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For as long as I have been in Sucre the city has been fixated on its impending bicentennial. On May 25th 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 25th 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 25th 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 25th 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 26th the bicentennial had passed and Sucre was once again its tranquil self. The whole long march to the 25th 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.
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
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.
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.
Every time I leave home and go a-travelling I am risking a great deal. I am throwing myself upon the mercy of the road, and staking everything on the kindness of strangers, and on the uncertain principal that at all times and in all places I will be able to find something suitably high-brow to read.
Somehow through every trip my luck has held, and I’ve still never had to read anything by Dan Brown. There has always been someone offering to lend a tome, or there has been a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore. In one instance there were the immense vaults of a British Council library.
On every trip or journey natural literary tendencies emerge. From out of that British Council library in Madrid emerged novels I’d never heard of by Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene. Crossing the USofA I couldn’t escape the Kerouac and the beats; I’m still not sure whether or not I want to escape them.
The theme of my time in Bolivia emerged in Coroico. Floundering and forgotten on the bottom shelf of a hotel book exchange was Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft.
This could only be destiny. In Madrid the treasures of the British Council had enthralled me, but they had all been very… British. A rather important someone had expounded to me the wonders of Jose Saramago, but I had been unable to find him in English. The Stone Raft was the first of Saramago’s books to be recommended to me, and ever since it had been wedged prominently within my consciousness, demanding attention. So, that forgotten book on that forgotten shelf became mine, and I had my literary theme for the trip, and yet another blog topic (care to read the first and second Saramago blogs?).
Whenever I read Saramago I am reminded of Madrid. He is Portuguese, not Spanish, but the same sense of humour and playfulness that I found in Spain is scrawled onto every page penned by Saramago. There are traces of the same all across Bolivia. It must be a Latin thing.
The Stone Raft could be called a celebration of Iberian-ness. It begins with the tearing apart of the Pyrenees, separating Spain and Portugal from continental Europe (Andorra sides with Europe) as the peninsula-turned-island floats off into the Atlantic. While some in Europe are glad to see Iberia cast adrift, others are filled with a longing to follow, and all over the continent graffiti appears declaring Nous aussi, nous sommes ibériques; Auch wir sind iberisch; Nos quoque iberi sumus; We are Iberians too.
Successive waves of panic and awe wash over the population of the once-peninsula. Gibraltar recedes away behind them, still anchored at the mouth of the Mediterranean. The Azores approach and it looks as though a collision is imminent. Within the severed peninsula, the population first surges towards the coast, to occupy the hotels left hollow by the exodus of the wealthy and the tourists, and then sweeps back inland to avoid the impending islands.
There is brutality as the authorities seek to maintain a sense of law and order; there is farce as the governments bicker and posture and concur; there is caricature as the North Americans ponder the possible strategic value of Iberia as an annex of Newfoundland. Out of all this emerges another narrative, as a group of strangers who have experienced personal miracles and anomalies to parallel the rending of the Pyrenees band together and take to the roads of Iberia.
Their journey takes them through the remote parts of Iberia, the barren, archaeological deserts of Andalucia, the Portuguese coastline, the mountains and wild coast of Galicia, the lonely Pyrenees and the terrifying drop into oblivion where once there had been only stone and border crossings. They do not visit Madrid or Barcelona, they flit by Sevilla and Porto, keeping largely to the villages, country roads and farmhouses. As they travel Saramago wanders and digresses, detailing the myths, histories and curiosities of the peninsula. He celebrates Iberia, its majesty and foibles.
As with Saramago’s other novels, he seems to skim over the surface of his own narratives, leaving much unsaid and unexplored. The tensions and ecstasies of the travellers are never explicated in full, but they are there between the lines, unspoken between the characters. There are no resolutions, and when the novel ends the peninsula is still inexplicably adrift in the ocean, though whether it will continue its voyage or not is unclear.
Once again I found myself pondering the why of a Saramago novel. The idea of the departure of Iberia is wonderful, and Saramago obviously enjoys dancing over the established political shape of Europe, but is there some deeper, obscure point here? I don’t think so, and more and more I like Saramago’s representations of life without conclusions and clever climaxes. There is nothing here but the reality and unreality of life.
My favourite image from the book is of a Europe daubed in graffiti, expressing both wanderlust and old existential angst. We are Iberians too, adrift on a mysterious raft in a cruel sea. Or we are Iberians too, yearning to be forcibly severed from the mainland, to have adventure thrust upon us. Or we are Iberians too, let us explore the lands we call home, and see them from a new perspective, and rediscover their hidden quirks and sublimities. What deeper point need a novel make?
