Misty Mountain Hop // 12th Mar 2005

Hi all,

Sorry, it's a massive email this time. If you don't want to read eight pages, just know that I am safe and well, having a spiffing time in Bolivia.

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Welcome to Bolivia, home of cocaine, llamas and bad tailoring...

Just after I sent the last email, I developed a nasty splitting headache (not aided by being stuck on a boat moored in a harbour with no less than three loud stereos competing for your attention at once), and a major dose of the so-called Delhi Belly. We all thought it was just a heat-related fever, which is quite common for gringos visiting the Amazon basin, and usually passes in a few hours. I dosed up on paracetamol and lay in the hammock all night, and all of the next day. The next morning it still hadn't passed, so accompanied by the Xixuau's nurse and Chris' daughter Cathleen, we took off for the nearby hospital.

Damn these third world countries! I had to wait a whopping three minutes before a young American-accented doctor saw me, and another ten before he'd put me under observation in a ward with a drip in my arm, and was taking blood samples. You wouldn't get that kind of "shoddy" service in the UK – the Crouch Oak Family Practice in Addlestone rarely sees anyone until they're well over the illness, and if you're not, the doctor makes you feel guilty for wasting his time with a non life-threatening disease.

Fortunately the blood tests came back as not being malaria, which could have nicely lopped seven months off my trip, but an intestinal infection. After a thrilling ten hours under observation, they prescribed me heavy antibiotics, lots of paracetamol, and an anti-diarrhea medicine. With my antimalarial pills to take as well, I was on ten tablets before breakfast and eight in the evening. There wasn't really much need to eat after that lot. And after all that, the damned hospital wouldn't take a penny for their services.

That evening our boat chugged its way downstream towards Manaus, the crazy city in the middle of the Amazon Basin. Arriving the next morning I felt marginally better; well enough to say goodbye to everyone from the Xixuau and check into the grotty, run-down Hotel Rio Branco. I set about stocking up on supplies for the boat I was to get on the next day. I also took the opportunity to replace the lovely sunglasses that now adorn a lucky aircraft cleaner in Rio with the most expensive new pair I could find. Three whole pounds later I was looking suave again.

The worst part of being in Manaus, besides the general feeling awful, was being on medication that wouldn't allow me to enjoy a nice cold beer. I'm no alcoholic (but don't they all say that?!), but it would have been so refreshing after drinking iceless pure spirits and lukewarm beer in the jungle for two months. I even found a place that served a blonde beer suspiciously similar-looking to my favourite brand, Hoegaarden, but was unable to quench my thirst with its succulent cold flavour. I also had my first (probably of many) experience of dining in a restaurant alone. I watched closely as a herd of Americans loudly devoured more pizzas than you could shake a stick at, but had noone to make snide remarks to. I've found that when dining alone in a restaurant, it's handy to take my diary. By writing in it, not only do you keep your mind from strangling itself with boredom, but the waiters generally assume you're reviewing the place and treat you very well. (Another similar top travel tip I've found is that a cigarrette given to a police officer, or someone else who can help you, goes a long way. In Trinidad, we got a police escort through the rough parts of the city to the bus station thanks to Mr. Tobacco.)

The next day I went to buy my ticket from Manaus to Porto Velho. Not sure where to go, I made the mistake of asking the first ticketseller I saw, and was mobbed by people trying to sell me boat tickets to anywhere in Brazil. After the initial round of assault, I handed over 110 Reais – nearly thirty pounds – for my ticket. The guy who sold me the scrappy bit of paper showed me the boat that would be my prison, the Christo Rei, which was the closest thing to a floating meat truck you could imagine. My heart sunk – the trip to the reserve on Chris' sweet little boat had been quite pleasurable, getting to know everyone else while slowly ambling up the river, but I would be stuck on this ugly lump of wood, feeling far from well, for three and a half long days – without another gringo in sight.

Needless to say, the initial time on the boat was depressing. I felt pretty homesick, as the implication sunk in that the rest of the world would be mine to take on totally alone. But then I always knew that the times of prolonged isolation would be the worst, and while it was no real consolation or cure, I managed to rationalise in my head why I felt bad and that it would probably be over pretty soon. However, I met a lovely Chilean couple, Sebastioan and Chloe, who are both students in Santiago. Sebastion speaks a little English, and Chloe speaks English really well – remarkable considering she'd learnt purely from movies and pop music. They've invited me to party with them when I get to Santiago next month.

The days on the gloomy boat dragged on. The illness situation impreved slowly, but I wasn't one hundred percent until the fourth day. The third night was a strange experience. We were sitting on the roof of the boat at sunset, when one of the other passengers (who had seen me playing my guitar incessantly in my hammock earlier) brought up his acoustic for me to tune. I did, then jammed a bit before he impatiently took it back and went down the boat to go to my hammock and read. Lots of the people in the small villages of the Amazon are quite religous, so it's no real surprise to witness spontaneous bursts of Christian lecturing or Bible-study all over the place, even on a large, ugly boat. We climbed down from the roof and were heading downstairs when I was spotted by the guy with the acoustic guitar, who insisted that I accompany the hymns the people were singing at the Christian mass on the boat's deck. I ended up stuck at the service clutching a cheap acoustic guitar for the best part of an hour, improvising simple accompaniments to the unpredictable tunes the people were wailing. (It amazes me how little sense of musicality the people of the Amazon I have encountered have – you'd expect all sorts of tribal drumming stuff, but they are more than happy with their dreadful Captain Pugwash accordion-led manufactured samba, and singing isn't one of the local specialities.) Still, I think I managed to blag my way through the service quite well, sticking with the same G-C-D-A chord sequence with a couple of hammer-ons and pull-offs for interest. At the end of the service the people were more grateful than was really deserved, and I couldn't turn round for the rest of the time on the boat without someone shaking my hand or smiling at me with a thankful expression – it was more like I had pulled their daughter from a flaming house than strummed a couple of chords briefly.

On the fourth day, I found out that the man in Manaus had been overly optimistic in promising me that a five day boat trip would take three and a half days. Fortunately Sebastian and Chloe were getting off at the next town to catch a quicker bus to Porto Velho, which would lop a good day and a bit off the travelling time. So we hopped off the boat, laden with heavy rucksacks and endured a few miles' walk in the searing, sticky midday heat along the dirt and badly-paved roads of the town of Humiata (it's on most world maps if you're interested) to the bus station, and my first experience of South American bus travel. Just before we took off in the bus, we were told by the local guy we'd been talking to while waiting that Porto Velho is the city with the most corrupt police in Brazil due to its location near the Bolivian border, and the consequent drug-trafficing that occurs. Fortunately we weren't there for long...

Everyone in South America is more chilled than the rest of the world. So nobody batted an eyelid when the driver of our fantastically un-air conditioned vehicle was swirving all over the road – often into the path of an unsuspecting Fiat Panda, or worse, a large Mercedes fuel truck – in order to avoid the enormous potholes that plagued the road like inverted chickenpox on a child's arm. Worryingly, the road was raised – like an old railway track – and the driver had a habit of swerving onto the steep gradient only a few feet away from nasty, bus-eating bog in order to avoid the warfield-style holes. The driver was hesitant at first, slowing down almost completely to a halt if there was a particularly large crater. But as time passed, the road got slightly better in its condition and the driver appeared to gain his confidence. The more time we were going, the faster he got. And when it started raining and depositing red silt on the road's surface, this was a secret cue to speed up even more. Looking out of the windscreen during the rain, you could barely make out the grey blur that was the tarmac.

After we'd passed the storm, all was going fantastically. We were flying along – quite literally – when the rear tyre burst. The bus swirved all over the shop and gradually slowed down, roughing the passengers up a bit. Everyone got out; some used the nearby stream to relieve themselves while the rest rather unhelpfully gathered around the driver who was changing the wheel. He did it quite quickly; obviously this wasn't the first time a tyre had exploded in the middle of nowhere. We all piled back in, and four and a half hours after we set out, in a lovely spot of rain, we pulled into Porto Velho. Not bad for what we were told was a two hour journey (there's a recurring theme here)...

Sebastian and Chloe were in a rush to get back to Santiago for the start of Sebastian's new university year. It was Saturday, and they had to be about 1000 miles south by Monday morning, so travelling fast was the top of their agenda. Through them I have learnt the art of not stopping; sleeping on buses, not worrying about washing or changing clothes for days on end, and dining cheaply from stalls. By the time we stopped travelling together, I looked like a real traveller – sweaty, unshaven, messy hair, and my backpack has grown to feel more like the limb I've been missing all these years than the heavy load it started out as. But we're about five hundred miles from that part in the story.

Upon arrival in Porto Velho's little bus terminal at around 7pm, without stopping to think even about dinner or the lunch we'd missed, we'd bought our bus tickets to Guajara-merem, at one o'clock in the morning. We started talking to an Israeli guy in the bus station, who changed his ticket to be able to travel with us at 1 in the morningas well. With five hours to kill, Chloe and Sebastian took headed back to the bus station to sleep for a bit, while the Israeli guy (none of us knew his name – he told us several times, but it was instantly forgetten by all) and I headed off to find the cinema. The mall we found was full of rich Brazillian kids of around thirteen years old. I hadn't seen any moneyed Brazillian kids until then, and it surprised me how much like English teenagers they were. They dressed in the standard Western trends – Converse All-Stars, pre-worn jeans and designer t-shirts and caps, talking irritatingly loudly on flashy mobile phones. Once the mall closed, their parents picked them up, in exchange for scowls and the Portuguese equivalent of "You're sooo uncool" in large SUVs and Volkswagen Golfs. The place was packed exclusively with these annoying kids (like a plague if irritating locusts), and the cinema was closed. Somehow we passed the time and got back to catch our bus.

Compared to the last bus, this one was pure luxury, with big comfy seats, hardly any other passengers and air conditioning. To make us appreciate the effort it had taken to install the air conditioning, the driver switched it onto maximum power. We arrived in Guajara-merem at five in the morning and thawed out on the way to the Brazillian border control. Guajara-merem is on the Bolivian border across the river from Guayaramerem in Bolivia. Yes, I was confused by the names. Getting our passports stamped to leave Brazil was easier than completing the mountain of paperwork it required to get into the country. (Dave, you'll know what I mean here.)

We boarded a little steel boat that had seen better days and crossed the river to Bolivia. It felt like I'd made real progress to get there. Normally, you have to get your passport stamped with a visa before you enter a country, but it was a Sunday and the immigration control lady was nowhere to be found. After being carted to her house and back on the back of taxi-trikes crudely made from half a knackered Suzuki motorbike and a lot of badly welded poles, it emerged that she'd been at church.

Bolivia isn't renound for its political stability – there have been something like four new governments in five years – so it wasn't too much of a surprise to hear that bus travel was impossible due to protesters blocking every major road. The bus that had set out last week for our next destination, Trinidad, had taken a full seven days to complete the seventeen hour journey. However, this didn't deter our Israeli friend, who boarded the bus alone. We hopped into a tiny plane, and once the cows had been cleared from the runway, took off. I haven't ever been scared of flying but this was my exception. The plane reminded me of the Pink Floyd lyrics "...I hope you're incredibly thin / And if you are stout / You will have to breathe out / So the man next to you can breathe in". I was disconcerted when the pilot opened the window with the sticker "DO NOT OPEN WINDOW ONCE PLANE IS AIRBORNE". I then realised that not speaking English, most of the warning stickers on the cockpit wouldn't make any sense to him. I could imagine myself in one of those small newspaper articles along the side of the page – "Ten Die In Bolivian Air Crash, Including One Briton".

Miraculously we landed in Trinidad – nice city except for the open sewage grooves running down the side of the street. Once again, we bought a ticket for the bus for that night (along one of the only un-blocked roads), ate junk food (at the overly promisingly named and inevitably disappointing Big Burger) and boarded our ride to the next town, Santa Cruz. The journey was interspersed with stops at grotty towns, and a badly-dubbed Stephen Segal moie specifically chosen for its ability to deprive one of badly-needed sleep.

We pulled into Santa Cruz, Bolivia's biggest city and the home of all the country's wealth, the next morning. We set about finding a bus ticket for Sebastian and Chloe to somewhere close to Santiago (a gruelling two day bus ride), and raced all over the city to find me a plane to La Paz. I don't know why I felt I had to leave the next day, but it seemed a shame to stop travelling when I'd got so far, and besides, having a couple of really friendly interpreters to help buy my ticket, negotiate on prices and generally take care of me was an offer too good to refuse. We covered every inch of the city in flotas, which are cheap minibusses that run fixed routes about the city. The windscreen is invariably covered in stickers which serve a dual purpose; to make sure you know where the flota is going, and to make sure the driver doesn't. In La Paz the flotas have a person whose job it is to lean out of the wondow and yell an impossibly long (and loud) stream of words, presumably places where the bus is going, but without any breaksbetweenwordssoyouhaven'tacluewhatthey'reactuallysaying.

I checked into the originally-named Hotel Bolivar that day, and bode farewell to my friendly Chilean travelmates. The hotel was fantastic – a 17th Cantury house with breakfast buffet, large rooms and a courtyard with inviting hammocks and tame toucans and parrots. I had a relaxing evening walking the city streets, admiring a gorgeous wooden sculpture by a local art student, and losing a good few days' sweat and grime in the luxurious hotel shower. I also had the chance to have my much-coveted cold (Bolivian) beer, and found out why Bolivia isn't renound for its breweries.

The flight the next day was with Transporte Aereo Militar – Bolivia's military airline. I was expecting to be herded onto an olive-green plane beside a bunch of machine gun wielding killing machines, on steel cushionless seats, maybe having to stop to kill a few drug smugglers oon the way. I was pleasantly surprised. It was the best flight I'd ever been on, and the whole experience could be summarised with an old-fashioned sweetness. The passenger list, and flight departures board were handwritten, the boarding card was re-useable laminated cardboard and the staff all wore their uniforms and carried out their duties with pride. Several times during teh flight the air host crouched down to walk down the aisle and offer everyone drinks, biscuits and packets of 'Ears Protectors' (a handmade envelope containing two bits of cotton wool – nothing like the 'borrowed' green foam industrial ear protectors I'm used to from band practices). The flight left from Santa Cruz, stil in the Amazon with hints of rainforest, and crossed into the Andes to La Paz. At various points in the flight I could see to the south teh beginnign of the salt plains and deserts, misty mountains that reminded me of Mordor and Led Zeppelin's Misty Mountain Hop, valleys with enormous flat areas of farmland with roads that cut through the landscape like scars on a back, green and red mountains, and finally the snow-capped Mount Huyuni Potosi and the city of La Paz. The plane had to ascend in order to land at the top of the mountain.

So what's La Paz like? Well, for a start, cheap. My hotel costs the best part of two pounds, and a massive meal costs around the same. Secondly, it's refreshingly cold after being in the tropical jungle for so long. It has a lovely laid-back yet chaotic feel; battered Toyota taxis and hand-painted flotas are always on the move, honking their horns and yelling unfathomable destinations at unsuspecting pedestrians. You can buy a cornish pasty or a bottle of Coca-Cola on teh street for about 15 pence. Over half of the population are indigenous, and a lot of them are very poor. The older women dress in traditional clothes – frumpy dresses, groovy handwoven shawls, and bizarrely, bowler hats. Quite a surprise to me – I've always associated bowler hats with Britishness, bankers, cane-handled umbrellas and single-breasted suits, not indigenous South Americans. (They look spectacularly jaunty.) The young women are beautiful, but it seems they get old quite quickly. And when they wisen, they go the whole nine yards, with more wrinkles than a baby pug, and a sour expression that shows no prospect of lightening. There are cool alpaca (baby llama) jumpers, hats, socks (I went crazy and bought a pair), gloves – you name it, there's an alpaca version.

Quite simply, I love this city. And this country. There's a slight quirkiness to everything, and a price that can't be beat. I had a Bolivian guitar lesson this afternoon, which was interesting. For those who are interested, the timing is mostly 3/4 with interesting strumming patterns aplenty, and the chords used most frequently are G, C, Am, E, D and D7.

Yesterday I went to the fascinating Museu de Coca. It was set up with the aim of preventing cocaine (and particularly crack) addiction, and documents the use of the coca leaf by Inca people (the leaf, when chewed in its natural form, has numerous positive health effects and has been chewed here for over 5000 years), the growth of the illegal cocaine industry, the ill-founded UN study that formed international law on coca plant growth, the war on drugs, how addicts can be cured, and loads of other truly fascinating stuff. I'll send anyone who's interested more information if you like. You can buy coca leaves to chew legally on the street here, which provide a mild stimulant and aphrodisiac, plus a heightened sense of reality. You can also buy sweets which have the same effect.

Thus brings us to the end of this enormous email. Congratulations for getting this far. Briefly, my plan for the next few weeks is this: spend a few more days in La Paz, living on the cheap to recuperate the cost of the two flights, before a three-day climb of Mount Humani Potosi, Bolivia's highest peak, next week (you need at least a week to acclimatise to the altitude before attempting any trekking). After that, I'm thinking of heading to Cuzco in Peru for the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu.

So, my friends, I bid you farewell. Keep me updated with any news from the home front, I love hearing from y'all...

Ollie