Wednesday, as you will understand in a moment when I tell you about Tuesday, is a quiet day, the main highlight of which is the 'virtual beer' we have over Skype with Michael, Helen and the marvellous Mark, so missed from our number in New Zealand. It is, as these things usually are, lovely. It's a simple day, but perfect. And an antidote to Tuesday.
We decide, on Tuesday, to journey to Sipe Sipe, a small town at the foot of some huge rolling green hills (or technically, mountains) in order to take a 'two and a half to three hour walk' to see some Inca ruins. The internet, in its wisdom, tells us the ruins are, well, quite ruined, but that it's a nice walk.
Two and a half to three hours, we say breezily, is a bit of a short walk by our standards, but still, it will be worth getting out of the city. Actually I am rather fond of the Cochabamba bustle, with its constant noise at all hours, its little group of people who seem to meet on a certain corner to argue at 4am, the men who played panpipes at five am one morning, and the fact that whatever hour of the day or night, someone, somewhere, is cheering on a football match. I like life in this end of town. But it will be nice to get away from the traffic.
To get to Sipe Sipe we have to take two Micros. I like Micros very much. They seem such an easy and sensible way to run public transport. Essentially they are small mini buses, with about eight seats, which display a colourful sign in their windows stating where they are going. There are plenty of then, so all you have to do is hang around on the road, flag one down that is going in your direction, and hop in. It's very easy, much easier than trying to hail a taxi in London, which I have always found to be impossible.
Once in the micro, you slot yourself into a seat, feel around like true English people for a seatbelt, and find there is none, or more accurately, there is a place to plug in but no belt. Or vice versa. You give up and hold onto the seat in front of you as you bump and grind your way along the road. When you want to get off you shout. Simple as that. There are no set stops. It's very easy and makes a lot of sense. The only down side is that the drivers will stop for anybody to get on, on the way, even if they hail at the last minute, and for anyone who wants to get off, even if they shout at the last minute. This entails, depending on the apparent craziness of your driver, a lot of screeching to a halt and/or mounting the curb. I grit my teeth a little, swallowing visions of bloody death rolls in rattling minivans, but in fact I don't see any accidents and the roads are too congested for anyone to go very fast, though I note the drivers are undeterred by this, and floor it anyway. Before arriving in Bolivia I had become quite uneasy about travelling by road, but have since realised the 'death roads' are known as such and can be avoided and that really, once you are in a vehicle, assuming you have been sensible about choosing both it and your route, well what can you do about it anyway - and it will probably be fine.
We jump nimbly out of our Micro at Quillacollo and, with absolutely no difficulty at all (once we figure out what side of the road we should be on), just jump into another one heading for Sipe Sipe.
Have I said how much I like the Micros? Despite their bone crunching judderiness (which is in fact part of the fun), and the vague sense that we may be doing gymnastics over the curb at any moment. They are easy, plentiful, better for the environment than the European style of everyone having at least one car and no one using the rapidly dwindling public transport available, and above all interesting.
Our friends from San Pedro talked about their Micro journey to Toro Toro (where we also plan to go), which had involved a longish wait for the Micro to fill up. (Micros tend to wait for there to be a reasonable number of people in them before departing - also better for the environment, and whilst this wait is generally minimal (about ten minutes for us on the way back from Sipe Sipe to Quillacollo, and much of that was spent still moving slowly, while the driver's assistant ran alongside holding the door open and calling for custom), it can be as long as an hour or two from the less frequently travelled to places.)
"It was great," they said, "we waited for two hours sat on the wall by the Micro, and saw all kinds of people walking by. It was fascinating!"
And yes, Micros are the very best of places to people watch. All kinds of other passengers jump on and off throughout the journey, including a lady with a huge cooler box, a very old couple, literally holding each other up but with such obvious and absolute adoration one for the other than I wondered if all the clutching was, after all, absolutely necessary. School children giggle together, babies are bundled on, passively chewing their fists as they are jolted and juggled and squeezed between seats. A lady dons a full face of make up, with elaborate care, despite the near impossibility of successfully doing so, given the jerky nature of our ride.
Reading back, I realise you can see all this and more on buses in England. Why do we romanticise things so much in other countries? Or, perhaps more to the point, why are we not similarly fascinated by our own?
We disembark at Sipe Sipe, and easily find the path we need to take for our 'two and a half to three hour' walk.
The path is in fact a road, very easy to follow, and winding up the hillside. Looking down we can see the blue black shadows of other mountains in the far distance, made dreamlike by the layer of smog hanging between us, the tiny, glinting lego town that becomes Sipe Sipe the higher we climb, and the distant mountains. The smog, as I comment to M, does not look as unappealing as you might think, given what it is made of, but more like a wispy, white mist, the way artists might depict things in fantasy pictures, so that everything behind it looks a little unreal.
As we wind our way round and round the mountain, we look down and across at other mountains and hillsides adjacent to it. The mountains are dotted with dry, brittle green bushes, which serve to give them the impression, from a distance, of being covered entirely in soft green moss, like the green felt used for hillsides in model railways. Between one mountain and another we look down into chasms of reddish rock, like wounds and scars in the landscape, but, like the smog, much more beautiful than they sound. It's blissfully quiet. We can't hear any cars and, apart from the odd truck passing us rather narrowly on the road, we don't see another human being. (Actually there is one incident early on when we pass some Bolivian ladies working on the roadside with pucks, shovels and wheelbarrows. We say 'Buenas Dias' and are greeted by a hard stare. As we retreat, one of the women calls out mockingly, 'que pasa, signora' followed by something I don't quite catch about my legs. I am wearing shorts which is most unusual in Bolivia, but was aiming for comfort and cool and assuming we wouldn't see many people out here. It's unusual in friendly Bolivia, but I shrug it off, though when we pass them again on the way down we don't bother to wish them a 'buena' day. The fact is my legs are just too darn beautiful and they were jealous. Or that's what I tell myself anyway. Sometimes its useful not to be fluent in colloquial Spanish.)
Birds sing, the sun shines, the sky is a bright blue with a few tiny streaks of white cloud, as if for decoration, and we are, as we had hoped, walking in stunning and peaceful countryside.
Except. There is one flaw in this plan, which makes it one of those walks which are much more enjoyable in retrospect than at the time. The 'two and a half to three hour walk' is in fact three hours. Each way. We are constantly climbing, albeit on a paved road in a relatively shallow gradient, and the sun is very, very hot with zero shade. Despite constant reapplication of sun tan lotion and wide brimmed hats, I burn the backs of my knees and M his neck. It's very dry. Little dust devils swirl up, every now and then out of nowhere, spiraling along the path ahead of us. Dust sticks to the sweat and the sun tan lotion on our skin and our feet begin to complain, even through their walking boots, about the cobbled road surface they are trying to climb on. Our water supply, sufficient for two to three hours of climbing, not six, becomes warm and sparse very quickly. The combination of heat and altitude does strange things to my stomach so that I have to retreat inside a half broken down abandoned stone shed half way up and therein have an experience I wish neither to recount, nor to think about. The longer we climb, the more frequently we have to stop to try to flatten ourselves against the rock face to try to take advantage of the tiny sliver of shade there. Eventually, we reach the ruins. They are indeed, 'quite ruined ruins' and so rather than walk the additional distance to reach the entrance, we stop at a good vantage point, though sadly without shade, to eat our lunch and gaze out at them. It has, for both of us, always been about the walk itself rather than any huge anticipation of the ruins.
And what a walk. It has felt much harder than climbing Tongariro in New Zealand and we were much less prepared for it. By the end of the climb up I was really struggling - and a little ashamed of it.
It all becomes clearer when we have staggered back down, stopped for chips at a street stall, clambered back into our Micros, arrived home, grabbed a beer from the shop next door, showered off our layer of dust, and collapsed on the sofa to look it up.
We have climbed 660 metres, starting at 2600 above sea level, and climbing to 3260. We walked, more or less constantly (without shade it wasn't an especially welcoming environment to stop in) for just under six hours, never on the flat. The round trip was a full twenty six kilometres.
It wasn't a special, artisinale beer that we drank on the sofa, it was, for me at least, just a normal Corona with a wedge of lime stuck in it.
But I think we had earned it.
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