The rotton roads to Chulimani, Bolivia

Taking a bus to Chulimani should not be the death-defying experience it is. Four hours from La Paz, the ride leaves the cold, high altoplano to ramble deeper into the Yungas cloud forest, an unpaved road threading the edge of mountain after ever-greener mountain. When I went last week, the ride was punctuated by frequent stops as the huge buses maneuvered past one another on the single lane road. Where waterfalls stream down the mountainside, the bus lumbered slowly across the road turned to rivers of churning brown mud. Over the course of the ride, the stale smell of human nerves warmed the bus until the windows steamed. How could it be that such a well-traveled path could remain so muddy, so terrifyingly narrow, so close to the edge of each precipice?

The answer lies just outside the tiny town of “Chuli”, where neat rows of the blue-green leaves of the coca plant patchwork the jungle mountainside. Coca is a staple crop in nearly every agricultural region in Bolivia. Its leaves have been chewed by the Aymara and Quechua people for hundreds of years. Even today, close to 95% of the population in Bolivia still continue to wad the leaves in their cheeks, chewing the paste with a mixture of ash to release its stimulating alkaloids. With its wide, juicy leaves, some of the best coca in Bolivia is grown in Chulimani region. Indeed, the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, gets his coca from here. Bees pollinating the white and black-dotted bean-flower shaped blossoms yield dark, rich honey—excellent accompaniment the region’s absurdly savory mangoes. Chulimani, with its clouds of multicolored butterflies and early morning mists, the great grey whales of clouds parting for the sunrise, seems like a town that should be as much of a pleasure to get to as it is to spend time in. Instead, the road is a deathtrap.

But building roads takes money, often monies in the form of foreign aid. And the coca plant, for whatever its cultural significance, its hundreds of years of use, and its contemporary value to the Bolivian people, just so happens to be the base plant in the manufacturing of cocaine. True, to take the small bluish leaves to even the first step of cocaine manufacturing—cocaine paste—takes resources most Bolivians don’t have, including a really disgusting process involving stomping the leaves in a tarp-lined pit soaked in kerosene. True, too, that a majority of Yungas coca farmers sell their leaves at market, and have no direct connection to the drug-running middlemen. The fact remains that there are no easy roads into Chulimani because there are no easy roads to transport coca leaves out of Chulimani.

Bolivians, by all accounts, seem to be a people ready to sit with that situation. Pico Iyer, in his essay on La Paz, writes of a heavy rainstorm striking the city and the chuilitas (indigenous women who’ve come to sell in the city), rather than leaving their curbside squats, simply lifting plastic tarps over their heads and foodstuffs, expressionless, until the hour of storming stopped. Another friend described a protest in Bolivia in which thousands of campesinos had walked for days from work in the countryside to La Paz. When interviewed, my friend told me, none could say for what they had come. A better road to Chulimani would require going up into the face of programs like US AID, who periodically sends “journalists” into the region to keep statistics on the coca production as part of the infamous policy of the United State’s “War on Drugs.” If this is the Goliath the town of Chuli faces, then David has long ago hung up his slingshot.

On the way back to La Paz, as my bus bumped and buckled sixteen inches from the cliff side, a two hundred foot drop revealing the brown snake of a river rushing by below, the older woman at my side shut her eyes, her hands folded neatly in the lap of her layered, worn velvet skirt. A bowler hat, resting above the perfect part of two waist-length braids, stuck to her head without hatpins despite the pitching of our transport. Earlier in the ride, at a checkpoint in the Yungas, younger women in similar dress had jogged alongside the bus, selling bags of chicken and fried bananas, and the old woman at my side had offered to pass me some. “No, thanks, I’m a vegetarian,” I said, and she’d patted my hand as though apologizing for what I was missing out on. She’d eaten her chicken delicately, and then tossed the bones and bag out of the bus, settling back into her window seat for a nap. When she awoke, as I had from my own sweaty, dazed attempt to sleep, it was because our bus had stopped and was listing with the rain on the very precipice of the road.

I was panicking. We had been in heavy rain for nearly an hour, and were driving uphill against torrents of water turning the narrow road into a veritable slip-n-slide. On my right, the rain seemed to threaten a tumble of rocks wiggling like loose teeth off the cliff face. On my left, we seemed destined to fall over the continuous drop we were to follow for a least another two hours. With a sigh, the old woman beside me assessed the situation, and then, neatly tipping her hat, removed from its inverted bowl a handful of dried coca leaves. She looked over at me and smiled. “Aqui,” she said, “Pruebalo.” Then, placing her own small handful in the corner of her mouth, tidily replacing her hat, and with one last shrug of her shoulders at the possibility of death, she began to chew.