Bolivian High

>>>>>> BOLIVIAN HIGH >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>                                              index

Outside the plane window, slowly drifting past, wrinkled chocolate brown mountains, serrated by gullies, are upstaged by snow-capped peaks and mysterious blue-green lakes. Then the land falls suddenly away into a large canyon, its dusty beige dryness filled by a mosaic of fifty thousand little grey, russet and tan boxes - the tin, brick and adobe houses of the citizens of La Paz. As the plane wheels round in a tight circle to position itself for a visual landing, the mosaic rotates and flashes reflections of the brilliant sun from a thousand glinting points, acting like a huge kaleidoscope.

Then the level ground of an arid high plateau comes rapidly up to meet us, we hit the runway, the engines roar into reverse thrust - and we keep charging along forever in the scant air of the world's highest international airport, way up at twelve thousand feet on the Altiplano of the Andes. Wherever in the world you're coming from, La Paz is different.

The Bolivian capital sits high in the Andes in a steep, riverless valley, its bare brown flanks colonised by an immense patchwork of small houses that cling to precipitous slopes. The light is crystal clear, even painful in its brilliance, and the air is fresh, dry and thin - so sparse that you gasp for it at the slightest exertion for the first few days. Climbing stairs makes you hyper-ventilate, but that's not really surprising. It's the panting from simply turning over in bed that gives you pause.

But still the oddest thing is the ladies in bowler hats. Not just the hats, so far from London and so finely perched on top of long black plaited hair, but also the multiple layers of full skirts overlaid with shawls and blankets that amplify their figures to gargantuan proportions. Or maybe they are all plump of rump, who knows except their husbands?

These women are the commercial soul of La Paz, the street vendors and shopkeepers. Along a vertiginous street that rises from beside the ornate colonial church of San Francisco, they sell colourful woven items - blankets, jackets, tablecloths - made from llama wool, or exquisitely soft jumpers and scarves knitted from baby alpaca wool. Grotesquely, dried and wizened llama foetuses lie in tortuous piles on streetside stalls: an ancient custom dictates that burying one under your house brings good luck. Welcome to the Witchcraft Market.

Some of the whitewashed houses have wrought iron balconies. A resident puts out his caged parrot on one to give it some sun. The bird keeps squawking, "Puta! Puta!" - "Whore, whore!". A woman vendor below, offended, leaves her array of leather bags, steps out into the street and calls up, "Why do you teach your parrot that? It's not nice! I don't like it!" Eventually, the bird is brought in, without comment.

In cobblestoned streets that wind along a hillside above the city's central boulevard, the cholas, as the women are called, operate a major fresh produce and grocery market. Wrapped in shiny silk shawls and vividly striped blankets against the chilly air of the shadows, hunched on the ground, perhaps with a baby slung on their back, and another in their lap, they sell the fresh fruit and vegetables of the Yungas, the hot lush lowland region that lies a half-day's truck ride over the mountain ridge. Or twenty kinds of potato, some brown, some grey (called chunos), some white and shrivelled (tuntas) from an ancient process of freeze-drying which preserves the tubers

These Aymara-speaking people descend from ones who lived here when it was an important central region of the Inca Empire, five centuries ago. Potatoes were the chief crop of the high plateau and one of the mainstays of Inca power as a crucial sustenance. Today's Bolivians like their spuds too.

They also revere their version of the Catholic religion. Beyond a richly carved stone facade featuring local flora and fauna, within the gloom of cavernous San Francisco Church, a chola in a huge flouncy pink ensemble stood fixated on a gaudy figure in a large glass case. Arms upheld in supplication, swaying back and forth in rhythmic fervour, mouthing words, she implored a sickly image of a pale-faced cavalier wielding a sword, kitted out in a plumed hat and apparel of white silk, blue velvet and purple satin, riding a creature that closely resembled Muffin the Mule. It was St James, Santiago Apostol, transmuted into a doll-like 17th century gallant, and much adored. A Tarabuca indian next paid fervent respect, dressed in a red textile cloak and knee breeches, and a leather cap whose shape imitated a conquistador's helmet, reconfirming that the past lives strongly in the present in La Paz.

The Spanish established La Paz in 1548, because - surprise, surprise - there was gold there. (The last Inca emperor, finally sickened at Pizarro's constant demands for it, asked: "Can you eat gold?"). With over one million people today, it is Bolivia's biggest city and thus its modern "goldmine". It has a high rise downtown area and posh suburbs, but these are curiously unobtrusive, being located in the lower and warmer reaches of town, quite the reverse of the usual tropical set-up where the rich live in the cool hills. In La Paz, the poor live in the heights, shivering, with great views.

As rare a city as it is, La Paz shares one thing with most third world capitals: a population explosion. Surveying the city from the roof of his little hotel, the sad-eyed fiftyish waiter said, looking at the tacky apartment blocks and houses clambering over one another all up the canyon sides: "La Paz was a small town when I was a lad. Now people keep coming in trying to get work. Lots of them live up on the plateau at El Alto where nobody could bear to live before. Now that's a city by itself."

Made bold and angular in the late low sunlight, the buildings' square forms composed Cubist landscapes in terracotta and tan as they jostled skywards. It was mesmerising, despite the nagging feeling that distance concealed the squalor of poverty. As night fell, a new beauty would gradually take over: little lights would come on all over the canyon sides until the poor suburbs became a twinkling starfield.

Far down the valley loomed the immense snow-laden massif of Mount Illimani (6402m). Over the canyon ridge to the north, you could just see some peaks of the Cordillera Real, one of the highest Andean ranges which runs northwestwards into Peru and provides a majestic backdrop to Lake Titicaca, a vast body of deep sapphire blue water unrivalled at such height (3600m), where the Inca imperial dynasty was mythically born.

Chacaltaya's ski slopes, the world's highest developed ones, lie within two hours' drive of La Paz. Llama and alpaca herds roam superciliously in the tough altiplano grass beside the highway. The Amazon basin can be reached within a day, hair-raisingly, on the Yungas road. High altitude salt flats spread an eerily beautiful landscape to the south. Bolivia is one of the most scenically varied countries in the world, and justly finds favour as an adventure travel destination.

The major tourist peril of Andean Bolivia is altitude sickness - soroche in local parlance. Soroche doesn't hurt, it just slows you down, makes you tired and "one degree under". You're short of breath, and you have a mild headache. Basically, your blood is not getting the oxygen it should and your system takes several days to start adapting and producing the extra red corpuscles required. Meanwhile, it's coca tea time.

The indigenous people of Bolivia have been chewing and brewing coca leaves since time immemorial to cope with the cold and the altitude of their habitat. The USDEA, in its efforts to eradicate the cocaine trade which is one of Bolivia's major earners, is never going to change that, no matter how much poison it sprays from the skies, and coca tea (mate de coca) - in dainty tea bags or funky whole leaves floating on the water - is served in every cafe in La Paz. It invigorates the lethargic and soothes the sick. God knows how it does both, but that's what different people report, sometimes the same person on different occasions, like this writer.

All ways up, whichever way you take it -- or it takes you -- there's nothing like a Bolivian high.