Return to the Island of the Sun

« Return to Bolivia

Two and half years later, I retrace my footsteps on the Island of the Sun. Not much has changed. The same little girl is playing on the sacred rock by the Sun Temple. The same man is rowing tourists to the south, weathered lines on his face barely betraying his immense physical effort. The most beautiful sunset in the world can still be found by hiking the Calvario, the hill that overlooks Copacabana. And in La Paz, the air remains choked with diesel fumes and speckled noise. Former eastern-bloc countries have rapidly industrialized in Europe, India and China have become economic powerhouses, and the world has become even more flat in terms of communication and trade, but Bolivia remains as Bolivia was - the poorest country in South America, seemingly barred from progress just like it has been barred from the sea.

Maybe I’m just hallucinating, my oxygen-starved brain crying for drama that isn’t there. Last time, I had weeks to acclimatize to the altitude, and when visiting the world’s highest capital city (3600m) and highest navigable lake (3800m), your body needs time to prepare for miserly air. This week, my preparation consisted of time in a plane, a short layover in Lima, and watching a man pass out from lack of oxygen on arrival in La Paz’s very chaotic airport. Picking my backpack off the conveyer belt resulted in a staccato breath, my heartbeat racing. Thirsting for O2 at altitude literally leaves you high. It was after midnight and La Paz was freezing. Sprawled inside a dry, moon-like valley, half-built houses pockmarked the surrounding mountain, creating a atmosphere of undeniable urban decay. It is a city of only 1.5 million people, although it looks like it could easily accommodate three times that amount. Bright revolutionary graffiti decorates cracked cement walls, modern billboards are few and far between. Driving from the airport, I see stray dogs chewing garbage. The highway feels as if ten thousand pianos once dropped from the sky, and we’re still driving over them. I cannot see a single crane, a single sign of urban improvement. Bolivia seems resistant to change. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Before Thomas Friedman wrote the seminal “The World is Flat”, he wrote a book called “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”. It discusses how modernization battles with cultural habits, how assembly lines of products rubs up against centuries of tradition. We can clearly see the world becoming culturally pasteurized, as multinationals and their invasive brands boil away the richness of local variety. Friedman does not judge whether globalization is for the better or worse. It is a reality of modern life. To see where we’re heading, look to the mighty USA. Across an entire continent, every US city has the same stores, the same strip-malls, the same same, hardly different. Travel across the developed world, ditto.

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