Bolivia - chaos and clowns

18th December 2009
Bolivia – chaos and clowns

Oooooohhhhh! BOLIVIA! Oh my god!!!!!! I have never ever been so challenged or so stretched in my life! So many things have stretched me in the last 7 days; I don’t know where to begin to share this adventure with you.

When I arrived in Bolivia in La Paz the stories of the terrible scams in the streets left me terrified to go out of my hotel for the first two days. Then I met a lovely Australian woman (who'd just walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain) who said she'd felt the same when she arrived, but now she loved La Paz. So I took heart. I bought a huge, beautiful bunch of blue flowers for my hotel room for 10 English pence. My hotel bedroom became my sanctuary. The hotel was complete luxury at 40$ a night. The food was the most delicious I've ever tasted in my life. The chefs made me special dishes every night. Supper would cost about 5 euros for 3 courses, all cordon blue, each dish a work of art. The contrast to what was outside made me feel I was living in a dream. Little by little I found my feet though my heart – but my physical heart wanted to come home right away.

Pure chaos!
The city was quite simply PURE CHAOS. I don't do chaos. I can’t function in chaos! I don’t like chaos. And all the time the altitude makes your heart pump and your legs refuse to proceed faster than at a snails pace. And altitude sickness was kicking in even stronger than it had done in Cusco. OH MY GOD. I have never seen anything like this city anywhere. Taxis in La Paz have the strange prerogative of saying no to you when you flag them down if they don’t want to take you somewhere, so the thing is you might get to where you want to go, but not be able to get back!! I had a few heart-pounding moments when I was completely lost and no taxi would take me back to my hotel. And to make matters worse, I kept forgetting the name of the road the hotel was in.

The streets were just indescribable! There would be 3 or 4 lines of traffic all trying to wriggle in and out of each other, belching fumes, taxis jam-packed like bumper cars, 'collective taxis' I mean JAM PACKED with folk, people sitting on the pavements or in the gutters selling everything you can possibly imagine. How there aren't millions of footless folk in La Paz I don't know. I never saw an accident but, but they must happen.

Meeting Ivan
By a piece of divine timing, I had managed to make contact with Ivan – having tried for 2 years to track down this amazing-sounding man who teaches circus and theatre skills to children. His is quite a story …. but for another time …. The day before I left Spain I had sold a painting, and decided I wanted to give the money to Ivan for his arts centre work so getting the chance to meet with him was an astonishing moment of synchronicity.

The hotel liaised with Ivan for our first meeting, and what a miracle that was! In amongst all the thousands of people in the area on the street, we met easily. In El Alto, where he is, it is the most unbelievably raw, rough city of shanty dwellings and millions of people on the street, animals, filthy kids, the whole place pulsing with car fumes. We arranged to meet again the following day as his theatre troupe was performing in La Paz.

Again, despite the thousands of people on the street the taxi dropped me just feet away from him.A few moments later his troupe performed, and I was so in my element surrounded by about 30 young clowns, I might have cried if I hadn't been worrying about getting sun stroke. The sun was so fierce.

I'm too tired to paint a beautiful picture of what happened next but just to say Ivan quietly introduced me to all his young people, aged between 16 and 30, and as clowns, in clown-like ways, they hugged and kissed me and danced and drummed and laughed. One female clown had a massive nosebleed beside a tree in the square, and Ivan photographed her close up, laughing, then kissed her so sweetly, then a few other clowns tried to find the screw in her head to turn the blood off!!

We then had lunch in a Bolivian Chinese cafe, seething with people, somebody had their visa card stolen, Ivan’s beautiful 8 year old son Claudio had eaten too many sweets so stretched out over two chairs and tried to sleep .......

Then after that whirlwind experience, we parted company for the moment as I was heading off for a trip to Lake Titicaca.

Of which, more in my next blog entry.