'Beaver fever' and other things to feel embarrassed about
I lost my dignity in a Burger King toilet. Also: dinosaurs.
Let me preface this week by saying I'm fully aware that nobody really wants to hear about other people’s bowel problems. Weekends spent with my grandad as a child taught me that.
Except actually, when you're travelling I have found people respond much more engagingly with stories about ill-health and misfortune than, say, stories about two smug child-free 30-somethings having a perfectly nice and easy time. (Do I just need new friends? I'm joking. Mostly.)
After a pleasant week in Sucre resting and recuperating after the extremes of the Uyuni desert, Dave and I took an overnight bus to Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s shiniest and decidedly most international city. It was described by our Spanish car-mates on the salt flats tour as “sucio” (dirty) and “aburrido” (boring) but ultimately Santa Cruz is a great transport hub with very affordable luxury condos available for short-term rent. And oh, was I ready for some luxury after sleeping unwashed in my coat for much of the week.
But first I sat awake for most of the 12-hour bus journey thinking about my stomach, wondering if I might finally vomit after several days of feeling on the edge of it. It occurred to me that more than three weeks had passed of my feeling generally unwell, and while it was difficult to determine how much of that was environmental (ie, sub-standard food options, sleeping in sub-zero temperatures, 5,000m altitude) hadn't I also been in the Amazon rainforest about three weeks previously? And wasn't it possible that this thing might not disappear on its own, that it might even be some horrible jungle parasite?
There's nothing like a sleepless night staring into the void of other passengers’ sleep drool to set one's mind racing in this direction. Either way, we were in the right place to find out: sure, Santa Cruz is popular for its international transport links, but it’s even more popular among Bolivianos and their neighbours (I now know) for its wealth of private healthcare, and in particular, cheap plastic surgery. The Istanbul of South America, if you will.
No, I didn't get a nose job, though we enjoyed gawping at the many people rocking around the city’s newer districts’ bars and cafés who had. I did, however, seek out a doctor to get myself and any unwanted internal lodgers checked out. But not before Googling my symptoms, of course, and deciding that I probably had something called “beaver fever” (no joke) and either way I would need an appointment asap.
Some more internet searching led me to Clinica Foianini, a private clinic with an emergency room attached. I was told I couldn't get a regular appointment with the doctor, but as a foreigner I should turn up to A&E and I'd eventually be seen.
The wonders of private healthcare! For less than £20 I was given an emergency appointment after less than five minutes’ wait, where a TV-beautiful doctor (Dr Rolando) prodded my stomach and my throat for a bit before gripping my hand, looking me in the eyes and telling me sincerely: “I'm sorry that Bolivia did this to you. But I promise you we will make you feel better.” Oh my.
Here's where the retelling gets tricky. I was sent to a room to get a blood test, and then, as anyone who has experienced similar mystery illnesses will know, it was time to test something else: my stool sample.
I don’t know about you but I cannot simply perform on demand, and especially not when a handsome man in scrubs is waiting patiently outside the bathroom to receive it. So I made my apologies and said I'd be back in an hour. Maybe two. I was handed a plastic pot and a pair of latex gloves, given a quite unnecessary mime of how to use them, and told to return promptly.
Sometimes travelling with your boyfriend is holding hands on remote beaches, sharing sunsets and distant dreams, and sometimes it's having a very real conversation about what fruit juices might contain more fibre for a faster exit result. Let's just say I was not back in one hour, or even four, but eventually after three cafés (coffee, strawberry juice, mango), a long walk around the plaza (really quite lovely!) and giving in to Dave's demand for a Burger King (because he'd been “so patient and understanding” and by now was “starving to the point of needing [his] own A&E appointment probably” and “how often do we see a Burger King on this continent, it's like fate!”) the elements shifted, so to speak, and I had a gift to give back to lovely Dr Rolando.
Have you ever had to shit in a cup in a Burger King toilet and then walk it across town in a plastic bag? It's mortification enough. But you'd think upon arrival at the hospital they would have just taken the semi-opaque bag and said no more about it – something like a carpark drug deal was how I'd imagined the transaction to go.
Except no, obviously not, don’t be daft. The reality, the thing that would come to haunt my nightmares (and take me several attempts at writing out) was this: another handsome man appeared at the ward’s reception desk to take my delivery OUT OF THE BAG and put it ON THE DESK for everyone around me to see. Clearly enjoying the moment a lot more than me, he proceeded to take out his pen and notebook and write out a DESCRIPTION of what was in the pot, all the way narrating this out loud in Spanish, before asking me if I agreed and finally making me sign my confirmation. And all while a queue of people was building up behind me, watching, waiting.
And the biggest joke of all is that I probably didn’t have a parasite. My tests were inconclusive, no discernible presence of beavers or anything else untoward in my blood or in my intestines. It may have been a bacterial infection, it may be a virus, Dr Rolando told me on Whatsapp later that weekend (he’d insisted I take his private number so that we could discuss my symptoms further…) it was impossible to know. But by this point the big bag of drugs he’d prescribed me – five different mystery pills – were doing the trick, so I was well beyond caring. And what a day out. If and when I ever I need medical attention again in the future, I’ll do my best to need it in Bolivia.
Alice did well to miss all this excitement because she’d left us for a few days to go on an Amazon jungle tour, somewhere near Trinidad in the north of the country. It sounded like a similar set-up and itinerary to the one Dave and I did in Peru, except with more opportunities to drink beer and sit in hammocks. She took heed from our experience and opted out of camping.
The three of us met again later in Santa Cruz where we’d planned to spend a weekend sampling Bolivia’s very fine but relatively unknown wines and lazing by the very lovely-looking pool on the rooftop of our Airbnb.
Unfortunately, following months of endless sunshine and heat sitting firmly in the mid-30s, we managed to time our arrival with that of a minor hurricane, meaning gale-force winds and a sudden drop in temperature from 35 to 15 overnight. We did the only thing we could given the circumstances, and hit the bars, cafés and restaurants of Sirari and Barrio Equipetrol hard, really testing out some of my new medications.
As keeps occurring in Bolivia, I cannot believe this is the same country as the one we were in a week ago: the contrast between landscape, climate, wealth and attitude is too much to get my head around. It’s as if there’s been a glitch in the matrix and suddenly we’ve been transported to Dubai or Singapore – a new dimension built out of skyscrapers and wine bars and concierge services.
It's easy to be snobby about Santa Cruz, especially for backpackers seeking “authentic” experiences, but honestly I thought it was great. Would I go out of my way to visit if we were on a shorter trip? Probably not. But as a place to stop and draw breath for a few days, drink good coffee and wine and go to fun and glitzy bars worthy of dressing up for, it ticks all the boxes. Dave and I have spent the best part of ten months roughing it in the pursuit of culture, so allow me this.
Easily the best city in Bolivia has to be Sucre, however. This was our first overnight stop after Uyuni, where we temporarily said goodbye to Alice and where we spent a week hanging out before moving on to Santa Cruz. We had initially planned to make an overnight stop in Potosi after Uyuni, but frankly by this point we were about done with high altitude and the cold.
Potosi has a charming city centre and is a destination in itself, but at 4,090 metres, it is famed for being the second-highest city in the world (after El Alto in La Paz) – not much of a recovery after the salt flats. However, we did stop there for lunch in the very pleasant main square before heading back to the bus terminal and onwards to Sucre, which felt well worth it for a chance to see the historic centre and break up the journey with a decent salad.
Potosi’s most popular tourist attraction is visiting the working Cerro Rico silver mine, though there are mixed attitudes around whether the trips are ethical or safe. We never fancied doing it in the first place, but when sitting down for lunch I read a headline in a local paper about the site’s imminent collapse(!) so it felt like we’d made the right decision.
With its perfect climate and colonial Spanish architecture, Sucre is a very easy-going and classically beautiful South American city. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and – something I certainly didn’t realise – was Bolivia’s first capital city before La Paz (the locals still proudly refer to it as such). In another life, I really think I could live there. We enjoyed café- and bar-hopping in sunny courtyards decorated with artists’ murals. We climbed up to miradors and savoured some incredible food – including a 70 Boliviano (£7.70) tasting menu at this place – in classy restaurants around the main square. And of course, we relished having our own space in an Airbnb with a washing machine, kitchen, hot showers and other such luxuries after the desert.
Pottering about the city led us to the Museo Casa de la Libertad, where Simón Bolívar signed the Bolivian declaration of Independence in the 1800s, and the city’s police department building, which we could enter for a small fee to see murals detailing the revolution and a rooftop view across the Plaza de Armas and beyond.
One afternoon, we set out to find the very impressive University of Saint Francis Xavier since our guidebook claimed there was a museum inside with mummies and shrunken heads. When we arrived and asked after it, the guy behind the front desk seemed to have never heard of such a museum, so we thought that was that. As luck(?) would have it, a passing academic-type overheard our conversation and interrupted to tell the man behind the desk to get up – to hell with security! – and show us “the rooms”. And so the four us embarked on a very awkward tour of the university’s upper floor, which did not contain mummies or shrunken heads but did have some nice paintings.
We were aware that this visit was somewhat off the books and an unexpected turn of events for all involved, so we spent what we hoped was enough time pointing at ceilings and walls and ornate chairs in wonder and making the right noises before scarpering off to happy hour.
While all of this made us feel like cultured global citizens, really none of it could compare to the main cultural event of the week: a trip to see some genuine dinosaur footprints!
Just outside of Sucre there is a working cement quarry where labourers uncovered thousands of the things in the early 1990s when clearing the space to mine it. Today the site is a slightly incongruous combination of loud and scary industrial site and neatly-run paleontology museum (Cretaceous Park, or Cal Orck’o). We were able to join a guided tour down into the quarry to see the footprints close up, led by a very lovely and enthusiastic man of science who demonstrated the creation of the different species’ tracks using an admirable collection of dinosaur toys.
Because I loved him so much and wanted to be his top student, I kept some notes on my phone like a nerd and can therefore tell you that there are more than 12,000 individual footprints* leading out of the quarry, belonging to at least eight different species of dinosaur – the largest known collection in the world. (*The internet says many different things with regards to these numbers of course – but that’s because they keep discovering new ones and so most online reports are out of date!)
I have more notes, but they mostly say things like “sticks and stuff covered the prints” and “used to be a mountain” and “rain and wind started to scratch of the layers – it was just luck!!!”. In brief, the space we saw was once a freshwater lake and the reason why it now presents as an almost vertical wall (confusing) is because tectonic plates pushed the ground upwards over millennia. The main thing to know is, it looks very, very cool and I’d never seen anything quite like it. Which is something I say most weeks on this crazy continent.
Travel bits and tips from this week
We took the bus from Uyuni to Sucre, stopping halfway in Potosi for lunch at Café de la Plata, which was charming like a wild-west saloon but with a good menu and run by a suitably grumpy old cowboy.
In Sucre we stayed at this Airbnb on Plazuela Treveris, a scenic square to the west of town that was home to daily brass band practices. That’s several brass bands, all practising at the same time, every night, Which could be great if brass bands are your thing.
To see Cal Orck’O’s dinosaur footprints, we took the dinobus (may not be its exact name) from Sucre’s Plaza de Armas. It costs 30 Bols each and is covered in dinosaur pictures, so you can’t miss it.
Dave and I took another overnight bus on to Santa Cruz where we met Alice in this rather lovely Airbnb, which had a pool and all the mod cons for less than a tenner each per night.
A non-exhaustive list of the places drunk and dined at in Sucre: Brewcraft, Goblin cerveceria (my favourite bar), El Solar (with the excellent tasting menu), Cheers Beer Company, Coffee Bike, Cafe Monterosso (very cute Italian restaurant that looks closed until you ring a secret doorbell), Pizzeria Napolitana (great menu del dia), La Taverne French bistro, Joy Ride, Kultur Berlin and Salteñeria Flores for salteña empanadas.
Last but not least we spent a lot of time Typica Café. Typica has franchises in several cities, all of which tend to be in beautiful converted old houses – the one in Sucre centre was especially great.
And in Santa Cruz: Amé café, Aviator (a bar with aircraft hanger vibes, to Dave’s delight), Boca Mixtura, Botanica, Distinto wine bar, Kao by Sacha'a, Sacha'a Huaska (yes we went to two versions of the same fancy Asian-style restaurant),
Almacen de Emilia (big Hackney warehouse vibes), Gaia coffee bar, Havana Cuban restaurant, Noi Pizzeria (in a lovely courtyard setting) and finally, never forgetting Burger King.