Going The Distance

Oh dear. We’re going to appear on television in Santa Cruz. On Bolivia’s favourite TV breakfast show on the PAT network.

Which, after the humiliation we have brought upon ourselves on other national TV shows along the way, is no big deal. What is a big deal is that we have no bike, and no jumpsuits. Both are languishing, humiliated and broken, in La Paz, where we reluctantly abandoned both for Bolivian public transport. It’s like Clark Kent showing up for the interview when really they wanted Superman.

I find the pre-meets for TV very stressful. They ask us for footage, and we pathetically try to navigate the mountains and mountains of film that we have amassed on this journey, in the short time that we are given. I always panic. Nothing, it would appear, terrifies me more than looking like real tits on national TV. Or rather, given that we pretty much always look like real tits when we’re wearing the suits, when we look like totally unprepared and amateur real tits on national TV.

To be interviewed by this lady, Desiree Duran, former Miss Bolivia

I’m typing this as Mike works his way through the few files that we have with us here in Santa Cruz (the mega-external hard drive is back in La Paz safely stored from the destructive powers of public transport) – and trying to tell the story (they keep saying “we need an international edit! Make an international edit!” Edits take hours to make…)

It’s going to take a while. That we know of old. Telly is not an easy business, everything takes an age. Editing is the slowest process of them all – and we’ve only given them about 15 minutes of footage to reduce. I keep coming back to the fact that Mike and I are going to have around 400 hours of footage to deal with on our return to England. That’s almost bigger than the trip itself, and it’s scaring the crap out of both of us.

Oh my God, I think the production assistant is trying to get hold of uniforms for us from the local dress up shop. Oh. My. God. Clark Kent just put on Spiderman’s costume.

Ha ha! It develops. As Mike and I sit in a corner working through an edit (and me typing), a camera has just been shoved in our faces (our unmade up, unprepared, totally caught off guard faces) with a light blazing at us, and a microphone to our gobs. Weird weird weird. A ten minutes interview as we sit at our computers on a makeshift desk. I have NO idea what is going to come of that.

THE PLOT THICKENS FURTHER. We haven’t got our overalls and so the assistant has brought back GREY AND GREEN KAWASAKI MOTOCROSS WEAR for us to do the interview in. OH. MY. GOD. Nothing can explain how absurd we are going to look. NOTHING. But you should get a good chuckle out of it on the blog, peeps.

Sitting at lunch in Sucre, we told a handful of Bolivians we didn’t know about what we are doing. When we said that one of the questions that we ask every couple is “what is love?”, the high-powered Laila leant forward to me and replied, “Amor es Jesucristu”. She then went on to explain that once you can shrug off the dependence on human love and embrace divine love, unconditional and ever-giving, then and only then your life will feel complete.

Hmmm. Interesting. People don’t often volunteer a response to our questions without severe prompting. A little more inquiry on my part revealed that she passionately believes in Jesus, through her evangelical faith. She lives in Santa Cruz and runs one of the biggest TV stations in the country. She’s extremely nice, pious, and so Mike asked if we could come to her church service, and perhaps interview a couple from the church.

Right. So. First time I’ve been to church for a while. The Ministerio Jesucristu Luz de las Naciones meets every Sunday in the meeting room of one of Santa Cruz’s 5 star hotels. The service states that it starts at 10am. We scramble northwards to the venue for that time, only to find no sign of anyone. AT ALL. At 10.20am, Leila arrives with her gorgeous daughters and her sister, and the service kicks off at 10.30am. People are still arriving an hour and a half later. TIB (“This is Bolivia” – an acronym we have come to depend on).

The congregation is led by a couple who have been married for 26 years, Pastors Joaquin and Maria. Joaquin leads the singing to open the service. We sing around 10 songs in a row, repeating each of them as we finish it. It lasts about an hour. Funnily enough, it’s the first time I’ve been in church for a while, and interminable singing sessions used to undo me, but somehow I find it really easy to be part of. I don’t even notice the time. I just settle back, suspend all judgement – as is our way with Going the Distance, and let the love in the room wash over me. I’m singing along in no time.

Maria stands up to give the sermon, she mentions what we are doing and how delighted she is to welcome us to her church. She then talks about love, the importance of Jesus’s love over human love. She can recall verses of the Bible from the top of her head which are projected onto a screen for us all to follow. She’s an extremely good speaker, and I follow along even with my Spanish. The congregation loves her, the room by now full. 

So we ask if we can interview the two of them. After a great lunch with Laila, we head to their flat. They are both good-looking and charismatic, and the interview is a good one.

They met at school, Joaquin was working as a barista (as well as being a student there) and said that when he first laid eyes on Maria, he just knew. It was as though a light was shining on her, it was a though God was pointing him in her direction, he says. He’s always been one for going after what he wants, and from the start, he wanted her. Maria’s friend fancied him, but he asked Maria to dance and they danced all night together. Apparently, the friend was ok with it.

They’re 16 at this point. They didn’t see each other again for the next 3 months. Maria thought about him a lot, but their paths didn’t cross. Then one night, her friend pulled her along to a sports evening thing. Joaquin’s friend dragged him out of bed to it too – no shower, no clean clothes. And they saw each other again. And they have been together ever since.

They dated for 5 years before getting married. I asked about the proposal, and Joaquin said that it was so inevitable (and so often discussed) that the question itself was no big deal.

They married, were happy for the first few years, then Maria said they got into a difficult patch. She was shy, insecure – and looked to him for support. Support which perhaps he couldn’t give her: she needed to love herself before she could love him. She realised there was a part of her that was missing, then one day, she felt God. He moved her and she realised that only with the love of God could she realise what life and love really meant, it wasn’t fair to look to Joaquim to fill those gaps.

The two of them are Evangelical pastors. Maria has been for a very long time, since that revelation, Joaquin was a helicopter pilot but has since given that up to be a pastor full time. Their services are dynamic and their congregation appreciative. We had lunch with two members of the congregation who rated Maria as one of the best in Bolivia.

Maria and Joaquin tell us that there is a huge difference between a ‘pact’ and a ‘contract’. A contract is a secular arrangement which binds people, a pact is something which you enter into with your heart and soul, in the eyes of God, for a lifetime. You have to work at making that pact work, but it’s far far better than being alone. Joaquim said that divorce is like gluing two bits of paper together with thick glue, leaving it for an hour or so, then trying to pull them apart: it’s messy and both sides lose something of themselves to the other. Jesus is love, and he should help any individual to overcome any difficulty in any relationship.

My friend Dan is always prodding me to commit my opinion and my judgement to ‘paper’ in this blog. Well, as I have assured him, that’s not the spirit of what we do. Also, there is something amazing about being in the presence of real belief – and real love. This couple have found a way to live happily, and more than that, they are sharing that belief with others, and spreading that happiness. As far as I know, it causes no harm to any other being, and the people who have felt the love, feel with their whole beings, their whole lives. Many of the congregation wept openly, including Maria herself, when they thought about Jesus dying on the cross selflessly, so that we could live. The couple asked us to open our hearts to Jesus at the end of the interview. We repeated Maria’s words to beckon him into our hearts. I’m not going Goddy on you, dear reader, but I’m very happy to share other people’s faith, other people’s passion, other people’s love. It’s a blessing that I can’t describe when couples open their hearts to welcome us in, and I feel endlessly lucky to be part of this mad adventure.

So it turns out that everything that Roald Dahl said was totally right about the mystical, magical world of a chocolate factory. Except for the Oompah Loompahs, the 3 course bubble gum, the chocolate river, the glass elevator (2 flights of concrete stairs)…

Mike and I wandered round Sucre’s biggest chocolate factory agog, being given tasters at every stage, of every different type of chocolate. Mike, who is our resident chocolate addict (I’m a crisp girl, m’self), was in seventh heaven. But also filming, with a hairnet on.

Chocolates Para Ti is the brainchild of Gaston Solaris. About ten years, he decided that he wanted to set up a factory of some sort. His background was in industry, and so he decided to set up a chocolate factory. He started with 7 employees. The company is now one of the most successful Bolivian companies, exporting to various countries in South America - and the States – and employing around 130 people. 95% of whom are women.

So Mike and I arrange an interview with Don Gaston and his wife, Gloria. But first, we head to the factory for a tour. Hairnets and white coats, check. Much giggling from wife at husband’s headgear, check. Sweet sweet smell of gallons and gallons of molten chocolate, check. (Our tourguide, head of production, said that she and the workers are now totally immune to it and can’t smell it at all)

Two floors. Downstairs is where everything is mixed: the cocoa, the cocoa butter, the milk, the sugar. All the ingredients are Bolivian. Huge vats of chocolate are around the place. We peer into the chocolatey depths with glee.

Everything they do in the factory is done by hand. This is done to create jobs for the community. Some of which must be fairly stultifying, but are jobs none the less.

1. The chocolate is made by adding the various ingredients together then mixing them up.

2. The molten chocolate is poured into a vat, where a wheel lifts it up to create a constant flow unto the moulds for the chocolate. Excess chocolate is returned to the ‘bath’.

3. Moulds are shaken to make sure that chocolate is evenly distributed.

4. Dried chocolates are pushed from the moulds by hand, then wrapped by hand. There is a table of women working hard at wrapping bars of chocolates, feverishly, flawlessly.

5. Chocolates are then distributed, again by hand, into boxes. 3 of each type into each box.

They create different types of chocolates too – there are chocolate-covered marshmallows (all made in the factory); and chocolate-covered fondants (which were hardish when we got to taste them, like balls of icing sugar which then melt in the coming days so that they ooze from the chocolate shells when bitten into). The whole thing was pretty rad, basically.

We then left the factory to interview Don Gaston and his wife, Gloria. They are both on their second marriage, and have been together for 15 years. Don Gaston seems like a formidable man: not only does he run one of Bolivia’s biggest homegrown factories, but he has found the time to write a weekly column for various publications for 15 years which he has recently published entitled My Two Loves: My Cities and My Country. Sucre, his city, he celebrates on the front of each bar of chocolate that he sells: each type of chocolate has a photo of the exquisite Sucre on it. A little advert for his city.

Gloria, when asked whether she is the duena (boss) of the factory, says with a smile that she is the duena of the dueno! Love it. When we ask her what love is, she answers that it’s giving everything for the other person. She says that everything that she does is about making him happy, he smiles and says that he feels the same.

We then head to the wonderfully tropical Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest city out east near the rainforest and the Brazilian border – to a hostel with Simon, the captivating pet toucan, my newest love – also with a big beak and blue eyes.

Why the extremely self indulgent “grinning-idiots-at-a-gas-station” photo, I hear you all cry? Well, aside from it being another one of Arequipa’s finest photographer (Fernando Gygax)’s portraits of Team Going The Distance (see our flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goingthedistance/sets/72157622959050555/ ) it is also to acknowledge that here in sucre we interviewed ourselves. (With the help of our friends Judy & Sue).

Potosi was once the biggest city in the Latin American continent – comparable to London and Paris at the time. It exploded into history due to the discovery of an enormous seam of silver in its mountain. The Spanish used indigenous labour to tear the mountain apart from the inside, and silver streamed out into the streets of the city, into the hands of the conquistadors – and rapidly went to pay off Spain’s debts in Europe, failing to improve Spain’s own economy or industry in any meaningful way. The Spanish left thousands of dead Quechuans, and an empty mountain behind; such that today the mines are depleted of all the large and easy to extract silver, and the locals are allowed to mine what is left out of the mountain. Around 12,000 Potosenos work the mountain today, in conditions that would not even pass a 17th century safety test.

We met with Jorge, who had been a miner for 6 years in his youth, and now is a guide, and youth leader in the church. Jorge first went into the mines at the age of 13 with his uncle (then 18) They went deep within the the mine (the tunnel he took us into stretched for 1km into the mountain, and 200 metres down into the earth – so when he said deep, I was able to imagine something really quite a long way from the entrance). His uncle told him to sift through a pile of rocks separating the dark ones from the light ones, while he went off down a tunnel. “Wait here – I’ll be back” he said, as he disappeared off in search of more ore. Jorge’s gas light soon ran out, and he had no idea where he was.He sat for three hours in the dark, waiting for his uncle to return, which finally he did. As first days at work go, that’s a pretty tough start. During his six years, he witnessed some friends get lottery-rich with finds of silver, and other friends die trying.

He left the mines at the age of nineteen (the average age of the miners – most retire in their mid twenties) and began work as a guide. He met Lillian in a local church group, who helped him find God, and soften his macho ways. After fours years, they were married, and had the first of three kids. Lillian is still worried about Jorge’s work in the mines. It’s still dangerous, almost as dangerous as mining itself she says. Jorge told us of one time when he was taking a group down a large boulder fell from the ceiling of the tunnel, behind him, narrowly missing the first tourist in the group. Another tourist dropped a camera down a hole that Jorge hadn’t noticed before – jorje jumped down the hole onto the ledge that the camera sat on, and clambered out. A miner noticed him come out – and told him that the shaft was 30m deep. Not a fall Jorge would have survived if he hadn’t landed on the ledge. It is thanks to God, they both say, that he is alive today, and that they have found each other.

The life of a miner is one that Jorge was lucky to have escaped early on. He described the work like an addiction,  like gamblers who don’t know when to walk away from the table. While  there are many stories of the big winners (like the guy four years ago who found the last big $1,000,000 seam. He drives a hummer, has a big house in Potosi, and two more in Sucre) there are not only stories of those that lost (around 40 miners die a year), but there are many visible examples of those that are losing, slumped in the gutter next to the beer shops outside the mine, where you can buy 96% proof alchohol, supposedly just for offering the God of the mountain, but inevitably some of it ends up in the mouth of the miner. No female miners are allowed to work in the mine, and the society is inevitably macho. There’s graffiti on the walls (one collective calls itself “pulmones de metal”, lungs of metal, which adorns one tunnel wall, next to an enormous vagina…) and Jorge explains how the miners talk about sex all the time, and how there weekends aren’t complete without at least trying to bed one of the Potosenas – local women who admire the miners, who also hope to benefit from a million dollar seam that reveals itself to one in a million miners. Preganacies happen all the time without love or sobriety, and consequently the mines are like a Dickensian workhouse,  teeming with children of all ages, with no parents, and no shoes, relying on Jorge and other guides to bring food from the tourists who visit. Most of these children grow up to be miners starting as young as 10, because they are used to the harsh environment and are suitably small for some of the deeper tunnels. As we were driving away from the mines, I saw another drunk lying in the dust like a discarded shop mannequin, with two small children playing next to him – one of whom was trying in vain to smash a rock on the curb, in bare feet.

Jorge’s children, to the contrary, are smiling, inquisitve, beautiful kids, who at the end of our interview join their parents in their doorway, singing a local church song about God’s love.

An early start for the Clears, 7.30am alarm. Grunt.

Ingo and Cecilia have the shortest relationship of any couple we have interviewed on the trip. 17 days to be precise. The reason that we have bamboozled them into participating is that they are our freshest example of Love At First Sight. It’s the stuff of Hollywood movies, and we’d've been mad not to capture their total delight and having found each other, their besotted smiles, their general loveydoveyness.

Ingo is one of the big group of bikers we have so happily been hanging out with. He’s German, he loves salsa, he’s a very nice guy. He goes out dancing most nights, and on one of the nights, he went out to salsa club in Cusco. He’d been there a few days and made a few local friends, so he happened to be with a Cusceno friend. At one point in the evening, a Peruvian dance came on and everyone started to dance to it. Ingo, an experienced salsa dancer, didn’t know the dance, but gamely had a go at joining in. At which point, his Cusco friend suggested that he danced the dance with his female friend, Cecilia.

So Ingo and Cecilia started to dance together. The way Ingo recalls it, about ten minutes into dancing together, he and Cecilia looked into each others’ and he said at that point, he just knew. He said it was as though they had had a moment of profound connection. He is quick to add that neither he nor Cecilia is emotionally naive – both have had proper and meaningful relationships before. With one look, he realised that this was the woman for him. He said that he saw someone who understood him totally, and whom he understood.

They danced together for 5 hours that night, during which time they talked and talked and talked, and before the end of the night, they knew that they would marry each other.

That alone was enough to have me crying (NB Me – not just Mike) but the amazing bit really is Cecilia’s story. She is from Arequipa, but had been living in Cusco for 8 years with work. She had finally decided that she was sick of living there and wanted to move back home. So she packed up her life in the city, sent it back to her family in Arequipa and quit her job. The night that she and Ingo met was her leaving party – her grand farewell to Cusco before upping and heading back to her home town.

So when she met Ingo, and the two of them shared this amazing experience, and they talked about forever, Ingo asked Cecilia to come with him on his bike journey: the bike, like all of the touring bikes, can hold a passenger, they could buy all they needed, he wanted her on the road with him.

She said yes.

So the next day, the two of them spent the day trawling Cusco’s few biker shops to get Cecilia kitted out for months on road with a man she met the night before. She looks adorable in her kit – they could only find motocross padding, so she looks like a boy racer.

What an amazing leap of faith. I ask if they ever had any doubts, and Cecilia said that, from that first moment, it was so easy, effortless – and there was never any question. She phoned her mother, 10 days or so before Christmas, to say that she wouldn’t be back for Christmas with the family or New Year. Her mother was upset – “why?” Because of work, came the reply. Cecilia knew her mother would give her grief for her impetuousness.

When I asked what was going through Ingo’s head when Cecilia got on the back of his bike and they left Cusco, he said that he had tears running down his face in his helmet.

So here we meet them, two weeks later, so in love that it’s palpable. They don’t even speak each other’s languages – Ingo answers in English, Cecilia in Spanish. Ingo speaks a bit of Spanish, Cecilia can just about understand English, but doesn’t speak a word of German.

They are travelling down to Buenos Aires over the next couple of months, they will then fly back to Lima where they will marry in a civil ceremony. Then the hardest part, Cecilia has to stay in Peru to learn German to take a test before she is allowed into the country (given that she doesn’t have a job at the moment). It’s likely to take between 2 to 3 months, which both are not looking forward to, but they know they’ll survive it. They talk happily and naturally about kids, about moving to Germany (where Ingo has a great job – eventually, they may well move back to South America, which Ingo loves); for the moment, the only important thing is that they are together.

Cecilia is a beautifully happy person. It’s not difficult at all to see why Ingo fell in love with her, she’s gorgeous, so unfazed by it all, she talks about how little importance she puts on material things. She just smiles when I ask about how they get through all the usual shit of life on the road together – border crossings, tropical rain, being tired/hungry. She says that when it rains, she just hugs Ingo tighter. Which of course, he smiles at.

They are so adorable, it gives me goosebumps even writing about them. What’s more, I think they really have thought it through. It’s not just some teenage love affair, they are so totally comfortable around each other. God, I hope it lasts – and I really think that it will (for what little that’s worth).

www.heldontour.blogspot.com

(we are both working overtime to update the site and we have managed to double up, so we can’t be arsed to edit – so you get them both)

Alanna: 

2010 welcomed in in style: Potosi’s Rotary Club. Wilting burgundy velvet carpets lead up a central wooden staircase to the ballroom, set with big speakers and small stage for a band. The adjoining room is filled with tables for 4. It looks like it’s going to be a great party, and we duly buy our tickets for dinner and drinks, all included. There are 12 of us, three tables are joined, and we each get a ticket for the 9pm kick off.

Herding bikers is like herding cats. As the wise Aussie Judy pointed out to me, the kind of people who get on a bike and travel 25,000 miles are the kind of people who have pretty big balls. And who don’t like being bossed about. So getting the group to move at all takes some serious patience – so we eventually arrive at the club, and our table, at 10.15pm.

It’s totally empty. Totally. The tables haven’t been laid, the food is far from being ready, the waitresses are surprised to see us. What? New year is in a little over an hour and a half – where’s the pary? We sit down, have the usual Bolivian treatment of drinks taking half an hour and much confusion from the waitstaff to arrive, and then contemplate what on earth is going on. We drink, in merry solitude, for the next hour, and at 11.50pm, the first other guests arrive. Apparently, new year’s eve is a family thing, you only go out after dinner. So why have they all paid for dinner? Certainly the most surreal new year I have ever spent.

Great news comes in the form of my brother proposing to his lovely girlfriend, Penny, back home. Certainly the best thing about new year this year.

Mike: New Year, Potosi. Who would have chosen this town to celebrate the end of the decade? Fortunately we were accompanied by a multitude of bikers, and we decided to celebrate Bolivian style, by booking a table at the International Club of Potosi. A bit like a rotary club, old fashioned with wood panelled walls. Although it lacked the stuffy atmosphere, in that it had no atmosphere at all. It was only until 12.30 when the other guests arrived when we discovered that the Bolivian New Year is celebrated at home with the family. Midnight was barely recognised, although there was a band playing to an empty room just before. I asked the MC when midnight was exactly, expecting him to tell us when he would begin his countdown, and his response was that “it had probably passed”.  So we had to make do with our various watches, and a vague consensus that Johannes’ watch would be the most accurate (being German). Though sadly it had no second hand, so we just guessed and counted down at random. Since we had 3 bottles of rum on the table, and the desperate need to make our own fun, the subsequent high altitude hangover meant the first of January was a write-off.

After a particularly hellish introduction to the nightmare that is public transport (how we mourned our temporarily disabled Ural), we arrived in Uyuni at 0700. With very little sleep we booked onto a day tour of the infamous salt-flats. The travel agent assured us that we’d have a good time, with the 2 other Brits and an American in our 4 x 4, and after a flurry of disorganization, our jeep set out with us and our new Bolivian friends, a mum and her three sons. Which meant for a day of heavy Spanish chat couped up in a hot car.
 
The day was our first foray into organized tourism for a long time, and we were hearded from the “train graveyard” – admittedly a great photo opportunity – to an “artesenal market” – where we were ushered through various stalls of tat, until finally we reached our destination, la Isla de Pescados. An extraordinary cactus-covered blip on the famous stark white landscape. We had a surreal picnic on the island with the twin teenage boys, the mum, and Fabio her 4 year old son, and an ostrich who scared the bejeezus out of Fabio. There were, of course, a good fifty other jeeps, and their contents of 5 tourists each, which meant the island was far from unpopulated, but the views out over the salar were well worth it. It really is an amazing place, where the featureless landscape plays tricks with your mind (to the extent that taking photos of each other in different planes of perspective, was practically mandatory) Before we knew it, our time was up, and we were hearded back into the car, to drive 100km back across the awesome landscape, to Uyuni, where we stumbled onto our second bus in 24 hours. I quite agree with Eric Idle’s character, Mr Smoke-too-much, in Monty Python’s travel agent sketch:
 
“I mean what’s the point of being treated like sheep. What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea – “Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home” – and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ‘cos they “overdid it on the first day.”
 
Except for Kettering and Coventry, read Cochabamba, Bolivia. And they weren’t bemoaning the tea. And they certainly weren’t wearing cloth caps. But you get the idea…

The first of our brushest with Bolivian public transport. Bike left, maimed, in a mechanic’s workshop in La Paz, we head with reduced luggage to La Paz bus station for the overnight to Uyuni, where the largest Salt Plains in the world are located. The road is in two parts: 3 hours to Oruro on paved roads. Then 8 hours of “lesser quality roads”. Ok. We sleep for the first three hours, no probs. Then, when we hit the unpaved roads, it quickly becomes clear that sleep will be unlikely: the roads are dust roads, grooved into lots of uneven bumps. At times, we are thrown out of our seats into the seats in front. I have to say, I find it pretty hilarious. We are awoken, at 6.30 – an hour before our destination – by the bus driver turning on Bolivian panpipe rock LOUD. So loud that even the Bolivians are pushing their sleeping bags against the speakers, one in front of us holds his hands tight against his ears for the entire hour. Mike sits bolt upright and flaps his hands in indignation. I giggle madly. Again, unlikely to be what he needs.

Uyuni is high and dry. Dusty dry and very bright. Clusters of indigenous cholas (the women with bowler hats) and tourists define this place. We reluctantly get breakfast, find a tour and join the realms of other tourists for a daytrip onto the Salt Flats.