Paraguay, utopia and life lived one-handed

Life in Paraguay is essentially life lived one-handed. The conductors on the buses as well as most of the passengers, the pedestrians in downtown Asunción, the motorcyclists in Concepción, the police, the shopkeepers, the idle knots of men in the plazas all manage to go about life using only one hand. Their other hand is forever occupied in clutching a tereré or maté cup; the accompanying thermos is always close by, wedged in armpit or crook of elbow.

Maté is not unique to Paraguay. In northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and in every street in Uruguay people sip on the strong infusion of tea through metal sieve-straws called bombillas. Paraguay, though, is the home of tereré, the same infusion served iced, sweet and packed with medicinal-or-otherwise herbs.

The prevalence of tereré, especially given the inconvenience of relinquishing forever the use of one hand for the sake of lugging it about, defies logical explanation. At all hours and in all situations, tereré is sucked upon in an almost preconscious, unintentional way. It reminds me of the relentless consumption of coca in Bolivia. It reminds me of a child fastidiously, resolutely dragging his security blanket with him at all times.

Perhaps because of this one-handed lifestyle, or the assurance gained by the touch of the tereré flask, or the properties of the tea and herbs, Paraguayan life takes place at a permanently sedate pace. It is a land in which hours and decades disappear easily, where things change slowly and horsedrawn carts still clack along the uneven paved or dirt streets. It is also a place in which people can hide, a haven of obscurity where people can do things they wouldn’t do elsewhere. In the 17th century the Jesuits set up camp here, building their reductions, their missions, and melding their culture with that of the indigenous groups to produce successful, syncretic communities utterly at odds with the exploitative style of other colonial projects in the Americas. In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish territories, and their little utopia came to an almost overnight halt.

Later Paraguay became the site of New Australia, an attempt by Australian leftist outsiders to build a socialist Utopia, This project in time also fell apart, as its members bickered and formed factions and breakaway communities. Eventually the Paraguayan government put an end to the project, dividing up the land among the community members. Apparently Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister tried to start an all-Aryan New Germany shortly after this.

More successful and showing no signs of disappearing or being disappeared are the Mennonites. The promise of unsettled land and complete seclusion drew them groups of Mennonites from the persecutions of the norths down to the wilds of Paraguay, where they could and can practice their religion in peace. Other groups (eg Japanese, Korean, Jewish refugees, Nazis, the Moonies) have also found their havens down in the obscurity of Paraguay.

The country is not always a sanctuary, though. A long history of dictators-acting-with-impunity has kept Paraguay a paradise of corruption, and at times cruelty and barbarism. It has long been a haven of contraband and cut-throat, cut-price shopping for big brothers Brazil and Argentina. Most of urban Paraguay hugs its river-borders, as close as possible to potential customers and commerce. Paraguay’s largest export is hydroelectric power, of which Brazil and Argentina enjoy vast amounts at criminally low prices.

The isolation of Paraguay has also preserved pockets of wilderness and wildlife, and perhaps most curiously of all, a language. Prior to European colonisation, Paraguay was inhabited by many small indigenous groups speaking a variety of languages, many completely distinct form another. Today though, Guaraní is the language of choice, and is more widely spoken than Spanish, with which it shares official language duties. This is the only case in the Americas of an indigenous language being adopted on a widespread scale by non-indigenous speakers, and stands in awkward discord with the plight of indigenous people and culture at large. Several indigenous groups today are on the brink of extinction, their entire remaining populace living in roadside shanties that look out across land they are legally entitled to, but still are powerless to inhabit.

I spent a good deal of time not quite sure of what to do in Paraguay. Its only superlatives, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and the world’s largest aquifier – a huge underground source of freshwater – are not the most thrilling prospective destinations. This is not to say that Paraguay is short on things-worth-looking-at; they are just little known or publicised outside of the country. I spent much time on buses or in plazas watching one-handed life trickle by me. The people I encountered were both shy and eager to help; they would point me in the right direction, pause as though to say more, and then quickly slip away. Although Paraguay has long been a haven for outsiders, these have tended to keep to themselves. The volunteers and tourists that turn up in Paraguay, hoping to find rather than lose themselves, are curious specimens for locals. Even the owner of my hotel in Asunción asked me what was keeping me there (for four nights).

Sometimes the cautious hospitality was incredibly helpful; in Encarnación I was eventually escorted by police patrol to the house of a friend of the couchsurfer I was supposed to be staying with but couldn’t contact. Other times the best-intentioned help didn’t work out; trying to leave Ybycuí I was told that Paraguayans always stop to offer a ride to anyone in need. This is true, but most Paraguayans aren’t on long-hall journeys from town to town. The few available rides on that empty road were mostly over the next hill to the next farmhouse.

The languid pace of life slows even further out there in the suburbs, the towns, the villages, the little concrete houses lost among overgrown gardens and herds of long-eared cows. On that night when I couldn’t find my couchsurfer I stayed in the poorest house I will probably ever stay in, a thing of corrugated iron and crooked-fitting wooden pailings and dirt floor. This was also where I received the warmest welcome fo Paraguay, where I was given a bed and plied with traditional food (including the chicken that had just had its neck wrung). It was here in this least probable of settings that I was finally, fully welcomed into the world of the one-handed, sipping on hot maté to counter the rain drumming on the iron roof and staining everything with brick-red mud.

The elegant crumble of Asunción

I had few demands of Paraguay, but one of them was that I see elegant old buildings, their once-colourful facades now peeling, fading, flaking and crumbling. Asunción didn’t disappoint; its historical heart is full of buildings clinging to their faded grandeur, even as their windows are boarded up and they are abandoned to urban decay.

Downtown Asunción is a strange place, the streets are full of civil servants, money changers and shoe shiners. Everyone else, it seems, has moved out to the suburbs. One of the central plazas has become a tent city; people came from out of town to protest and got stuck here, huddled beneath tarpaulins and around smouldering fires. The presidential palace, the senate and the congress (which is a gleaming new thing built with ‘thanks for believing in us’ money from Taiwan) buildings look out across a sluggish curve of the River Paraguay, but between them and the river has sprouted a shanty-town that now shares a back fence with the palace.

Needless to say the palace is well-maintained (and heavily heavily guarded), as are a few other monuments of national pride, like the Pantheon of Heroes where unknown soldiers and dictators lie coffined side by side. Around these proud edifices the downtown is crumbling. Some of the more significant historical buildings are being restored by various cultural centres – Spain, Catalonia, France, Germany and Japan are all involved in preserving Asunción – but these are well outnumbered by the buildings doomed to obscurity. It is a strange feeling, walking the evening streets and realising just how many of the buildings are uninhabited or underinhabited. It was just as strange realising I was the only guest for four nights in a three-story hotel.

Where once the city might have clustered around its palace and cathedral, now it centres itself around the malls. Giant shopping compounds, skirted by drive-through everything (including the first McDonalds I’d seen in seven months) are scattered around outer-Asunción, and these are a far far better place for sampling the contemporary culture of the city. The centre of the city might be decaying, but out around the malls everything is fresh and hip and glossy.

I inevitably cringed, as most backpackers will cringe, at the idea of spending too much time among the malls. The old downtown was full of fantastic, free galleries and museums and cultural centres. The malls were full of people. The old downtown was full of crumble and decay that for whatever reason attracts me so, but the malls had places to eat, supermarkets, bookstores. For any Paraguayo the choice must be easy; grub around among the emptying shells of the past, or hang out with your friends and meet people among the foodcourts and cinemas of new-Asunción. It is a shame for the city, and after visiting the malls the centre feels all the more forlorn and lonely, but this was exactly what I demanded to see. So the malls  and the McDonalds, the SUVs and the siliconed wives, the enormous parking lots and air-conditioned foodcourts, maybe they’re all just the inevitable consequence of my search for elegantly crumbling architecture.

Two National Parks in Paraguay

Skinny-shouldered parrots, jays with flaming crests, wisps of stork, jabirus brooding like butlers, raw-headed vultures, birds of prey frozen in attitudes of indifference, and flocks of black, brown, grey, white and blue; there was more wildlife to be seen on any bus ride across Paraguay than there was in many patient hours spent skulking about the undergrowth of its national parks. The roadside birds were largely unfazed by the buses thrumming past, while a single heavy bootstep in the parks was enough to put unseen creatures to flight, or to fill a forest with silence or alarm calls.

The parks I visited in Paraguay – and these were the most accessible, least-remote parks – are definitely not major tourist destinations. They were well-equipped, with guest services and rangers ready and waiting, and one even had bilingual information in its museum, but it is not exactly easy to arrive at all these quite-good facilities. Most visitors are locals who drive in, visit the war memorials and promptly drive out again. Hiking trails are well-marked on maps, but are fast receding into the rampant wilderness.

The war that spawned the memorials was the War of the Triple Alliance, in which the (then considerable) military might of Paraguay got embroiled in a battle against the less-prepared forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. During the six years of war Paraguay lost territory, had its capital sacked and had its population reduced to less than half of what it had been. The war effort was pushed on by the increasingly mad dictator Francisco Solano López until he was finally shot down while trying to flee the site of his final defeat.

Parque Nacional Cerro Corá is where Solano died and the war ended. With the end of the last dictatorship in Paraguay in 1989 the memorialising of Solano and his type has passed out of favour, but Cerro Corá is still riddled with monuments to the tyrant that almost saw his country disappear off the map.

The road to Cerro Corá crested the first brief suggestions of hills that I had encountered in Paraguay. Herds of bone-white cattle lay tranquil in patches of clear land studded with intransigent palm trees. Close to the park the soft undulations in the land grew more severe, and stone began to break through the earth, forming great stumps of isolated cliff among the scrub and forests of palm.

I was again dropped on the side of a highway, and pointed off along a dirt road. The park visitors centre, when I stomped up to it, was deserted except for a skinny black cat with a squint. Secure with my bag of bread and ramen I sat and waited for someone to arrive and let me into the bunkhouse.

The sun went down, I helped the cat dig chicken bones out of the trash; no one showed up. I squeezed my pack and myself through an unlocked window and claimed a gritty mattress for myself. I wondered how long I could live on bread alone, given that i could’t heat the ramen. I wondered whether the ghosts or the camp ground psychopaths would come for me first.

A ranger and some cyclists did eventually show up, but even though I wasn’t alone in the park after a full day of wandering its red-sand trails there were more of my footprints than of everyone else’s combined. Although few people explored the trails, they were scrawled across with animal prints; small dogs, big dogs, small cats, very big cats, pigs, deer, rodents, small birds, big birds, very big birds.

The whole park felt a lot like a land that time forgot, with its rolling plain of dusty green punctuated by those great molars of eroded mountain; the sort of place in which men in pith helmets are set upon by dinosaurs. A land remote and magnificent.

One of the great difficulties of reaching the other park was getting its name right. I did finally arrive at Ybycuí, but only after clarifying which Yby- I wanted to visit (I still can’t pronounce the park’s name comfortably). Ybycuí preserves some of the last stands of sub-tropical forest in Paraguay, a great swathe of trees and insects and never-seen animals. There were things out there, bounding through the bracken, but in Ybycuí their privacy is virtually undisturbed.

The memorial here was attached to an iron foundry that functioned throughout the war, manned by the swelling number of political prisoners. Its remote location wouldn’t seem to suit such industry, but I suppose the transport connections were better in those days.

Long loops of streams coil about the park, some flowing and chattering, others still and brooding. Waterfalls link them together and are prominently displayed on maps, but really the best of the park was not these secluded drops, but the grander seclusion of its long, forested slopes, the shadows and the sunlight, the things rustling in the green.

And this was really what the parks can best offer. There is nothing mind-blowing or jaw-dropping about them, but they offer a chance to disappear completely into the mystery and seclusion of their lands; war flickered among the trees and glades of both parks, but since that brief ripple these lands have remained remote and unspoiled. A place where wildlife can hide, and where infrequent gringos can lose themselves.

Filadelfia: a multi-lingual backwater

El Chaco, the vast flatland that covers the northern half of Paraguay and sprawls over into Bolivia, has a reputation as a harsh world of thorns and mud (in winter), or thorns and dust (in summer), where few men would dare or bother to try and scratch out a living. Once upon a time Bolivia and Paraguay, each backed by an international petroleum company, went to war over this region, when it was thought that (as yet undiscovered) oil might be lying beneath all that dirt and scrub.

The Trans-Chaco has a reputation as being a rough, tough stretch of highway that jolts and slithers from one nation to the other, but compared to most of the mountain highways in Bolivia, where every nighttime bump had me convinced we were about to topple over some immense precipice, this road feels tame and civilised. On the Paraguayan side of the border it is even asphalted. The endless, dead-straight strip, on which the vehicles appearing out of distant mirages took many many long minutes to finally pass the bus, was utterly unlike anything I had seen in the past six months. It was all so low, and straight, and flat.

This wild wilderness was where I bid my midnight goodbye to Bolivia, paid my expired-visa fine, and entered into Paraguay, a country I had prowled along the border of on my last South American trip, but had been unable to enter. This time I had the visa, and I was welcomed into the country by disinterested customs officials and straw-haired kids asking for food.  

The bus dropped me at a big, blank intersection, and I was told that to get to Filadelfia I should hitchhike, and that it wouldn’t be hard because the Mennos were good people. I’d wanted to stop in Filadelfia for exactly this reason; to find out something about the Mennonite communities that had washed up in waves in El Chaco, and that had somehow managed to thrive and prosper out there.

It was a friendly rancher that brought me to the edge of Filadelfia, and into the strange world that the Mennonites built. Filadelfia is the centre of the Fernheim Mennonite communities, which were settled by groups of Canadian, Russian and German Mennonites fleeing various persecutions of the 20s, 30s and 40s. It is also the first town I’ve seen in South America not to have a central, monument-filled plaza. The Mennonites wasted no time with such things; the first buildings erected here were a hospital, an industrial plant, the cooperative centre where goods are bought, sold and bartered, and the town hall, which had to serve for all governmental, social and religious purposes in the early days.

Today Filadelfia is a logical grid of dusty streets, its ‘main street’ being the strip of shops facing the plant and old town hall across a wide avenue. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed children tinkle along on bicycles, and giant pickups roar through the town. A few blocks from the ‘centre’ in any direction and the asphalt once again gives way to dust tracks and wild scrubland of cactus, bottle trees and thorns.

The success of the Mennonites here is a great credit to their work ethic; ‘Faith, Work and Unity’ is the maxim on the municipality sign, and the communities have thrived and brought prosperity to the Chaco through an uneasy mix of disparate cultures and values. The Mennonites are big land-owners out here, and they have cleared vast tracts of land to graze the cattle (this is illegal today but continues) that produce renowned Menno dairy products, but there are many miles of Chaco and not all that many Mennos, and much of the hard and menial work is done by members of the indigenous communities that have existed in some form or other for centuries in El Chaco. While Filadelfia represented a new and remote home for the Mennos to preserve their beliefs in, it is also a successful farm town, full of teenagers on dirt bikes and pin-ups advertising cheap beer to those whose beliefs do not forbid such things. Street vendors sell pirated DVDs, which apparently aren’t overtly prohibited in the Bible. I spent my first night in a rough hotel patronised by brown folk and my second in a neat, clean place patronised by white folk. The town is more or less divided along these lines; the wealthy, white people are greeted in German, and the poorer, brown people are greeted in Spanish or Guaranì. A polite formality exists and maintains the balance between the two groups, and as long as that harmony survives the community flourishes. This is probably the most multi-lingual country town anywhere in the world.

I didn’t do much with my time in Filadelfia; the town can be walked in an hour, its only museum can be seen in a few short minutes (a few more if you can read German), but it is none the less a fascinating place, with its strange ethnic mix, and its rigid formality. A trickle of tourists pass through, and these generate cautious curiosity. Cameras provoke suspicion. I did have the chance to meet a fellow couchsurfer who was doing time as a volunteer out here. As interesting as she was finding her work, there couldn’t be many tougher places to live as an expat; the rigid Mennonite codes and sensibilities imposed upon her because, as a white girl, it is with these that she belongs. And even apart from this there is the simple fact that there is almost nothing out here; the town is as dry as Mennonite aesthetics, or the vast emptiness of El Chaco.

My favourite sliver of Filadelfia life was that although the community has adopted the long, catatonic siesta, this siesta is still commenced and terminated every day by a loud bullhorn sounding from the industrial plant. Not a minute more relaxation can be tolerated, and as the horn sounds the sleepy streets become busy with motorbikes as people rush to and from work, cleaving to their defining work ethic and bringing a few frantic moments to this otherwise sleepy scrubland town.

Santa Cruz: the surprisingly-Bolivian city

I’ve probably never been so full of preconceptions about what I would find in a town as I was when the bus brought me into Santa Cruz. From the Che sites the bus had lumbered ever downhill into overgrown, tropical lands where the clothing got scantier as the foliage got denser, until we reached the big smoke that I’d heard so much about.

From a tourist perspective it would be easy to overlook Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s largest city in terms of population and of urban sprawl. From a holistic, wanting-to-see-both-sides perspective, though, the city is impossible to ignore. Even if there is really nothing to see here.

La Paz is high and dense, crammed into a canyon, full of old traditions, and fanatically loyal to Evo. Santa Cruz is flat, low and tropical, sprawling over the by turns muddy and dusty flats, full of SUVs and American brands, and rabidly, rabidly anti-Evo.

None of this is any secret; Santa Cruz is billed as more Miami than Bolivia, and it has often erupted into violence and confrontation with Evo and his loyal factions. I was expecting to finds signs of all this, but on the other hand I’ve met great cruzeñas (one in particular) in other parts of the country, and these people testified to the friendliness and casual openess of the city. It is a world far removed from the hard stoicism of the mountains.

Walking the streets, Santa Cruz struck me as a weird cross between Houston and Manila, although the locals of either city would have good reason to consider Santa Cruz as small-fry in comparison with their own metropolises. None the less the similarities are there; Santa Cruz has grown out of a colonial Spanish outpost, and in its centre traces of this are still visible. Until a few years ago sloths hung from the trees in the leafy central plaza. The city has really only become significant in the last 60 years, though, as highways and railways have linked it with the rest of Bolivia, and more importantly with Brazil and Argentina. These allowed bargain-hunters in and agricultural produce out. Although how much more beef and fruit do Argentina and Brazil need? The rise of cocaine and the rise of Santa Cruz may form a far more important correspondence.

More important still was the discovery of grand gas reserves in Santa Cruz department. Thus came Houston to Santa Cruz, a city now of opportunistic businesspeople, of the nouveau riche, of urban sprawl, and of gaz-guzzling vehicles. Nobody is anybody without a car in Santa Cruz; how else would the world know what music you like to play?

I had no idea what to do in Santa Cruz. I wandered the city centre looking for guidebook-recommended restaurants, but most had moved on. Time and again I returned to the pretty central plaza, where old men gathered to play chess, and dignified, jacketed vendors sold steaming cups of coffee with rapidly-forming skins. Nuns flitted by and dogs attired in far more expensive clothes than mine strained on their leashes. Still, the most surprising thing about this place was how Bolivian it felt.

No true cruzeña would want to hear this. The woman I stayed with, among others, sang the praises of Santa Cruz, a modern, cosmopolitan city without the problems of the poor mountain pueblos. But the salons and boutiques of the centre quickly give way to familiar crumbling facades and dirt streets. The people here are whiter, many are taller and slimmer than the mountain-dwellers, but they are still filled with caution and curiosity and need to stare a bit when they spy a gringo. There are still people begging, people selling whatever they can to earn a crust, people sleeping on crushed cardboard in doorways. In Santa Cruz everyone can work if they want to, my hostess told me, but the city is known for its crime too, and even immediatly beyond the high walls and gates of the hostess’s house there are decrepit hovels, and streets that are little more than thick bogs of mud.

On my Saturday night in Santa Cruz the city gathered around any public screen to watch featherweight Venezuela beat the Bolivian national team in a world cup qualifier.Anguished faces and fists slamming on tables – just like those in every other city in the country – showed that beneath all the vitriol of regionalism these people are Bolivian, just like their highland rivals.

Why so much hatred then? Why the photographic exhibits proudly showing cruzeñas attacking police, storming government buildings, humiliating indigenous people? The uniformity of the bile on the tip of every tongue here makes me throw questioning glances at the media, which makes no attempt at objectivitiy, and is (of course) owned by the powerful and wealthy of the region. These people have reason to hate Evo; Santa Cruz has risen as a haven of semi-legal business, of tax evasion and of getting unmarked packages across the border. Evo wants to redistribute land, ensure the government receives its share of all profits; he wants to centralise and legislate, and hamper the freedoms these remote jungle traders enjoy. And from these people, I can only assume, spreads all the fascistic claptrap about the need to defend ‘liberty’, to fight Evo and his indigenous, pagan hordes. The same old, tired story of the cunning and the influential tapping into the credulities, ignorances and vanities of those propping them up.

Three days in Santa Cruz was more than enough. I grew tired of all the pro-Santa Cruz babble and the anti-Evo drivel; for all its wealth Santa Cruz is a dull city, low on art, low on prettiness or curiosity, low on traditions and culture, high on shopping and gas. The sad truth, I suspect, is that those making all the money know that this ia a temporary thing, and are just trying to make what they can while they can. The gas supplies will deplete, the tax and border regulations will tighten, and they will be forced to take their rackets elsewhere. There is thus little reason for them to invest in the city; SUVs are a safer investment, and will allow them to flee the scuppered city all the more quickly when the time comes.

Did Che Guevara die of boredom?

I said my tearful goodbyes to my little world in Sucre, having delayed the inevitable for a full month, striking off one by one every name from my list of intended cities-to-visit, until there were only two names left, Samaipata and Santa Cruz; a cursory visit to the lush low and lower lands of Bolivia’s East before I left the country behind.

The last day in Sucre was all rushed goodbyes and slow shuddering hugs before a bus rushed me off and into the night. At 4am I was left on the dusty highway on the outskirts of Samaipata and spent the next few hours loitering about the town, the air full of rooster howls and dog cries, until a hostel opened its doors.

Samaipata is talked up on Bolivia’s gringo trail. Situated at less-than-troublesome altitude and between animal-rich national parks, milennia-old ruins and the villages where Che Guevara passed his last days, it is known as a place to relax in between partaking of the many adventures in the region. I’d long had my eyes on the Che trail, but as the time dwindled away it too had been scrubbed from the list of intended destinations.

Samaipata by daylight looked almost identical to Samaipata in the small hours of the morn. The town was empty, its lush central plaza abandoned, most of the shops and restaurants closed. Only the string of tour agencies had opened, but the price for a personal tour (there certainly wasn’t anyone around to share a tour with) per day was almost double what most Bolivian make in a month, and as usual the miser within me screamed his arid objections. There just didn’t seem to be any way to do anything in Samaipata; I was left my scratching my head and wondering whether Che Guevara had died of boredom.

On my first afternoon I wandered out to El Fuerte, the only Samaipata site more or less within walking distance. A pretty and mysterious place it is, perched, on a hilltop overlooking green valleys. ‘The Fort’ itself is a natural stone slab atop the ridge and riddled with ornamental carvings and niches for holding ancient, long-disappeared idols. The usual myths implicating extra-terrestrials, vasts hordes of gold and super-sophisticated, mysteriously-extinct cultures surround the site; more likely, though, is that generations and epochs of different groups, aided by the sculptural tendencies of nature, gradually hacked and wore away more and more of the site until what was once a curiously big rock became a bizarre bastion of half-terraces and empty nooks and crannies; a place that even today seems eerie and haunted by ghosts or fairies or deities.

The site is slowly being reconstructed and groomed back into service, and the pilgrims are coming, although mostly on half-day guided tours. I was there alone, picturing jabbering deities in every niche, and wondering why Che had picked such a tranquil and isolated spot in which to foment revolution in Bolivia.

I decided to visit some of the Che sites; no doubt there were ways of reaching them that didn’t cost 1000Bs per night. It was just that no one seemed to know what they were. Checking out of Samaipata I had to grapple with the usual dodgy maths and suddenly inflated prices, and speculated that maybe these had been responsible for the death of Che Guevara.

I was very lucky on the dusty highway outside of town. Before long an open-topped truck rolled up which was heading to Vallegrande, where the body of Che was presented to the media and then buried with minimal honour. Over the side of the truck i went; it was full of bags of rice, as well as decrepit furniture and one enormous karaoke machine. Alone in the back, I dozed in the sun, the silly truck-riding grin smeared across my face.

Approaching Vallegrande I asked the driver if he would be continuing on, and he rattled off a vague list of villages further along the road, including La Higuera, where Che was captured and executed. It was only later on, after an immense woman heaved up among the rice bags beside me had begun asking for money, that the driver explained that he wouldn’t actually be going to La Higuera, but that it was a quick walk to the village from where he would drop me off. I wondered if I had missed that point earlier, his clenched country drawl near impossible to decipher, or whether he had just felt no need to mention such details. And I wondered if accent problems and cultural barriers had killed Che Guevara (and apparently they had played their part, Che’s faction learning the Guaraní of the lowlands and not the Quechua of the mountains we were winding among).

The sun set over the endless folds of ridge and valley, and I was left at the roadside with another clench-jawed campesino who was very very uncomfortable in my presence. He kept his distance, head bowed, wolfing down bruised bananas, but with the aid of the cookies stashed in my pack I prised sentences out of him. The driver had said (this I am sure of), that this guy would take me into town, and that it would take less than an hour. After an hour the guy stopped abruptly, said that this was his home, and disappeared over a gate of sticks. Perhaps Che had died by the stoic mistrust and suspicion of the locals (and this too must have played a part, because the revolution certainly didn’t ignite out here).

Alone in the dark with a pack on my back, I decided that this was exactly how Che would have spent his time here. I followed my shadow cast by the moon, and tried to keep my imagination away from the things moving in the trees and bushes.

An hour later I caught a glimpse of La Higuera, a few lights glimmering among the trees. When I came to the town it was deserted, save for the grumble of the generator and the drawn-out creak of the guesthouse gate. The guesthouse was also deserted. Did Che Guevera perhaps die of a spooked and lonely heart? For one of the rare times in this whole jaunt, I craved gringo company.

The town was not completely deserted though; on the main plaza – consisting of three Che monuments and a few sleeping dogs – a gas lantern shone light through the open door of a tiny shop. Into that puddle of light stepped an old lady with a nervous tic and an oozing eye. She offered me stern hospitality, and a headful of reminiscences about the last days of Che.

La Higuera turned out to be beautiful and tiny and well worth the trek. As my host told me over dinner and then breakfast and then lucnh, before ‘the war’ the village had numbered 80 families. Now it numbers about 20. Those that remain are sustained by the slowly increasing trickle of Che tourists. Che may be revered all over the world, but nowhere more so than here, where he is probably alone responsible for the ongoing existence of the village, and certainly for the constant supply of Cuban doctors and investment (the newish school I stayed in was built with Cuban support). The town, being of Santa Cruz province but also of the Quechua-speaking impoverished mountains, is divided between admiration and distrust of Evo Morales, but for Che, a man of more extreme socialistic tendencies, they have nothing but adoration.

And finally, this is how Che died, according my hostess, told over stale bread and gritty coffee and piles of potato and corn, and quite different to how I had previously read, written and imagined the story to go.

Che had stayed in the village, sleeping outside the schoolhouse in which he would later be incarcerated, with his tiny band of revolutionaries. Three hundred soldiers had descended on the village in pursuit, and Che’s group had been forced to flee, jettisoning their scant supplies as they headed down into the dry quebradas below. The soldiers had been unable to find the group, though they had combed the area. They offered anyone in the town $100US for information about the guerillas, but no one would have betrayed them for any money. The guerillas had holed up in a natural cave, inside as big as a house but virtually impossible to find from the outside. Eventually a cattle farmer passing through the quebradas stumbled upon their position and informed the soldiers, who set out en masse. The final shootout took place on the banks of a stream, shaded by old trees. Thirty soldiers were killed, as were four guerillas; Che and his companions ‘Willy’ and ‘Chino’ were captured and taken to La Higuera. Che was a shadow of his former romantic self, his beard long, his face blackened, sick and skinny, his boots in tatters. In the evening he was given his last meal, peanut soup (sopa de mani) and chicken – such ingredients as can’t be found in La Higuera any more – which he devoured with hunger. At 3am he was taken outside and placed against a wall. He said ‘you are only going to kill a man, not the revolution’, and then was shot several times. A helicopter came, scattering the terrified locals. Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande where it was cleaned and exhibited. His hands were cut off and made their way to his widow in Cuba, his body was buried in Vallegrande.

Sucre celebrates two hundred years of ‘independence’

For as long as I have been in Sucre the city has been fixated on its impending bicentennial. On May 25^th the city would celebrate what the giant posters festooning the churches and plazas have advertised as the two hundredth anniversary of the ‘first cry of freedom in the Americas’. In preparation for this grand date the central plaza was fenced off for three months so that its perfectly fine paving could be uprooted and replaced. Buildings all over town were obscured by scaffolding as fresh coats of paint were thrown at every slightly off-white edifice. Other stranger changes occurred; previously blank and chaotic roads received confusing lane markings and other arcane symbols; bright orange trash cans appeared in every street; on the eve of the bicentennial electronic walk/don’t walk signs appeared around the central plaza, twittering and flashing conflicting signals and bewildering the locals.

The bicentennial was to be Sucre’s finest hour; which other South American city could boast of having electronic cross walk signs? Along with everything else, in the lead-up to May the city was bedecked in flags. Bolivian flags hung from balconies in every street, and with them hung the provincial flag – a barbed and medieval red cross on a white field. It was in Sucre in 1809 that Bolivia – then known as ‘Upper Peru’ and little more than a mineral-rich territory caught in the crossfire of the Lima vs. Buenos Aires rivalry – first declared independence. It would take another sixteen years to actually achieve independence.

A sort of historic sleight of hand is involved in this claim to the first cry of freedom in the Americas. By 1809 the American Revolution had already taken place, Haiti had gained independence and early independence movements had already risen (and fallen) in Venezuela. Still, claiming 1809 as the anniversary allows Bolivia to leapfrog all its South American neighbours, whose bicentennaries all fall between 2009 and 2025. Where Bolivia should be the last to celebrate its independence, it has become the first.

The weeks leading up to May 25^th were a jumble of concerts at shifting venues, food fairs and semi-celebrity sightings. The Ms. Bolivia contestants arrived en masse, all of them about two feet taller than the average Bolivian. There was a Ms. for every city and province, and one from the phantom Litoral province, which Bolivia lost to Chile in the War of the Pacific over a hundred years ago. I’m not sure who she was or where she actually came from, but she looked too frail to reclaim the province she was representing. Ms. Chuquisaca (Sucre’s province) unsurprisingly won the title of Ms Bolivia, and Sucre was firmly back in the spotlight. It may have lost two of the three branches of government, it may have very few significant industries or businesses (apart from a cement factory that sponsored many of the celebrations), it may no longer be at the fore of progressive American thought, but Sucre had Ms. Bolivia, and it had the bicentennial.

The celebrity Bolivian most conspicuously absent from the bicentennial was polarising president Evo Morales. He made an appearance at Ravelo, a town close to but not within the boundaries of Chuquisaca, before returning to fortress La Paz. Sucre’s days as one of the progressive centres of the Americas are well and truly over. Nowadays conservatism characterises this city of lawyers and dentists. When Evo was elected the idea of an indigenous president, especially one fixated on reform and wealth redistribution, sat very uncomfortably with Sucre’s white and wealthy. As Evo has shifted power away from Sucre (official capital) and to La Paz (de facto capital), he has earned the ire of not just the elite, but just about every one in Sucre. The hot-blooded spirit of independence no longer means Sucre wants freedom from oppressive colonial powers, but rather from the most radical president in Bolivia’s history (that’s not to say he isn’t at times oppressive…). When those red crossed flags waved and fluttered, they were declaring as much as anything that this was Sucre, not Bolivia.

Officially Evo was boycotting the bicentennial, because one year ago racist thugs in Sucre had beat up indigenous people attending May 25^th celebrations. The real reason is more likely that Evo is so hated here that had he turned up, the violence would have repeated, albeit on a much larger scale. As it was, the long long bicentennial weekend was largely peaceful, all the aggression being worked out in long processions of furious flag-waving.

Bolivia is a nation of marchers and music-lovers, and all its festivities are characterised by these activities. At all hours in the days before the bicentennial, groups would take to the streets, keeping loose time with their drums and horns, chanting their slogans and waving their flags. Representatives from the outlying barrios made the many-kilometered dance-march in full and elaborate costume, flinging fireworks about them. Military bands in elaborate regalia were more formal and subdued. For the first time since I have been here, skirts became common sights on the streets of Sucre, as any woman with a pair of legs was wrapped in one and given a banner to hold.

Among the concerts, the flourishes of amateur fireworks and the endless processions, the highlight of the festivities came on sleepy Sunday morning. Sucre is usually at its most catatonic at this time, but on this particular morning the city awoke to the sound of many many drums and voices. The city was being invaded by campesinos, country-folk of predominantly indigenous heritage. Thousands upon thousands of them marched into town, bearing their banners and their instruments. There were a few red crosses in the crowd, but far more prevalent were the three-coloured flag of Bolivia and the rainbow forty-nine chequers of the indigenous flag. The marchers shouted pro-Evo messages, held placards declaring ‘no to racism’, and cheered for Bolivia (rather than for Sucre) while the sleepy Sucreñas looked on in disbelief. Would this end in violence? It would not; it was a show of strength and unity by the people that had been brutalised one year before. They filled the streets, occupied the central plaza, and then melted away to let the dazed city folk get on with their suddenly miniscule-seeming processions.

By the Monday of the actual bicentennial the celebrations were losing momentum. The midnight ban on alcohol that temporarily came into force with the beginning of the 25^th may have had something to do with this. Still, fireworks were launched, and an enactment of the cry of freedom was enthusiastically followed on the steps of the house in which Bolivian independence was finally ratified in 1825.

Concerts continued to break out from time to time in the ensuing days, but by the 26^th the bicentennial had passed and Sucre was once again its tranquil self. The whole long march to the 25^th had gone off with barely a violent incident. My favourite images from the celebrations come courtesy of some clever or careless vendor who instead of red crosses sold red heart balloons, which hovered over the passionate crowds wherever they gathered around the city.

An update on the San Pedro prison tours

By now the San Pedro prison tours are surely Bolivia’s worst kept secret. It seems like every backpacker coming to La Paz has heard that it’s possible to bribe your way into the prison, and that once inside you’re welcome to take as much locally-made cocaine as you like (provided you don’t tell anyone about it – wink).

While the glamour and sleaze of the San Pedro tours will continue to echo up and down the gringo trail for a long time to come, the less thrilling recent developments at the prison will no doubt take a lot longer to find a willing audience. Of course when talking about something that never officially existed it’s hard to find or provide reliable information, but for now it’s a generally accepted fact that there will be no more tours at San Pedro, at least not for some time.

The tours have never been very reliable. They have started and stopped and started again over the last few years, always hovering somewhere in the middle ground between possible and impossible, existent and non-existent. At the start of the year though the tours were gaining in fame and popularity; word was spreading that they were safer and easier than ever. This was the beginning of their end though; as they gained a higher and higher profile it became harder and harder to disguise their existence.

In January a (very good) article appeared in Britain’s The Guardian, which provided prices for the tours, details of how to get into the prison, and even the names of who could organise tours. In February a video was posted on youtube.com showing both backpackers and cocaine inside the prison. When the Bolivian media got hold of this video the tours became just too undeniably existent to ignore. The director of the prison was fired and his replacement clamped down on not just the tours but also other liberties within the prison Whether this director is serious about cleaning up the prison, or whether he to will eventually turn a blind eye and a greased palm to the tours remains to be seen (prison reform has been discussed and promised before, but there have as yet been no substantial changes).

It seems unlikely that tourists will be entering San Pedro again any time soon, though. Even if this scandal quickly dies down, something bigger is looming on the horizon. Brad Pitt’s production company’s film adaptation of Marching Powder – the book that first popularised the prison tours – is set for release in 2010. Once this comes out and San Pedro becomes even more widely known the ensuing scrutiny will make it all but impossible to resume tours.

Even in the short months since the tours ceased at San Pedro, word is spreading that tours are running in other prisons. It was perhaps inevitable that where a demand existed a supply would be found. And this is the daft truth of the whole prison tour business; San Pedro was always whispered of and marketed as a truly unique jail, but in fact it is just one example of Bolivia’s rotten penal and justice systems. Walking by the prison in Sucre, which looks almost identical to the school on the adjacent block, I’ve seen couples kissing through the main gates, and an ice cream vendor selling to guards and inmates. School children come and go; grizzled, idle men sit in the concrete patio behind the gate. This prison may be smaller, but it is not so very different to San Pedro. I have heard similar things from volunteers who worked at the prisons in Cochabamba.

This, I would suggest, is a far more worthwhile and memorable way to visit a Bolivian prison; to volunteer to teach classes to inmates or to work with prison reform programs. Rather than perpetuating a corrupt and repressive system, volunteering actually ensures that some good comes of this silly gringo fascination.

 

My first blog about the San Pedro conundrum.

An outstanding article that sheds light on life within the prison and the reality behind prison tours: http://www.boliviabella.com/san-pedro-prison-tour.html

The Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/jan/17/prison-tour-la-paz-bolivia

More on Marching Powder: http://www.marchingpowder.com

 

Organisations working in Bolivian prisons:

Ayni Ruway (prison rehabilitation program), in partnership with Sustainable Bolivia: http://www.sustainablebolivia.org/AYNI%20RUWAY.html

Article by a prison volunteer: http://www.volunteerbolivia.org/brian.htm

Prison Fellowship International: http://www.pfi.org/national-ministries/americas/bolivia

Bolivia dreams of railways

For a country of jagged mountains, sweltering swamps and jungles, and very little in between, Bolivia is criss-crossed by a surprising number of train tracks. They cut through the lowlands and are lie coiled up over the highlands; they loop through every major city and many tiny towns; they are everywhere, but they are almost all in a state of disuse.

 This is the sad truth of Bolivian railways. The maps in Lonely Planet Bolivia are sutured with dotted train lines, and punctuated by the sad refrain ‘Former Train Station’. La Paz has a train station but no train services. Cochabamba has a train station but no train services. Sucre and Potosi have train stations and were almost but are currently not linked by a train service. For now the only train in Sucre is disappearing into the long grass behind the station. In the yards around it chickens are raised, and the guard dog cavorts with her puppy.

There was a time when train travel was the only way to get about in Bolivia. There were virtually no highways, and two networks – one in the highlands and one in the lowlands – sprawled across the country, carrying most of the country’s people, visitors and freight. La Paz was linked with Peru, Chile and Argentina; Santa Cruz – at the time little more than an agricultural backwater unable to imagine that it would one day become Bolivia’s biggest city – was connected to Brazil.

One of the causes behind the war that cost Bolivia its coastline was its taxing of the railway line between the mountains and the coast. Once Chile had taken the coast, leaving Bolivia landlocked, it offered a compensation of sorts in the form of rail connections between Bolivia and the Pacific, allowing Bolivia to export is mineral wealth. The connection still exists today, but is nothing more than a pair of rails over which the occasional freight train runs. There is no passenger service, and the tiny stations and stops along the way are derelict.

Trains-as-compensation are a recurring theme of Bolivian history. When Brazil annexed most of Bolivia’s rubber-rich jungles (and proceeded to ruthlessly deforest these), it offered a train line as compensation that could eventually link Bolivia with the Atlantic. This was to be the third attempt to connect Bolivia’s north with Brazilian lines, but the tracks never reached Bolivian soil.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw the gradual dismantling of the Bolivian rail system. In 1964 Bolivia had about 100 train engines and 3000 kilometres of road. By the turn of the millennium it had 50 engines and 40,000 kilometres of road. As the road networks expanded the two rail networks, which have never been connected, fell out of popularity. In the 70s and 80s Bolivia’s economic situation saw railways and other public services starved of funding and rapidly deteriorating. In the early 90s a study found that $40 billion would be needed to completely upgrade the rail system. Needless to say this money did not and does not exist. In the mid 90s at the urging of the World Bank most of Bolivia’s industries were privatised, including the rail system. The aging system was not profitable and passenger services were soon discontinued, leaving only a limited freight system.

Today there are a few passenger services in Bolivia. The so-called ‘Death Train’ (what is it about Bolivia and such epithets?) runs passengers, cargo and contraband from Santa Cruz to the Brazilian border, a vital link for the city’s economy. Another more touristed line runs from Oruro to Uyuni to Tupiza to the Argentine border. It still retains some of the faded grandeur of the old rail services, in the uniforms of the conductors and the rattling place settings in the dining car. The rails and cars though have seen better days; when I trained from Uyuni to Oruro there was a seven hour delay because the train in front of ours had de-railed.

There are no real prospects for the revival of Bolivia’s rail network. Buses, vans and trucks – both official and unofficial – are the transportation of choice, and the lonely rails embedded across the country are slowly disappearing. In 2007 thieves stole 100 metres of track; this is perhaps one of the few remaining uses for the tracks, unless huge amounts of money miraculously appear to rehabilitate the system.

One of the main tourist attractions in Uyuni is the train cemetery, where long links of rusting locomotives slowly crumple and collapse into the desert. They serve as a sad reminder of another of Bolivia’s lost institutions, another lost opportunity to progress.

Big Phil’s recipe for Pique a lo Macho Vegetariano

Despite the gradual rise in my Spanish level, conspicuous holes in my vocabulary remain. While I can fill my bag with the fresh and the green from the central market, in the eatery above the market the simmering pots and pans are filled with thing I have no name for.

In a purely gastronomical sense I have no need to know the names of these foods. I know enough to know they are meat-based, and that they are thus not for me.

Still, the longer I spend in Bolivia, the more the names of these forbidden foodstuffs begin to encroach into my vocabulary. One dish that has long lodged in my lexicon is Pique a lo Macho. Pique itself is a rather bland handful of French fries interspersed with hot dog meat and sold outside schools and on street corners all over the country. It becomes more interesting when it turns macho. Pique a lo Macho is a giant steaming mound of French fries, drowning in five types of meat (meat of sausage, meat of cow, meat of bird, meat of pig, and meat of other), eggs and a lot of chilli. It requires a big plate and a strong table to support it, and as such is not hit-and-run street food.

Since learning of this most unacceptable dish, I have longed to vegetarianise it. Just because I don’t eat meat doesn’t mean I don’t like big, greasy mounds of unhealthy food.

 

1. Get a lot of real big potaters and cut them with a real big knife into real big wedges. Boil the real big wedges for ten minutes, or until they’re soft (usually Big Phil won’t touch nothing soft, but in this case it’s necessary).

2. Boil some water and then soak some real big eggs in it. Set some water aside to soak some real big chunks of soy meat. Soak some real small chunks too until they’re good and sloppy.

3. Get a real big plate, a metal one (Big Phil likes metal). Put the real big potater wedges on the plate, coat in oil and salt, and bake until real hot and crispy.

4. While the real big potater wedges are baking, get a real big pan. Heat some oil in it until it’s real hot.

5. Dice a real big eggplant (everyone knows the biggest eggplants are in Bolivia) into real big cubes and put them in the real hot pan. Add a lot of salt.

6. Cut some onions into real big rings or half-rings. Dice a lot of real big cloves of garlic into real small pieces. Put them in the pan with the real big real hot eggplant.

7. Use your real big knife to cut up a real big head of broccoli. Cut up a real big red bell pepper/capsicum, and a real big green one too. Put them in the real big pan.

8. There aren’t many fresh mushrooms in Bolivia, and the tinned ones only come in real small tins. So open a tin or two of mushrooms, halve them, and put them in the real big pan, which should be real full.

9. Add the real big and real small soy meat. Peel and half the eggs and add them too.

10. Dice a couple of real hot locoto peppers. They’re hotter if you crush them a bit first. Crush them real good. Use different coloured peppers – Big Phil likes colourful food. Put them in the pan.

11. Add a lot of cilantro, cumin, vinegar, veggie stock, tomato paste, salsa ingles/Worcestershire sauce/HP sauce/BBQ sauce. Enough to coat all the real big veggies, without turning everything to slop (even though Big Phil likes slop, it isn’t the way for Pique a lo Macho).

12. Take the real big real hot potaters out of the oven. Pour the real big real spicy vegetable mix over the potaters. Add some grated cheese. Bake until cheese is melted.

13. Serve on the same real big plate, with real big bottles of mayonnaise, ketchup and hot sauce next to it.

14. Go at it with your real big hands. Use a real big fork if you’re dainty.

15. If it isn’t so spicy it hurts, then you did it wrong.