San Vicente

"Here Death`s Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid"...what I really love about that sign is that they decided to make Deaths possesive. It takes the grammatical incorrectness to another level of confusingness...if confusingness is even a word. Click the picture to see the whole set.

I`m a huge fan of the movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Maybe it`s nostalgic, because I remember watching it with my dad when I was younger, and he would point out the places..."that`s monument valley, by where we broke down that one time", "that`s up near Redondo in New Mexico, where I broke down with a load of logs once", etc.

So I was determined to make it to San Vicente. It`s the tiny mining town where Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid bit the bullet at the hand of the Bolivian Army. I arrived on an overnight bus to Tupiza at about 3:30 a.m. While I waited a few cold hours, I talked to a few locals about how to get to San Vicente. One truck goes at 3 in the afternoon and would leave me there in the middle of the freezing night, with not a single hotel or even a hostal within 100 miles. A return truck came back through on Wednesday, and it was Monday...I had to get to Uyuni, arrange a 3 day tour of the Salar, cross the border and get to Antofogasta by Saturday to see my cousin`s band`s first gig. So, I was forced to pay for a one day jeep tour.

As day broke in Tupiza, I realized that Butch and Sundance couldn`t have picked a more fitting place to come for their final hurah. It looked and felt just like their old stomping grounds in Arizona or New Mexico. I felt like I was in a mini Sedona, without all the crystal-power hippies and where a decent hotel costs 2 dollars instead of 50. I walked about a block and wandered into an open Mormon chapel, used the bathroom, sat through an early morning seminary class and ate some breakfast. Gracias Hermano.

I arranged my tour with a couple of Canadian guys. Our jeep driver was about 4 foot 6 inches. He told us the amazing story of how he was an orphan from an indigenous community in the middle of the altiplano. By a crazy twist of fate, he found his way to Cochabamba (the Bolivian Amazon Basin), and within a few years became one of the premiere cocaine producers in the region. By the time he was 16, guys in a white linen suits and and panama hats traveled in private jets to commission him to make a LOT of cocaine. Unfortunately, he also became one of the regions premiere consumers of cocaine as well. But then he found religion and a good evangelical priest helped him clean up. Wow.

San Vicente is in the middle of nowhere on the Bolivian Altiplano...not pretty. I can`t blame the director of the movie for shooting that final scene somewhere in Mexico.