R + D | South America

We were trying to get the 3 o´clock bus from Tupiza to the border. (This is a slight backtrack from the last entry, but worth the read). I had been staring at a locked office door for two hours waiting to buy a bus ticket.  When siesta time was over, a beautiful woman with wet, just-brushed hair arrived and unlocked the door, followed by a man of similar age. They were definitely not sleeping during siesta. Her emphatic claim that the bus would arrive in a few hours was undermined by the busy signal on the telephone when she tried to call Potosi (the point of departure) to prove the point that the bus had actually left and made it through a blockade. Despite this and multiple other convincing indications that the bus was not coming today, I bought two tickets. I think I did this because she was beautiful. The bus did not come at 3 o´clock. She did not look at me when she said “viente minutos mas” and spoke to me like I was a fly. The bus did not come at 3:20, 3:40 or 4:00. I was fascinated by how beautifully passive-aggressive she was every time I came back to the office to ask why the bus hadn´t yet come.  I think I kept coming back every twenty minutes because she was so beautiful, but I hated her.  

At 4:10 a double-decker bus pulled into the Tupiza station. It was an heroic arrival given all the uncertainty and it sent all the loitering, pessimistic Bolivians scurrying to buy tickets. We two gringos were dumb enough to have purchased our tickets in advance  on the word of the saleswoman.  The waiting locals shook their head in pity when I told them I already had tickets.  We did not have a good track record with bus ticket office ladies telling us the bus was coming in viente minutos and so when the bus pulled in in a cloud of red Tupiza dust, I had just finished telling the gathered crowd that the saleswoman was a mentirosa (literally, a liar, but much more conniving in the feminine I think…as opposed to the male mentiroso).

So after much uncertainty we took the best seats at the front of the top deck with a huge panoramic wrap-around window in front. We watched the green-bedded canyon lands around Tupiza turn into a wide, windy expanse of scrub grass. We were heading south fast and I kept having to adjust the curtain to fight off the sun blazing down orange in the western sky.

As we pulled into Villazon (the Bolivian border-town) at dusk, a group of men sprinted toward the bus. We squeezed our way through the mob at the door all yelling the name of different Argentine cities followed by a price. “Buenos Aires ciento bolivianos! Salta cinquenta! Jujuy cuarenta!” We put on our best “get the hell out of my way” faces and started walking for the border.

It was a good 2 km walk down the main street toward Argentina. We spent our last few Bolivianos on mouth-watering empanadas from an old lady cooking them up on her portable streetside stove and, a few blocks later, paused while the o.j. vendor used one of those mounted metal contraptions, which look like they should be mounted to a workbench rather than a cart full of oranges, to peel and squeeze our last cup of Bolivian citrus heaven.  That was the taste in our mouths as we side-stepped trash and refuse and finally saw the bridge dividing the richest and poorest countries in South America.

The border guards on the Argentine side looked European, one with a white face and moustache, one grey-haired and Italian-looking. They were driving a Peugeot with Gendarmaria written on the doors. A French car with a Spanishized French word on the side. Their uniforms were well-made and stylish. All this was strange and immediately stood out to both of us.  It was the first time in a few months we had seen locals who looked ”white” and the first time in months we had seen European cars. But there was something else that stood out, something different from the Bolivian guards that had just stamped us out. I couldn´t quite put my finger on it.

We stood in the entrance line waiting to be stamped into Argentina behind Bolivian men holding large duffel bags and looking like they had a long way ahead of them. I had seen these same guys being coached by a well dressed woman in front of the Bolivian exit office. They were workers heading South for higher paying jobs and she was the intermediary. I watched them thinking what it must be like to face a new country with your family behind you and be poor. When you´re rich, none of it matters. They were like Mexicans heading north to work in the U.S. or Eastern Europeans heading to Germany.

That´s when it hit me. Why the Argentine border guards looked so different. It wasn´t the whiteness in their faces or the better-made uniforms or the handsome imported cars that made them stand out.  What was really different, and took me a long time to identify, was that the Argentines looked like people living in the first world. They had a casualness about them I hadn´t seen in months. I can´t describe it exactly, but it´s a certain relaxed look you don´t see in the third world. The hard faces of the campesinos in the Andean countries (Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) never look relaxed. Resigned or passive maybe, but never casual.

La Quiaca on the Argentine side looked relaxed and well made. The buildings were brick and had the adornments of a relaxed people. They were painted and some houses had porches. There were tree lined sidewalks and no trash lying in the gutter. People walked by without trying to sell you anything.  For months we had seen nothing but adobe walls and corrugated tin roofs, streets swimming in trash, and everyone with something to sell.  Every minute of every day was spent trying to eke out an existence. Here, people just walked around idly on sidewalks made for walking around idly.

It was late now, around 9 p.m. We took a taxi (a Fiat) to the bus station, sharing it with an indigenous woman with a huge blanketed bundle. The taxi driver joked with us and listened to rock on the radio. He had cigarettes and a cell phone and CDs in the car.

At the bus station there were people everywhere, all sitting on the floor with opened packages of new clothes, toys, and cheap made-in-China-like-junk spread out in front of them. The goods were all in transit, not on display. They were being moved between bags, and wrappers and packing material was being left behind. I spent a long time trying to figure out what they were doing exactly. It seemed to me they were all Bolivians coming into Argentina with cheap stuff to sell. They were waiting for buses to penetrate a vast and comparably rich country.

I bought two tickets to Salta in an office with a computer and we headed out to eat at a nearby hotel, worried we wouldn´t get dinner at 10 pm before our midnight bus. Everything about the hotel and restaurant was different from Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. The window panes, door handles, tables and chairs, floor tiles, light fixtures,  all had a solid but dated feel. It reminded both Danielle and I of South African buildings. The bathroom had soap and toilet paper, heavy porcelain and running water, they were clean and you didn´t have to pay.  

We ate a steak that we are still talking about a month later. Every steak we’ve eaten since in Argentina has had to compete with the bife de chorizo in La Quiaca. It was thick and pink inside and had the smell of a pool-side barbecue. We had not had meat like this in months. The meat north of here is functional, eaten for protein and has no smell. Everyone in the restaurant was dining casually and it was well past ten o´clock. After Danielle dipped her bread into some olive oil (olive oil on the table!!) we were approached by a jovial older fellow who was sure that we must be from Spain, given the dipping of bread into oil. A few geographical corrections later and we had been joined by him, Gonzalo Fernandez de Mendoza Lopez, and his associate, Gregorio.  They were like an old-married couple taking casually contradictory positions on all subjects, including whether or not my steak was the best one I would taste in Argentina. Gregorio, an Argentine Jew whose family had come over from Belarus, had, at the age of seventy, fallen in love and just relocated from Buenos Aires to join his new wife doing aid work in a nearby Quechua village. Gonzalo, the effusive Spaniard, was helping them set up a database for the village library. Gonzalo told jokes belittling the Argentinians while Gregorio tried desperately to make Gonzalo seem polite. After a lot of laughing, a group photo, and much dipping of bread into olive oil, they insisted on walking us to the bus station–despite the late hour, it was still dinner time in Argentina. It was 10:45.

As we approached the bus station the sea of goods and migrants was spilling out onto the sidewalk. Gregorio told us that “the border is imaginary,” but when we slipped into the clean smelling seats of the bus with working overhead reading lights, air conditioning, and a working toilet just down the aisle, I thought the border may be porous but it is not imaginary. We pulled out of La Quiaca heading south into Argentina. I got out my ear-plugs and a pillow. Behind us was a line. On that side, the buses are late and people are trying to survive. On this side, life is casual and they import French cars.