.com).
Until 2007, the Death Road was the only road between the Amazon and the city. The road is only 3,2 m wide, with sheer drops of 600 m on one side. In South America, people drive on the right-hand side of the road except on the Death Road. Here they drive on the left, so that the driver going down the pass can lean out of the window to position his wheels on the edge while giving right-of-way to vehicles coming up! The Death Road earned its name from the average 26 vehicles a year that fell down the cliffs. In 1983, a truck with 100 people plunged over the edge. There were no survivors.
Nowadays, the Death Road is used only for downhill biking and some tourist vehicles. What an adrenalin rush! We started early in freezing weather in the snow at the top (above 4 000 m) and careered downhill for 64 km to end six hours later in the steaming Amazon jungle. We dropped 3 600 m in elevation, getting rid of layers and layers of clothing as we went. We repeated this for the next three days, each day in a different location, descending up to 4 000 m a day.
Afterwards, our cycling group floated on a boat down tributaries of the Amazon River for three days, camping along the way, to the town of Rurrenabaque. We were appalled to see the rivers of the Amazon being destroyed to extract alluvial gold.
The northern part of Bolivia is remote jungle, with few roads. Travelling by boat is the main mode of transport and the only viable option in the rainy season. We saw lots of coca plantations in the lowlands, and everywhere in Bolivia we saw people chewing ping-pongball-sized bundles of leaves. Chewing coca is an intrinsic part of Bolivian culture – it helps combat altitude sickness, fatigue and hunger – but coca is also used to produce cocaine, and drug trafficking in this part of the world is big business.
South along the Andes
From Rurrenabaque, we flew back to La Paz. We then drove south to the base of Volcán Sajama, an extinct volcano. At 6 542 m, it’s the highest mountain in Bolivia.
On this part of the Altiplano, you travel through a desert-like landscape – water is abundant but little grows because of the extreme cold and wind. We followed tracks that carried almost no traffic and arrived at rivers that I had to wade through before attempting to cross with the Landy. We often camped wild in sub-zero temperatures. (In hindsight, it was irresponsible to do this remote stretch on our own, but as so often happens, you only realise this when you get there and then it’s too late to turn back.)
We crossed the Salar de Coipasa and the more famous Salar de Uyuni. These “salt lakes” are huge white expanses of salt that have leeched out from the surrounding mountains over millennia. You drive on a crust with water underneath, and many overlanders get stuck. If your vehicle gets bogged down, or worse, if it punches through the crust, you’re unlikely to get out without help.
Salar de Uyuni covers an area of about 10 000 km², roughly half the size of the Kruger Park! For kilometres and kilometres, all you see is a flat white expanse with the Andes in the far distance. During the rainy season, from November to March, water accumulates on the surface and reflects the sky. The horizon disappears and it feels as if you’re flying through the clouds.
From Uyuni, we travelled further south
along the Altiplano. This area is characterised by beautiful high-altitude lakes, each with a different colour: red, green, white… The lakes are home to flamingo searching for food in the icy water. Three of the world’s six species of flamingos can be found here – Chilean, Andean and James’s flamingo. The latter species is incredibly rare, only found on the high Andean Plateau.
In various places along the Andes, you’ll find a hot spring where locals like to picnic and cook eggs in fountains of boiling water. Among the lakes south of Uyuni, we came across a geyser field called Sol de Mañana, where the steam plumes are at their highest early in the morning. As the sun rose just before 6 am, with an outside temperature of -20° C, the field of geysers blew steam as high as a three-storey building. It sounded like steam locomotives exploding around us.
In the footprints of Butch Cassidy
We’ve always been fond of cowboy movies – Butch Cassidy is one of our heroes. We never knew it, but his character was based on a real person called Robert Parker. After robbing too many banks, Parker (Butch) and Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid) fled from Texas to Bolivia. There, they had a run-in with the law near the town of Tupiza. So, when we were in Tupiza, we stayed in Hostal Butch Cassidy and hired horses to retrace the footsteps of Butch and Sundance in the canyons around town, and to see whether we’d be lucky enough to find a stash of Bolivianos (the Bolivian currency) forgotten somewhere in the hills!
The southern part of Bolivia is remote. Even today it looks like the Wild West, with endless, empty gravel roads stretching over high mountain passes. This has also made the area a popular venue for the Dakar Rally. All the locals are Dakar crazy!
Dynamite for sale
Buying dynamite without a licence is illegal in Bolivia, just like everywhere else in the world, but in the city of Potosí anyone can do it, even with the police watching!
At 4 100 m above sea level, Potosi is one of the highest cities in the world. In 1544, when an Incan man called Diego Huallpa was searching for an escaped llama, he started a fire at the foot of a mountain known as Potosí. To his surprise, he saw the soil melting and a shiny liquid started to ooze from the ground – silver! The Spanish called the mountain Cerro Richo (Rich Mountain) and soon large-scale excavations began.
During the boom years, Potosí became the biggest and wealthiest city in the Americas – its silver bankrolled the Spanish empire for centuries.
With the mine having become unprofitable in modern times, informal co-operative miners have taken over mining activities from the government. We visited one such silver mine with a guide. First the guide stopped at the market and encouraged our group to buy gifts for the miners. Since they’re responsible for their own well-being and means of production, the gifts consist of goods they need on a daily basis to perform their mining activities: 200 ml of 96 % alcohol, a 2-litre Fanta, a bag of coca leaves, a dynamite stick, a detonator and a length of fuse. All bought legally! Miners are highly superstitious – the alcohol is offered as a gift to please Pachamama (Mother Earth). We walked deep into the belly of the mountain along horizontal tunnels, wriggled our bodies down shafts and heard dynamite explosions that were too close for comfort. All this while suffering from claustrophobia made worse by the lack of oxygen at the extreme altitude.
Bolivians love a party
We passed many traditional villages on our travels through rural Bolivia. The people and their traditions differ depending on where you are – Bolivia has 36 indigenous groups in total. One thing they all have in common is that they never miss an opportunity for a parade or a party!
We were fortunate to stumble upon an Independence Day celebration in the small village of Escoma. What an experience to see the parade passing by, complete with a brass band and traditionally dressed men and women in red dresses and bowler hats.
It’s said that the dresses worn by most indigenous women were imposed on them by the Spanish king in the 18th century, and that the bowler hats worn daily apparently date back to the times when the British built a railway line in Bolivia and imported too many small-size hats for the workers. These hats were given to the local women and this started a fashion trend that persists until today.
We planned to cross the border
into Brazil in the north-east of Bolivia. Along the way, we passed through the city of Santa Cruz, which was far more modern and prosperous than the other Bolivian cities we’d encountered.
In this region, there are many churches built by Jesuit missionaries in the mid-1700s. They were largely forgotten until the cult movie The Mission shed light on the Jesuits again, in the late 1980s. Since then, many of the churches have been restored. Some are entirely built from wood and carved with beautifully intricate patterns.
We visited a small mission town called San José de Chiquitos, east of Santa Cruz, and our visit coincided with the annual Chiquito festival, which dates back some 250 years. During the festival, the townsfolk wear masks with white faces and red cheeks to mock the priests, and a special dance is also performed. The red cheeks refer to the European priests, who were often sunburnt!
Farewell Bolivia, and thanks. We’d been mesmerised by the snow-capped Andes, the starkness of the Uyuni salt flats and the colourful lakes on the Altiplano. But it was the friendly and interesting people who left a lasting impression.
NEXT MONTH: Vivian and Hanlie tackle northern Argentina and the Atacama Desert in Chile.
In their previous lives, Hanlie was a biology teacher and Vivian was a consulting engineer. Over the years they travelled with their three children through southern Africa. When they retired in 2016, they looked for new adventures and decided on South America. In October 2016 they shipped their Land Rover Defender to Montevideo in Uruguay and went overlanding through Patagonia (see go! #150).
Since then, they’ve been back four times. They travelled through the central Andes to Cusco in Peru, and from Cusco back to Uruguay across the lowlands of Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. In 2019, they explored the Pantanal in Brazil, the Amazon rainforest and lesser-visited countries like French Guiana and Suriname.
Each trip lasts about three to four months. They’ve driven more than 55 000 km in total and they’ve crossed international borders 38 times.