rattled up to the door a few minutes after six o’clock.
A quarter of a mile north of the town we crossed the frontier and entered Bolivia. For the next four hours there was little in the landscape to relieve the monotony of the journey. As those who are familiar with stage travel know to their cost, bumping over rough roads of stone or sand, in a cloud of dust with nothing to see on either side except a brown, treeless, rolling plateau, is not exciting. Nevertheless the process of keeping eight mules on the go, up hill and down hill, is never absolutely devoid of interest. As it was quite impossible for the driver to reach the foremost mules with his long whip, he employed a strong-lunged boy to race alongside of the mules, pelt them with stones, curse them in his worst Spanish, and frighten them into frantic activity with the lash of a short-handled whip which he laid on with no delicate hand. The mules became so afraid of his mad rushes that when they heard him coming they bolted in the opposite direction, sometimes pulling the stage-coach a rod or two off the road.
In a rarefied atmosphere that would almost kill a foreigner who should try to run any distance, the Indian boy only found it necessary to take short rests on the running-board of the coach, and even then he had breath enough left to keep up shrill whistling and loud shouting so as to make the mules remember his presence. If he stopped this continuous performance he heard from the driver in no uncertain language. The result was that, notwithstanding the primitive cart-track, the stage was able to make the sixty miles between La Quiaca and Tupiza in twelve hours. To be sure, there are two changes of mules and the luggage is carried on a separate wagon. But the road is as bad as it possibly can be. So much of it is in the bed of a stream, the coaches can only run in the dry season, May to November. In the rainy season the road disappears under swollen rivers and resort has to be had to saddle and pack animals.
In this extremely arid region the business of feeding the mules is a most difficult one. The rainfall is very slight. It is only by irrigation that fodder will grow at all. The ground is not sterile but it is so dry and parched that it does not look as if it would ever grow anything. The Indians in the vicinity are Quichuas, who speak the same language as did their former masters, the Incas. They are a patient race with little ambition and few wants. This does not prevent them, however, from charging all the traffic will bear when any one desires to purchase alfalfa or barley straw for his mules. Don Santiago told me that he had once been obliged to pay as high as forty dollars, gold, for enough fodder to give an eight-mule team a proper luncheon. Needless to say, transportation is expensive. The coach-fare from La Quiaca to Tupiza was ten dollars, about sixteen cents a mile. A charge of two cents a pound is made for luggage. None is carried free.
Our first stop was at Mojo, to change mules and eat a “breakfast” which consisted of the customary highly-spiced mutton and potatoes. We were not “favored by the addition of an excellent roasted guinea pig” as was Edmond Temple when he stopped here in 1826. Yet guinea-pigs are still common hereabouts and we saw several on the road.
Mojo is a village of four hundred inhabitants. There is a small branch office of the Bolivian customs service here which is supposed to look after travellers and their baggage. The principal custom house for southern Bolivia is at Tupiza, a much more agreeable spot for the residence of the officials and a natural distributing point for the region.
A short distance from Mojo we began an abrupt descent. In one place the hill was too steep to permit the road to make a proper turn, so we all had to get out and help lift the stage-coach around a “switch back.” After this tortuous zigzag we came out on a broad plain over which we passed without difficulty to the banks of the river Suipacha.
The water was low and the cart-track attempted to steer a straight course up stream. But as the shrunken current meandered over the sandy river-bed, we were obliged to ford it every three or four minutes. This entailed constant difficulties, for the leading mules would invariably stop to walk as soon as they entered the water, while the others trotted briskly in and tangled up the whole team. Perhaps the fault was mine, for I was having my first experience in driving an eight-in-hand, and the hard-mouthed mules took particular delight in giving me a bad time. Notwithstanding our difficulties, we reached Suipacha on time, and stopped to change mules.
This valley was the scene of one of the earliest victories of the patriots in 1810 at the beginning of the wars of independence. It will be remembered that after the glorious 25th of May, recently celebrated in Buenos Aires, the Argentinos attempted to free the province of Upper Peru from Spanish control. The result of the victory of Suipacha was to cause the Bolivians to rise and join the Argentinos against their oppressors. The patriot army marched joyously northward across the plateau, although the Argentinos suffered greatly from the cold and the high altitude. When they reached the southern end of Lake Titicaca, the Spanish army, augmented by hundreds of obedient Quichuas, attacked the patriots and practically annihilated them.