To South America

Vegetarians, be afraid. Be very afraid. Welcome to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the most carnivorous of all the cities I’ve visited to date on this trip. To be honest, I wasn’t aware of Santa Cruz’s existence until I found a cheap flight here from Frankfurt. It’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as Bolivia’s other urban heavy hitters such as La Paz, Sucre and Cochabamba and it‘s easy to see why. It’s quite the underwhelming place and under normal circumstances it would serve as an urban doormat, welcoming me to the country before I made my way to Bolivia‘s other urban jewels. I’m here for two weeks though and for one reason only - to learn Spanish. Having travelled through West Africa for 2 months and having added approximately 5 words of French to my vocabulary, I’ve decided that I’m sick of struggling with the local language and so I’m going back to school.
I find it impossible to write about my initial experience here in Bolivia without making reference to food. The streets of Santa Cruz are lined with street vendors. You can eat anything you want here, as long as it contains chicken in one of its multitudinous forms, and chips. Santa Cruz is the embodiment of the fat guy who says “I don’t have a problem with my weight. I eat, I get fatter. No problem.” The only living thing more worried than a vegetarian here in Santa Cruz is a chicken. If I was playing a word association game and the words Santa Cruz were uttered, my immediate response would be ‘CHICKEN’. Roasted. Broasted. Fried. Smoked. Grilled. Baked. Barbequed. Shit, if you wanted your chicken dressed in a tutu and smoking jacket, I‘m sure that even that wouldn‘t be a problem. As long as you ordered it with fries of course. I don’t know what the statistics are with regard to coronary disease in Bolivia but if Santa Cruz is anything to go by then I’m pretty certain that it’s one area in which Bolivia is a world leader.
I spend two weeks in one of Santa Cruz’s outlying neighbourhoods and it gives me a good chance to see life here up close. On my first day in the neighbourhood, wandering in search of a bottle of mineral water, I pass by shop after shop with metal bars across the entrances and so I walk on assuming they’re closed. It turns out that they’re not - the bars are in place as a type of security blanket for the shopkeepers, fearful of armed robbery. It takes some getting used to though, shouting your order in through the bars and waiting for it to be passed through the little hatch. It all leaves me feeling like saying “A Mars, a bottle of Coke and my conjugal rights please. Gracias.”
The bars are a symbol of the fear which is whipped up and served thick (with chicken and fries probably) on a daily basis by the endless number of lowest common denominator tabloid news programmes which are only outnumbered by the deluge of telenovelas from Mexico (and you thought The Young And The Restless was overcooked). It’s a wonder some folk leave their homes at all given what they witness on the likes of Uno, to name but one station. Genocide, pestilence, sexual assault, global warming, rioting - and all of this happening in the local supermarket - all form part of a daily dose of an around the clock onslaught of intimidation and fear. It’s like Eastenders, only real. Uno seems to have a team of reporters whose job it is not to seek out stories in the various neighbourhoods of Santa Cruz but to whip the locals into a frenzy which would explain how they never fail to be there on time to see a local gangster have his face rearranged by a kicking and spitting army of seething mujeres.