La Paz and All That Jazz

When I think of 'the Jazz Bar' I invariably have visions of a smoky blue, dimly lit basement, little round tables with candles and wine, gravel-toned musicians and of course, a stage full of musical instruments. In my head, 'the Jazz Bar' is always in the 1970s or, having never been there myself, how I'm positive the '70s must have been. Bearing all these romantic fantasies in mind, imagine my delight when I got the chance to visit a real life '70s jazz bar! But it wasn't in the '70s! It was in this very decade! Coma awakeners and the forgetful, it's 2010. The Thelonious bar in La Paz has it all from the razor throated waitress right down to the hangover inducing cheapo table wine. Hooray! On our first trip to Thelonious there was a band comprising two silky voiced ladies, a hyper-enthusiastic guitarist, bass player and a keyboard player whose lack of a thumb on his left hand failed to impede his fabulously frenetic performance. Also present was a man with a table upon which was a vast array of instruments. Maracas, the triangle, a washboard. It was as if he's raided the music room cupboard at my old primary school. As he played each item in turn and seemingly at random, it became clear that this fellow had The Dream Job. The resulting sound of the band's collective effort was a kind of 'elevated elevator music', easy listening speeded up with an upbeat Bossa Nova rhythm. We returned to Thelonious after our trip to Uyuni. The Salt Flats, whilst offering their own unique brand of saline entertainment, were a musical wasteland. Thus, the aurally deprived Uyuni contingent all hot footed it sharpish down to the jazz bar.

This time our performers were two men, one large, one smaller, the latter bearing a resemblance to Lionel Richie. Both proved to be breathtakingly accomplished guitarists and surprisingly emotive vocalists. Lionel had a wind chime that he ran his hand along for that lounge room ambience. His guitar also had a CD for a fret board. I know not why, but it seemed to work. We found from our Canadian friends that we'd arrived just too late for the Buena Vista Social Club medley. Obviously gutted, we were cheered by the rapid and adept guitar duo as they stirred the audience with their impassioned, intense and typically Latin singing. Only one member of the audience remained unmoved. Having had, I can only assume, a tiring day at the office, to say nothing of a few too many drinks, a man sitting in front of us kept dropping off. Mr Snooze's buddy, meanwhile, danced around furiously. Aghast at the napper's apathy to such uplifting music he occasionally slapped his friend on the back of the head in an attempt to rouse him from his slumber. zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The Curious Magic of the Uyuni Salt Flats

The overnight bus journey from La Paz to Uyuni was the most bone-shaking experience of my life. Emerging blinking into the morning sun like a newborn fawn, sleep deprived and with aching bones from the rocky and laughably named 'road' I thought "This bloody trip had better be worth it's salt". We had a couple of hours to kill before the Jeep was to take us on our way, so we pottered around the early morning market, surveying the diversity of complete tat being peddled. Our newly acquired Canadian friends and our companions for the Uyuni adventure, Meg and Fed agreed that garish-coloured plastic dinosaurs would be an ideal prop for the silly perspective pictures we were looking forward to taking later that day. How original, we congratulated ourselves. No one else is going to have these. Not so, as it later transpired that the Salt Flats had more dinosaurs than Jurassic Park. That Prehistoric plastic vendor must make an absolute killing from fatigue-addled gringos freshly stumbled from the Hell Bus, such as we were. Dinos duly purchased, the four of us tramped off to meet our driver and guide for the next two days. Elias is a quiet, gently spoken chap with floppy hair, Roy Orbison shades, a fine alpaca jumper, and no determinate age. Our first stop is the Cave del Diablo, a low-ceilinged grotto with several square holes carved into the ground. These were said to be the tombs that housed the local dead, although the bodies mysteriously no longer lie there. Legend has it that the Devil possessed the bodies, taking them with him to hell, a typical example of imaginative Bolivian folklore. Nearby are 'the Galaxias', another cave, this time filled with astonishingly fragile rock formations, uncannily resembling corroded mammal bones. The fun didn't stop at marvelling at extraordinary rocks. Oh no. We then entertained ourselves no end by looking at the perfectly formed salt pyramids harvested by the salt miners and then going and standing upon them. A most diverting exercise. What japes! Lunchtime brought us to a salt hotel. At first glance a very basic structure with craggy and uncomfortable furniture, it is remarkable for the fact that everything - walls, chairs, tables, though mercifully not the bog - is made from compacted salt blocks. It came as no real surprise to our group of by now seasoned travellers, accustomed to the quirky illogicality peculiar to the South American peoples, that there was no salt made available for consumption with lunch. It was all we could do to resist stealing a pinch from the floor to enhance our essentially flavourless meal. My main reason for wanting to visit the Bolivian Salt Flats had always been that they afforded the opportunity to pose for and compose ridiculous perspective photographs. Puerile, I know. Imagine my childlike glee when after lunch we drove to an optimum spot for taking just such a frivolous collection of snapshots, the Islas Pescados. After cavorting about on the crunchy salt crystals like ecstatic five year olds in the first snow, Meg, Fed, Matty and I set about the task of trying to make our little dinosaurs look gigantic and menacing against the expanse of blinding white landscape and brilliant blue sky. Like the other two hundred and forty eight people wielding toy dinosaurs alas, we failed, as evidenced by the unconvincing menagerie enclosed below.  Other props we utilised to better effect were: a corkscrew (On account of the blog title), a bottle of wine, a Rough Guide to South America, a pair of sunglasses and a borrowed house of cards. By some incredible magic we discovered that, if we positioned ourselves at certain distances on the salt, it would appear that a tiny me was standing on a giant Matty's hand or a miniscule he was dangling from the fingertips of a gargantuan me. We played about for ages and revelled in the tremendous environment of the Salt Flats. They possess a bizarre and surreal quality, reflecting the mountains of the horizon, giving them the effect of floating on air. It's really like nothing you've ever seen, as cliche as this must sound. 
On day two of the Uyuni trip a series of events unfurled that made us grateful for our reliable guide Elias, the follicularly blessed and well-sunglassed. The first was an encounter with another tourist Jeep sporting totally threadbare tyres, one of which had unsurprisingly given up the ghost. It was obviously written into the Uyuni Tour Guide Code Of Honour that, upon encountering a colleague in vehicular peril, one must stop to help. Elias did just that, supplying the unfortunate driver with a jack, thus facilitating his assuming a very precarious position with his head beneath the offending Jeep. If jacks are as unreliable as every other article on this wonderful continent we didn't hold out much hope for him. Still, the incident passed without fatality and freed our party on the way to the next debacle. We had on our travels often heard tale of the relaxed attitude Bolivian drivers have to abstaining from alcohol. In that they don't bother. So we encountered another tour group, most chagrined at having been forced to send their driver home. It was ten in the morning and he was pissed as a newt. Perhaps he had forgotten to spit out his mouthwash that morning but, given the general profile of driving folk in Bolivia, this seemed unlikely. Anyway, back to our trip, with the thankfully sober and well tyred Elias. Next stop was the mummy cave. There is no small amount of pleasure to be gained from seeing a rock with an arrow pointing the way and the legend 'Mummies' painted on it with white paint. Or it could have been Tippex. The mummies were exceptional and creepy. The story we heard from the guide was that a nocturnal people had perished when they were forced from their cave into the sunlight and incurred terrible burns. This didn't exactly ring true but the event seems entirely un-Google-able. Answers on a postcard please. Speaking of holiday correspondence, the happy news came today from Matty's sister, Lucy and her beloved, Neil that they had only just received the postcard we sent two and a half months ago from Argentina. God love the South American postal system! Yes, the mummies. We gawked at the strangely preserved, gnarled and grotesque bodies for some time, wondering how on earth they manage to retain their hair when all around us living specimens fail to do so. I would never recommend trekking up a volcano in flip flops, much less at an altitude of 4, 200 meters. At this height, every step you take feels like a sprint and by golly, I was exceedingly out of breath approx. two steps in. Our youthful guide Elias, who we shamefully found to be no less than fifty years old, coursed up the volcano with nary a wheeze. Imagine my consternation when Meg and I, she a mere twenty three years of age and I (only 20!) found it a right challenge to get anywhere at all. The scenery was beautiful, as far as I managed to gather from the inexplicable altitude induced hayfever symptoms. Many a cute ear-tasselled  llama dotted the landscape, as did the odd lurid red quinoa field. The views of the salt flats below, the many-hued orange, red, grey and green volcano and the birds eye aspect of the Salt Flats and it's mysterious floating mountains all made this a voyage worthy of the considerable effort. Fed and Matty were given the chance to drive the Jeep across the Salt Flats. Now, I'm not a driver myself, but even I knew that this is no mundane motoring experience. The salt is almost completely unmarked and navigation is done by simply staring at and following the tracks left by the previous vehicles. This must be soporific in the extreme. Since you rarely pass anything by there is no frame of reference as to how fast the car is going, and obviously it would have been foolish to expect anything as ordinary as a functioning speedometer aboard our Jeep. Against all the odds we made it to our final port of call, the Train Cemetery in Uyuni. Here lie an abundance of once-glorious, now rust-coloured and abandoned steam locomotives. Decrepit as the old trains are, they still appear very striking against a Western movie-style backdrop of parched red earth and deep blue sky. One local couple found this antiquated bygone scene the perfect place to canoodle, while the four of us found the anachronism stark, sad but very beautiful. One comedian graffitti artist had scrawled in Spanish on one of the decaying machines 'Mechanic urgently required'. Clearly that ship had sailed but it was a nice concept.

   

Various Notes on La Paz

The bus journey from Copacabana to La Paz proved to be unique in that it didn't take place wholly on land. Leaving Copacabana the bus seemed always to be following Lake Titicaca. We saw it to the left, then the right, then before us and behind. Now, my geography wouldn't win any prizes (except that I once got 100% in the USA geography quiz at school in 1993), but even I knew that in order to get to La Paz we should probably be moving away from the lake. At the very least we were expecting a bridge. The situation that followed could well have featured in a poster campaign for  'Travelling In South America: An Idiosyncratic and Off the Wall Pursuit'. So we all had to get off the bus at this pseudo port and pile into a rickety old fishing boat to, as the chicken jokes go, get to the other side. While on the vessel a German girl asserted 'I'm fine with this. Some people get really seasick, but I'm not one of them No, I'm not feeling sick at all'. Sitting directly opposite her, I instantly thought that the German girl was feeling ill as the proverbial hund and was trying to talk herself out of it. Getting across the pond without being spewed upon was definitely one of my greatest achievements to date (notwithstanding that quiz at school). So, what had become of our bus in the interim? Obviously nearby there was some hastily constructed bridge to cater for the overflow of tourist traffic that has risen over the past few years, a bridge that couldn't take the weight of both passengers and vehicle. Ho ho, not so, as we witnessed our bus floating across the lake on what appeared to be a makeshift raft. I have enclosed a photo here as this mode of transport would be beyond belief for any commuting tube connoisseur. After this delightfully diverting passage, La Paz was a bit of a culture shock after party-centric yet laid back Copa. The steep, narrow and broken pavements and streets are flanked by as many artisan markets selling alpaca jumpers and other diverse wares as can be imagined. However slim the streets might be, you still take your life into your own hands crossing them. Beeping, decrepit buses make their presence known by virtually nudging your legs as you pass. There is no pedestrian right of way per se, although the Bolivian street walkers appear to be used to it, despite the collectivos coursing toward them, probably because the bumper to bumper traffic disallows them squeezing through with their portly frames. It's a wonderful minefield. 

The Bolivians are a superstitious bunch. One of their idols is a fat little buddha-like character called Ekeko. The locals have his image in their house and load him up with all the things they want during the forthcoming year. Aspirational items such as cash, SUVs, mansions, lottery tickets and, bizarrely, cigarettes are purchased in miniature and piled onto poor overburdened Ekeko. Then you take your little figurine to a Witch Doctor to be blessed so that the tiny trinkets become a mega reality. Matty and I bought a little wooden carving of Ekeko but strangely couldn't locate a Witch Doctor in La Paz. I'm afraid our ship might not come in on this occasion. At high altitude any beverage you choose to partake of has an accentuated effervescence. Imaginative people as the Bolivians doubtless are, they've managed to cultivate a game from this geographical quirk. If your out on the town with your friends and happen to be sharing an oversized beer, do the pour and observe what fate has decreed. Too much head is a curse to male lager drinkers (we're not in bloody Holland now) but a blessing for those same males in other areas of their lives, where there can never be too much, if you know what I mean. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Anyway, if you're in Bolivia and find yourself with the most frothy beer, you're the lucky one. The next thing you need to do is take a pinch of your beer head and pop in in your pocket. This action apparently guarantees you no end of fiscal wealth in your forthcoming life. A flimsy consolation prize to having less actual beer than everyone elseat the table and more bubbles? Perhaps. It's quite a nice custom nonetheless. Speaking of booze, another fantastic thing about La Paz is it's shower gel. We bought this red wine infused body cleanser from a street vendor, not least because procuring any goods whatsoever from a South American pharmacy is the epitome of a massive faff. So, the pharmacy gig goes thus. You select your chosen toiletry and take it to the counter, cash in hand. The person you've approached at said counter looks befuddled at your brandishing of money so early on in the transaction and issues you with a ticket, stipulating the product you're interested in and it's cost. This ticket then needs to be related to a second pharmacy assistant who is, to all intents and purposes, The Cashier. He or she accepts your ticket, along with the long wielded money,  and stamps the document. The next step for the customer is to transport the now validated ticket to the original shop assistant you had dealings with (remember, all those moons ago, when you wanted some SPF15?) who will finally pass you your goods with a receipt. Who would have thought getting some sun lotion on board would be such a time consuming rigmarole? Regardless, how about that red wine flavoured shower gel? To think, I went into the bathroom smelling like booze. Now I can emerge, doused in cosmetic cleansers, smelling not wildly different. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of that particular Lux focus group. 

Music and llamas were always the passion at the Coooopa...

The passage from Peru to Bolivia took us to Copacabana, a bijou little town on the shores of Lake Titicaca. As we disembarked blinking from the bus, the scenes before us were much larger than life. This is one of my favourite features of travel around South America. You can jump on a bus from one country to another and emerge in the midst of the most boisterous May Day celebrations. Cars and outsize cartoon trucks were decorated with gaudy flower arrangements and garlands. All around were dancing processions of traditionally attired Bolivians being led by vivid marching bands. Standing in the town centre, one is subjected to an aural assault from all sides, at least six factions of warring bands competing for the attention of your eardrums with varying degrees of musical proficiency. I'm not saying that the sounds was terrible, only that the musicians might have put a spot of practice in, or at least tuned their instruments in preparation for the festivities. I suspect that the jarring tunelessness of the instruments could in part be attributed to the fact that the players were fantastically sloshed. It's just a hunch, of course. Perambulating along the lake front, little llamas, adorned in scaled down versions of the vehicle's ostentatious regalia, frolic in our path. Afternoon revellers, unaccustomed to boozing, a dangerous habit at this heady altitude, totter and tumble around, many being escorted home by their stoical wives. The funniest vignette had to be the sight of one couple, both as inebriated as each other, reeling precariously and bumping into one another like two disturbed Weebles as they went. Hilarious spot-the-drunkard fun. In a bid to get into the alcohol fueled jollity we went for a drink at a bar that was apparently being run by a ten year old boy and a girl that couldn't have been more than four. Talk about starting them young. White wine in Bolivia seems to have the same novelty status as ostrich schnapps. We ordered a bottle of Vino Blanco and promptly saw the little boy leg it to the local shop and return to the bar, smuggling the exotic beverage back under his jumper. The wine was hideous but the sunset was something else. A line of yellow hung over the dark mountain and beneath a perfect blue sky. Breathtaking. We watched the little llamas with their rosary necklaces for a while, until a small boy herded them into a van where they stood patiently, peering inquisitively out of the window, waiting to be taken home after a long day of delighting gringos. The following day, traversing the ramshackle pavements, we chanced upon yet another marching band being led by traditionally dressed men and women, many of them dancing with gusto. It didn't escape my notice that a few of the musicians were lagging severely behind the rest of the troupe , no doubt struggling desparately through the hangover of yesterday. It goes without saying that the instruments were no closer to being tuned.