Western & Ends

I crossed over the border to Peru under a bright and burning sun. In winter and in summer, the air over the mountains is a perpetually thin cover, neither holding in heat at night nor filtering the sun during the day. Standing outside the border crossing, Tuesday morning coming down, and my red pack radiated heat into my back. We were held up at immigration as someone, some American, didn't have an entrance visa and was trying to get an exit visa; always a problem, for me and for her.

And then it was a bus around the lake, from the south to the north, on the way to Puno. Winding back and forth by the lapping waves, the little kitten waves rushing over the rocks on shore, and I was stuck in the fourth seat of the second-to-last row, my knees stuck together and my head leaning to the right. A young girl to my right peeled an orange, breaking each wedge off and tossing the peel out the window. She wore a heart-shaped locket and as we rounded a bend, she closed her eyes and opened the heart and kissed it - once, because once was all she needed.

I walked through Puno and caught my bus to Arequipa. The ride was quiet and uneventful.

Into Arequipa at night, past the chicken shacks and car parts, empty-lot restaurants lit with florescent bulbs, the endless parade of brick-built walls and stained-tin roofs. Peru's second city.

The great cathedral is made of sillar, some sort of luminous volcanic rock, and in between the bell towers the form of a volcano rises, hazy through the dust and the smog; the perfect cone-shape volcano on the edge of town. In the sunshine, the white stone walls are just a single sheet of bright light drifting through the air, but as the sun passed to the west, the rocks still glowed; the lighter lines where the blocks meet, the grayed reliefs and blackened shades.

The plaza is bright and well designed, flanked on three sides by Doric arcades, also made of sillar, with balcony restaurants and wooden roofs. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful plaza I've seen in Latin America.

I spent two days in Arequipa just wandering around, eating ice cream, and drawing a little. It was the end of my trip, the last place I came to I didn't know. Eventually I boarded a bus, the most expensive bus I took, and came back to Lima.

Brothers & Lakes

The hike out of Copacabana started out low and warm, hugging the lakeshore for a quarter mile past farms and sheep and fields, burned and charred. Lake Titicaca is at tremendous altitude and the sky was completely cloudless except for a few low puffy things far off on the other side of the water.

And far it was; the lake is an ocean, it's Great, it's Tahoe, it's seemingly endless and endlessly blue. Color seems more saturated at altitude - or so it seemed to me - and the sky and water swirled with hues so brilliant and intense that 'blue' or 'green,' single words, just can't do them justice. The sky and the water deserved whole phrases; they earned endless streams of adjectives.

We, the same Americans and I, were hiking to some small village to catch a ferry to the Isla del Sol. Like usual, I had no map - but I wasn't concerned; as it is in life, there's only one road. You just never know how long you're on it, that's all.

Well, we hiked - we must have, I was wearing my hiking pants. The road climbed around a mountain, and in between the pines and eucalyptus, the lake would suddenly spill into view; the vast and terrifying lake. You start at altitude and you gain some more, and the lakeshore, the far lakeshore is a dark arc of land, bright brown, maybe spotted a little, but bent around the lake and the curvature of the Earth itself. Below us, waves broke around rocks, less threatening now, leaving white trails of foam to float back out with the water.

After a long while, we started asking the few people on the road how much further we had to go. Some said an hour. Others said three minutes. Then some said four minutes, so at least those numbers matched, right? Of course they were all wrong, but what can you do? Maybe we just walked especially slowly.

Eventually we staggered into town, village really, and walked to the water's edge. The man there hustled for ferry passage to the Isla del Sol, stopping us in the middle of the lake and asking for money. He wasn't even upfront about it, saying he'd like to charge us less but his hands were tied; suddenly we're the bad guy for complaining. Bolivian business.

It was sunset on the other side of the island, but even near the top we were obscured by shadow from the ridge. I looked back across the water, but not in the direction I had come from, but farther east, at the white-capped mountain range and the moon, that celestial dinner plate, rising off the low hills. As it rose, the sky darkened into the bright blackness of a fullmoon night, and I settled down to dinner.

Into the Void, But Hopefully Not

The buses in La Paz that go to the west, over the hills to Lake Titicaca and beyond, leave from the Cemetery District - or, perhaps more accurately, from the various streets directly next to the cemetery, which is never a good place to begin a journey - end, maybe, but never begin.

The cemetery is on the outskirts of town (which in La Paz is more "up" than "out") and in the dark the taxi ride was just a blur of light and dust, half-caught cries from peddlers, pavement and not. I was with three Americans, the first I'd seen since Buenos Aires: Maggie, very sweet, very tough but a six foot blond - a visual liability; Corey, the boy from Mendocino County, whose mysterious time "in the mountains" of North California has funded seven months of travel; and Eleanor, the professor's daughter with the British accent, baby-faced at 29, a professional traveler. We didn't know each other and we didn't know where we were going; strangers, at altitude, heading higher.

We piled in a van, a combi, probably because someone thought it would be more authentic to be cramped in a rattling deathtrap through Bolivia. The first half of the ride was more uncomfortable than dangerous, as we slowly weaved out of La Paz and then, in great sweeping turns, climbed from the valley. There were few towns. The driver seemed to be in a hurry.

At a certain point, though seemingly at random, we got on a ferry. Well, to be accurate, the combi simply turned off the road and onto a wooden boat, barely twenty feet long - like an overgrown dory or an open-ended barge. A man punted us slowly from shore until the motor kicked in. On a moonlit night, on a moonlit lake, we pulled towards Copacabana. It was beautiful and serene, the quiet night.

And then I was forced to remember we were in Bolivia. The cobrador poked his head into the van and asked for a boliviano fifty from each of us to cover the ferry. This is the thing about South America: no one seems to grasp the idea of "price" as something all-inclusive, as the complete cost of getting from point A to point B to the traveler. For our cobrador, as is often the case, the price of the journey was reflexive only to himself - that is, his cut - and everything else was someone else's problem. (When we protested, he made a big show of charging all the Bolivians the same B\ 1.50) It all makes little sense to me: if he just made the price seventeen to start, kept fifteen, and paid the "toll" himself, he wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of irate tourists and surly Bolivians. Another mysterious piece of commerce in South America.

Eventually we got off the boat, up the concrete embankment, up the long semi-paved road to the west. Maybe we climbed for awhile; no, we must have.

I don't think about death very much, maybe more than the average person, but it never is a possibility, just an abstraction, a conversation starter; "What if I got hit by this bus?" You simply can't live your life preoccupied with the thought of death - it's like flipping through a book to get to the end; there simply isn't any joy in it.

Well, we climbed for awhile, the driver, the Americans, the Bolivians, the Peruvian honeymooners necking in the front seat, and I. And then we started to go down, down the narrow road of broken pavement, down with mechanical acceleration.

Really, we were flying down this mountain road, and if the driver had any reason to hurry, he took it. The first few minutes I was simply in disbelief that anyone would drive so recklessly; "He's a professional," I thought, "and he knows what he's doing. This little stretch will flatten out just around the bend - He'll break if he needs to. "

But the road never stops, just twists and turns across the mountains, and the drive never ends - hairpins taken wide, riding on the wrong side of the road - and as we go I see the first cliff, because we're on cliffs over the lake, thousands of feet above the lake, and with each new set of switchbacks the cliffs go from my left to my right and back.

There is no guardrail. There are no signs. And the driver never takes his foot off the accelerator.

I was sitting in the jump seat, by the door, and I instinctively reached down with my right hand and gripped the edge of the seat, locking my elbow and bracing my shoulder. Maggie screamed out - in English - but the driver refused to yield. He was too busy explaining the history of the lake to the Peruvians, using his right hand to point out into the darkness, just as natural as can be. He looked at them when he made a point, to emphasize the point. I hated that couple. I focused every fiber of my being onto that couple, and with my elbow locked I wanted to throw them from the van, off the cliff, those beautiful Peruvians making sloppy kisses, holding hands, but now, no now, looking and nodding and asking the driver who, what, when as we screamed around the mountain.

And then, as we swerved around a boulder in the road, a feeling came over me, one of those feelings of complete and total sadness. I sat up as my back tensed, and I could see the van flying off the road, or rolling down the cliff, and there was nothing I could do about it; it was an inevitability. The faster we went, the quieter I grew.

Being in a situation like that, you just can't prepare yourself mentally for it, you can't rationally explain why you're in the situation and how it could possibly be anything but dangerous. On a rollercoaster, getting the cheap and ersatz thrill of death, you always know you will pull into the station safe - it's the return you're paying for, the vuelta.

Well, sadness passed through me and off the cliff and I was at peace. The world flattened a bit, and my eye divided the background out the windows and the interior of the van into separate spheres. It scanned the inside, the faded seats, the looks on people's faces, the calm hand movements of the driver, the little hugs of the couple, the way the Virgin prayer card swung from the rearview. That's all that was left in my life, but maybe that's all there was to life to begin with; just a van filled with strangers - some in love, some gripped with fear, some asleep, a van driven by a madman who won't slow down, can't slow down, hurtling through the unmarked darkness, caught between life and death.

I lived, I lived, but it wasn't a cheap thrill. I had mentally prepared myself for my own death, and that's something I don't want to repeat.

The shower in our hostel didn't work. Now that's Hell.

The Snows of Bolivia

It's rare that I stop my day in America to watch the sunset, and the little fireworks around the setting sun - maybe from my car, on PCH, I'll see it go into the sea somewhere north of Catalina between the oil platforms, but even then I'm moving, driving, going somewhere in particular. But on my trip, for whatever reason, I've seen dozens of sunsets, a few sunrises, and I always seem to have a sense of the sun moving across the sky, the changes in temperature and brightness, the atmospheric things.

Lying in my bus seat, staring out the window in Bolivia, I thought I saw the sky change shape; the horizon seemed to close around the sky, drawing in, shrinking in circumference behind the near mountains, pushing the very top, the crown of darkest blue, higher and deeper. The sky was a high-peaked dome of royal hues, and it fell vertically from a point above me. I don't know why I remember this so distinctly, but for some reason it's stuck in my mind as something important.

Outside of La Paz there is nothing, absolutely nothing, just brown hills and scrub, winding roads and tin-roofed shacks. But then, just after dawn, the bus comes through a small pass onto a wide highway, descending from the mountains, and you see it, La Paz, for the first time: a million people, an entire city, a capital, built into a canyon, the suburbs marching uphill, the snowbound Andes in the background, everything perched. That's the only word for it, a city perched in geography.

I stayed at some dive off the main tourist street, near the Witches' Market. La Paz is - and this is a bit of urban studies wankery - one of the easiest cities in the world to navigate. Not that the street plan makes any sense, and there aren't any street signs really, but if you get lost, just head downhill. The city's main road, it's only main road, was built on top of the river that made the canyon, so everything slopes towards this one avenue. Very easy.

The tourist scene in La Paz is its own foreign culture; neither Bolivian, nor produced Bolivian, nor European or American - just a bunch of young foreigners operating without restrictions, fueled by cocaine, beyond regard for themselves or others. I was fairly terrified.

The stories! Two girls who didn't eat for two days because they couldn't get out of bed. Another who had a hundred dollars left and needed to get back to Sao Paolo. People with sunken eyes and greasy hair, barely communicative, disheveled and destroyed. They came six thousand miles for this?

I met the German girls for drinks, and later, as I left their hostel, it started to rain, and I skipped from stone to stone uphill back to my dive. Halfway there, on the deserted street at three am, the rain stopped - paused really, because it took a moment for the rain to become snow, singular flurries of snow falling on the peaked roofs, 'on the living and the dead.'

Well, I pounded the pavement, rode in combis, uphill and downhill. Somewhere near the stadium I got directions from this little high school girl, probably about 15, who must have just gotten out of school because she had loosened her tie and unbuttoned her blouse. She had tattoos, she wore too much eye makeup in that way teens do, but she was very, very nice. Live the dream Bolivian goth teen girl - just stop cutting yourself.

The last day I was in La Paz, a parade took over the main street. I waited for a couple friends in the main square, eating peanuts. It was my 4th of July, or closest facsimile, to be eating peanuts, wearing a baseball hat and aviators, watching a parade on a sunny afternoon.

I even had a beer.

Sweet & Sucre

I´ll be honest: I didn't have high hopes for Bolivia. Perhaps I had been swayed by every South American I had talked to, who each had their own stereotype. Peruvians think Bolivians commit all the crimes in Peru, Paraguayans mock how cold it is on the altiplano, and Argentines, in their Argentine way, declare Bolivian girls to all be ugly, each and every one. In retrospect, I think this says something more about Peru, Paraguay, and Argentina than it does about Bolivia, but when everyone tells you something, you listen.

My stereotype, or gut feeling really, was that Bolivia was going to be like Peru, the sierras of Peru, but poorer. Well, when I rolled into Sucre, my feet numb, I quickly learned how wrong I was.
Not that Bolivia isn't poor. It´s extremely poor, and you can see on the faces of the shoeshine boys in the plaza the look of want, for food, for education, for opportunity to do anything but be a fifty-cent-a-shine boy on a Sunday in an empty plaza. (They kept asking me if they could shine my shoes, which puzzled me greatly since I only have one pair of shoes on this trip, and they are old dirty Asics running shoes - I should have let one try to get a shine off my polyester clogs. )

And Bolivian culture is similar to the high sierra of Peru, with short dark women in long bright skirts, layered with aprons, vests, and cardigan sweaters, with tights on but no socks and open-toed shoes. They wear their hair braided in long double strands down their backs, and on their heads they tilt black derby hats, very narrow-brimmed. They are bell-shaped women on the sidewalks and in the street, bundles on their backs, dust on their feet, walking uphill.

Sucre is on a hillside high in the mountains of Bolivia, probably around 10,000 ft or so, and from the bus station and my hostel the city slopes downward to a palm-tree filled plaza, the historical sights of Bolivia´s independence, and a generally touristy street of fancy cafes. It is a beautiful city, and though I had to walk about a mile uphill to get to bed every night, I remember it fondly.

It amazes me how large the disconnect can be between the touristy part of town and the rest, the local stores and restaurants and bars; it is a social divide, not a geographic one, because people will see and visit what they want to see and visit, and a backpacker is just as unlikely to visit a hole-in-the-wall polleria as a Bolivian is to go to Paddy´s ex-pat Irish pub. Almost everywhere I´ve been, if you walk two blocks from where the tourists are, there won´t be any tourists around.

I´m not saying anything is necessarily more authentic, because nothing is so static and produced as authenticity, but that there has to be a happy balance in travel between new experiences and the familiar tastes of home. A lot of backpackers I´ve seen reward themselves for anything, for just traveling, by associating only with what food, drink, or people, they already know. But, two blocks away, with a little extra effort, they could see so many new things that, as haughty as it sounds, really represent how life is in Bolivia, or wherever they are. That step is one few people make.

Personally, I wander from the tourist areas because I get bored with how clean and nice everything is, and my inner urban student wants to take in as many blockfronts as he can. So I walked, a lot, up and down, in no general direction, through the white-washed colonial streets of Sucre until I came to the cemetery in the far north, on the edge of the desert wastes.

The cemetery was fascinating: above ground, vaults six or seven high in long houses maybe two or three hundred graves long. In the center of the site were the tombs, family mausoleums in an eclectic mix of ages and styles and levels of decay. The grave buildings went on for a long time, ten, twenty rows, some vaults glassed-in, with gold letters and wilted flowers, while others had quickly painted stenciled names and dates, the paint having run down from the letters, mingling with the concrete dust. Five hundred years of funerals.

As I walked back towards the entrance, I saw a crowd gathered by one of the buildings, a low hum that comes with crowds, and as I got closer I could hear the wailing, the sobbing, the quiet emotion of a funeral. And I watched the two workers carefully raise the casket up the ladder to a fourth-floor vault, and the campesinas in their black mantles over the bell-shaped skirts, and saw the general disregard some people near the edge of the crowd of mourners had for the goings-on; men dressed in black shirts and sandals, sitting on the edge of a planter, sharing a cigarette, spitting on the walkway. Eventually the workers sealed the vault, and the moaning died down, and the crowd dispersed, but I was walking ahead of them back up the hill.

Later, at night, I walked into town but turned right, away from the plaza, towards the rotunda chapel at the east side of Sucre. I had seen a market there on my way to the cemetery, and I figured it would be more lively at night. For once, I was right: thousands of people jammed the streets around the chapel with a festival market nearly two miles long, with stalls selling everything and everything was cheap. At the upper edge of the market, for the market was arranged in the horseshoe shape of a carnival, were hundreds of foosball tables, literally hundreds, all occupied, five games for a dollar.

And there it was, Bolivian life and Bolivian death, all on one day. I think everyone else in the hostel went to the Joy Ride Cafe, an Irish bar on the plaza, for drinks.