4/5/06
LA PAZ, BOLIVIA

In my $1.25 room in Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, I woke up to drumming. March 23rd is El Día Del Mar, when Bolivians mourn the day, in 1884, that Chile made them a landlocked nation. Along the lakefront was a brassy parade with Uzi-toting sailors. Looking out over hundreds of bowler hats, the speaker began, Yet another year, with a pained heart...

Copacabana has the air of a beach town. Bob Marley plays out of waterfront cafes, and the sky is a piercing mix of blue and white; an impossible sky anywhere else. On the streets sit country women with fish and vegetables laid out on plastic. The cathedral is tiled and Moorish-looking, with a big courtyard and a waxy vault of candles. Out front on Sunday was the Blessing of the Automobiles. Cars lined the plaza decked in flowers; a monk prayed through them splashing holy water into the open hoods while another man swung a pungent brazier. Car owners laughingly christened their vehicles with liter bottles of soda (one local brand: "Sfru").

A hike and a motorboat away from Copa is Isla Del Sol, the Inca's humpbacked birthplace of the sun. It had some good walking, gorgeous views, and pesky kid-guides. It was too pretty an afternoon to do much, so I lounged outside with backpackers-- one Canadian, one British, one Pole, one German, one Swiss, one American, and me-- eating plates of trout and rice. Eventually a couple of us slopped down through the terraced fields to swim in the lake, which was, of course, shriekingly cold.

A couple days later from a rainy crossroads near Copa, the Brit and I crammed onto a bus that threw us back and forth crawling up a lumpy wet road. Sorata is a foggy village nestled between mountains-- good hiking. We stayed in a rambling, high-ceilinged, gone-to-seed mansion with Escher-like stairways around gardens with parrots. Dusty magazines from the '60s sat in the parlors.

Afterwards, we traveled south and up to La Paz. La Paz is the highest capital in the world. Approaching it through the slums that rim the valley, the roads are just gutted dirt. Buses sometimes have to back up and search for another way down, like when they're stopped by rock-throwing blockades of van drivers. La Paz proper covers the valley floor. It's a hive of modern capitalism mixed with campesino life, where women twist spiked heels on cobbled streets. Around the alley from our hostel, there are racks of dried llama fetuses and other traditional Aymara medicine, but a few minutes away is Burger King. It's probably one of the few cities in the world where, from the relative glitz at its center, you look up (way up, in this case) to see the poor neighborhoods.

Cheap meals are salteñas (hot stuffed pastries) sold from food carts where you can stand spooning on different sauces as you eat. Shoeshiners wear ski masks and low-pulled ball caps-- they look like robbers. If you're taking a hot shower in La Paz, you're under an electric crockpot/showerhead contraption with taped wires coming out of it (best not to worry about this). One night from the roof I watched the most amazing thunderstorm I've ever seen-- cloud-to-cloud bolts cracking the sky every three or four seconds. La Paz, so far, is my favorite South American capital.

The Brit and I day-tripped to Tiwanaku, a badly-managed monumental site on the southwestern shores of Lake Titicaca. It's hugely important-- the Incas derived a lot from this culture-- but I walked away sick at the money-grubbing guards and the haphazard reconstructions. What can you do. Back to La Paz, where we ate burgers at a restaurant wall-to-wall with young Israelis.

Travel can make you feel so giddy and bulletproof that you jump into something that you have no business doing, like attempting the summit on a 20,000-foot mountain.* Huayna Potosí stands over La Paz in the jagged Cordillera Real. We bumped by Land Rover up to its shoulders-- four nice Swiss people, three guides, and I. On a steep glacier we practiced with crampons and ice axes, then tried to eat hot soup in a cold cabin decorated with climbing stickers and antlers. Sleet blew outside.

At that altitude, you're like one of those deep-sea fish that slowly explodes when brought to the surface. Your head hurts, your eyes redden, your throat is parched, you wake up with panicked lungs, your stomach doesn't work. You can force food down and be sick, or not eat and be weak. On the mountain my body kept crashing, and I kept trying to eat chocolate-covered peanuts that my mouth didn't recognize as food. It was an act of will just to chew them.

It takes two days to get up the mountain, not including that preliminary day of training and (attempted) acclimatization. The next day was hard enough, a head-spinning plod up rocks and more rocks. I couldn't eat dinner afterwards and formed grave doubts about summiting. We sardined in a drippy tin hut and tried to get some sleep before midnight. At 11:30pm Lorenzo and Luís and Choco were already boiling water for coca tea. Time to go. We got our gear together, crashing about in the sweeping flashes of headlamps, and made outside and started up the snow.

You can't see ridges, just ascending sheets of gray in the headlamps. Overhead, perfect stars. I started out feeling okay, then badly, and then each step was a commitment to further suffering. You trudge around gloomy crevasses. Now and then you have to wrench the frozen rope on your axe into a usable shape. When a boot scoops backwards you try to brace yourself, but the axe handle just punctures the snow and puts you on your knuckles. Rests are collapses.

After nearly six hours of this comes the final climb, and it's enormous. You hug the mountain with your axe, lungs crushing your heart with rapid gasps. Between efforts all you can do is sag against the snow; nothing left. A little more, Luís is saying at the top of the rope. Like hell, you think.

Then, hanging with the top in sight, you choke your breathing back and crawl up floundering and somehow stand up, hit with blindingly beautiful views and endorphins and relief and utter surprise. I nearly fell right down the other side. Sit down, Luís advised.

After a day like that, you can deposit yourself on a park bench in La Paz and not want for a thing.

*Huayna Potosí is actually 19,974 feet, but I don't care and I'm rounding up.