4 CultureShock! Bolivia
Brazilian and Argentine football teams would fl y up from
sea level to La Paz and get roundly defeated by a makeshift
Bolivian squad.)
I was served coca tea in the fi rst-aid offi ce, and quickly
recovered my balance and a portion of my self-esteem. We
were greeted by countless members of my wife’s extended
family, one of whom, a cheerful brother-in-law, put my two
suitcases into his trunk and invited me to sit in the front
seat of his car.
The front window became the wide screen of a mind-
boggling documentary. Through the streets of the shantytown-
turned-city, El Alto, through tangled telephone wires, (facing
us) there was the view of Mount Illimani, dressed in brilliant
white robes, sitting over the scene judgmentally, imposing
a sense of awe.
Suddenly the car came to an edge, and it seemed as if
we were going off into a bottomless abyss. They called it
‘The Hole’. It was La Paz, twisting and curling far below, an
unplanned mixture of colourful highrises and colonial row
buildings with a single motorway spiralling down as if into
a huge open mine pit, and then temporarily straightening
out when it arrived at the city centre, only to begin a new
downward spiral, plunging its way to the south zone of the
urban labyrinth.
I couldn’t see it, but I knew that this hole was virtually
bottomless, that there were ancient footpaths that could
take me through an unbelievable diversity of ecosystems,
to fertile valleys 2,600 m (8,530 ft) above sea level and
later as one approached sea level, steamy forests of
Amazon tributaries.
I looked back up. There were other footpaths that could
lead the hiker into the same cordillera that I had glimpsed at
from the plane, and lead me, or so I wished, to view the face
of shining glaciers, from a vantage point of 5,000 m (about
17,000 ft) above sea level.
As we entered the city, I could glimpse at the faces in
overcrowded streets and not miss the fact that the majority
were indigenous, just as I had read. I wondered if there was
a correlation between two facts: that the majority population