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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.

That would be NO to Evo's new constitutuion, and not to Santa Cruz's call for autonomy. The whole city bedecked in confusing yeses and nos as the country votes and votes again.Cathedral, full moon, palm trees, street coffee (not in shot, but ubiquitous).

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.

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 white city gets whiter

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.

viva Sucre, viva Sucre, etc etc

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.

out of the 19th century, into the Sucre evening

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.

no to racism, yes to brightly coloured flags

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.

happy heart at the food fair

happy heart by Sucre's own liberty bell

happy heart outside the casa de la libertad

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.

the train lines at Tiahuanaco, good for grazing

 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.

Grand Sucre Station

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.

the rails to Chile; not very busy

the Chile-Bolivia rail connection

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.

they thought they could

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