National Geographic Traveller

IMAGES: SUPERSTOCK; ALAMY; GETTY

from giant soup pots. They form long, forlorn

queues of men, women and children, standing

quietly and hopefully, laden with bundles

and bags, while the old women’s bowler hats

and straw boaters bob expectantly. They’re

stranded because they can’t get to La Paz, nor

a
 ord a hotel, nor, it seems, feed themselves.

“I don’t know what course of action to

take,” I write. “I could get a plane out of here.

The airport is still open. But that would be

$300. But if it means saving my skin...”

I know I’m being melodramatic. It so

happens that my favourite piece of travel

writing is about a coup, one experienced by

Bruce Chatwin in 1980s Benin. “This was not

my Africa,” he wrote, aˆ er being bundled

into a truck and forced to stand in the sun for

hours by angry teenaged soldiers, then getting

his bare toes stamped on by a large lady

sergeant. “Not this rainy, rotten fruit Africa”.

I feel proud, at least, that I may get to

witness a real coup, just like my literary hero.

But there our shared destiny ends. I’m stuck

in a suburb in a very nice, but small, town.

I’m not a campesino waving a banner for

justice; I’m an English girl on a jolly. I think

what they’re fi ghting for is very worthy, but I

can be no help to them at all. All I’m doing is

eating ice cream and checking the news on

a very slow internet connection.

I’m about to switch o
 the light and lie

silently, listening for gunfi re, when I’m called

to the hostel courtyard by the receptionist.

“Mira,” he says, gesturing to the TV. The

president, a white-bearded man in his 60s,

is making his resignation speech.

The next day the bus station opens and,

along with the grannies in their bowler hats, I

return, unscathed and unnoticed, to my travels.

 Things are changing rapidly here and as I write, my

stomach is churning. I think there’ll be a coup soon 

Metropolitan Cathedral

OPPOSITE: Locals protest

in Cochabamba

November 2016 79

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