15. Lake Titicaca (Peru).

We wound up in Puno, Peru. Compared to Bolivia this was some kind of bourgeois paradise with prices to match. We watched a bizarre military parade featuring a man with a cartoon head looking confused and useless. Later we supped on alpaca steak filled with ham and cheese.

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The Ham and Cheese Problem.
I like ham and cheese, who doesn’t? A good ham and cheese sandwich provides a high level of satisfaction. I wouldn’t eat it every day, nor would I eat it every meal. I wouldn’t hide it inside another meat and I certainly wouldn’t expect a restaurant called The House of Ham and Cheese to be a success. South America disagrees. South America has ham and cheese for breakfast, ham and cheese in pastries and on pizza. Ham and cheese inside steak. Ham and cheese. Ham and cheese. There is no escape. For a while there is a vague sense of happiness. For a while. Every menu, 90% of dishes... some meals don't even mention the fact, as if it is an expected extra.

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It was around Puno that we ate a guinea pig. It was caught and cooked for us, luckily. That’s one experience that isn’t in my top ten. The rodent arrives face down on a plate, completely intact from above, but slit down the middle from underneath. It has been allowed to keep its teeth and skin, and lies sprawled like roadkill. It’s a fiddly animal to eat, and fingers are a must. The thick skin must be removed and the tiny little greasy muscles squeezed out from between bones. The taste was somewhere between yesterday’s roast chicken and pork. Not especially nice, and awful to look at. Waiters laughed at me and other tourist diners gawped. Half-way through I jokingly pulled an ear off to scare Laura. It freaked me out more than her and I retired from the world of rodent eating.

There wasn’t really time to sit around eating completely defenceless animals, so we booked an overnight tour of the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca.

In the morning we were put-putted across the water to Islas de la Uros, a group of floating islands constructed from the totora reeds of the lake. It was a curious surface to walk on, and our feet kept slipping into moist indentations.

The islands came into being centuries ago as some kind of haven from the vicious Incas, but the isolationist tribe of Uros now focuses on drawing in crowds of tourists and selling them pillow cases, model boats and mobiles made from the totora. Grinning children and enterprising old women struck charming and typical poses for the camera before demanding money.

There was something depressing about their modern way of life, but I don’t suppose there really is much difference between that way of making a living and any other. Except that tourism is extremely lucrative.



The next stop was the island of Taquile. Our group arrived and was divided out to local families. After brief introductions we were marched up a mountain to the home of a lovely Quechuan family who gave us a bed for the night. We trailed behind the girl who collected us, puffing hard and sweating profusely.

The house was basic but beautiful. The guest room had been sort-of plastered, but the rest of the house was 100% mud and straw. There was no electricity and our mattresses were made from the reeds of the lake. We dropped off our stuff and left for a tour of the island with our group.

The tour began at the island square, where there must have been a wedding or something, as drunken men and women danced and laughed heartily to music in a nearby courtyard.

We walked across the island to see some pre-Incan ruins and examples of ancient land cultivation before heading home again. Our host family gave us a filling meal of quinoa soup and a delicious tea, essentially hot water with a stick in, the name of which unfortunately fled my mind as soon as it entered.

That evening was party time. There was a knock at our door and our new family burst in thrusting a cholita outfit and a poncho at us exclaiming “Si? Si? Si?” We actually hadn’t felt like doing anything, but the look of joy on their faces made the decision for us.

We danced all night in the village hall, swung around by various butch ladies until our lungs threatened to burst from the altitude and exhaustion. We were beat, good and proper, but we had the night of our lives.

The next morning we played with Rodi, the young boy of our hosts, who was quite taken aback by the whole experience. We said our goodbyes and descended the hill in brilliant sunshine. The end of our whole holiday seemed to be brought so near by that one goodbye that we felt deflated and flaccid as we boarded the boat and watched the next load of tourists float towards the island. We’re just one link in a chain of motion here, we thought, forgotten by tomorrow. But the memory of Taquile Island is still fresh within us. The scenic mountains and groups of noisy capricious sheep, the drunken ancient men and the prattling of the annoying Israeli of the group, the crumbling old walls and the delightful stick-tea; all these things refuse to leave us. Taquile is a lovely place, and Lake Titicaca one of our favourites.

We returned to Puno and had a bag stolen.

14. Tiwanaku.

What’s more annoying than a group of tourists? Clearly a trick question.

We decided to join a tour group regardless to visit the Tiwanaku ruins. The site was vast and it was too much to expect to take it all in without help.

It’s a sad truth that all major archaeological sites get looted beyond recognition. For this reason no one really knows much about Tiwanaku or the people that lived there when it was built about 1,000 years ago.

I wanted to be completely awed by this place, as it was a site of significant importance judging by its ancient references across Bolivia and Peru, and estimated population of 20,000 at its peak. But only a small portion of the city has been unearthed.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t and isn’t impressive. The scale of the place is clear even if mostly just by impressions in the ground or small walls. The decorated doorways and countless huge statues are worth the ticket price alone.

The Puerto del Sol is the Gateway of the Sun, a huge arch reportedly weighing almost 45 tons, carved from a single block of andesite. Apparently it works as some kind of calendar.

The engineering that must have gone into the entire complex was astonishing. 25-ton chunks of basalt lay inexplicably 40km from the source. The standing walls and pyramids, though some partially reconstructed, bore the intricate jigsaw structure typical of Incan stonework. Some serious time and manpower must be the cause, but it’s almost tempting to believe the Aymará stories of divine intervention.

After our guide gave some rudimentary narrative and showed us a stone carved with the structure of the inner-ear so as to amplify sound, he gave us some time to ourselves.

We ended up in a pit. A pit full of heads. There was a complicated theoretical backstory about families donating a head to symbolise their family persona during construction, and so 175 bizarre stone faces scrutinised us as we stood confused, and dazzled by the heat.

We had been running on empty for so long now that bones were starting to show in ugly places, and after looking around the site museum and pretending to be able to concentrate on what our guide was saying, we were glad to get back in our minibus to drive back to La Paz for a completely necessary sleep.

We still had enough energy to get out when the bus stopped on the ridge, however. We stood with the group and admired the crater of the city. Like an amazing mixing bowl, houses swirled inwards and lashed at the sides, llama foetuses ostensibly buried under every one of them. A huge road lay squirming amongst the houses, snake-like.

The next day we bought one of everything from every tourist shop. Then we spent about 4 hours trying to send it home. Eventually we were successful, after reams of paperwork and having to pay a woman to sew a sack around our package.

We sat down in Dumbo to discuss what to do next. It was then that we realised we needed to be back in Rio in less than three weeks, and had yet to enter Peru. Making it to Machu Picchu and all the way back to the Atlantic coast was going to be tough. But we had sacrificed a trip to the Amazon in Rurrenabaque due to illness, and we couldn’t bear missing out on another major feature of South America.

We gathered together our things and entered Peru.

13. Lake Titicaca (Bolivia).

Memories are worth all the troubles and trials of travelling. Many images remain but correspond suspiciously to photographs. But what can’t be faked is a feeling. One of the most vivid of those remains being perched upon a barge ready to put-put our way across Lake Titicaca towards the Isla del Sol.

As we sat amid a dozen or so other passengers, most of which were Israeli (complete with the token Twat Israeli), a young man about my age stepped onto the boat and began to serenade us with song and music. He played the panpipes and charanga (ten-stringed Bolivian guitar fashioned from an armadillo) whilst singing in Quechua. He was stupendous, and the bright yet woeful sound of his music has stayed with me longer than the words to describe it.

More of my most vivid memories descend from Isla del Sol. On arrival we stomped up several hundred ancient steps to make friends with some donkeys and cholitas. The rest of the people off the boat vanished. They weren't at the guesthouse we chose to sleep in, and we never saw them again. In fact we never saw any tourists at all except in the little villages at the North and South of the island, or once or twice when groups quickly came and went from ancient ruins we were admiring.

After staying the night in a room with a speech-defying view over the mountains and lake we set off to traverse the island. The guidebook was redundant for this task, as was the map we had bought in La Paz. A map without a gradient in such a situation is as useless as one without a scale.

I was confident that getting lost was impossible, as the island was an island, and we could always see the sea, so we marched on. Four hours later and we had no water or food to speak of. We should have arrived by now, but hadn’t as yet found anything resembling a proper path. After a while we found a trail that led down a mountain to a pretty little beach and guesthouse. The hunger inside was like a waterfall pounding our stomachs, but the guesthouse was unoccupied.

We sat on the pier nearby and sulked. “Aya, amigos! YA ya ya ya ya!” rang a voice from the mountainside. Our heavy heads, bruised by the sun, scanned the cliffs. A cholita bounced excitedly down a mountain trail like a little girl in a fairytale, wicker basket nestled in her elbow and pigtails flapping at her midsection. Like an angel in a dream she bounded over boulders and excitedly agreed to cook us lunch. The taught-skinned exhaustion bowed to flaccid relief and we tumbled onto the sand to wait.

As we sat happily on the beach the school further down rang its bell for the end of the day. Small and not so small children ran and skipped towards us, rucksacks thrusting loosely from side to side.

“Ello amigo!!” “What es your name?!” “How are you?!” “What es your name?!” We have both worked with children, and get along well with them. We had a fun thirty minutes before the best meal of our lives was presented. 84 pence each had bought a whole large trout roasted with vegetables and some kind of rice-like salted bean. The hunger and our ecstasy complemented the flavours like a dream, and we sat long afterwards drinking beer and soft drinks before walking down the beach to be rowed to our destination by a burly cholita for a handful of pennies. A crowd of children waved us off whilst a family of pigs drank the fresh water of the lake.

On arrival we found a place to sleep for 15Bs. 15Bs! That’s less than 60p each.

The next day we explored the Incan ruins on the island. There were a lot of them, all of which had piles of human faeces in dark corners. When you have to go, you have to go, but not in ancient ruins! Have some respect you scummy tourist swine.

Along the way we passed dozens of houses constructed from mud bricks baked in the sun. The occupants gave us friendly smiles, and we met a gorgeous little girl with skin as dry as the earth. “Hello.” I said to her. She looked sheepishly at me and clasped her hands behind her back, rotating gently from side to side.
“Como esta?”
“Bueno” she mumbled with a little smile.
“What do you think of this?” Laura handed over a little llama finger puppet.
“Si” she nodded gleefully.
“Y esto?” I handed over 2Bs.
“Sihehehee”
We handed over a few more Bolivianos and left her to get on with whatever she did all day. If only we had spoken more Spanish, or Quechua, or Aymará or whatever most people were speaking.

It’s such a shame that the English schooling system doesn’t really encourage a language like many Continental countries do. We have met so many Europeans fluent in several languages as a given from their schooling, it’s not fair that English people take the prominence of their language to mean that there’s no need to learn any others. That’s one way to be unprepared for change – the only thing which can actually be predicted.

More happy children skipped by.

Aymará and Quechua legend steeps the Isla del Sol in mysticism as the birthplace of the sun, and as we looked out across the enormous sea-like lake from the site of ritual sacrifice we couldn’t help but feel slightly odd. I wonder why religions give birth to such bloodthirsty traditions from obscure myths. We ran our hands over the smooth surface of the sacrificial stone and were overcome with a strange urge to get on it and lie down.

The sky was a metallic blue. Not a single cloud. The ever existing, ever changing emptiness. The blankness of the universe stood nobly and eternally above us as we waited for our hearts to be scooped from our chests. Our lives pop in the fire as it rages hungrily on for all time. How would it feel to die for the sins of the righteous? I had a feeling it would be bloody awful. No one was around, and we stayed for some time before snapping out of the trance.

We sat up, ruffled the bizarre connection to the past out of our hair and screwed up our eyes so as to push the imagined experienced into obscurity. “Let’s go”.

We went to catch the boat back to land, preceded by the inevitable wait of a couple of hours. Luckily the stopping point was near a handsome ancient building. We looked around and got lost within its labyrinth walls and tiny pitch-black rooms for about an hour, then settled down to wait with the family that charged the few Bolivianos for entry. We had no chance of communicating with them, but played happily with their child for a time before a strange vessel appeared around the corner of the island. It was a mock-up of a traditional reed-boat, enormous, with giant dragon figureheads and towering masts. It stopped at the foot of the hill and spilled out its cargo of fat Americans. The beasts clawed and sweated their way up the mountain towards us and piled into the ruins in a cloud of obnoxious drawl and camera flashes.

The little boy showed us his Pokémon trading cards and we rewarded his gregariousness with a finger-puppet of an old lady. He was so happy that he started to fall asleep, and his mother carried him around a precarious fence on the edge of the cliff to put him to bed under a simple shelter.

Then a boat finally arrived. In fact it was the same private boat we had seen at the North of the island that morning, charging 150Bs to take people back to Copacabana town on the shore. We asked nicely and got a lift the rest of the way for some small change.

Lake Titicaca is huge, and though the Isla del Sol is relatively close to the coast it still took a good two hours to get back. Laura spent the entire time threatening to vomit.

Somehow the Bolivians and Peruvians have negotiated a squiggly border across the lake, and the 230km long puddle features dozens of islands on both sides. We made a note to visit the other side when we entered Peru.

Copacabana, the main entry point to the lake on the Bolivian side, was a lovely little town. Its scenic location and pack of tourist shops and delicious restaurants kept us amused for a couple of days. The only problem was the lack of a cash machine. It seemed that the town was designed for day trippers, so our experience was a little difficult, especially as we arrived on a Sunday when the bank was closed. We were forced to use the black market currency converter as no-one in the official places knew what our strange English banknotes were.

Pedal boats are all the rage on the lakefront, and we decided not to dissent. We hopped in one and caused a vicious argument between the cholita whom had invited us, and a young man with a selection of boats of his own. Whatever they were fighting about, the cholita won. I think a good policy is not to mess with a cholita. At one point in Santa Cruz we had stumbled across cholita wrestling on the hotel TV. It was seriously aggressive. More like a cholita version of a cock-fight.

We peddled out in silence. The weather was warm and there was a cool breeze. We let the vessel float for a while, rotating slowly on the calm lake. Water stretched as far as we could see, giving way once or twice to various islands – Isla del Sol, Isla de la Luna, and the Copacabana shore. On the beach stood an enormous advert in the typically succinct Bolivian manner “Cusquena: es cerveza!”

We drifted until the midday sun shot us a glance which said “go inside amigo”. We took its advice.

Later in the day we took a walk outside of Copacabana to the nearby Horca del Inca. As we climbed the hill (why is everything on a hill?) we saw two cheeky faces peer over the rock above us. “Hello. Hello.” Two more small friends for us. They gave us the guided tour, bouncing around over boulders in the sweltering heat, jabbering in Spanish. The excited boys tugged us up the hill pointing at various stones and sculptures in the rock. Apparently the site was an ancient observatory, and the various holes and carvings in the stone worked as some kind of calendar.

The boys were clearly not new at showing people around, and were duly awarded with a handful of coins after they had struck their heroic poses for the camera.

Back in Copacabana we watched the bizarre ritual of the blessing of the automobiles. A priest performed consecration by splashing alcohol on the vehicles of waiting Bolivians and Peruvians for good fortune. The line of vehicles was stupendously long, not helped much by the drivers and passengers at the front of the queue drinking the remaining alcohol.

We saw a troupe of minibuses at the central plaza, and decided to leave.

12. 'The Most Dangerous Road in the World'.

“Cycle down the most dangerous road in the world!”

The advert was for one of several companies offering bike rental to ride down the road from La Paz to Coroico. Laura had a clear disadvantage, as she couldn’t ride a bike at the time. She decided to come along in the support bus for the view. On the day, however, the sickness rose in her and she had to be sent back to the hotel to wait nervously for my return.

The road is famous for being incredibly dangerous, and that was definitely true. You have to wonder if the danger is in the road, or the attitude of the drivers on the road, however.

The ride starts at the top of La Cumbre mountain, almost 5,000 metres up. The first part of the road is great. Nice and wide, smooth tarmac. Apparently we went up to 80km/h on that part. Then, after passing through a drugs checkpoint, the road becomes a joke. The tarmac disappears to reveal dust and rocks, and the roadside barrier disappears to reveal drops of 1,000 metres and more. The rocks below taunt with broken vehicles and deep scars in the hillside from cars and, in one instance, a coach. The views are breathtaking “but don’t look at the views” says our guide, “because you will die. Keep your eyes on the road”.

The road is narrow and dust is everywhere. I swell up with the adrenaline and shoot ahead to the front of the group with our guide and a fat pro-biker called Gary. We bounce over rocks and skid round corners, stopping occasionally to let vehicles pass. The road is so tight that no two vehicles can pass each other unless one reverses into a lay-by. Coursing on we throw a couple of Bs into the donation bucket of a man who guards the corner where his family went over the edge.

Gary is ahead of me and skids round a sharp corner, throwing dust up into my path. I keep tight to the bend and try to blag my way though, but the cloud moves and a stray dog stands defiantly in the way. I swerve around, inches from the edge, and wish the dog a painful death.

As we go on and on, my confidence increases to astronomical levels, and the inevitable happens. I round a corner approaching a steep drop into a long inside curve. My speed is too high on the second curve, and as I turn into the corner I know I won’t make it. I see the shallow ditch and bank straight ahead but there’s nothing I can do. I force up the front wheel but there’s no way I can climb the steep side, and the handlebars sweep out from beneath me. I crash hard. My body hits the stone wall and my elbows make stinging, scraping contact. The bike tangles itself in my legs and together we tumble along like shackled corpses thrown from a train. Eventually I skid to a halt on my knee and arse. Ow.

Others from the group cycle past taking a quick look at the accident and hurrying on. I begin to hate everyone, but then a guy I had shared some coca leaves with on the bus, Andy, stops and helps me sort myself out and rejoin the group. Luckily they had stopped just around the bend to let everyone catch up, and the guide patched up my dripping arms and leg. After, that is, I had to dig the pebbles out of my elbow myself.

Later, four hours from the start, we arrived at Coroico. Gazing out over the layers and layers of mountain-tops, I drank a couple of litres of beer with our guide Ian, and Andy before the bus drove back up the trail to La Paz. It was there that the real danger of the road was obvious. The driver sped up the road like a joyriding chav, blasting his horn at every corner but forgetting the brakes. Skidding halts preceded the passing of other vehicles, and a huge lorry forced us to reverse for about a mile to find a safe passing point.

Eventually we made it back, and it occurred to me that Laura and I had intended to leave La Paz on my return. We had checked out of our hostel. If they had no free space when Laura had gone back there she had no way of letting me know. The people at the desk had no English and neither of us had a phone. That is if she even got back…

Luckily, she had. In fact we had a room of 8 beds all to ourselves. She panicked when she saw my bloody bandages, as did the guy on the desk downstairs, but I was just happy to be back. I was knackered, but still buzzing from the ride.

I think too many people follow the ‘go there, take pictures’ formula for travelling. What we all need to do is throw ourselves down mountains and out of planes – really memorable, dangerous stuff. Sometimes the exploring aspect of travelling can seem like more of a creation of memories and photographs for the sake of it, than a real experience or achievement. To really get the most out of travel you need to push the limits and do something less ordinary, and something your body will remember too.

I’m not claiming to be the perfect traveller, but I got so much more out of cycling down that hill than I ever got from a zoo, museum or tour. Hiking, biking, gliding, caving, canyoning, etc – that’s where the fun is! Memories are great and a good reason to travel, but it’s imperative to have the most fun possible at the same time, don't you think? Scars, bruises and muscular fatigue make me feel like I've really done something!

So, we hung around for a few more days and saw some more museums. One day we ventured out to the Valle de la Luna – an extraordinary mound of dust and dirt that has been eroded into fantastic shapes and patterns by the elements. We spent half a day wandering around, and balancing on precarious bridges and rocky outcrops over the valley below. I was so impressed that I felt compelled to buy a t-shirt two sizes too small for me. I felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger, though, when I tensed my muscles and ripped the seams. Bike riding, road walking, shirt ripping, book reading, alligator biting SOB, that’s me.

We had both started feeling fatigue since the onset of the sickness, but on our last day I jogged around the streets which walking alone had caused my lungs discomfort a week or two before. In a miracle of fast-tracked manly evolution I had acclimatised. Laura was still ill, and had lost about a stone from eating little and keeping less down. I was leaner too, but full of renewed enthusiasm. The thrills and sights from La Paz urged us on towards further adventures on our journey to Peru.

11. La Paz.

If you ever visit La Paz, you will be grateful to arrive after 9am. We got in at about 5am. It was freezing, difficult to breathe at over 4000 metres above sea level, and everything was shut. All the hostel and budget hotels had their shutters down. We found one hotel which offered us a room for 250Bs but couldn’t bring such shame on our families. We wandered around blindly for a while until we found a place with a ‘residential rooms’ sign. I leaned on the bell for five minutes and made of mess of some Spanish into the intercom.

A guy let us in and nervously overcharged us at 70Bs, but we were so knackered that we just accepted it and flopped into bed. We later discovered that our room had the neon sign hanging outside its window.We stayed in La Paz for a long time. We had various ideas about learning some Spanish, but eventually decided that our time and money could be better spent. We’d managed to get by with a dozen phrases and the numbers so far anyway.

The first few days were occupied by walking, eating and sleeping. We had a good look around the town and immediately liked the place. Though it was dusty and unclean, the busy city had charm in surplus.Our second hotel was handily located two minutes walk from the tourist centre of town and the ‘witches market’ – a steep street populated by sellers of dried llama foetuses, bizarre looking charms and pots of suspicious powders. In Bolivian tradition, a dried llama under the foundations of a new building ensured a good life. In tourist tradition, weird objects make money.

The setting of the city was amazingly beautiful. At the top of steep roads one could see the bowl of the city descend into the crater of the centre and rise up again on the other side, poking from the mountainside in fungi-like clumps of white walls. The guardian of La Paz, the Illimani mountain, loomed above all.

Laura was the first to succumb to altitude sickness. After a couple of days I had similar symptoms, though they may have had something to do with the burger I’d bought from a man in the street. Whatever the cause, we spent a couple of days exploding. It didn’t help that our hostel room was on the fifth floor. Stairs at 4,000 metres are an abomination.

Maps. What is the deal with maps? One very important tool for finding your way around is a map. Why then does there exist such a thing as a map without a scale? For a guide to Butlins I can understand, but for a city you need to know how far it is from one place to another. It’s misleading not to. It’s like a car with no speedometer or a syringe with no measurement. How difficult is it to include a scale? How difficult is it to make a map a map and not a drawing? This annoyance was enough to send me into fits of rage in the various cities whose tourist maps were nothing more than cartoons. Worse still is the kind of map that considers certain roads too small to be worthy of acknowledging the existence of, or naming. Yeah, we got lost a lot.

Again, poverty was everywhere. Small children stood alone with a tiny charango, playing and singing for the tourists. They seemed to do quite well, as did some of the beggars in the main tourist areas. It’s difficult not to give small change to something so cute, or to a woman sat next to a cash machine with her children; especially when you’re withdrawing a hundred Bolivianos at a time and eating in restaurants two or three times a day. It was a prime spot on the ‘tourist hill’, and I think the woman there must have made a good living from it. Other parts of the city didn’t fare so well. One lady sat next to a set of bathroom scales on the off-chance that enough people wanted to weight themselves to keep her in pocket. A man sat behind two scuffed calculators for sale.

Every main street featured balaclava-clad young men with shoeshine kits. Apparently it is so embarrassing and shameful to be a shoeshine boy that they had to hide their identity. That sat together in little groups and pointed and laughed at my feet.

It’s really difficult to get shoes my size, and I often end up buying off the internet. I bought a really nice, fair-trade pair of canvass shoes from America just before we left England. But after a few days of wearing them I realised that they were too small. With no hope of buying anything above a size 8 in South America, I hacked off the front of each foot to allow my enormous toes to stick out. The soles flapped impotently and I felt like a twat. But at least I made the locals happy.

One day whilst I was exploding significantly more than Laura, she went out for the day. She returned with some of the strangest photos I’ve seen. Little girls and boys dressed as bananas and pencils, cholitas and nuns. A man dressed as a lion dancing in the street amidst clouds of pink smoke. Translating the banners later, it was a march for free education. And why not?

We visited the zoo and a handful of La Paz’s dozens of museums full of mummies and earthenware before stopping by a sign:

“Cycle down the most dangerous road in the world!”

…

10. Cochabamba.

We really aimed for the stars with this holiday. Our plan of getting from Rio to Macchu Picchu and back in 72 days was ridiculous, and resulted in so many missed opportunities. Countless hot tips had to be ignored, like the dinosaur footprints and legendary museum south of Cochabamba. In fact there were a lot of things to do around Cochabamba. It was something of a hub for travel in all directions. The mines of Potosí and the capital city of Sucre lay directly south, the widely-considered capital La Paz was due west and routes to the rainforest and mountains lay north. East retraced our steps. But it stank something terrible.

Near our hostel was a fruit market. Now I don’t know about you, but I like to buy my fruit in the comfort of normal smells. Such as traffic fumes. Not bodily fluids and decomposition. Vendors sat on the pavement surrounded by various fruit and vegetables completely oblivious as we hurried past trying not to breathe. After a few days the retching stopped and we began to get used to it too. But seriously, what is that about? If I tried to sell houses surrounded by corpses, or cars surrounded by fire, I don’t think I’d be very successful. But come to think of it I think we did buy some tiny bananas. There must be a moral in there somewhere but I just can’t tease it out.

Cochabamba has a great big statue of Jesus, just like Rio. It stands over the city, arms outstretched. But it’s bigger, and you can climb up inside it. Unfortunately, when we finally made it up the massive hill he was on, Jesus was locked for lunch. We waited, but in Bolivia if you don’t feel like opening your shop, you don’t. It was a hot day, and it seemed the person in charge of unlocking the Plinth of Christ had better things to do. We walked down the 2,000 metres, 1,385 steps back to the town in a tirade of sweat. Salt stains crept across my clothes like an advancing tide. Laura, who doesn’t seem able to sweat at all, panted and grumbled as she sucked on a bag of water that had been in the sun so long that is tasted of plastic.“Why are we walking when we’ve got a ticket for the cable car? Walking sucks, I hate walking. For god sake why are we walking it’s about 40 degrees! Why are we waaaalkiiiing????”

She did have a point, but I still wanted to throw her down the remaining steps. It was hard work walking down; I hate to think what it would have been like walking up. Cochabamba is already 2,000 metres from sea-level before any steps get involved, and you can tell. The air thins like breathing through a surgical mask, and things get all the more difficult. I’m not used to getting tired before my muscles do, and it’s a strange sensation, something like panic.

Bolivia is poor, and Cochabamba makes it obvious. Children and adults begged ferociously. In England, giving money to the homeless is tainted by drugs. At university I worked with the Big Issue and completed an empirical research paper on ‘the stigma of homelessness’. I saw how widespread the problem is, and Bolivia was in many ways worse. Groups of pre-pubescent children huddled together huffing at a bag of glue as we walked past. Later a cholita laid her baby on a sack of rubbish for comfort as she pulled more bags from a dumpster and tore them open. A stray dog sniffed at the child before being kicked away. Men with missing limbs begged with congealed eyes.

Our conflicting emotions resolved themselves in giving out toys and food. We bought a few dozen finger-puppets at 1B each and gave them out to homeless kids. We made a lot of little friends that way. Chocolate made us even more.

I realised then just how significant and important organisations like the Big Issue are. A welfare system, and support for those with mental health and addiction problems are fundamental requirements for a people’s government. But the Bolivia of 2005 was a political shambles.

My friend Simon had visited South America a year or two before and been tear-gassed twice in La Paz during political demonstrations. In fact we were lucky not to get involved in anything similar. The trend in Bolivia is bastard in government, people outraged, bastard ignores people, people eventually overthrow bastard. Sounds good? The problem is that Bolivia has never had a revolutionary political party that is organised enough to take that public sentiment and turn it into a governing party. After one bastard is removed, a period of several months at least passes before a new one is elected. In this period public anger subsides, and the climate is good for another soulless ass to lie his way into office.

But actually, 2005 was different. The new president, Evo Morales, gave new hope to Bolivia. The first indigenous Bolivian president in the almost 500 years since the Spanish conquest, Morales came from a background similar to most Bolivians: severe poverty. Thus his politics lean towards a socialist government for the people, and his bold reforms of land and nationalisation of natural gas explain why the United States hate him so much. In fact at the time of his election the US Ambassador to Bolivia threatened that electing Morales would result in a withdrawal of foreign aid. God forbid that a head of state wouldn't kill for money.

But we are yet to see whether the government can survive beyond the honeymoon period without betraying its original goals, as is the general international trend. It seems that running a country isn't a easy job. Who would have guessed?

Ultimately, I hope you agree, we can only hope that the inclination towards democratic socialist governments in Latin America continues, because it is in the interests of the majority of the population. What struck us on our return to England was that all news coverage of the new Bolivian presidency focussed on the opinion of the wealthy. How many wealthy Bolivians are there? Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, screw the rich minority! The same thing can be seen in coverage of the Venezuelan presidency, brilliantly exposed in the documentary 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'.

So there's a win for democracy, right? But does 'democracy' make any difference to anything at all, really? Does it actually mean anything? The US, UK or EU could really mess Bolivia up if they felt inclined to, and do so in the name of 'democracy'. Take Chile under Allende as an example. Democracy is a buzz-word that lost any concept of equal-rights that it held a long time ago.

What do you do when the 'World's Policeman' is a bent copper? If the USA is a democracy then I'm my own father.

Sadly, there is no such thing as democracy in capitalism, or in so-called 'communism' and so the world is doomed for the forseeable future.

The 'western' world has a sickening imbalance of priorities, am I right fellas?

These disjointed and incomplete musings rattle round my head on night-busses as I zone in and out of a dreamworld.

9. Corumbá to Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

Anyway, not content to stay still for too long, we headed North-West, towards Bolivia.

Corumbá is a place to wait until you can leave Corumbá. It is a border town between Brazil and Bolivia. There is an ice-cream shop and a buffet restaurant. We made good use of both and bought tickets to Bolivia on the ‘Death Train’; apparently so called because of its tendency to jump off the tracks every so often.

Crossing the border was astonishing. In Europe, borders are more of a slow blending of language and architecture between very similar ethnicities than anything else. Brazil to Bolivia was like black to white. The somewhat stylish youths that populated Corumbá gave way to Bolivian Cholitas and child street musicians. Prices descended from ‘cheap’ to ‘cheap!’, though we still got ripped off at customs; but what’s two pounds between some English people with a grand in the bank and Bolivian guards with machine guns?

The ‘Death Train’ turned out to be fine. In fact it was quite nice. Two bad American films were shown during the journey, and apart from having TVs installed in the ceiling, for all intents and purposes it was the same as an old intercity train in the UK. We were in Super-Pullman class, mind you (the best). We had heard some miserable stories about anything less and decided to pay the very small difference in the anyway cheap ticket price.

It seemed perfectly safe regardless of what Lonely Planet blabbered. If anyone ever died on the journey it was probably a product of eating the food sold through the windows at stations along the way rather than anything else. We bought some excellent home cooked food that way, and made one woman the happiest we have ever seen anybody by tipping her a whole American dollar.
On arrival in Santa Cruz, we stared in disbelief at the prices in the first hotel we went to. It was a nice looking place. 70Bs for a double en-suite. That was less than £5, our first taste of the ridiculously cheap country we came to passionately love. As a present for Laura I bought 40 red roses for 40Bs. Breakfast was a 1B pastry from a street stall. A bag of coca leaves was 1B50c.

Santa Cruz is big. Like me, big, sweaty and smelly. The roads were wide, baking, and the sun made us sigh every time we went outside. Memories of that place revolve around endless mechanical pacing down long stretches of sticky pavement towards some half-goal. However, it was here too that we discovered the wonder of the dilapidated Bolivian taxi. One dollar would get you anywhere and leave a tip. Safety, however, wasn’t part of the bargain. Firstly, most of the taxis are un-insurable death traps. Doors held on with electrical tape, improvised wing-mirrors or none at all, holes in the floor; we saw it all. Secondly, local confectionary stores sold little signs for your car that read “TAXI”.

Taxi drivers were wily perverts to boot. Very clearly looking up Laura’s dress as she got in, one driver agreed to take us to the zoo. My pronunciation must have been wrong because we had tried several other taxi drivers with no luck. He drove us round and round for about half an hour before dumping us at the side of the road, miles away from anywhere. Annoyed, we walked around looking for something to do. I’m 6 foot 4. Bolivian phone boxes are little shelters in the street made for the average Bolivian who is maybe 5’6”. I wish I had been concentrating more; then perhaps I wouldn’t have felt unnervingly sick with concussion for the rest of the day.

That wasn’t the best day so far, and the zoo did little to improve matters. The conditions reminded me of the film Amistad. Leopards and lions paced in 12 foot by 10 foot concrete cells with paw-prints in the cement, spat at by children. Little monkeys grasped for our hands from their bare cages. Laura cried and I decided to drop everything and start a charity to make zoos in poor countries better. One day. Perhaps. A free-roaming sloth improved our mood as it slunk silently by. We also saw a pair of turtles having sex.

We didn’t see any tourists at all for a good few days in Santa Cruz, but eventually bumped into a guy we had met in Campo Grande, Sam.

Sam had met a girl on a Pantanal trip and fallen head over heels in love. Unfortunately for him she had to fly to Buenos Aires after the tour for some kind of language school or family commitment or something, and the two budding lovers were torn apart. Sam forked out over £400 to go and see her, but had a difficult time.

“We arranged to meet at the front of the airport,” he said, “but I got there late and she wasn’t there. I waited around for ages thinking I had ruined my only chance to be with her and wasted all this money.”

We carried on talking as we sat down to eat. The restaurant we had found was a place called Dumbo, a name which soon became synonymous with good cheap food, and eating far too much. Sam had trouble eating that day, he said, because he had his arse checked for drugs at the airport. That’s what happens when you inexplicably fly hundreds of miles for a couple of days from a cocaine hotspot.

“I suddenly realised that I had completely screwed up and was at the wrong door, or the back door or whatever. So I ran like as fast as to the front and I thought I saw her getting on this local bus.” He spoke so calmly about such a ridiculously frantic scenario that we couldn’t help but laugh. “It was so clichéd, I ran after this bus with my massive rucksack, choking on this terrible pollution they have there, jumping over roadworks and getting beeped at, yelling her name.” His slight body sat twitching in his seat as he thought about it. I sat in balls-soup flicking sweat from my eyebrows. Laura ate her ice-cream enraptured as the chick-lit plot unfolded.

We couldn’t believe it but he did actually catch up with the bus “and it was her,” he giggled excitedly, “I was so happy, like silly happy.”

So they spent a few days together and he flew back to Santa Cruz to get examined. “It was expensive but… what can I say? I love her.”

Whatever. They knew each other for three days.

Despite his lack of respect for money and ridiculous way with women, Sam was a really nice guy, and we spent a day or two with him before he moved on somewhere else. We did various touristy things together, including climbing a bell tower and recklessly ringing the bell which echoed all across the city. Amazingly no-one said a word about it, although funny looks there were plenty. We paid 1B each to get up there and clearly had to get our money’s worth.

The bell tower was in the central plaza, which was beautifully colonial. We looked down at dozens of thin, brown, relaxed Bolivians. We were starting to become accustomed to the traditional women, Cholitas, which were everywhere. Quite scary-looking, they were generally fat and in their 40s with jet-black pigtails and a bowler hat.

How to be a Cholita:
Buy bowler hat
Buy generic Bolivian dress
Grow pigtails
Get massive arse
Piss in street

Pissing in the street is no joke. Loads of men and women could be seen doing it in Bolivia, making no attempt at hiding it or looking in the least bit like they should be. Cholitas squatted on the side of the road leaking dark yellow stains from underneath their enormous pleated skirts (possibly made from thick Georgian curtains). For this reason a lot of Bolivia smelt awful, especially our next stop.