The Road to Bolivia

Every Westerner I meet in Peru tells me: 'don't take the cheap night buses, especially not to Bolivia'. An apparently safer, more comfortable version is only forty Peruvian soles more, but I decide I want to experience the real thing.
Squashed between a man whose woolen poncho reeks of 'chicha' (corn beer) and a lady holding two chickens, I settle in for the long night that will take us from Cusco to the Bolivian border by Lake Titicaca, and onwards to La Paz.
Ten excruciating hours later, the dawn breaks. My first glimpse of Bolivia is enough for me to immediately forget cramped legs, freezing droughts, an attempted pickpocketing and one of the chicken defecating on me while I dozed.
After Peru's slopes which are somehow lush with life at all dizzying heights, the rocky Bolivian mountainsides have an eerie, barren beauty.
We pass through many tiny, dirty pueblos. In each we make a rattling stop, and the bus is swarmed by locals bearing buckets of steaming corn, bottles of chicha and baskets of bread. Sales cries fill the bus. Food and a mixture of currencies change hands before we move on. I take a giant corn cob with cheese melted across it. The white kernels are as big as my thumbnail, and very filling. I eat hungrily while struggling to keep it out of reach of my neighbor's chickens.
The city of La Paz, nestled in a bowl of mountains and glowing in the early light, is a beautiful and very welcome sight.
I stumble off the bus and into the city, ready to be swept up in the colours, smells and sounds of Bolivia.
My first surprise is upon reaching the cathedral. The large ornate building is closed every day but Sunday. I find it intriguingly ironic that in front of its locked doors is where about thirty shamans seem to have set up shop. The whole square is full of smoky incense and the sounds of haggling, the scraping of cymbols and rattling of bells. Nearby are stalls selling piles of tiny ornaments: houses, cars, miniature figures and body parts, as well as small neat stacks of what appears to be monopoly money.
I strike up a conversation with a young street seller who is sitting weaving his bracelets on the edge of the square. His accent makes harsher sounds of the Latin American Spanish I am used to from Peru. He tells me that the people can purchase from the stalls a icon of what they want- money, a house, someone's return, the curing of a particular ailment- and take it to the shaman, who will then perform spells to bring them luck in that area of their life. He then tries to sell me his bracelets, and practices some English to ask me clubbing that night: 'you like dance? Drug? La Paz it's crazy, all nights!'
I find a room for sixteen Bolivianos a night, and have slight misgivings when the shower tap handle gives me a bad electric shock and then the water stops all together. However, the view out my window is of an intriguing back alley market. I watch as matronly ladies in traditional dress of huge colourful skirts and neat round hats haggle over fowl in crates, baskets of unfamiliar greens and shovelfuls of dried corn.
Later, in the witches market, I find all kinds of strange remedies. Dried starfish, pickled snakes, and incense for healing specific illnesses. A shop owner snaps at me not to touch anything as if I might wear some of the magic off. She also tells me that the dried llama foetuses hanging in the doorway are to be buried under the foundations of new buildings, for good fortune.
That night I sit in a small restaurant tasting ceviche and listening to the mournful songs of wandering muchileros in the street below. Tomorrow I will bus on to the salt flats of Uyuni, out over the vast white emptiness to an island which I've heard is covered in cacti so old they were there when the salt flats were still a sea.
I am swept up in adventure. I did, however, book the more expensive bus this time.