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.