Copacabana, Monday 25 September
The vicious, corrupt Bolivian customs officer is a gardener. He is dressed in a wool jumper and is pushing a wheelbarrow. He directs me to immigration, where I fill in the standard tourist fiche (five minutes). I return to the customs office. The customs officer parks his wheelbarrow and we complete a transit permit for the Honda. Although patient, he is keen to get back to his barrow. He stamps and signs the permit and points me to the transit police for a countersignature. Total time at the Bolivian border? Barely fifteen minutes. For this I have worried.
I suspect that the writer of my guidebook is an irritating and arrogant young man – the type that officials hate on sight. Or perhaps I have been lucky. Perhaps my age helps. They imagine me dying on them and the paperwork and they think Quick! Move the old fool on!
Copacabana is built on the saddle between two hills. The town slopes steeply down to the shore and reminds me of a Mediterranean fishing village come tourist resort. The townsfolk seem friendlier, happier and more fun-loving than Peruvians. They may eat tourists, but they exercise charm. Peruvians prefer the bludgeon. A big white cathedral dominates the town. The tiled dome and the minarets at each corner of the vast courtyard belong to a mosque. The simplicity of the cathedral’s interior is equally Islamic.
I book into the Colonial – big room with lake view and hot shower. The bedside lamp doesn’t work. I switch rooms. The shower doesn’t work. However, the beds are comfortable and the room rate plus continental breakfast is five dollars.
A wet Brit on his gap year confronts me on the stairs. He has been swimming in the lake. He claims that the water is shallow and therefore warm. I am shivering from the bike ride. The swimmer, a second young Brit and two young North Americans make a foursome in the hotel garden. I would enjoy hearing their stories. Unfortunately, I carry a fatal disease, age, and they choose the table furthest from where I sit.
Lake Titicaca, Tuesday 26 September
Copacabana is on a peninsula. The peninsula is mountainous and projects from Peruvian territory, so it is a de facto island. You take a ferry to Bolivia proper. The ferry port is twenty-five kilometres from Cochabamaba. The road climbs to 4100 metres. Early morning is cold – especially for a biker. The road is under repair. Men lug stones. They don’t wear gloves. Nor do the women who man the wheelbarrows. The hems of the women’s petticoats and skirts show beneath yellow slickers. I consider myself a feminist. This isn’t the equality I envisaged.
The road follows a high contour above Lake Titicaca. Thick rain clouds to the east dye the waters wine-dark. A lone white motor launch draws a white trail. West is sunshine and the water is brilliant blue. My guidebook reports that the lake is mystical, that the terraces on the peninsula are Inca and that La Paz has the best market for buying ingredients for witchcraft. Guidebooks also warned that the customs officers were crooks and warned that I would be raped, strangle mugged, abducted by guerrillas and shot by paramilitaries.
Forget the book and the mystic and the Incas. Stick with the facts: the fells are beautiful and the lake is beautiful. I am immensely privileged in riding these hills on such a glorious morning.
I eat a chicken roll and drink a large mug of hot black coffee in the caféteria by the ferry quay. The woman who serves me has lost an eye; the socket has been sewn shut. She asks whether I am sometimes frightened riding alone. I say, no, I’m fine, just so long as I ignore guidebooks.
A dozen women sell fruit and whatever from stalls outside the caféteria. One of them demonstrates the size of whatever she is discussing by holding her two forefingers a couple of inches apart.
‘Me?’ I say from the doorway, pointing a finger at myself. ‘That’s not very kind.’
A few seconds pass in which the women don’t believe what they’ve heard. Then they break up. One has the laugh of an excited chicken. An old crone is doubled over: ‘Mala, mala, mala!’ she shrieks. Bad, bad, bad!
Wooden barges ferry trucks and buses across the straits. The barges are outboard powered and the passage is some 400 metres. Ten or more of the barges wait in line. The crew won’t cross for a lone biker.
A minibus drives onto the lead ferry and the coxswain waves me on board. He asks about my journey. He wants his photograph taken with the bike and me. One of his crewmen takes the picture. The crewman is a novice with a camera and cuts off part of my head. The coxswain is happy with the result.
La Paz is 120 kilometres from the ferry. The Spaniards founded the city in 1548. They longed for shelter from the viciously cold wind that blows across the Altiplano and sited the city at the bottom of a gorge. In those early days, rush hour was three horses and a mule. Imagine pouring the traffic of a major city into so constricted a space. On a bike I advance a hundred metres in twenty minutes.
I am staying two nights at the Hostal Republic two blocks off the cathedral square. The hostal was once the private house of an ex-president. An estate agent would describe it as a two-patio two-floor Spanish colonial. I have a single room on the upper floor overlooking the rear patio. The shower is reasonably hot and the towels are excellent. The building is romantic. Sixteen dollars is a reasonable room rate. The help found a plank so I could ride the Honda up the steps. The patios are cobbled and the Honda is happy.
I am a good tourist all afternoon: two museums, two churches and a cathedral. The cathedral is gloomy. One of the museums is under repair. However, the coffee in the coffee shop at the Museum and Church of San Francisco is the best I have drunk in more than a month.
In the evening I chat with a German, a professor of philosophy. He has delivered a new book to his publishers and is taking a short break. Flying directly into La Paz often brings on altitude sickness. The professor is suffering – or I bore him to bed.
La Paz, Wednesday 27 September
Today I visited more museums and am overdosed. The streets are steep, and walking at over 4000 metres is tough on an old man. What did I see? More crude and unimaginative Inca gold, beautiful Tiwanachu ceramics. Fifteen hundred years of working with clay – why no potter’s wheel?
Because of a culture in which no one dared think outside the box?
Or you can believe that the indigenous peoples are genetically uninventive.
Nonsense!
To Cochabamba, Thursday 28 September
La Paz is in a hole. A road leads in. A road leads out. Escape is simple. I ride one hundred kilometres across the Altiplano before pulling in at a roadhouse. I park beside an outsized Bolivian-registered 4x4 fitted with all the Chelsea extras: spotlights on the roof, spotlights on the bull bar, winch, cowcatcher, rocket launcher, smoke grenades, ejector seats. The passenger-side smoked window slides down. A neat Bolivian blonde asks where I’ve come from. ‘Mexico? On that bike? Magnificent.’
I, of course, look humble.
‘Where are you going? Argentina? Tierra del Fuego? Wow! Us too. That’s really great.’
The man (ponytail) drums a finger on the padded leather steering wheel.
The blonde takes the message. The smoked window slides up.
I dismount and waddle into the roadhouse. I waddle because I have dressed for the altitude. First the lower half: underpants, long johns, two pairs of chinos, dull-blue waterproof trousers, red rugby socks, Church’s shoes. The top: two undershirts, one cord shirt, one sleeveless jumper, two long-sleeved jumpers, scarf, leather jacket, bright-blue waterproof jacket, wool gloves, leather gauntlets. Why am I freezing?
Bolivia’s Morales is the president of the urban poor, the subsistence farmers and the manual workers. A magic wand should go with the job. It doesn’t. Morales is behind on his promises. His electorate is impatient. The miners have blockaded the road to Cochabamba.
This is the third day of the blockade. Cars can manage a U-turn. Trucks and buses are stuck. They are stuck in a double column tailing back for twenty-five kilometres. Local women are making a killing serving food. Bus passengers drag their gear in hope of a cab. I weave through the queue to the rock barrier.
A union meeting is in progress. I introduce myself to the picket as the father of an elected union official, a Trotskyite. Un ingles, muy militante.
A rock is dragged back to let me through. We embrace. The picket mounts a grass bank beside the road to be photographed. A miner takes the camera and photographs me in the centre of the picket. Sadly he doesn’t push the button. I consider explaining his error. I also consider that a wise man would get the hell out of there fast.
The road climbs beyond the blockade. Snow sprinkles the fell. The snowline is well below the road. Cloud spits ice at my cheeks. My fingers freeze. I don’t give a damn. Honda and I have set a new personal record: 4700 metres.
We have covered 420 kilometres from La Paz to Cochabamba. The Honda rests at a very smart Honda agency. I am in a hotel on the city’s central square. The owners of the hotel are Serbian and friends of Jorge Stambuk whom I met in Girón, Colombia: he of the bio-diesel plant. The hotel bears that essential of a proper European family hotel: Madame sits behind the front desk and takes the money. I have a large room and large bathroom. The water is hot. The decor is 1930s. My relationship to Jorge Stambuk earns me a twenty percent discount. I am very comfortable.
Cochabamba, Friday 29 September
I sit in the sun and eat breakfast this morning at a pavement café. I am warm. Cochabamba is heaven. Rereading my writing of the past days, I realise that I have talked with few people since leaving Nazca. Opening conversations with strangers demands emotional energy. Cold is a sapper of energy. All those clothes form a barrier.
Now, in the sun, I am brave. I chat over breakfast at a café with an Argentinian architect, constructor of a cinema complex. Jewish. We talk of the conquest and the Jewish emigration from Spain to Latin America and of the Islamic influence on early Hispanic colonial architecture and of the friendships and business friendships and alliances between Jewish and Arab immigrants in Argentina.
The architect speaks of the Malvinas/Falklands war, of the young men whose lives were sacrificed to the demands of a drunk and to a woman’s desire for re-election.
S.I.M. is the Honda agent. I watch the Honda being serviced. The mechanic is meticulous. I am about to start the bike. The mechanic orders me not to touch the throttle. I kick the starter. The engine burbles contentedly. The bill is twelve dollars.
Cochabamba, Saturday 30 September
The sun shines. I sit at a café with members of Cochabamba’s Classic Bike Club. They insist I fetch my bike from the hotel garage. It is barely visible parked among its wealthy relatives, more a guinea-pig than a Hog. These men are wealthy. The custom seats on their Harleys and massive Hondas cost more than my entire 125. We exchange tales of accidents; politics are off the menu. Frustrating, as I long to learn their opinions.
The Bolivian chemical engineer in Girón, Colombia, has given me an introduction to a Bolivian icon, a footballer – goalkeeper for the national team. I am invited to lunch at his home. He is younger than me by a few years and yet he walks with a frame and is clumsy with his hands. ‘Cortisone,’ he explains. ‘Playing when injured.’
We drink and talk while the TV displays extreme sports. I watch the crashes, kids bleeding, and I come near to vomiting with sudden fear for Jed, my youngest son: Jed, the mountain boarder, on first-name terms with ambulance crews.
The BBC’s correspondent described last week’s strike of the southern provinces of Bolivia as a strike of white Bolivians against the indigenous population of the north. Oddly, I find no mention on the BBC’s site of the miners’ blockade. Perhaps the correspondent is seeking to define the miners’ colour.
I have been in Cochabamba for two and a half days. I have walked the streets, sat at cafés, eaten in restaurants. Where are these pure bloods of European descent? This white majority of the BBC correspondent’s imagination?
My own perceptions are limited and probably equally erroneous. Cochabamba is a fun city. It is a city loved and cared for by its residents. Flowering trees line clean streets. After La Paz, you feel that you are in a different country. Here are a few quotations:
‘There will be civil war.’
‘What can you expect when the president is an Indian?’
‘Morales is honourable but better an intelligent crook than an honourable incompetent.’
‘The Americans should do something.’
‘The Americans are to blame, always interfering.’
The poor of La Paz love Morales.
So do Europe’s liberal intelligentsia.
I am ignorant. I have no facts. I have no opinion.
To Santa Cruz, Sunday 1 October
A TV crew will film my departure from Cochabamba. I pack, load the bike and wait in the central square. The cathedral is the far side, police headquarters on my left. A brass band is practising. Cops wander over to inspect the bike.
I tell them I intend riding the lowland road via Villa Turani to Santa Cruz. Villa Turani has been a centre for the US DEA and the War on Drugs, a campaign as corrupt and corrupting, ill-conceived and unsuccessful as the War on Terror.
The cops warn that I may be stopped by civilians posing as narcotics agents. There are no agents in civilian clothes. I must insist that the fake agents accompany me to the police station in the next town.
What if they are armed?
‘Of course they will be armed. Everyone is armed. Insist,’ insists a cop.
Sun shines. The TV journalist waves from the far side of the artificial lake. The lake water is clean. The flowerbeds are beautifully kept.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Yes, right, I’ll insist.’
The band plays.
The cops shake my hand and wish me well.
The first 200 kilometres to Santa Cruz are biker heaven, easy climbs, swooping curves. I break at Villa Tunari. Midday and fish fresh from the river and grilled over charcoal is on the menu, with squeezed orange juice.
A further 470 kilometres to Santa Cruz.
Beyond the mountains the road runs straight across ranch land, dairy farms and huge fields of sugar cane. The heat is splendid: no need for a jumper or leather jacket. Dusk as I reach the city. Sunday and the boys on bikes are out and rowdy. I grin and pull in beside a clutch of Harleys revving at the pavement.
One of the riders (bearded) returns my grin and says, ‘Yeah, I know.’
I find a nine-dollar hotel with hot water just a block away from the Plaza Central. I unload and leave my bags in the lobby while I park the bike in a parking lot. I return to the hotel and find that a young man has carried my gear up to my room. Such small unasked-for kindnesses give immense pleasure.
I lick great coffee ice-cream on the cathedral plaza. The population appears marginally paler-skinned than in Cochabamba. The cathedral is vast; the ceiling is inlaid with wood; standing room only for eight o’clock Mass.
South, Monday 2 October
My target is Yuquiba on the border with the Argentine. I fail to pick the left turn at kilometre thirteen and ride thirty kilometres on the hill road to Sucre. Dumb! I have a tail wind and cruising at a hundred kilometres an hour is easy on a great road across dry forest patched with rough fields. Hot as an oven and I stop wherever bottled water is available from an icebox.
The only service station midway is out of gas. The next gas station is a further hundred kilometres. I buy four litres from a drum at the next village.
I stop the night ninety kilometres short of the border at Villamontes. I try the Hotel Rancho first. It is recommended by the guidebooks. A surly receptionist gives a room rate of twenty-six dollars. The next two hotels are full. Finally I stop at the Hostal la Oyerencia on Avenida Heroes del Chaco: nine dollars for a large room with fan, hot water in a good bathroom, cable with CNN. I have ridden 1000 kilometres in two days.
Villamontes has a pleasant small-town feel. Although famous as a centre for sports fishing, the heat of its summers is infamous. The owner of the hotel sits in a rocking chair on the cool entrance porch and shares maté with young friends who stop by. I sit on the steps and join in the conversation. The owner is from La Paz. Her husband is an official. The hotel is a recent acquisition.
Yuquiba, Tuesday 3 October
Today I face a headwind and eighty kilometres is a maximum. Cold drizzle stings my cheeks. I stop at the roadside and pull on my jacket and rainwear. Miserable, I pull into Yuquiba and find a hotel on the square, with bathrooms and cable TV. A great restaurant on the square has an upstairs packed with Mennonites in fresh blue overalls and straw Stetsons. They don’t drive cars, trucks or tractors. A Mennonite baby is sucking on a plastic pacifier.
Yuquiba is a border town and a bazaar. Shops overflow onto the pavement on my hotel’s side of the street. A young woman walks ahead, mid-twenties. Her build is too square for fashionable taste. She wears short blue shorts, a sleeveless sports top, flip-flops. Add two teaspoons of creamy milk to a cup of good coffee and you have her skin tone. Her confidence and her independence strike me. Admiration is unimportant. She has dressed to please herself. I imagine her giving a nod to her reflection in the mirror: ‘Yeah, girl, you look good.’
I sit at a pavement café in the evening and watch other women pass. This female confidence is new. The mid-thirties and younger have it. They are freed of servitude. They create their own roles. Meanwhile, Mennonite women cling to serfdom. They speak softly, avoid eye contact. Whether gift of God or genetics, beauty leads to sin. Cover it up. Hats and headscarves are obligatory. The route to hell lies in the glimpse of a pink earlobe.
The Mennonites share the headscarf with Islamic women. Little separates the scarf from the hijab. The hijab is a close relative to female circumcision.
Yuquiba is an odd place in which to meet a soulmate. Early evening and we sit together at the pavement café. He introduces himself: Luis Yudi.
Jewish?
Arab. Orthodox Christian.
Luis was seven when the family emigrated from Syria. Now he is in his early sixties. We are both early school leavers. Self-educated, we are suspicious of what we are told. University graduates are less enquiring: memorising the lecturer’s notes is the route to success.
The exchange of opinions is serious stuff. Before speaking, Luis gathers himself and hunches his shoulders and dips his head the way a boxer does.
He is proudly Arab and full of odd scraps of Arab history. Did I know that Gibraltar is named after an Arab admiral?
He has contempt for George W. Bush and the US administration. Their ignorance offends him. The president’s use of the term ‘crusade’ is typical. The Crusaders were liberal in whom they pillaged and butchered: Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Jew.
He has visited England and Scotland. He has warm memories of London. He judges as reprehensible Blair’s failure to denounce Israel’s recent destruction of Lebanon. Does Britain no longer have its own foreign policy?
He is, of course, a true Semite. Most Israelis are mestizo. Yet to be sympathetic to the Palestinian ordeal and to criticise Israel is to be anti-Semitic.
Although a businessman, he is also a writer. He has written a treatise on the Bolivian constitution. Eight copies of the book have been printed and bound. He fetches a copy from his house. He has dedicated the copy: Para el amigo Gandolfi para que en tu tesis la midas con optimo calificaciones…
Luis, I thank you. Such meetings prove the value of travel.