Witches Market, Womans Wrestling

Trip Start Sep 29, 2007
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Where I stayed
The Brew Too
(La Paz hotels)

Flag of Bolivia  ,
Sunday, March 30, 2008

 We took an overnighter bus from Sucre to La Paz. This bus turned out to be a doozy. The bus was supposed to be a semi-cama (the seat that partly lays back to a bed kind) but in fact was a normal seat kind, the type you have to sit up straight and rigid in with your legs curled up in a feutus position. We didn´t have much sleep which was partly due to the presence of some dodgy cowboys sitting in the row behind us. These Bolivian boys looked as though they would pounce on your bag with a knife if your eyelids dared to flutter closed for a second.

The most interesting part of this bus journey was the passenger who got up half way through the journey and started touting a basic looking mathematics program booklet for adults that he had written. The guy got people to test his own mathematical skills and put the hard sell on. The guy seemed to be quite famous and many people were starstruck, buying up the programs that would make them mathematical geniuses and getting the guy to sign the back of them 1
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 . Joy. We tried to put him off by calling out numbers in English and bad Spanish.

The other highlight was eating the Bolivian specialty snack  charque kan (llama jerky) that was sold as a complete meal with egg, corn and potato accompanients. We also had banana cake and jelly for breakfast while all the locals snacked on soup.

Eventually we rolled in to La Paz, we were two days early and managed to secure some accommodation at The Adventure Brew Hostel which came highly recommended to us by Leigh and Anna. We checked into The Brew Too which is a large hotel unattached to the main Brew dwelling. The Brew Too is somewhat a gringo hostel that brews it´s own very tasty beer branded as Saya.  This would explain the numerous amount of Australians who seem to be staying there.

We spent a couple of days wandering the vibrant streets of La Paz and shopping and haggling for good value souvenirs, mainly of alpaca origin. We bought a load of finger puppets and some Andean wooden pipes from a blind man who owns a music store downtown. Another instrument in his store was guitars made from armadillos. We spent one day wandering the city's most unusual market the Witches Market that lies amid lively tourist handicraft shops. What they're selling isn't exactly witchcraft in the Hollywood sense, the merchandise is mainly herbs and folk remedies, as well as a few more unorthodox ingredients intended to manipulate the various spirits worshipped by the local Aymará people. If someone is feeling ill, or is being pestered by unwelcome or bothersome spooks, they can purchase a plateful of colorful herbs, seeds and assorted critter parts to remedy the problem 2
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 . There are wandering yatiri (witch doctors), who wear dark hats and carry coca pouches, and circulate through the area offering fortune telling services.

If you're building a new house, for example, you can buy a llama fetus to bury beneath the cornerstone as a cha'lla (offering) to Pachamama, encouraging her to inspire good luck therein. This practice is strictly for poor campesinos , however; wealthier Bolivians are expected to sacrifice a fully functioning llama. Some foolish lads we met at the Brew Hostel had purchased a bonafide llama fetus and kept it in their backpack. God knows what they were goning to do with it?? There´s a fetish for everything i believe. Somebody knicked it from their dormitory because it was stinking to high hell. Glad we were not in their room!. Again i stress..... it´s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A. I think the fools were Australian too. We also saw whole Jaguar fur skins, birds feathers, magic love potions, toads covered in glitter and little talisman bottles.

Tonight we went to the wrestling high up on the hill in the neighbourhood of  El Alto. The whole gig was a huge palava with good guys and bad guys. That is military man versus super action hero and traditional indigenous Bolivian villager woman versus hard core mean woman 3
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 . The show included costumes and capes and midget throwing. There was full on choreographed routines and an over the top host on a microphone. Props included ropes to strangle with, chairs and fake blood. Most of us bought stupid wrestling masks and i looked ridiculous in mine. We bought some masks for the local kids who were very happy, we even adopted a little boy for the duration of the show and bought him popcorn. Us gringos were seated in the front rows and paid ten times as much as the locals for the seats. This was the zone that seemed to get the roughest with wrestlers falling over the barriers and throwing chairs, beer and water bottles and spitting at the gringos. The audience responded by throwing fruits and vegetables back at them. The whole thing was fairly feral and some of it was in bad taste. At one point, a wrestler dressed in army garb forcefully pashed a gringo girl seated in the front row. There was a special tourist key for the only toilet in the venue, everybody else just did their business on a cement floor. A fun night was had by all.

On our return to the hostel we got roped into playing Bar Trivia with all the other gringo trashbags in the joint.
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