Culture Shock! Bolivia - A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette

208 CultureShock! Bolivia

Apolo and Beyond

The port of entry to the region

is the obscure town of Apolo. To

reach Apolo from the tip of the

highlands, the explorers were

fortunate to fi nd a spot in the

metallic cargo compartment of

a merchant driver’s utility truck. The metal surface collected

both cold Altiplano air and direct highland sun rays. It was

simultaneously hot and cold.

The route passes Lake Titicaca, where the pavement ends,

then bounces over a pass on the skirt of Mount Illampu,

winding down to Apolo, a semitropical mile above sea level.

Until 1994, there was no vehicle access to the town.

Andrew calls Apolo a bizarre place; its isolation has

fostered inbreeding, creating an underclass of near midgets

who cannot talk. Like the imported Oompa-Loompas in

controversial Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,

Apolo’s peculiar muscular outcasts do heavy labour, mainly

toiling as carriers.

The town’s large plaza is surrounded by adobe structures

with corrugated roofi ng. The people are friendly. There are

three restaurants. But you’d better tell them in advance

if you plan to eat; there’s not enough volume for steady

service. The façade of one of the restaurants is covered

with pornographic photographs. The town’s primary mode

of subsistence involves 15-day round-trip forest treks, to

collect incense.

Andrew was to make several trips from Apolo, through the

cloud forests that rise up again to 2,800 m (9,186 ft), then

down to the tropics, with a fi nal destination in the town of

San José.

In the 1940s, this route was a cattle trail. In the 1980s, it

became a cocaine trail. Today, coca is still grown, but only

for domestic use. Hard boiled, independent gold prospectors

are the newest breed to penetrate a territory that is wilder

than the old Wild West.

During the long hours of tough hiking, Andrew and his

colleagues chewed the native coca leaf, learning fi rst hand that

Coca consumption was once
restricted to the Inca nobility,
but was later introduced to farm
labourers and miners, as a means
of increasing stamina and killing
hunger. For Andrew, chewing
coca was an obligatory example
of cultural adaptation.