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.

An attempt with many photos to do justice to the Bolivian desert.

The border between Chile and Bolivia was remote, frequented only by freight trains, and watched over by a volcano dribbling smoke. Each side consisted of a single guard post surrounded by derelict buildings and garbage. On one side stood the barren, stark desert of Chile, full of mines. On the other side stood the colourful, sublime desert of Bolivia, teaming with animal and plant life and scattered with adobe villages.

Every village we ground through on the way to Uyuni bore signs announcing the work of Evo Morales and his re-allocated funds, his work done to help the local Aymara people that scrape out a living in this remote and difficult land.

In Uyuni, the human hub of the desert, two very different cultures were merging and striking deals. Locals in their traditional garb – the ladies in bowler hats and many layers of skirt and petticoat – were selling handicrafts, fruit and snacks to the dreadlocked, gore-texed backpacker crowds. Most backpackers stayed only long enough to book a tour out into the desert or to return, take a lukewarm shower, and catch the night train on to the rest of Bolivia. Such a frenetic pace must seem ridiculous to the locals, who have lived for centuries according to the slower rhythms of the desert, of high altitude, of Thursday markets.

In Uyuni i met up with Jules and Viv, comrades from my time in Korea, which already felt like forever ago. They had brought four others with them; together we formed a jeepload of eager gringos, and set off on a four day tour of the sublime south west.

Lake Minchin, a prehistoric, inland body of water remembered in Andean mythology once covered the altiplano of Bolivia. As the waters of the lake gradually receded away they left behind the world’s largest salt flats, containing some ten billion tonnes of salt. Today the Salar de Uyuni is one of the biggest tourist attractions of the country; an endless plain of perfect white, punctuated by rugged islands, bubbling springs, small-scale salt mines, and jeeploads of awestruck visitors.

 

 

Surrounded by salt and with a near-cloudless sky overhead, perspective warps and distorts. It is impossible to distinguish the distant volcanos from the much nearer islands of ancient cactus and coral. A speck on the horizon could be a person or a jeep or a mountain. Tourists compete to take the most original trick photographs, bringing props out into the desert and spending hours composing their witty scenes.

 

The only organisms that survive out here have adapted specifically to life on the salt. The small communities of people mine the salt and its minerals, albeit on a miniscule scale. Marooned colonnies of cacti and vizcachas cluster on the rocky islands in the salt sea.

In comparison to the Salar the surrounding desert seems to be full of overwhelming colours and a superabundance of life. Wherever there is water there are llamas. Wherever there is no water and seemingly no way to survive there are families of dainty vicuñas. The bigger lakes – stained by the tiny pink organisms thriving within them – attract thousands of flamingos that strut through the waters, honking and chattering.

There were long distances to cover in the jeep – every day we had more ground to cover as we sped between the main drawcards of the desert – but one of the great wonders of the desert was it constantly changing landscape. The desert was in places red with stone and in other green with coarse grasses. In places rivers had gouged deep canyons out of the stone, and in other that gurgled happily through llama-filled meadows. Bizarre rock formations grew out of sand dunes, and bizarre plants grew out of rock formations.

On the beginning of our third day we entered a volcanic region, where geysers sprayed the stinking steam into the morning air, and where the jeeploads congregated to bathe in thermal pools while ducks and gulls circled and picked off the breakfast buffets.

As our tour progressed the food grew less creative, and fell back on the staple potatoes and eggs more and more often. On the third day in the least-ominous looking valley we got a flat tire, and soon afterwards discovered that our spare was also flat. A long wait in the sun, an abortive attempt to scale a deceptively tall peak, and we continued on our way; dusty, dried-out and dehydrated.

The sublimitiy of these deserts is guarded over by their harshness; by the burning sun and the chill winds, by the freezing night air, by the razor-edged stone and the spined plants. It is a place that, after four days, leaves you stuck between a desire to see more and a need never to cram yourself into a jeep again. At night we shivered and squatted in the dust, looking up at a million stars each pulsing with their own distance rhythm. Alien constellations invisible to most of the world burned brightly and shooting stars fell into the darkness. The magnitude and clarity of it all was breath-taking, but so too was the cold of the air and the ache of our bones.

When eventually we trundled back into Uyuni I was hungry for real food and for the freedom to steer my own course, but i was also elated by all i had seen. The desert is one of the most spectacular places i have ever seen. And between the many flat tires and dull food, between the many reports of shoddy tour companies and drunken drivers, between the heat and the altitude, the dry skin and the cold nights, between the rarely-running trains and the partially derailed train that kept us detained for hours awaiting a way out of Uyuni, it seems safe to say the surreal beauty of the place will be preserved against outside invasion for a long time to come..