Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (17 page)

The Death Road is in a league of its own and the only person who can really keep you safe on it is yourself.

05/11

La Paz is the world’s highest capital city and when you approach it from a height of 400 metres, overshadowed as it is by the snow-crested, 6438-metre Illimani, it looks like a city that fell into a hole from the sky. You think:
Wow!

La Paz has a distinct Andean yet 1960s feel to it, thanks to the ugly beige tower blocks and dangerous low-hanging cables threatening to tangle in the hair of passing pedestrians. Short and stocky, leather-faced
campesinas
(local women) huddle on every street corner drinking
mate de coca
, or hot leafy drinks known to help with altitude from silver cups, wearing infinite layers of ponchos and scarves and the obligatory pork pie hats. They all seem to sell, as far as I can see, bars of Dove soap, loofahs and phone time — whereby you pay by the minute to make a call on one of a collection of mobile phones laid out on a table.

It’s hard to breathe and the people seem to be indifferent to the point that it’s verging on mean. Or maybe that’s just a reflection of my mood at the moment.

I’m still the tiniest bit deaf in one ear and, also, I’ve not really been sleeping well. Perhaps it’s the altitude, but I’ve been having bizarre dreams for the last couple of weeks, the sort that linger with you all day and unsettle you like a tiger crouching in the shadows.

Anyway, I’ve managed to pass a couple of days here before I take another bus to Cuzco in order to begin the Inca Trail. I started by checking out the famous Witch’s Market. I was, of course, hoping for something akin to Diagon Alley, with women in pointy hats stirring cauldrons and casting spells, and perhaps the odd hole-in-the-wall pub with a kindly wizard splashing ladles full of cold Butter Beer into giant mugs. But no. You should know that La Paz’s Witch’s Market is nothing like Harry, Ron and Hermione’s hangout.

Instead, I found a strip of rather uninspiring stalls selling shriveled up llama fetuses and lucky charms. The lucky charms looked more like little jars of cotton threads and Skittles sweets sitting in water. Disappointing. Don’t bother. Unless of course you really need a dried llama baby, or you want to stir up the scene a bit more and go dressed as a witch yourself.

I like this idea. If this Witch’s Market was a staple tourist spot in England, as it is in La Paz, it would have been hyped to the max already with people dressed in costume, juggling with fireballs, selling jellied candy-sheep’s eyes and reading tarot cards on every corner. Bolivia is keeping it real and, I’m afraid to say, it’s all the more boring for it. You can’t even buy a cape.

I spent a couple of hours in the tiny Coca Museum, which is actually great. They hand you a mammoth booklet when you enter, containing all the English translations for the exhibits, which hilariously have been copy-checked quite visibly and numerous times in pencil on each page. I thought it was quite funny how someone’s taken the time to do this, but hasn’t yet printed a new English booklet containing the changes. I would have offered but, you know, I’m quite busy. If you’re in the area and you’re looking for a little project, and perhaps some free coca products (ahem), you know where to go.

As well as learning all about how Coca-Cola derives from an alcoholic drink containing cocaine, which was promptly banned (shame), I learned that Sigmund Freud was the first famous European cocaine user. I didn’t know that; did you? Mind you, it does explain a few things. Doesn’t coke give you a giant ego? You’d have to be pretty aware of an ego to sit down and develop all those theories about it.

We could produce a book in itself about Bolivia’s cocaine issues but suffice to say this country is riddled with it and La Paz is renowned as the top place to try pure cocaine for the first time. Apparently, there are over 9000 factories hidden in three-by-four metre spaces throughout the country.

I heard rumours before arriving in La Paz about a cocaine lounge called Route 36. The problem is, it keeps shutting down and moving. The owner regularly pays off the local police, but they’re still at risk from other officials barging in, so now it’s gone so underground that few tourists can ever find it. I quite fancied popping along, just to talk to some of the clientele about this interesting ‘holiday experience’, but no amount of asking got me any closer.

There are others, of course, in which you’re served the stuff on giant silver platters like canapes at a cocktail party, but it seems the mother-of-all is gone for good. Perhaps I just don’t look trustworthy enough to tell. Either way, I’d probably be careful who you ask if you’re looking for the same thing. You never know when you might find what you’re
not
looking for.

I also tried to get inside the San Pedro Prison. This gargantuan penitentiary in the middle of La Paz is famous for housing criminals convicted of drug-related crimes, yet allegedly it produces some of the country’s best cocaine at night in its factories. You used to be able to take tours and embark on cocaine benders with the infamous British prisoner Thomas McFadden, but these trips are no more, and not just because he’s since been released. A movie version of
Marching Powder
(the book written by Australian Rusty Young about McFadden’s life in the prison) was planned with Brad Pitt in the director’s seat and, with the fear of Hollywood’s invasion upon them, officials at San Pedro began improving its public image.

The media will tell you now that all tours and all cocaine production lines have ceased inside San Pedro but, if McFadden’s words are anything to go by, chances are they’re just being even more sneaky and you simply have to find the right people to bribe. There’s too much money to be made in cocaine production for them to stop completely. Stopping the tours has dented the economy in the prison enough as it is.

Read the book, if you haven’t already, especially if you’re considering a trip to Bolivia. It’s one of the most interesting portrayals of South American drug culture I’ve ever read. McFadden told Rusty everything about the corruption that powers what’s essentially a microcosm of the Bolivian capital. Prisoners at San Pedro are expected to pay for their own cells and food. Their wives and children can live alongside them. There are shops and restaurants inside like any other town, and prisoners live by their ranks, as in the most fortunate and rich can afford giant cells with TV systems, in-built kitchens and en-suite bathrooms, while the poor eat next to nothing, live in shared cells and have to rely on the wealthier prisoners to survive by taking up employment in their various ventures.

According to McFadden, being a prison officer is one of the most highly desired jobs in Bolivia, because of the money to be made by accepting bribes. Some prisoners are allowed to pay to go out for the night, accompanied by a minder, to dance and eat and gamble and drink in La Paz, which is how McFadden got to meet his Israeli girlfriend, a tourist who spent many nights with him in the prison and who, in the end, encouraged him to start the tours. These prison tours were eventually recommended by
Lonely Planet
as one of the most bizarre and exciting ways to spend a day in Bolivia.

Good luck getting in now, though. Brad Pitt would be a wanted man in La Paz and not for the usual reasons.

At my hostel (the Adventure Brew, which is huge), I got chatting to a British girl called Anna who was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring forlornly into her rucksack. It transpired she’d packed for her travels in a drunken stupor after a goodbye party with her friends and, having created two piles of clothes — a ‘maybe’ pile, and a ‘definitely pack’ pile — she had actually packed the ‘maybe’ pile, and now found herself hungover in freezing-cold La Paz with nothing but a collection of sparkly, strapless party dresses, some high heels and her hair straighteners. I tried not to laugh and told her it was better than what happened to a bloke I met in Argentina, who’d packed in a state of blind inebriation and turned up in wintry Buenos Aires with a pair of IKEA bedroom curtains in his bag and nothing to wear at all.

I also got chatting to a guy called Mobi from Argentina. The more we got into our beer, the more he opened up about his travels. Chats about the cocaine industry and our opinions on the book
Marching Powder
led to the subject of ayahuasca. It’s funny, but on the Bolivian salt flats tour, a girl called Claire was talking about it over dinner and I overheard her say, as I had heard several times before now, that ‘the spirit of the vine’ will call to you when you’re ready.

‘When you’re ready to take it, you will know,’ Claire had said and I panicked, because simply by hearing her talk about it, surely I was receiving yet another sign of readiness myself?

For the past month or so I seem to have been hearing more and more about ayahuasca, at the strangest times, without ever asking. And I’m not even in Peru yet. Of course, there were those German guys on the jungle tour in Ecuador way back, who did a ceremony one night with a shaman and spoke of heaven, hell and almost crapping their pants, but even though I was intrigued back then, I never thought to try it.

‘It sounds like Mother Ayahuasca is calling to you,’ Mobi said when I told him all this. ‘How much do you know about the sacred medicine?’

At his words, I was swept immediately back to Ratu Bagus’s shaking ashram in Bali. I spent a week there last year surrounded by hippies and while there was no ayahuasca there, they shot a ‘sacred medicine’ containing blessed tobacco up their nostrils before shaking on the spot for six hours every day, searching for a Divine Energy. I left early.

‘I’ve had some experience,’ I told him. ‘But not with the ayahuasca kind.’

‘It’s one of the strongest hallucinogenic substances on the planet,’ he said. ‘No one really knows if it was created by accident, or if, like they say, the plant spirits directed indigenous Amazonian people to create it, but it definitely changes your life when you take it. I know it changed mine.’

At the widening of my eyes, Mobi went on to tell me stories of his time at a retreat called Hummingbird somewhere near the Peruvian jungle city of Iquitos, including an alarming tale of a lady who got so off her face she drank a man’s sperm from a cup, after he pronounced it the absolute essence of himself, endorsed by Mother Ayahuasca herself. Apparently, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, this hippy also drank his own urine every time there was a full moon.

I finished at least three beers as he spoke and, thanks to the altitude, felt like I’d drunk double. Mobi told me the ayahuasca had helped him to heal emotionally after his friend died in an accident. He saw visions of heaven, a place so beautiful it was difficult to return from, but he also saw death: an infinite black hole filled with screaming demons that he fought his way out of for what felt like hours. He emerged, so he told me, with a greater appreciation for life and a total understanding that every moment, no matter how bad it might seem, is worth living. Even the sperm-drinker felt refreshed afterwards, he said. I was mesmerised. I wanted to know more. I took it as yet another sign.

‘Be careful who you do it with,’ Mobi warned me. ‘It’s getting more popular with gringos and there are con artists who will try to take your money. The right shaman will find you once you start putting your intentions out there.’

I nodded, deciding to start my research at once. And then I told him, probably because I was a bit tipsy and he seemed like the kind of guy I could tell, about all my weird dreams — the swirling shapes and creepy voices coming from floating orbs instead of visible bodies. Mobi smiled knowingly.

‘Sometimes, the plant spirits find you first and try to help prepare you. They know you’re ready. They know you’re coming.’

‘But I’ve not been dreaming about ayahuasca,’ I reminded him.

‘No, but you’re remembering your dreams, which means you’re getting more in touch with your subconscious mind. It’s all part of the preparation. Have you dreamed of any jaguars?’

‘No.’

He looked disappointed. ‘Well, if you dream of jaguars, or snakes, they are signs of protection. Look out for them.’

Whether the stuff about dreams is true or not, ayahuasca seems to be calling me with a force like no other spiritual ritual or practice last year in Bali ever did. While I don’t much like La Paz, cocaine seems like a stupid waste of time and money and the Witch’s Market is about as spellbinding as a broken wand, I can’t deny that the ‘spirit of the vine’ has found me once again, where I least expected it.

07/11

I met a girl from Australia in the hostel today, who chose to come to South America purely based on a series of dreams she’s had since the age of ten. In these dreams, she sees herself as a curly-haired, partly dreadlocked teen in a white dress, running with a female friend through Machu Picchu, surrounded by goats.

She remembers it vividly as a whole place at the heart of the Inca Empire, before the overpriced gift shops and pole-toting hikers cluttered up the landscape. In her dreams, she sees the buildings as they were, she says, their polished dry stone walls and three perfectly intact primary structures: the Intihuatana, or Hitching Post of the Sun, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows.

The funny thing is, this girl never knew what it was she’d been dreaming about until one day when she turned the TV on in Melbourne and saw a documentary on Sun Temples. She was even more shocked to hear that the Incas believed in reincarnation. Some ten years later, she’s come to Cuzco with the sole purpose of standing amid the wonder that is Machu Picchu for herself and seeing if she remembers even more from what she’s sure is a past life she must have led in the fifteenth century.

Unfortunately, this girl is not on the tour I’m doing with Gecko’s Adventures. I’m signed up for a four-day trek, which cost almost $500, including a night in a hotel either side. You can do the Inca Trail cheaper but I’ve heard horror stories about bad guides and not getting fed properly, so it looks as though it’s definitely worth doing some research and talking to other travellers before booking anything.

I shared a taxi to my hostel in Cuzco with a doctor called Al from South Africa, who told me he’d been held at gunpoint in Ecuador and had $500 in cash stolen, on a bus. I decided after that not to carry my iPhone around with me anymore and also to keep all my money in my bra when travelling on buses.

Before arriving here in Cuzco, I had a quick stopover at Copacabana by Lake Titicaca. Twelve kilometres northwest of that town is the Isla del Sol, which has been welcoming pilgrims and visitors for hundreds of years and is really easy to reach on a day trip. It’s an important island in the Andean world of religious sites, as it was here that the Inca dynasty was born, although these days, strangely, it seems to be populated by a large number of filthy, snuffling pigs, a few wild cats in cruel cages and sunburnt tourists looking as I was, I assume, for the Sun Factory.

The Incas believed that the god of creation, a heavenly being called Viracocha, rose from the immaculate waters of Lake Titicaca and commanded the sun and moon to light the whole world. I caught the boat over with a crowd of lobster-red backpackers and spent the day learning interesting things, like the fact that the most famous beach in Brazil, Copacabana Beach (which I’ll see in February, as my plans to go to Carnival are set now), featuring scores of women in thong bikinis and the hottest men in the world, so I’m told, is actually named after Lake Titicaca’s Copacabana. I never saw the Sun Factory but I have my suspicions it was crafted under the lake, which is why it’s so big — the biggest and highest lake in the world at almost 4000 metres.

Another touristy site is the shrine of the Virgen De La Candelaria, where you’ll find Our Lady dressed in lustrous garments and residing in a glass box in the Moorish Cathedral. She’s worshipped there like a living lady, and is only moved at very special times during festivals in case she gets annoyed and causes a flood. I don’t know why it’s called the Moorish Cathedral. It was a bit dull. One visit was enough for me.

There’s nothing really moreish about Bolivia’s Copacabana in general, to be honest. It has awful Internet connection and bad food and most people, like me, just use it as a transit point before boarding a bus either to Bolivia or Peru. The lake is very pretty, though. And I had a lot of fun when I rode a peddle-powered boat shaped like a swan out across the water with a hot man called Boti, who I met while eating a greasy plate of spaghetti and being sad at having no wi-fi in a restaurant that advertised wi-fi.

But I digress. Onwards from Copacabana, I enjoyed another horrible night bus over the border into Peru (during which at one point I had to get off the bus and actually pee on the road in front of oncoming traffic) and two nights of debauchery at the lovely Pariwana Hostel in Cuzco, where I’ve just met my group for an Inca Trail briefing. I’m scared.

To be honest, when I signed up for the Inca Trail several months ago, I had no idea what to expect, really, aside from a lot of walking and some nice scenery. They only let 500 people on the trail each day, so you must book ahead. I’ve just been told that contrary to my imaginings, we’re not staying in cozy hostels along the way. We will not be sleeping in warm beds, taking hot showers at the end of each tedious day, or using handy plugs for charging camera batteries. We will, in fact, be
camping
!

On the plus side, our guide Elias seems quite lovely and speaks excellent English. It’s going to be his 150th time on the Inca Trail and he’s absolutely certain (from looking at us for twenty minutes, sitting on chairs) that we are all physically fit enough to be able to cope, which is comforting. I told him that I didn’t have a sleeping bag just now, to which he chirpily responded that I could borrow one (for 45 soles), along with the hiking poles I’ll also need (for 45 soles). Then I asked him, ‘What about a pillow?’ and he made a rolling-up-clothes motion with his hands, looking at me sheepishly.

I wanted to say all sorts of things, of course, mainly along the lines of, ‘Isn’t there some sort of luxury version of this, involving llamas carrying us up beneath glitzy umbrellas and sleeping beneath goose-down comforters in heated tents, and if so, can I get a refund and do that one instead?’ But in the end I bit my lip and smiled because I don’t want my fellow hikers, who all look very nice and excited, to know what a snob I am. At least Autumn left me with the travel pillow, so all is not lost. Its U-shaped squishiness is a little victory I shall cherish when everyone else is sleeping on their rolled up, mud-spattered hiking pants.

Elias just handed us all sacks that we’re to fill with a maximum of five kilos, although the sleeping bag I’m having to hire weighs two. The porters will carry these, containing our clothes and toiletries and, in my case, travel pillow, scented feminine hygiene wipes and emergency Toblerone stash, so all we have to carry on the trail is a day pack.

I still can’t believe that for once I’ll be doing something at just the right time of year … even though the Incas built the end prize so far away and I’m really not much of an outdoors adventure type person. Let’s think about Machu Picchu, though, the reason I will undertake this treacherous journey. I’ve always wanted to see it with my own eyes.

The Inca people first came onto the scene around A.D. 1150 in what’s now modern-day Peru. The Inca Empire spanned 3500 miles at its height in the 1520s, from what’s now modern Colombia, through to central Chile and quite a lot of Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina. It’s believed that Machu Picchu itself was abandoned around 1572, when those brutal Spanish rulers marched in, stomped all over their traditions and went about destroying most aspects of the Inca culture.

Machu Picchu is called ‘The Lost City’ because it quite literally got lost in the jungle until a lucky American explorer called Hiram Bingham III brushed some wild vegetation aside and rediscovered it in 1911. In 1983 the site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site and now thousands of visitors every year get to witness what’s known as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. Not all of them walk there, though. The cheater’s train only takes a couple of hours.

In order to feel more excited about seeing Machu Picchu for myself, I went to the Inca Museum in Cuzco yesterday. It was pretty good, although, as usual, the English translations left a lot to the imagination. Also, like many museums about ancient civilisations, it was probably about eighty per cent pots. I’m always suspicious of museums that feature vast collections of pots. Sure, you’ve got your mummies in a dark room, conveniently shrouded in cloth and lit very dimly by a two-watt red bulb behind a glass door, and you’ve got your combs and other tools crafted from flint and promiscuous hooker bone, welded together with dinosaur semen and what-not, but mostly what you pay to see in these places is a whole load of pots.

I don’t know about you, but to me this just screams, ‘We don’t know anything about these people at all, but hey, we found some pots, so we’ll make a museum out of them and pretend they tell us loads, till we figure out something else. That’ll be ten soles, please.’

I wonder, if the human race as we know it dies out, whether future civilisations on earth will pay to visit museums filled with the remnants of our Crate and Barrel eighteen-piece dinner sets and Betty Crocker frying pans and cake trays. Will they all go, ‘Ooh, weren’t they clever, would you look at the decorative artwork on that Harvey Norman kettle!’ completely oblivious to the evidence of all that quantum electrodynamics/nuclear fission/laser technology we dreamed up later? It’s a bit daft, when you think about it. The Incas must have made so many wonderful things, but the average tourist coming to Cuzco judges them on their giant pots.

I suppose it’s their fault really, though … they didn’t write anything down. I found out that the Incas kept records by tying knots in bits of string that varied in size and colour, which we can only guess the meaning of in most cases. They communicated verbally, of course, but as for taking a pen to a piece of paper … well, they just drew pretty pictures on all those pots. Even the reason for the existence of Machu Picchu itself is open to debate, and I’m looking forward to learning more about these debates on the trek.

Somewhat disheartened and not much the wiser as to the
real
way of the Incas, I had an excellent lasagne at Cuzco’s Paddy’s Pub, ‘the highest 100% Irish-owned pub on the planet at 11156 ft’, according to the sign (shameful, I know, but someone told me their lasagna was excellent, which it
was
). Then I paid three soles to enter the Museo de Historia Natural, which is basically a large room that smells like disinfectant, full of fossils and creepy dead things.

I couldn’t make out if this was Peru’s ugliest collection of animals, or if they’ve all just been stuffed so badly that they’re now grossly contorted. I swear, there’s a member of the puma family in this museum with the tiniest head ever and a body so long it looks like it’s been tied between two buses driving in opposite directions. All have ghoulish, bulging eyes, too. You wouldn’t want to get stuck in here at night.

Like a lot of South America, the Museo de Historia Natural also needs to invest in some more light bulbs. A lot of the exhibits were shrouded in such a cloak of darkness I could barely tell my dead Homopteras from my dead Orthopteras, two types of what appeared to be giant winged insects, fastened cruelly to red tabletops with large pins. However, if you want to see a pig fetus, a double-headed calf, a Siamese goat or a six-legged lamb, this is the place for you. Most of these oddities from the animal kingdom are crammed into Tupperware boxes, or floating in tanks full of formaldehyde. I stood for a while in front of what had to have been the world’s biggest toad wedged like a strange balloon into a screw-top jar and wondered whether there was more point to a room full of Inca pots, or whether both were irrelevant and I was just a silly tourist throwing my money at whatever I was told to.

Oh. If you’re a corn fan (the vegetable, not the band) there are twenty-one different types in here. I counted them. Corn is very important in Bolivia and Peru: they do everything with it. And while we’re onto veggies, the Incas were the first to cultivate the potato in Peru and there are seventy-eight kinds of fake potatoes on display for your enjoyment as well. I counted them, too. They’re not really good fakes, though. I couldn’t help but think that if the people of Cuzco put half as much effort into producing their fake potatoes as they do their fake North Face and Columbia weatherproof hiking jackets, there might have been more than one person in the museum. As it was, it was just me … counting veggies and scribbling notes like some weird plastic food fetishist from afar.

We’ve got a 5 a.m. start tomorrow and then it’s time to shove everything I own, bar my five kilos, into the hotel storage room and begin the Inca Trail. I’m kind of hoping I get some sort of dream recollection of my own past life in Machu Picchu overnight, so I can have something more to look forward to, like my friend from the hostel. Knowing my luck, though, I’ll dream of getting stuck in a tent with dead toads stuffed into Inca pots, all lit dimly by Mother Ayahuasca holding a red two-watt bulb.

8/11