The town of Lahauchaca lies midway between the Bolivian capital of La Paz and the mining town of Oruro to the south. I got there in the afternoon having had to cycle through the bad weather around La Paz in the morning, but the sun had come out in the afternoon and the town was seen at it´s best. Except for the drunk mechanic. I was cycling slowly towards him and my hotel. As I got close he shouted something very profound sounding. My Castellano is still very lightweight, so I´m not sure quite what it was. It may have been about the size of the universe, the incoming of spring, or the endless job of servicing diesel engines. Whatever it was, I stopped to shake his hand and assured him that ésta bien´. Something was good. He hugged me firmly, or perhaps he was just stopping himself from falling over. I hugged him back and reconfirmed ésta bien´. He then jestured to me with two arms to be on my way, giving me his blessing to cycle through his country, which he did do without toppling, so I though I´d better do just that and that was the last that I saw of him. He was the third most drunk person that I´ve met on my travels.
The person at number two has to be the old lady who swung me around the improvised town centre dance floor, fuelled with the cicha from what looked very like a paint tin. I had one glass and it wasn´t all that bad at all. The chica that is, not the dancing, that wasn´t so pretty.
Number one is unlikely to be beaten. He was crossing the road, facing in the wrong direction, around lunchtime, both arms outstretched in opposing directions, one firmly attached to an orange plastic cup containing, I´m guessing, the thing which was causing him to be doing a star in the middle of the main road. As I approached, he swung his leg that was furthest from the direction that he was going in and pointing in the opposite direction, heavily, like is was make of lead, through 180 degrees and successfully made the half way line on the road, now facing towards his destination. He stopped for a good 10 seconds to be steady. Not moving, except for his arms cycling in mid air, without spillage. He didn´t see me as I cycled past. It was a long straight stretch of road, so I recon the chances that he didn´t get run over are fairly high. He was going in the direction of a house, the only thing, never mind building, that I could see for a mile around. I´m not sure where he´d come from. Unless his wife had thrown him out of the house. In which case, if he did make it back there, then I should worry for his safety after all as his outdoors experience didn´t seem to have shown him the error of his ways.
The hotel at Lahauchaca was pleasantly different. Small adobe brick dormitory buildings were spread around pleasant archways. I got a whole dormitory to myself for B/30, about $5. I asked about a good restaurant and the oldish chap asked me what I wanted. I said chicken, and he said that he´d ask The Seniora. That he did, and The Seniora said that she´d make me dinner and sent her old fella out to buy a chicken. I´ve eaten a few chickens since I got to South America. Everywhere fries them for lunch, dinner and sometimes breakfast, but this was the most succulent bit of chicken that I´ve had since I arrived. Complete with rice, papas fritas and very juicy tomato. All shopped for and cooked within an hour. A very good dinner for less than the price of the room. All three of us ate chicken that evening, I´m guessing due to my funding, and I once again explained my trip and the route ahead. The chap, from what I understand, said that he was nearly 70 and had only been to one country, Bolivia, but that it was a good country. There is a contentment seen in a lot of the people here which is just not so common in the west. In the morning The Senora had gone into town and I paid the bill to the chap. His wife ran the business - she´d given him the money for the chicken on the evening before and she´d written a note of what had to be paid on a bit of paper. The chap asked me to write the items, dinner, room and breakfast in the carbon copy receipt book that they keep. I assume that he never learned to write, not a practical thing for him to do working on the land, or maybe his glasses were not handy. Whichever it was, I got a good breakfast and a warm goodbye on my 60 miler to Oruro.
