On a journey of extremes – South America’s richest rewards are in its poorest country.
The cliff-hanging cycle tour down Bolivia’s Death Road is punctuated by rest stops at breathtaking precipices, where guides inform riders about the tragedy of others who have attempted the route before them: the bus that plunged from this ledge, killing 100; the four rusty crosses here that mark a car’s final, fatal turn; the backpacker on a mountain bike, just like ours, who took that hairpin bend way too fast and sailed into the abyss.
My wife and I are not so young and we are not especially seeking a near-death experience when we tackle the 64-kilometre Death Road, an hour out of Bolivia’s political capital, La Paz. It is our last full day on our Bolivian highlights tour, at the end of a three-month, whirlwind tour of South America, which has been action-packed enough for middle-aged risk-takers. We’ve swum with crocodiles and piranhas on our Pantanal tour wetlands of Brazil, strolled blithely into guerilla and landmine territory in Colombia and trekked to the continent’s fabled lost cities.
So we take this ride with the safest outfit money can buy, undeterred by its name, Downhill Madness. We start at 4700 metres above sea level and descend 3600 metres in a few hours, not so much for the adrenalin but because, after only two weeks in this much-ignored country, we do not want to miss a final glimpse of its boundless, heart-stopping beauty. Beneath our pedals, clouds drift through valleys. Don’t look down! Look up and a glacier steals the limelight.
Bolivia was our afterthought. It was not even on the itinerary when we left home. We squeezed it in only after the constant urging of travellers we had met on the road. They said the Salar de Uyuni tour, the salt plains that cover the biggest flat surface on the planet, must not be missed.
We entered Bolivia on a road rimming Lake Titicaca, the high-altitude lake shared with Peru. The postcard does not change at the checkpoint. The indigenous peasant farmers still herd llamas and alpacas; pre-Columbian ruins still speckle the countryside; the locals still speak Quechua or Aymara; the women wear the same bowler hats and smile with the same flash of gold-filled teeth; and, offshore, small boats made of reeds still carry fishing families to artificial islands, also made of reeds, a lifestyle that has persevered on both sides of the border for hundreds of years.
Our first stop, much like the advancing Spanish conquistadors in the 1530s, is Copacabana, 90 minutes over the border. There is little risk of mistaking this modest lakeside town for Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana. And yet that brazen child in Rio was named after this holy place. Pretty but shambolic, Bolivia’s Copacabana, one of the nation’s big tourist attractions, has no auto-teller machines foreigners can use. We discover it will be two days before the bank opens. Nearly cashless, we book in to the only hotel we can find that takes credit cards, Hostal La Cupula. It is a little above our usual standard so we’re relieved the next day to find $80 covers the huge double room with ensuite, three-course dinner with wine and breakfast.
Catholicism and Inca legend are fused in the town’s Basilica de la Virgen de Candelaria. It contains a wooden statue of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary, dating to 1583, to which miracles are attributed to this day. The grandson of the Inca ruler Manco Kapac is said to have carved the statue after the virgin appeared to him in a dream.
The next day we are three hours to the east in La Paz and witness again the melding of belief systems. At the 16th-century San Francisco Cathedral, an indigenous woman goes to the marble font of holy water at the entrance. Discreetly, she dips a plastic bag into the font, looks about, blesses herself, then leaves the church with her loot, perhaps a remedy for a sickly child or a dying mother or a failing crop.
La Paz perches improbably on steep Andes valley walls and sprawls through mountains that howl with the echoes of its vanquished wilderness. The view from slum alleys can be priceless, though the 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya Glacier overlooking the city has all but vanished, spoiling more than a postcard. It has been a vital source of water for La Paz.
The city buzzes – it is wild but with manners, in the way of a place civilised by indigenous and Spanish customs. A tough suburb in the heights rollicks to a brass band on the night we arrive, Aymara men and women dressed to the nines and dancing in the streets, unhindered by the piles of litter at their shuffling feet.
La Paz in Bolivia
Our La Paz stopover tour deserves more than the few days we afford it, so we wear out our shoes on the cobbled streets of the Witches’ Market, knowing we’ll never again buy good leather boots so cheaply and never again find so many alpaca jumpers, scarves and blankets sold in so many shades of bargain.
But we have come with a grand plan. We will bus it three hours to Oruro, from where we will take a first-class, overnight train to Tupiza, in the far south of the country, from where we will ride horses into the canyons and sunsets that possessed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid until their apparent deaths in an ambush.
Sometimes the best plan is to have no plan. Ours is ambushed by a train strike.
Instead, we take an overnight bus further east, on one of Bolivia’s few sealed roads, to Sucre, the judicial capital. It is a historic, charming, manicured, middle-class university town with cheery boozing establishments and comfort food for Western palates. Otherwise, it is an inoffensive stop on the way to the far more interesting Potosi, the world’s highest city at 4090 metres above sea level.
Now UNESCO-protected, Potosi was built around the biggest silver mine on the planet. A scar of barren mountain, Cerro Rico, towers over the town. Founded in 1545, the mine bankrolled the Spanish empire and Potosi, current population 2700, grew to 150,000 by the year 1600. The mine was, and remains, a disgrace. More than 8 million miners have died over its life and many continue to die each year, either crushed by rockfalls in its shafts or, more commonly, of silicosis pneumonia or from the poisonous effects of carbon monoxide, arsenic gas, asbestos and acetylene vapours.
Every day, tourists enter the mine, which yields less silver today, more zinc and lead. It is not recommended for the asthmatic or claustrophobic. I am both. But I cannot resist this opportunity to witness men at work in conditions that have changed little since the Spanish drove indigenous and African slaves to their deaths.
Next on the journey is Uyuni which is not a destination but a launching pad to the world’s biggest and highest salt flats. Here on our Salt flats tour we discover infinity. All perspective is lost out here, where the earth is white, blindingly white. Risen from a lake – and before that an ancient sea – the baked salt earth covers 10,500 square kilometres of Bolivia, 3650 metres above sea level. It is one colossal mirror for the sun.
From kilometres away, the labourers are visible; six or seven salt miners. They are clothed from head to toe but not all can afford sunglasses. They shovel half a tonne a day per worker, for less than $20. For a little more than half that you can buy 50 kilos of their table salt. The supply seems inexhaustible and yet Bolivia still imports the stuff.
Convoys of tourists in four-wheel-drives crawl over the salt-encrusted lake, as if daring to be swallowed. We get out to take trick photographs. There is no foreground nor background in the infinite white, so we become tiny people inside a giant’s shoe, we recline in a potato chip and we poke from wine bottles as if we’re the corks.
We stop at a craggy island rising from the flats that is populated by giant cacti and walk among these eerie triffids. They have grown at one centimetre a year and many are 10 metres tall, so they are 1000 years old. We find the tallest cactus: more than 12 metres. From here we take in the flats. Everything that isn’t salt seems so tiny – the trucks, the tourists frolicking on the flats, all human history before and since the conquest.
Red Lagoon in Salt Flats
That night we sleep in a hotel made of salt bricks and eat at its table made of salt, before another two days of wonders: pink flamingos swarming on lagoons coloured fluorescent green and red, the world’s highest desert, remote geysers spewing steam enough to power cities and thermal springs to soothe a traveller’s aching bones.
Back in Uyuni, there is a steady procession to Minuteman Pizza, the perfect comfort food for cold and weary travellers. We swear, like many others, that it is the best pizza on the planet. Maybe it’s just the altitude. Maybe it’s the fact they take donations for the salt miners to buy them sunglasses. Or maybe it’s all the amazing photos that travellers have left on the walls.
Picchu is looking pretty small, but once we get down to the ruins, the views are stupendous. We dump the loathed rucksacks and embark on a 2-hour tour with Washington, to learn about the King’s habitat for himself and his 400!! children, the result of several (100s of?) concubines, and the Sun Temple’s geometrically-aligned windows, allowing light during the summer and winter solstice to hit the same point on some special rock: a symmetry that, today, astrologists still marvel at.
There is no more popular 