Eight days ago at this time of night we were in the process of
stuffing our gear into the backpack once again: we were getting ready to leave
La Paz and board the bus for Lima in the morning.
Was it only the fact that we had been here before that made
me sad to leave this city where I had left Buenos Aires, Montevideo and
Asunción behind with a light heart? Was it the knowledge that we were nearing
the end of our trip?
No, I don’t think it had much to do with that. During our
travels there have always been some places that have touched my heart, made me
feel, in some strange way, that I belonged. I am filled with a deep sadness
when I leave them, and I leave a piece of myself behind. Cusco is one of those
places, and Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, the rocky hills of the hacienda of a
distant relative in Argentina, Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca … What makes these
more special than so many other beautiful locations I cannot say. I do know for
certain that I love the highlands in all the South American countries where we
have travelled, be it Ecuador or Colombia, Peru or Bolivia. It has to do with
the clear air, the landscape, the steep slopes, the breathtaking views, being nearer
to the sky, maybe, but there also is something about the people of these high
altitudes that touches me and draws me in.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We arrived in La Paz around three-thirty in the afternoon
after a short one-hour flight from Santa Cruz. The La Paz airport is the
highest point of the city at 4,200m altitude, and we were a little worried how
this would affect us after spending all this time in the lowlands. Walking
slowly, sucking on ‘lifesavers’ (sweets being recommended to counteract the
effects of high altitude), we found that we didn’t have a problem.
According to our travel guide there were plenty of ‘micros’
– small busses – running between airport and city centre, a much cheaper option
than a taxi. Dodging taxi drivers in search of passengers – it helps to know
you are not taking a taxi! – we went
looking for a micro. Our destination, we had decided, would be the Plaza San
Francisco. From there we wouldn’t have far to walk to the hostel, if we
remembered correctly from last year. Micros were parked along the curb, and we
soon found one that would be travelling in the right direction. Our backpack
was hoisted onto the roof (Johann’s help was much appreciated since the driver
was much shorter), and we were ushered into the back of the twelve-passenger
van, or rather minivan. By the time we got going every single cramped seat was
occupied: returning or visiting travellers, mostly businessmen, it seemed, but
also two soldiers in the blue dress uniform of the navy. Interestingly,
Bolivia, although it lost access to the ocean to Chile in the War of the
Pacific (1879-1884) and now is completely land locked, maintains a small naval
force, mostly stationed on Lake Titicaca. The sky was clear enough to give us a
good view of snow-crowned Illimani, Bolivia’s second highest mountain and the most
important landmark of La Paz, venerated by its people.The centre of La Paz is more than 500m lower than the
airport, and the drive down affords great views of this city that fills the
whole narrow valley and sends spurs up the steep hillsides enclosing it
protectively.
The micro driver descended at a good clip, the bumpy road
causing us to turn around anxiously off and on, checking to make sure our bag
hadn’t ended up on the road by any chance. Once we entered the city proper our ‘taxi’
stopped from time to time to disperse one or the other of the passengers, and
finally we, too, were let off at the Plaza San Francisco in front of the church
of the same name, right in the heart of La Paz. Shouldering our packs we
crossed the plaza and found ourselves at the bottom of steep ‘Calle Sagarnaga’.
Step by slow step we climbed up, passing street vendours, cubicle offices of
travel agents and restaurants, stopping to catch our breath after a
particularly steep section. After a couple of blocks we arrived at the
intersection to busy Calle Illampu: we were almost there. It was as if we had
just walked along this street yesterday, not a whole long year ago. The
traffic, too, had not changed since, and we crossed doing the only thing one can do in La Paz: wait until traffic
comes to a standstill (which is every few steps, it seems) and wind your way
through the three or four lanes of cars, making eye contact with the drivers of
the vehicles in front of which you pass. Actually, by now that feels like a
safer way to cross than on wide, less crowded streets, aided by traffic lights
without any ‘communication’ with the driver.
We had decided on the same hostel we stayed last year during our
time in La Paz, the 'Sol Andino' in Calle Aroma, just off Illampu, and the same
woman greeted us when we entered - it's a strange feeling to return to a familiar place when one travels like we do. While the hostel lacks atmosphere a little
and, more importantly, the common room that is the heart and meeting place of so
many hostels, the rooms are spacious and very clean, the breakfast is good, and
the location is as close to perfect as it could possibly be, within walking
distance to pretty much all the important places in the city centre.
Johann was feeling a bit under the weather, but I was hungry
and went in search of something to eat after a good nap. By now it was eight pm
and dark, but Illampu was teeming with people, as far as I could see very few
of them tourists. Here it was, the atmosphere I had so longed for without
realizing it: the woman sitting beside a pile of mangoes, engaged in
conversation with her neighbour selling empanadas and cuñapés (small cheese ‘buns’), tables piled with wrist watches,
tools, Christmas decorations, children’s toys, bananas, glasses; women knitting
(many of them!), one with a spool of white yarn twirling between her feet,
planted far enough apart to make room, unceremoniously lifting up her woolen
sweater to silence the whining of a cranky toddler by plunking a nipple in his
mouth … I slowly walked the two blocks
to the intersection with Sagarnaga, savouring every step, the din of traffic
and voices, breathing deeply the tantalizing scents. There, at the corner, were
the stands I remembered so well: piled with all kinds of goods, bundles of
chamomile, mint and many other hierbas,
herbs, emitted their wonderful fragrances.
I turned around and walked back, stepping a couple of steps
down from the sidewalk into a tiny tienda
to buy a bottle of water and a couple of bananas from a woman obviously
flustered by this foreign visitor. I stopped once more at a small restaurant
for some cheese empanadas, heated in the microwave, courtesy of the vendor, so
that they’d be nice and hot when I arrived home.
Several times more we strolled along Illampu and down
Sagarnaga in the next few days, on the last day branching off into little side
streets filled with shops catering mostly to tourists, selling everything from
the soft hand-knit sweaters made with alpaca or, even softer, baby alpaca wool,
hats and ponchos to jewellery, bags, hammocks and an amazing array of musical instruments. I could have spent hours
looking at the hand crafted guitars, adorned with wood inlay and other lovingly
carved details, and the smaller charangos,
small Andean string instruments belonging to the lute family with ten strings
in five groups of two each, traditionally made with the back of the shell of
armadillos but now more often crafted with wood, which not only is easier to
find but also offers a better resonance. There were also many different kinds
of flutes, from pan flutes to quenas,
the original six-hole flute of the Andes, and, of course, percussion
instruments. I would have loved to bring home a charango, but apart from the
difficulty of transporting it, what would I do with it later, unable to play
and without the opportunity to learn? Instead, I settled for a CD with musica tipica.
I imagine it would be easy to assume that this part of the
city is serving mainly tourists (even though not a whole lot of them were
around when we were there; maybe it was the wrong part of the year), but apart
from all the aforementioned shops selling handicrafts there are many street
vendours very obviously not catering to tourists, not only in Illampu but also
in Sagarnaga.
The so-called ‘Witches’ Market’, for example, is without
doubt very interesting to look at, but most of the things sold here, between
Sagarnaga and Calle Santa Cruz, along calles
Linares and Jimenez, would not find their way into the home of the average
tourist. Herbs and seeds, folk remedies and aphrodisiacs, soapstone and clay
figurines are one thing – but who would be interested in a llama fetus or dried
frogs??
When I discovered the first of these lama fetuses –
sometimes covered in short fur, sometimes with only the leathery skin stretched
over the bones – it didn’t really register what I was looking at, and my glance
swept over it without recognition. Once I did
see it for what it was, however, there was no avoiding them: hung side by
side above the vendours’ heads, stacked tightly in shelves they are as much a
part of the whole scene as the piles of cut flowers and stacks of vegetables in
stands a little higher up the street. According to what I could find out on the
internet the llama fetuses are always buried in the foundations of new
constructions or businesses, offerings to Pachamama,
the Earth Mother, revered by Andean people since Inca times, to protect the
workers and bring good fortune to the business.
We ventured beyond our immediate and so very intriguing
surroundings as well, of course. One walk led us up the hill opposite Sagarnaga
to the ‘Plaza Murillo’, La Paz’s central plaza, surrounded by important buildings
like the Presidential Palace, the cathedral and the National Congress of
Bolivia. Content to observe them from a bench in the plaza instead of entering we noted a strange feature: for whatever reason the numerals on
the clock of the congress building are arranged counter-clockwise, so it
appears to run ‘backward’.
A little higher up the hill, in Calle Jaen, I had the
opportunity to find out more about the music of the Andes when we visited the
Museum of Musical Instruments, 'Museo Instrumentos Musicales de Bolivia'. This is an wonderful, privately
run museum, housed in a colonial building, where a huge array of musical
instruments has been assembled. Different rooms contain everything from
pre-Colombian instruments made of stone, clay, wood, bone and even flutes
crafted from condor feathers to modern instruments sorted according to type.
One room is dedicated to miniature depictions of musical instruments and
Bolivian dance scenes. Here, the ‘smallest guitar in the world’, no bigger than
the head of a pin, can be viewed through a magnifying glass. Other rooms
contain musical instruments from different time periods gathered from all
corners of the world, sheet music, and strange inventions like guitars with two
necks mounted back to back, or with five necks arranged around a pentagonal
body like the spokes of a wheel. Many of them were created by Ernesto Cavour,
an accomplished Bolivian musician who founded the museum in 1962.
 |
| Guards keeping watch over the sarcophagus of Marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz, the third Bolivian president, between the cathedral and the presidential palace |
We went on one more very interesting excursion before we left
La Paz on Saturday morning: a guided tour to the pre-Colombian archaeological
site Tiwanaku (Spanish Tihuanaco or Tihuanacu), but I will save that for another
posting.
