Month: January 2025

What do you think of when you think of Bolivia? Is it the final scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman and Robert Redford make their cinematic last stand near San Vincente, in the south of the country?

Or maybe Bolivia’s best-known agricultural product, the coca leaf and its derivatives? There’s even a coca museum in La Paz.

Coca is found in many everyday products here.

Of course, coca is important to other consumer products.

According to Wikipedia:

“When launched, Coca-Cola’s two key ingredients were cocaine and caffeine. The cocaine was derived from the coca leaf and the caffeine from kola nut (also spelled “cola nut” at the time), leading to the name Coca-Cola.

In 1903, the fresh coca leaves were removed from the formula. After 1904, instead of using fresh leaves, Coca-Cola started using “spent” leaves – the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with trace levels of cocaine. Since then (by 1929), Coca-Cola has used a cocaine-free coca leaf extract.“

Personally, when I think of Bolivia, I think of the pre-Inca civilization of Tiahuanaco, as exemplified in the iconic Puerta del Sol. Even though I’ve been to Bolivia long ago, I haven’t been to either Tiahuanaco or Lake Titicaca.

Before our day-trip to Tiahuanaco, we visit the National Archeological Museum in La Paz

La Paz is a big change from Chile. It’s definitely more third-worldy. It’s cold. And high (3650 metres above sea level.) And it rains a lot.

This is a statue of Christopher Columbus. It has to be fenced off to prevent destruction by irate mobs.

Poor Christopher. Like poor old Sir John A. Macdonald at home, in my lifetime he has been transformed from hero to villain. Manufactured outrage compels folks to prove their 21st century moral superiority over people who have been dead and gone for a long, long time by smashing public property. Statue-toppling seems like a pretty low-IQ endeavor in my book, but that’s just me.

In case you haven’t guessed, this is a personal bugbear of mine. It annoys me that statue-topplers always claim to be acting in the spirit of ‘social justice’, but it’s a sad fact that dumb people just like to break stuff.

While in La Paz, we visit a few markets.

The Mercado de las Brujas has all kinds of witchy ingredients.

There seems to be a market on every second street. This means things can get a little congested.

I remember these Blade Runner-ish conditions from my last visit. The population has probably doubled since then.

Indigenous women in Bolivia seem to be strangely, um, rotund.

We think that some kind of hoop device is worn under the skirt.

The demonym for someone from La Paz is ‘Paceño’. (We learn this after buying a local beer of that name.)

People sell handicrafts on every street corner.

The day arrives for our tour to Tiahuanaco. This was one of the remarkable pre-Incan (let alone pre-Columbian) civilizations that sprouted up on the continent.

This gate was used by Evo Morales at his inauguration. Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, Morales led the country from 2006 to 2019 and was extremely popular until he tried to bypass the constitution and seek – surprise! – a fourth term.

As usual for politicians everywhere, the rot sets in after a certain amount of time in office. Now he’s famous for impregnating underage girls and building himself a luxurious presidential palace atop a skyscraper in La Paz.

Back to Tiahuanaco: in the small onsite museum, we see a statue of the Decapitator Deity.

We were amused to learn about this Tiahuanacan deity in the Archeological Museum in La Paz. He is usually shown carrying around the severed heads of his victims.

The name reminds us of either a WWE wrestler or the next Schwarzenegger movie.

Some parts of Tiahuanaco have been restored, with mixed results.

It’s a cold, rainy day when we visit, but we make the best of it.

When we finally get to the Puerta del Sol, it’s a bit disappointing to see how small it is. I thought it was Arc de Triomph-sized (see photo of the Puerta above). It doesn’t help when we are pummeled by a punishing hailstorm in the few minutes we have in which to view it.

Lake Titicaca is nearby. In olden days, it came up to the city itself.

Sight or Insight of the Day

One major improvement in La Paz since I was last here: the wonderful teleférico network that crisscrosses the city.

Produced by a hybrid Austrian-Swiss company (not surprising, since those two countries seem to have a duopoly on the global market for ski lifts and cable cars), it’s the ideal way to avoid the chaos of terrestrial travel in La Paz.

It goes almost everywhere. It is safe, clean, comfortable, efficient, and quiet.

La Paz is in a sort of crater – a valley, really – so it’s a city of steep hills. You get a great view of the surrounding mountains from the rim.

You also get a bird’s-eye view of the street life below.

The system is quite new – it opened in 2014. It’s probably the most modern thing in Bolivia.

Ok, that’s a really slick piece of marketing. Robinson Crusoe, as most people know, is not a real person. He’s a fictional character made up by Daniel Defoe. That character was based on a composite of tales of survival popular at the time, one of which was that of Alexander Selkirk, who was indeed marooned on this island from 1704 to 1709.

The island is 757 KMs distant from Santiago. There are no scheduled flights. You have to leave from the private aircraft terminal with its hangarful of Learjets and Citations.

The departure area is suitably luxurious.

Our craft, however, is not a jet. It’s a 70’s-era Piper Cheyenne.

After a couple of hours, the island is sighted among all that empty blueness.

We are met at the airstrip for the transport to town.

This trip to the island is by special request – a gift for Maria’s upcoming birthday.

Then it’s a 40-minute ride in an open boat to the town of San Juan Bautista.

Along the way, we pass a rock formation known as ‘the gorilla’ to those with an active imagination.

We catch our first sight of San Juan Bautista, population 800.

We stay for a week at this hotel, La Robinson Oceanic, overlooking the water.

This is Rita, our very friendly host, with Chulita, one of two dogs on the property.

She gets a lot of attention while we’re here. (The dog, that is.)

Most people come here to fish or dive. We’re here to relax and do a bit of hiking. Parts of the trail are covered in gigantic Pangue plants.

There is a very rare red hummingbird, only found here. We’re lucky enough to see half a dozen of them flying from branch to branch nearby.

(It took many, many photos to catch this one sitting still.)

For the locals, fishing for lobster is a common occupation.

San Juan Bautista has suffered several tsunamis in the past, the most recent in 2010.

A ship arrives from the mainland every fifteen days or so, bringing essential supplies.

The inhabitants are very friendly. Of course, everybody knows everyone else. Islanders are very civic-minded: there’s virtually no trash or graffiti. The town plaza still has an unvandalized Christmas tree made up of crochet squares.

We hike up to the Selkirk Lookout, the highest spot on the island. It’s also where I took the photo mentioning Maria’s birthday.

It’s a stiff climb, but worth it for the different landscapes we go through.

Daniel Defoe took a lot of liberties with the Selkirk story. In the book, Crusoe’s island is in the Caribbean. And Crusoe is marooned for 28 years, versus four years and four months. And there were no cannibals and no Friday.

Still, the Robinson Crusoe story is one that virtually everyone on the planet is familiar with.

Besides the original, there was the Swiss Family Robinson, published inn 1812 and subsequently made into a Disney movie.

And then there was the Space Family Robinson – several TV versions and a comic.

There is a craft brewery on the island.

We visit for a tasting and dinner. There’s a great view from the patio..

Dinner is seafood ceviche, seafood empanadas, and beer.

One morning, Maria goes snorkeling while I nurse yet another cold at home.

Maria fetches some of these photos from the excursion company’s Instagram page.

There are seals everywhere here. They’re very playful and curious.

The seals hang out with the humans of their own free will – no bribery involved.

Another chapter of island history is the sinking of the German warship Dresden here in 1915.

It was fatally shelled by several British warships. One shell penetrated the cliff face near town but didn’t explode. Maybe someday.

There is a trail to the next bay over.

This is in fact the bay that Maria went to on her snorkeling expedition.

Our last day arrives. It’s another lengthy boat ride over choppy waters.

On our way to the airstrip, we are shown the only sandy beach on the island. It’s covered in seals.

The airstrip is on the only flat surface. There were plans to build a road to town, but I think that’s been abandoned.

So we say goodbye to our second Chilean island destination.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We didn’t mention our companions on the island: Roberto, Carlos, and Steven.

This is a trio of life-long friends, Colombian-Americans, all very successful business owners. All kind of eccentric.

They’re keen sports fisherman, and regularly meet up in the world’s more exotic locations to yank unbelievably huge fish out of the ocean and to rib each other mercilessly in English and Spanish.

(The island is probably most visited by fishermen and scuba divers.)

They accompany us on the flight to the island and back, and stay in the same accommodation.

Very interesting guys, generous and kind, but kind of high maintenance, like many people with lots of money.

Back from Easter Island. We have to wait until January 07 for the flight to our next destination, so we cool our heels in Santiago for the third or fourth time this trip.

Speaking of dates, in Real Time, today is January 10 – Maria’s birthday!

A brief roundup of our activities: we visit the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. It is superb.

Even better, there are no self-loathing, groveling messages of apology and abject kowtowing to the Culture Wars that make many Western museums such repulsive places these days. Looking for examples of this peculiar self-flagellating folderol, I come across this article. Sheesh, just crawl into an alley and blow your brains out, already.

We stay in several different places. In one place, we meet a Belgian man and his teenage son. The evening is spent singing golden oldies on the son’s El-cheapo Bolivian guitar.

One day, we take another wine tour, this time to the headquarters of Concha y Toro.

Another day we ascend the Gran Torre Costanera. It’s the tallest building in South America (for now). According Wikipedia, it also ‘includes the largest shopping mall in Latin America‘. I don’t know, we’ve seen some pretty big malls in our travels.

The view from the top is, um, panoramic.

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights is about the history of the Pinochet regime.

It’s well designed for random wandering. If you want an idea of the kind of things that were going on at the time, the film ‘Missing‘ (1982) may be worth re-watching.

We like the way the building makes extensive use of copper – a material that Chile has a lot of.

La Chascona is the poet Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago. (He also had one in Valparaiso, which we visited earlier, and another one on the coast, where he’s buried.)

It has, among other things, a painting by Diego Rivera. Considering the minimal security, I fantasize about stealing it.

Santiago has many lovely buildings and tree-lined neighbourhoods. Too bad it suffers from two serious problems: garbage and graffiti. At seemingly random street corners, small mountains of garbage appear overnight and begin to grow. The graffiti, I believe, is the result of an extended period of social unrest (that is, ‘riots’) that took place between 2019 and 2022. Which normalized the destruction and defacement of public property. Which is pretty ironic, considering Chile probably enjoys one of the most equal and financially healthy governments in Latin America.

Something we haven’t seen before: the Santiago Metro has 21 lending libraries in its system.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Speaking of the Metro…as we are taking the subway one day, we come across this travel poster.

It’s for the Juan Fernandez Archipelago – AKA ‘Robinson Crusoe Island’ – which happens to be our next destination.

We love Easter Island! It might be our favourite place on the trip so far.

Arrived here after one of the most comfortable flights ever (Emergency Exit row seats!) The aircraft is so new, it looks as if it’s just been unwrapped from the cellophane.

Mataveri International Airport has a quaint grass-hut terminal. We are greeted with floral leis on arrival.

Interesting airport fact: Easter Island had no useable airport beyond a dirt field until the Americans built a base here (1965-1970) and constructed one. In 1985, they came back and extended the runway to serve as a possible emergency landing strip for the space shuttle.

It feels like we’re on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. Nobody here is in much of a hurry. Hanga Roa, the main (and only) town, has a population of around 7,000 people.

There is no deep harbour. There’s a small beach in the centre of town that regularly has sea turtles swimming leisurely a few metres from shore.

Needless to say, there are lots of friendly dogs.

Easter Island has an interesting and controversial history. In reality, much about the original Rapa Nui people is unknown, or guessed at wildly. A handful of proven facts:

• humans did not arrive on the island before the year 1200 AD
• Rapa Nui people are Polynesian people, as proved by DNA and linguistic evidence (sorry Thor Heyerdahl, they did NOT come from the South American mainland)
• Rapa Nui people underwent a lot of self-inflicted troubles even before the arrival of satanic Europeans – of course, it was no picnic after Whitey arrived, either

The main draw are the moai, the giant statues that you associate with Easter Island.

It also seemed like a good place to spend Christmas. It turns out there’s a song by an ’80s-’90s English band, Sad Lovers & Giants, titled ‘Christmas on Easter Island‘. The lyrics don’t seem to have much to do with Christmas OR Easter Island, but what the heck.

There are reported to be over 900 moai on the island. Some come in groups.

Some used to have eyes made of coral and obsidian. In this case, they have been restored.

Almost all have long ears, big noses, and beetling brows.

People may remember the comic strip ‘Sherman’s Lagoon‘. Sherman is a shark. He has a friend and preceptor, Kahuna, who is obviously patterned on the moai.

A specialty of the island that we have for lunch almost every day (in different locations): tuna empanadas. These are large empanadas stuffed with thick chunks of fresh tuna and melted cheese.

There are things to see besides big statues. One day we visit a couple of caves.

We visit Orongo, a Rapa Nui ceremonial centre.

These have been partially restored.

Orango is perched on the rim of Rano Kau crater. On one side is the wetlands on the crater’s bottom.

On the other side is the ocean, with the small island of Motu Nui, the site of the ‘Birdman‘ contest. This bizarre egg-hunt was extremely important to the Rapa Nui people.

How remote IS Easter Island?

• Its closest inhabited neighbour is Pitcairn Island, 1,931 km to the west
• Its closest point to mainland Chile is 3,512 km to the east
• Its closest point to Point Nemo – the furthest point in the ocean from any land – is 2,688 km

I’ve never even heard of Point Nemo. Apparently that’s where space-exploring countries try to dump their superannuated space stations.

Back to the moai: often, images show the figures standing on a grassy hillside.

These photos are often taken at this location, Rano Raraku. This is the quarry from which almost every moai on the island comes.

The many that so picturesquely cover the hillside are ones that hadn’t been delivered yet when moai production was suddenly shut down entirely.

An interesting note: moai are often shown facing the ocean like vigilant sentinels. But when put in place, they almost always faced inland, to protect ‘their’ community.

You can see several that were abandoned in mid-carving.

We go to the beach three times while here. There’s only one, Anakena. It’s clean and uncrowded.

A week is over all too soon. It’s back to Mataveri Airport for flight LA844 to Santiago.

Our flight back is even better than our flight here. For some inexplicable reason, we get to fly back business class! Five and a half hours of sheer luxury. We could get used to this.

A final comment…sad to hear that former President of the United States Jimmy Carter just passed away at age 100. He was a decent man. See you in another life, Jimmy.

I think Jimmy deserves another tip o’ the hat.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Another Easter Island mystery.

We rent a car for three days. While looking at Google Maps for interesting places to visit, We come across this intriguing feature.

Hmmm, an ‘Old NASA site’? It’s on the road to Anakena Beach, so we stop on the way.

What remains looks like something out of the TV series ‘Lost‘. (Which I’m rewatching at the moment.)

The facility opened in 1983. I manage to find some brief footage of its inauguration here (https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/223943/). We can’t find a closing date, but the site is clearly abandoned.

It’s interesting that in the film clip, the area is totally bare. Today, it’s surrounded by ranches and trees.