Back in Sousaphone country
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
1
34
165
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Sucre, Bolivia
Monday, May 23, 2005
morning. We were waiting for the bus to Sucre (the twin capital of
Bolivia with La Paz).
The guide books warn you that street food (which we have enjoyed
very much in other countries) is simply not safe and not even to
consider buying it - let alone eating it. We watched unpasteurised
milk being transferred from five litre containers into two litre
soft drink bottles which had been cursorily rinsed with local water
(which is also not safe) and decided that perhaps, in this instance,
Footprint might be right
conscripts
.The women selling the milk were wearing the traditional dress of
Bolivia. This seemed totally impractical for huddling on a street
corner over a basket of bread or saltenas (empanadas) or solidifying
milk, but obviously generations have defined the most practical,
warm and hardwearing outfit: a skirt of heavy velvet, knee length
and pinch pleated at the waist (each skirt contains about 5-6m of
fabric), under this is at least one cotton petticoat of the same
construction and volume, add to this a blouse, jumper, cardigan and
top off with a blanket or traditional axsu pinned around the
shoulders. Footwear is sandals teamed either with bare legs or (if
you're a bit soft) hand knitted, argyle pattern stockings. Every
woman has twin, waist length plaits of silky black hair (even the
ancients with only a few flecks of grey) finished with beaded
toggles or llama wool tassles
hand 38 footprint 68000000
. A traditional bowler hat completesthe ensemble. The hats are so hardwearing and expensive they become
family heirlooms and are passed down from mother to daughter. Men
also have a traditional dress (involving three quarter length pants,
hand woven tunic and axsu (probably another name for men), sandals
and a variety of hats) but mostly what you see is jeans, sweatshirt,
bomber jacket and baseball cap.
Distinct from other buses, protected by a plethora of saints and
rosaries, our bus to Sucre is guarded by a selection of football
clubs. Lunch was vegetable soup and chicken with pasta, vegetables
and potatoes - the whole bus served, finished and cleared in 20
minutes. We changed buses in Potosi. Potosi is a silver mining
town
Jalqua weaver
. In Salta we had decided that we would not give money tobeggars but, instead, buy stuff (which we usually didn't really
want) from people who were at least making an effort to work for
their living - but what can a man with no hands do?
Loading the bus was chaos, everyone had at least one bag, one
blanket, one bundle, one sack of potatoes, a take-out meal and a
child, no one could find their seat despite assigned seat numbers, I
strongly suspected the women in front of us hacking and wheezing had
TB and wondered, for the first time, about all those confined spaces
we'd been in and how long those school vaccinations are good for.
There is a Bs2.00 (NZD0.40c) departure tax. We set off with about
five people on the bus (and yes, us plus three Bolivians is plenty
sufficient to create chaos) - one was not a passenger but an urchin
busking, singing, out of tune and off key but lustily for a
donation. Around the corner he got off and all the other
passengers, avoiding the bus station charge, piled on with the one
bag, one blanket, one bundle, one sack of potatoes, a take-out meal
and multiple children
When I grow up
.Having soaked up Sunday in Sucre with recharging our exhausted
batteries (we'd forgotten how draining this traveling thing is) we
hit town with a vengeance on Monday. We visited three churches -
the cathedral (for the famous 1601 jewel-encrusted Virgin of
Guadalupe), San Miguel (1628) for beautiful Moorish architecture and
because it was from here the Jesuits departed to convert Argentina
and Santa Monica, "perhaps one of the finest gems of Spanish
architecture in the Americas" - they were all closed in defiance of
their posted opening hours. Instead we bought David his funky
Bolivia souvenir tee-shirt (apparently it was a selling point that
this had been made by a 5-year-old). About then the camera decided
to die (yes, fixed only ten days ago having held us up in Salta for
two weeks) in the same fashion but more permanently - suddenly not
having chosen the hit repeatedly and shout repair option seemed
rather disappointing.
[Caveat for following paragraph: If Heather had known when she went to
university that textile curator and textile anthropologist were
jobs ...] Sucre is the textile weaving centre of Bolivia. In the
afternoon we visited the marvelous Museo Textil-Etnografico. This
is the showcase for a project which began about 20 years ago.
Realising that the traditional weaving techniques from pre-Columbian
times were being lost the Indigenous Art Renaissance Program began
establishing workshops in scattered villages to relearn dying
techniques, encourage modern but authentic innovations and
provide a source of income to remote, subsistence communities. The
tradition of weaving is very formalised. The workshops were initially
only for women using traditional dyes and working in the traditional
colours and patterns of their regions. The women who identify as
Tarabuco work on a white background in graduated bands of colour
depicting scenes from daily live interwoven with complex geometric
patterns while the women of Jalq'a region work only in black and red
depicting real and mythical creatures resident in the underworld.
The project was so successful that within a few years men were
asking to have workshops established for them as well. The Inca
tradition upon which they are drawing is been so degraded over time
that they are basically only using it as an inspiration to develop, =0
Aunconstrained, a vibrant, multi-coloured style based on dreams and
visions. We watched a Jalq'a weaver working and after nearly 20
minutes of practically being inside the woman's clothes I still
didn't understand how they do it. We then had to run back to the
static displays of looms and pore over the set up until we still
didn't understand it. They had a brilliant display of weavings
found among grave goods from a tomb found in the area. The woven
pieces were somewhat the worse for moths but the natural dyes were
as bright today as a thousand years ago when they were woven.
Bolivia was the first country in South America to declare its
independence, on 25 May [this sentence is nearly as correct without
the comma]. They start the celebrations on 24 May when every school
in the province fields about 50 students, all the teaching staff and
the brass band to march around the central square. It starts at
9:00am with the "tinies" all clutching at a line of red, green and
yellow bunting in a crocodile and wraps up just after 1:00pm. It
was great to see the first event of the independence schedule a
celebration of education. I'd never seen a Sousaphone used in anger
until we came to the Americas, now they're everywhere - beautiful
pearlescent enamel encircling their scrawny players like a cross
between Anaconda and Dumbo's trunk. We note that teenagers are
slovenly (even when scrubbed up) the world over, and that at one
time, there must have been quite the industry in Sucre for the
production of high-heeled, over-the-knee, white leather marching
boots.
This morning, however, we weren't there for the parade. We were
fighting our way through the crush of milling adolescents to meet
the Dino Truck. Hard to miss, this is a converted 1950s Ford truck
with lollipop red cab and Barney-like dinosaurs painted on the seating
tray. First they issue you with hard hats, then they bring out the
basket of rubber dinosaurs for identification. Then, each clutching
our own dinosaur, we set off for an adventure. 68 million years ago
dinosaurs walked in this area and their footprints have been preserved,
fossilised, on the vertical face of the wall of the most active cement
quarry in Bolivia. The quarry works around them. This means that millions
of year old footprints in the "soft" rock appear and disappear as the
trucks lumber past. It is the largest dinosaur trackway in the
world and they're still dynamiting! The disappointment and
frustration is clear on the guide's face as she points out a set of
tracks and observes they will probably only last another week. The
flip side are the tracks of a mother and baby carnivore that
appeared only last week. It's really cheesy and low budget (they're
trying to get government support for a UNESCO Heritage rating) but
we spent a morning walking where the dinosaurs walked.
25 May is Independence Day proper. The bands started practicing
about 7:30am and by 9:00am we had secured a prime position on the
parade route - being tall is a real advantage on a national day for
short people. La gente were out in force and they had all dressed
up for an important day, so had the special force crowd control
police. There were a large number of people in uniform who really did look
like Billy T (see below) doing "banana republic general". The President
was in town and did a walkabout. Then the supreme court, various branches
of the judiciary, all the staff of every government department and
every university facility you can imagine and some more schools
paraded past accompanied by the air force band (they had several
Sousaphones). After them came the workers' co-operatives - the coca
growers, the potato growers, the weavers' association, the
stallholders from the mercado.
We wandered over to the marshalling area where there seemed to be a
disturbance of some sort. [All foreign affairs websites warn
Westerners to stay away from any public gathering in Bolivia as they
can be "volatile"]. Apparently some groups (who had also dressed up
and brought their banners along) wanted to participate in the parade
but were not on the "list". The police formed a cordon between them
and legitimate paraders. This was very colourful - there were
regular police in khaki satin bomber jackets, tourist police in flak
jackets with fire extinguisher sized pepper sprays, riot police in
mountain camouflage with tear gas launchers. As we realised the
police line might not be holding we also noticed the Bolivians had
started a relaxed but determined jog away from the scene.
Discretion being the better part and all that ... we retreated about
10 steps before a settlement was obviously negotiated, probably of
the "look, I'm the one with the tear gas canisters, right",
variety. Non-legitimate paraders agreed not to throw anything else
and the police agreed to let them parade along the side of the
square where the president couldn't see them.
The military arrived late in the piece - long after the president
must have wearied of identical groups of dark suited civil servants
in inappropriate shoes parading past. And then things got really
colourful. First came a seemingly endless sea of fatigue clad
conscripts, each carrying a Bolivian flag (striped yellow, green,
red) and making good use of the shouting drills we'd heard them
practicing in Uyuni. And what can you really say about regular army
parading past in Confederate-style uniforms in alternating platoons
of canary yellow, douglas fir green and fire engine red, all with
natty beige scarves and fixed bayonets, while the band thumped
out "Yellow Submarine"? After them it was only left to move the 300-
400 riot police who had been hidden in the council offices and let
the gauchos have the field.
Late into the night the gauchos were still racing up and down the
streets and threatening damage to anyone who didn't recognise the
sound of metal horse shoes clattering across cobblestones.
