“No tienes miedo, gringa?” (Aren’t you afraid, foreigner?) Those were the questions that accompanied my solo run through the Bolivian Andes. “How do you stay safe?” “How do you charge your phone?” and, “What about pumas?” (I will admit that one surprised me a little.)
Fear is a companion we all travel through life with. The adventurers I watched growing up constantly proclaimed “fearlessness” as a value system, banning weakness and hesitation.
And I will admit I had adopted a habit of preparing my campsite for defence, or a quick escape each night. My shoes were placed next to me with the laces loose and the tongues pulled back so I could step into them quickly. The trekking pole was laid next to me, a weapon. My knife stayed in my right-hand pocket. Every time I woke and thought I heard something coming, I clenched the folded blade in my hand.
Still, the locals thought I was crazy. Before hitting the final sub-range of Quimsa Cruz, a mountain range in La Paz, a woman told me that if I continued into that valley, I would never come out. “It’s a very poor region, and the police don’t bother going there,” she said. “It’s lawless, and there is a lot of crime. You’re rich, and you will simply be murdered for your things. They won’t think anything of killing you.” Then: “You do have a gun, right?” I responded that I did not. She tried, and failed, to disguise the fear in her eyes. “You really need a gun if you want to go there.”
I had grown used to warnings by that point, but that one stuck with me a little. For the first time in the journey, no one in the pueblo [village] greeted me. The younger men stared with disdain. I realised I was unwelcome. Suddenly, the warnings against this valley seemed very realistic.
My anxiety increased with the drop in altitude. I removed my watch, camera and iPhone, and stuffed them deep in my pack. A feeble gesture – I was still a white gringa on “holiday”, no one needed to see which version of the latest GPS watch I was using to know that I had more money than them. I had already ducked off the main track, slowly bushwalking my way alongside the route, hoping to avoid detection.
