A complete transformation happens to Bolivia when you leave the well-visited altiplano and places like Uyuni and Sucre. The climate and culture are very different. And it’s not crawling with backpackers – in 2010 at least. To feel it, head east…
….past enormous Santa Cruz and out towards the Chaco wasteland in northern Paraguay and the Pantanal wilderness that buffers western Brazil from Bolivia.
Hot, flat, and more than anything else, low, the country east of the Jesuit mission town of San Jose de Chiquitos was nothing like the Bolivia we’d seen so far, nor the one we’d imagined before we came. But first we had to get there.
The Train from Santa Cruz to San Jose de Chiquitos
From Santa Cruz, a train line runs east to the Brazilian border at Quijarro. It is, or was, known as “The Death Train” – either because it’s a long, hot, bumpy ride, or because of its reputation for accidents, or because people used to ride on the roof so their cargo remained inside, and inevitably fell overboard as the train rattled east. These days, it’s just long, hot and bumpy. We were only going half-way, to San Jose de Chiquitos, a manageable six or seen hour ride.
 Huayna Potosi |
 Uyuni |
 Parque Lauca, Chile |
The train left at noon. At ten minutes to, the ticket lady refused to sell us tickets because she wasn’t sure we’d get to the platform before it left (fifty meters is a long time to cover in ten minutes). She advised us to buy the tickets on board. But the policeman wouldn’t let us onto the platform without tickets. Our travel companion A raced off to try again, and as soon as he did, the policeman closed and locked the platform door! So I raced off after A to tell him not to waste our money. We had missed the train.
A man approached us and said he could outrun the train and drop us at the next station before the train got there. We struck a deal – if we made it, we’d pay gratefully. If not, he’d bring us back to the main station at no charge. We all hightailed it out of the station, threw our junk in the trunk and roared out of the carpark. Halfway to the next village we sped along parallel to the train tracks. Over my shoulder I saw the bright headlight of the train, about three kilometers away. We were going to make it.
When we got to the station at Cotoca, the train was about five minutes behind us. We paid our helpful taxi driver and walked off the platform to where everyone else was standing, right on the rocks by the tracks. I suddenly saw why the train took so long to get to Cotoca. It was lumbering along, blaring its horn at all the carefree pedestrians strolling down the rails. Only at the last conceivable second did they leap out of the way.
We saw a few empty seats in a wagon and prepared to climb in. Before the train had even stopped, I was shouldered out of the way by a tiny woman with a big basket of chicken skewers. She hauled herself aboard and I suddenly thought, rather irrationally, “this is one of those little trains that doesn’t stop, it just rolls slowly along while everyone piles in”. So I followed this woman, hauling my 25 kilogram backpack onto a moving train, almost toppling over backwards but somehow staying upright long enough to stumble in, turn right and dump everything on the first three free seats I saw. Yon and A were aboard before the train stopped too – quite remarkable given the amount of luggage we had and how narrow and steep the entrance was.
Once aboard, it was the lunch ladies’ time to shine. As we settled ourselves in, and the train stopped, then set off again, they were marching up and down the aisle, fiercely advertising their wares: “Chicken skewers!” “Coconut juice! Nice and cold!” “Paraguay Pancakes!” “Refrescos!” “Chicken and Rice! Very delicious!”
No sooner did they all get to the end of the train than they turned around and came back. This went on for the next two hours as we bounced and bundled our way down the tracks out of the village and into the flat, scrubby wasteland beyond.
After a chicken skewer, chicken and rice (yummy, like risotto), two coconut juices and a whole cake, we lay back as best we could in the heat and tried to rest. Six hours to San Jose de Chiquitos!
