Roughing It in Mountainous Bolivia

I had just taken my fingers out of my ears to see if the dynamite had gone off, when it did.

Whoom! The first explosion blew out the flame on my carbide lamp.

Bam! The second knocked my plastic hat askew and pushed me several steps down the tunnel as I belatedly tried to recover my hearing--not to mention my balance.

“Isn’t this fun?” the disembodied voice of our Bolivian guide exclaimed gleefully in the darkness up ahead. “Who wants to light the next fuse?”

There was not exactly a chorus of volunteers. In fact, there were not any volunteers. Wimpy gringos, you could almost hear the guide thinking.

But hey, he was used to this. He’d been leading tours of this mine almost daily for years, and before that he’d worked as a miner.

We, on the other hand, were just a couple of camera-toting, guidebook-clutching, city-dwelling norte americanos, cowering almost a mile inside the Cerro Rico mountain in Potosi, Bolivia, on a tour that would have horrified even the laxest of safety inspectors back home. Stumbling, groping and occasionally bumping our heads, we followed our guide through the tunnel as fast as we could, which wasn’t very fast, considering the ceiling was so low that we had to crouch. I tried not to think about the tons of rock above us, buttressed by wooded beams that looked as if they’d been placed there by the Spaniards who had mined the mountain in the 1600s.

“Some (huff) relaxing (pant) vacation (gasp),” I said to my friend Tony, who was in front of me.

“I seem to (cough) remember this (choke) being your idea!” he rasped back, hoarse from the dust. Things might have gotten ugly, except that right about then we reached a fork in the tunnel and realized we’d lost our guide.

But never mind. Like the legendary 19th-Century outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we had come to Bolivia in search of adventure, and neither of us could deny that was exactly what we were getting. From the electrified shower heads in our hotel rooms (well, the shocks didn’t hurt that much) to the train that kept stopping so the conductor could remove boulders from the tracks, Bolivia provided us with plenty to write home about. And yes, we loved every minute of it.

Granted, this mountainous South American nation is not the most obvious of tourist destinations. Bolivia doesn’t have the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Argentina, the archeological ruins of Peru, the beaches of Brazil. (In fact, it doesn’t have any coastline at all, so its navy anchors in a lake.) If you’re the sort of traveler who demands designer boutiques by day and mints on your pillow at night, Bolivia probably isn’t for you.

But if you’re looking for harshly spectacular mountain scenery, tourist-friendly people and prices--and you have a sense of humor, an appreciation of the unexpected and the ability to rough it--you’ll find that Bolivia has all the ingredients for a memorable vacation.

That’s what Tony and I were looking for last fall when we started discussing what to do with three weeks off. Neither of us knew much about Bolivia, but from the descriptions in the few guidebooks we were able to find, it sounded like it met our criteria: cheap, colorful and sufficiently terrorist-free to ensure returning with our limbs intact. Granted, there was a cholera epidemic going on in South America, but our doctor assured us that our chances of contracting it were slim as long as we drank bottled water and avoided eating seafood, which could have come from polluted waters. Besides, both Tony and I liked the idea of exploring a country that more than one of our friends couldn’t locate on a map.

So it was that we found ourselves landing at El Alto airport outside La Paz one night last November, the lights of the city glittering in the valley below like stars in a cup. “Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our ascent into La Paz,” joked Tony, referring to the fact that, at more than two miles above sea level, El Alto is the world’s highest commercial airport--so high, in fact, that pilots need special certification to land there and some visitors to La Paz spend their first few days suffering from the altitude sickness known as soroche.

We didn’t know many people who’d been to La Paz, but the few who had warned us about soroche, with the glee usually reserved for telling horror stories about labor and delivery to pregnant women. “You feel like your eyeballs are going to pop out, and you can’t breathe.”

Thus forewarned, I had packed enough Tylenol to stock a pharmacy. But we didn’t need it. Neither of us had any problem other than a slight shortness of breath when we took the stairs too fast and, that first night, a vague headache quickly dispelled by a cup of mat e de coca-- a non-narcotic tea brewed from coca leaves.

In our hotel the next morning, we had our first encounter with a Bolivian shower, which--unlike showers in many Third World countries--was plenty hot, thanks to two wires that ran from the wall through the shower head and heated the water. You had to operate it correctly or you risked electrocution, but it wasn’t that hard: All you had to do was turn on the water, then switch on the current--or wait, was it the other way around? Never mind; we made it out alive and, with cameras slung around our necks, wandered into the plaza in front of our hotel.

On most trips, there comes a moment when you know your vacation has truly begun: that first glimpse of the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, the taste of an orange right off the tree, the realization that you’ve been driving for 20 minutes and no one has cut you off--experiences so foreign you know you couldn’t possibly be back home. In Bolivia, that moment came when we glimpsed an Indian woman sitting in the plaza breast-feeding her baby, and wearing a five- or six-bouffant satin skirt, a bright-fringed wrap and the bowler hat that has come to symbolize Bolivia in the eyes of the world.

It was a Saturday morning and the city was bustling. The country is one of the poorest in South America and the residents scratch out a living however they can: One woman had a rusting bathroom scale that passers-by could use for a fee. A man placed a typewriter on a card table and put out a sign: For Rent. Another offered use of a telephone that sat on the sidewalk, the cord running along the pavement to who-knows-where. And everywhere there were the money-changers, whispering “Dolares? “ and holding out thick wads of bolivianos, the local currency, as we walked by.

The entrepreneurial spirit was also alive and well on Calle de las Brujas--Street of the Witches--where women with impenetrable eyes sold herbs, powders, animal skins and talismans. We had barely turned the corner when one of the women beckoned us over, clearly delighted at the sight of two gringos (read that: suckers) so early in the day. Tony, who is philosophically opposed to souvenir shopping on the first day of a trip, tried to drag me away but it was too late--the woman was already pressing clay talismans into my hand, assuring us they’d bring us a good vacation.

In the end, even Tony was caught up, bargaining for the little figures to take home to friends and family. For a friend whose love life was in the dumps? No problem--she produced the intertwined figures of a man and woman. For a new house? She had just the thing: a dried llama fetus, which, planted in the garden, is supposed to bring luck. (Being city dwellers, we passed on that one.)

We laughed when we left, but maybe there was something to it, because in a country where we’d been warned to expect delays and complications, our trip went flawlessly. At Lake Titicaca on the Peruvian border, we climbed a wind-swept hill and sat for hours looking out over the turquoise water. In La Paz, we picnicked on sausages and beer with a Bolivian family we’d met. In Sucre, we got into the spirit of the mid-morning saltena break, embarking on a search for the restaurant that served the best of the spicy little meat pies.

And in Las Yungas--a town named for the warm, coffee-growing valleys in the Bolivian northeast--we spent two days on the porch of our whitewashed hotel (price: $2.50 a night), mesmerized by the changing light and cloud patterns on the nappy green mountains. When it got too dark to see, we hiked downhill to the three-block-square village of Coroico, where we ate dinner in a top-notch restaurant specializing in, of all things, cheese fondue.

Of course, it helped that both Tony and I enjoy the process of traveling, since getting around in Bolivia was half the adventure. Many of the roads are unpaved and twist so torturously through the mountains that it can take five teeth-jarring hours to travel to a town only 100 miles away. The single-lane dirt road to Coroico, for instance, had no guardrails, and our bus lurched out over 1,000-foot ravines strewn with the wrecks of vehicles disquietingly like our own. “How many go over the edge?” we asked the owner of our hotel in Coroico when we arrived. He shrugged nonchalantly. “Two or three a month.”

A less hair-raising (but equally entertaining) trip was our overnight ride to Potosi on the creme de la creme of the Bolivian transportation system--an odd contraption called a ferrobus, which looks like a bus but runs on train tracks. We boarded at 7 p.m. and settled--or rather, shoe-horned--ourselves into the faux-leather seats, which clearly had been built for people with shorter legs than ours. The movie “American Ninja” flickered on a television that hung from the ceiling, and a steward--dressed in a white jacket and black bow tie--served orange soda in plastic cups. Every half an hour or so, the ferrobus would screech to a stop and he and the conductor would leap off, heave a boulder from the tracks, then jump back on; by the end of the trip, the steward’s jacket was no longer so white.

We arrived in Potosi the next morning, which coincidentally was a local holiday. Virtually everything was closed, so against my better judgment--I’m a certified claustrophobic--we and a few other tourists arranged to visit one of the cooperative mines that had been worked since the 1600s, when Potosi was the silver-mining capital of the world.

Which is how, several hours later, we came to find ourselves standing in the darkness a mile inside the mine, our guide nowhere to be found.

It had been an interesting tour in which we watched the miners hack at the rock with crude tools and chew the golf ball-sized wads of coca leaves that are a staple of their workday. But now we were lost, and I pictured the headlines back home: “Gringo Journalists Missing in Bolivian Mine.”

“What are we going to do?” I said to Tony, my voice rising several octaves.

But the little talisman we’d bought on Calle de las Brujas must have been working because before I could muster a full-fledged hysteria, a miner appeared. If he was surprised to see a couple of gringos standing there, he didn’t show it; he just grunted and waved us in the right direction.

A few minutes later we saw the proverbial--and in this case literal--light at the end of the tunnel. We emerged blinking into the sunshine to see our guide standing there. “Where have you been?” he scolded, but we weren’t even angry. After all, it was part of the adventure.

GUIDEBOOK

The Best of Bolivia

Getting there: Varig, the Brazilian airline, offers flights from Los Angeles to La Paz, with connections in either Rio de Janiero or Sao Paolo. Round-trip fares run $1,105-$1,396, with some restrictions on stopovers and length of stay. American Airlines offers a 14-day advance-purchase fare of $1,261 from Los Angeles to La Paz; the flight is routed through Miami. Lloyd Aero Boliviano, the Bolivian national airline, does not fly out of Los Angeles, but offers a $744 fare from Miami. Certain flights may have layovers in the Bolivian cities of Santa Cruz or Cochabamba.

Where to stay: In La Paz, we stayed at the newly opened Hotel Max Inn on Plaza San Pedro. For $28 a night (in American dollars, which are accepted for virtually everything), we got a spotless room, private bath, plenty of hot water, television, telephone, mini-bar and full breakfast (from U.S. phones: 011-591-2-374-391). The five-star Plaza Hotel is another option for about $75 a night (011-591-2-378-300). In other parts of the country, we simply chose hotels that our guidebooks described as “expensive” (in Bolivian terms that’s $10-$30 a night), and found all to be of good quality.

Where to eat: As in most other Latin countries, Bolivians eat their main meal at lunch; the cuisine is spicy without being incendiary. In La Paz, we kept returning to the restaurant of the Hotel Copacabana on the Prado, where the food was good and the price unbeatable: $3.50 for a four-course lunch. We also became midmorning regulars at a variety of saltenerias , where the addictively spicy little hand-held meat pies called saltenas are served until noon. For those who want a taste of home, there’s a restaurant called California Donut on Avenida Camacho, where you can get hamburgers, fried chicken or--surprise--doughnuts.

For more information: Bolivia has no tourism office in the United States, but you can obtain basic tourist information by contacting the Bolivian Consulate at 870 Market St., Suite 355, San Francisco 94102, (415) 495-5173. We also relied on the South American Handbook and a guidebook called “Bolivia: A Travel Survival Kit,” which is part of the Lonely Planet series. We did find that some of the train and address information was outdated.