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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.
It seems I can’t come to La Paz without getting caught up in some profound existential dilemma. On my first trip the question was of whether or not I would visit San Pedro prison (i wrote about that too, here); on my return it was whether I would cycle the world’s most dangerous road.
The World’s Most Dangerous Road, also known as the Death Road, was so dubbed by the Inter-American Development Bank, based on the number of fatal traffic accidents on the road. The road is a thin and muddy thing, wrapped around precipitous peaks and cliffs and linking the mountain passes around La Paz (over 5000 metres above sea level) with the humid little village of Coroico (1700 metres above sea level) in 70 short kilometres. Two vehicles can barely pass each other on the road, and with the thick mists and heavy rains that cling to the mountains, the slightest miscalculation can send vehicles plunging hundreds of metres straight down into the jungles below.
The main tourist strip in La Paz is festooned with advertisements for the Death Road; guided tours of the road are a combination of bussing and mountain biking down the road, from the frosty heights to the tropical valleys where hot showers, swimming pools and buffet lunches await.
Lonely Planet gives serious, precious page space to the Death Road, urging readers to choose their tour agency carefully, as a lax mechanic or slightly faulty bike will lead to almost certain death (they also report 8 gringo deaths on the road since tours started more than ten years ago. Compared to the more than twenty annual bus or truck accidents that earned the road its reputation, the probability of gringo fatalities is incredibly small). The recommended agencies charge more for peace of mind; the price of a tour is about the average monthly wage in Bolivia.
Since the last Lonely Planet guide to Bolivia came out a new and wider road has opened up, giving the buses and trucks that had so much trouble with the original road a safer means of descent. This means the Death Road is today used almost exclusively by tour groups.
When I arrived in Coroico I found myself one of the few gringos in town not to have cycled the road. Talk around the hotel pool was of how the road wasn’t quite as dangerous as adventurers had expected. The scenery was spectacular, sure, but where was the death-defiance?
I held my tongue and didn’t point out the contradiction between paying for the safest tour outfit possible and still expecting to encounter death and destruction. I also resisted the urge to point out that while the road might not seem dangerous enough to many gringos, to the hundreds upon hundreds of families that have lost people on the road, it is no doubt quite dangerous enough. The crosses and flowers that line the road (and every road in Bolivia) should be a testament to the road’s danger.
Today the Death Road is probably the safest road in Bolivia. It is the only road in Bolivia not menaced by speeding, drunken, test-messaging bus drivers. It is the only road in Bolivia on which every commuter wears a helmet, a reflective vest, and on which every vehicle has been tested and tuned before every trip. It is the only road on which every five to seven travellers have their own guide trained in first aid. It is the only road on which all travel is cancelled during inclement weather (the biggest bike agency in town strongly advises against cycling the Death Road during the rainy season, but in spite of this will still take you if you really really want to go). It is the only mountain road that is reserved for one way travel. Given what the road has become, cycling it is far safer than cycling downtown La Paz, or just about any other part of Bolivia.
Needless to say I couldn’t bring myself to cycle the road, settling instead for watching the stunning, changing scenery from a cramped bus that safely traversed the new road (and cost less than the per person toll for using the Death Road). Every tour includes a free ‘I survived the Death Road’ t-shirt in its package; I just couldn’t reconcile myself to the idea of owning such a shirt. How could I wear it in Bolivia among Bolivian friends? Where could I hide it while in Coroico, where for generations anyone wishing to leave the village actually did risk death in the back of a truck on that notorious and once-dangerous road?
So no world’s most bizarre prison tour for me, and no world’s most dangerous road for me. Another superlative activity passed up using the excuse of cultural sensitivity. I wish someone would put that onto a t-shirt. I survived the world’s silliest conundrum. I survived Bolivian bus drivers. My other car is a rickety old farm truck full of campesinos and potatoes. I chose the boring, sensible path and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
The name on the lips of every backpacker passing through La Paz, and advertised on every tour agency’s signs and fliers, is San Pedro. La Paz’s lack of superlative tourist attractions has allowed San Pedro to become one of the hottest backpacker destinations in the city.
San Pedro prison, located in central La Paz and just a short hop from the main tourist burrow, was catapulted to fame in 2002 with the publication of Marching Powder, which tells the story of Thomas McFadden, an Englishmen caught moving cocaine through Bolivia and subsequently left to languish in San Pedro prison, awaiting trial. The destitution and corruption a the heart of the Bolivian judicial system had spawned this prison, where prisoners were forced to pay for their cells, if they could afford them, and where drug barons lived in penthouse cells with cable TV. The families of poorer inmates lived in the prison, coming and going through the main gate, to attend school or visit the markets before returning to sleep within the guarded walls.
The entrepreneurial McFadden started offering prison tours, whereby seriously hardcore backpackers could visit the tour, spend the night in a cell, and avail themselves of the ample quantities of cocaine – said to be the best and purest in Bolivia – produced in the guts of the prison.
McFadden was eventually released, as was the book, leading to disintegration of the prison tours. Thereafter they have persisted as rumours, resurrected from time to time by enterprising inmates, and causing a headache for guidebook authors; how to deal with one of La Paz’s most intriguing sites, given that it was potentially very dangerous (rumours echo about of tours gone wrong, of disappearing money, and of the occasional assault), and very far from being legal. The current Lonely Planet Bolivia volume offers general details about the prison, which are no different to those given in Marching Powder, but no clues as to how to actually arrange a tour.
By the time I arrived in Bolivia word was out that the tours were operating more successfully than ever. They had been cleaned up and were very safe. When I finally made it to La Paz I wandered around the walls of the prison, and in the space of about fifteen minutes, while sitting in the plaza outside the prison, I saw three tour groups enter. I was offered the chance to join one of these groups, but didn’t have the 250 bolivianos ($40-50ish) needed to get in. If I’d had the cash on me I almost certainly would have joined the tour, out of obligation if nothing else.
By the time I returned to La Paz less than a week later, the tours had been shut down. There was no one in the plaza offering tours, and no gringos passing through the gates and into the prison.
A new word was out; an article had appeared in The Guardian in the UK, explaining exactly how to join a tour – who to talk too, how much to pay, and what to expect once inside. This posed a very serious problem; the tours were only possible while they were unofficial. They depended on corruption and blind eyes being turned, and existed only because officially they didn’t exist. An industry built on bribes and feigned ignorance can only function for as long as there is no public scrutiny. As soon as the tours were publicised and official, something had to be done to stop them.
Officially the prison tours were shut down as part of an effort to combat the corruption about the prison. Unofficially, rumours got about that the official powers of the prison were unhappy with their cut of the now officially advertised prices.
And further in the distance lurked another fact; Brad Pitt has bought the rights to Marching Powder, and his production company is currently completing a film adaptation of the book. When this is released San Pedro will become very much public knowledge, and it will be next to impossible to deny the cocaine labs, the bribed guards and officially illegal prison tours that are all a daily reality of life in San Pedro.
And for me there is the ongoing conundrum; I feel obliged to visit San Pedro, to prove myself a consummate traveller by visiting the prison and writing about it. But on the other hand I have no desire to be one of these parasitic gringos who bribe guards, enter the prison, and so become a part of the whole problem of the corrupt Bolivian judicial and penal systems. Every Bolivian I have heard talk about San Pedro speaks about it with a kind if embarrassed bafflement; why would all these gringos on limited time and money, bother visiting one of the ugliest, most corrupt places in their country. Every gringo, on the other hand, talks about the prison as the ultimate exotic destination; a mixture of crime and violence and drugs and a world very different to the one back home.
For now I find myself siding with the Bolivians. Ten days ago I would have visited the prison, and almost did. Now it seems like just another over-exploited tourist trap, which does more harm than good to the people of Bolivia.
(Later I wrote an update on the San Pedro prison tours…)
As I began to pack up my life in Cochabamba, I found myself needing to jettison some already-read and no longer needed books. So I paid a visit to the Spitting Llama, Cochabamba’s second hand bookstore.
While it was (briefly) tempting to trade the Albert Camus I had just read for another of his books (“who travels with Camus?” my friend exclaimed, before she found out what I’d been reading), I eventually traded one Camus and one travel book for a bundle of short stories and… a Spanish-English dictionary.
This may be a profoundly boring choice, but it signifies something important for me. I have graduated from phrase books to dictionaries.
Admittedly, I still have my phrase book (Lonely Planet’s Costa Rica phrasebook, first edition, published 2000 and written by Thomas Kohnstamm, whom I’ve already diatribed against but who writes a great phrase book), but the crucial difference is that now my vocabulary is not limited to the 60 pages of English-Spanish conversion in the back of this book. Now I have 450 pages of English to Spanish, and almost 350 pages of Spanish to English.
Where before I was skimming over the surface of Latin America, spewing barely understood, pre-assembled phrases, now I’m sinking down, or perhaps squirming my way into the depths of one country, stammering and conjugating my way into its language. It is surely a good thing. This is exactly what I’ve been yearning to do since I first skipped across the Americas three years ago.
And now I can tell you that the Spanish word for frippery is chorradas, that the word for gazumper is tramposo, and that the expression for wodge is buen trozo or porción grande. So in fact I’m expanding my vocabulary in two languages. Clearly not all 800 pages of dictionary will be absolutely useful, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that I’m a dictionary kind of traveller now.
In my novel (which I will endeavour not to refer to in every post), I created a protagonist that I didn’t like. He starts the book arrogant and cynical; he writes tirades against other travellers, whom he cannot get along with; he writes to shock and to demonstrate how knowledgeable he is; he believes himself to be the highest authority on all travel matters, because he too has written a book.
Thomas Kohnstamm has written a book that does a far better job of exposing the flaws of the modern traveller. This is because his work is non-fiction, and because he is the cynical, arrogant protagonist of his book. His book – Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? – is about his first stint as a guidebook writer for Lonely Planet, researching northern Brazil.
Upon its release the book caused something of a stir. Kohnstamm not only broke most of the rules of guide book writing – such as accepting favours from hotel owners and using second-hand information to verify details – but he suggested that this was common place in the industry. In short he was saying that guide books are not as trustworthy as many people think they are.
I almost always have at least one Lonely Planet product in my pack when I travel. Over time, having often found the maps not quite right, and having in the past been directed to hostels that don’t exist, and having almost always found any price listed in the guide far lower than the actual, post-LP price, I’ve come to realise that the books are not infallible. This much should have been obvious from the beginning, and this is the biggest problem I see with LP guides; not the way they are written but the way they are read. They are given too much power. Reading them as bibles of travel is bad for travel in general. It results in an over-developed tourist trail.
Kohnstamm comes as a challenge to the infallible LP idea. But he doesn’t come as a big enough challenge. Having lamented the shift in LP from long-term, low-budget adventuring to mid-range hotel, night club and organised tour vacationing, he then fills his book with tales of how drunk or high or laid he got. He spends all his time with gringos, except when he is chasing Brazilian girls or getting into altercations with police or landladies or furious mothers.
The question should perhaps not be whether travel writers go to hell, but whether they go any place new. Whether they encourage widespread travel, travel beyond the pages of their books and off the tourist trails, or whether they merely make it easy to find a hostel and a bar. Kohnstamm’s mandate while working for LP was only to revise existing information, an approach which only saturates the existing areas. It does nothing to share around the lucrative wealth of a tourism industry. It merely over-exploits a few areas at a time.
Free of LP and writing his own book, Kohnstamm does no better. He never deviates from the familiar path of the irresponsible tourist. His book reads like ever other Latin American travel narrative, incorporating girls and drink and drugs, shitty hostels and corrupt cops. His is a tale very much in the style of Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs – all great writers, but writers belonging to a more consumptive generation of travellers.
It is time for a new generation of travel writers. Kohnstamm has the talent and the opportunity to become a part of this generation. But if he or me or anyone else is to become so, they’ll have to aim higher and discover a new spirit of adventure such as is so lacking on the LP-saturated tourist trail.
