Shaping The World In Profound And Unexpected Ways. Bolivia With Shafik Meghji

Books And Travel

From the silver mines of empire to lithium mining under gigantic salt flats, Bolivia has played a significant part in history and is now shaping the future of green technology. Shafik Meghji talks about the diversity of the country from its landscape to its people and religious ceremonies, as well as recommended places to visit, and books to read.

Shafik Meghji is an award-winning travel writer, journalist, and author, specializing in Latin America and South Asia. He has co-authored more than 40 guidebooks. His latest book is Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia.

Show notes

  • Bolivia’s geographical diversity and recommended places to visit, including the largest salt flats in the world
  • The unexpected ways Bolivia has influenced and shaped the world
  • Indigenous culture and architecture
  • Festivals and other religious and cultural events, including the dance of the devils and the witches’ market
  • Balancing the desire to travel with environmental responsibility
  • Recommended books about Bolivia

You can find Shafik Meghji at ShafikMeghji.com

Transcript of the interview

Joanna: Shafik Meghji is an award winning travel writer, journalist, and author, specializing in Latin America and South Asia. He has co-authored more than 40 guidebooks. His latest book is Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia. Welcome, Shafik.

Shafik: Thanks, Jo. It’s a pleasure to be chatting to you. Looking forward to talking about all things Bolivia.

Joanna: Let’s start with the basics, just in case people don’t know.

Where is Bolivia? And what are some of its unique characteristics in terms of geography and climate?

Shafik: Partly, as the title of my book alludes to, a lot of people who aren’t familiar with South America or Bolivia specifically, would find it difficult to place. It’s essentially right in the heart of South America. It’s bounded by five different countries; Brazil, and Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, and Chile.

It’s incredibly geographically and climatically diverse, so it’s landlocked, but apart from the sea, it has the world’s largest salt flat, it has massive payotes due to the Lake Titicaca, which I’m sure lots of people have heard of.

It has some of the highest mountains on earth, of course, the Andes, it’s got part of the Panama Canal, which is the world’s largest tropical wetland, which he shares with Brazil, around a third of it lies within the Amazon basin. There are foothills and there are low-lands. There’s desert-like landscapes, this huge metropolis, like cities is incredibly diverse, and the climate ranges from absolutely freezing to sweltering. And you can sometimes experience both of those in the same day.

Joanna: How brilliant. We’re going to come back to some of these places.

How did you come to travel so much to Bolivia? And what’s your personal link there?

Shafik: I think like a lot of places and destinations that people come to love, it was really just by chance, it was a bit of an accident. I started off my career as a news desk sports journalist, and then slowly got fed up with that and resigned, and went backpacking around India, and then around South America.

I was really at that point, just in the highlights, I wanted to go to Rio for Carnival, and I had a wonderful time there.

Joanna: Of course.

Shafik: Of course, it’s impossible not to and really I only planned to spend a few weeks there and ended up spending a couple of months. But after that I’ve managed to drag myself away and I wanted to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, The Classic Gringo Trail stuff. But at the time I couldn’t afford to fly and the cheapest way was to travel overland from Brazil to Peru, through Bolivia. And so I planned to do that and didn’t really think too much about it.

I didn’t really know much about the country.

But as soon as I crossed the border, I got hooked, I ended up travelling to the Salar de Uyuni, an otherworldly landscape, the world’s largest salt flat. I visited the world’s richest silver mine, I traveled into the Amazon and explored the most biodiverse National Park on Earth. I went to some of the highest cities in the world, well over 4000 meters.

During that time, I really started to learn a bit more about the cultures, the peoples, the history, and I realized that this country that most people, including myself, before visiting would have had trouble placing on a map has actually influenced and helped even to shape the world in profound and unexpected ways. And that really led to kind of a lifelong love of the place.

So I later returned as a travel writer to co-author The Rough Guide to Bolivia. And that gave me a great excuse and an opportunity to visit virtually every part of the country. In doing so, I met so many fascinating people who were generous enough to share their stories. And I learned about the history of the country.

I learned about how, really, it feels like the future has arrived in Bolivia. It stands on the front line of so many touchstone issues, like climate, emergency, populism, and so on. And that all was brought together in my book Crossed Off the Map.

Joanna: I want to return something you said, that Bolivia has influenced and shaped the world in unexpected ways. I bet everyone’s listening is as surprised about that, because probably we don’t know.

What are some of the ways that Bolivia has shaped the world?

Shafik: I’ll tell you the story that really first gave me an insight into this aspect of Bolivia’s history, and it was a visit to a place called Potosi, which today most people outside the country don’t really know too much about it, may not have heard of it before.

Potosi is the second highest city on Earth. It’s high up in the Altiplano, which is a high plane between two branches of the Andes. It’s a city and above it, well, is a mountain called Cerro Rico and that was home about 500 years ago to the richest silver mine in history.

During the Spanish colonial period, so much silver was pulled out of these mines that they said that according to legend you could build a solid over railway track all the way from Bolivia to Madrid, and still have enough leftover for a solid silver engine divide on top.

This silver changed the world. It connected up Europe, and Latin America, and Africa, and Asia, together for the first time. The silver was shipped to Europe, which helped to fund the Industrial Revolution, and various wars and conflicts. It traveled over to Asia to Manila on these huge galleons. And there, it was traded for Chinese-made goods.

The silver from Potosi helped to fund the Great Wall of China, for example. And it also played a role in destabilizing various dynasties.

It became such a significant place for hundreds of years.

And it became synonymous with great wealth in ‘Don Quixote,’ there’s a phrase ‘worth a potosi,’ which means worth a fortune, which would have been commonly understood at that time, now is obviously drifted out. It’s also the source of that quirky things such as ‘pieces of eight’. This pirate phrase is actually based on some of the silver currency that came out of Potosi.

When I visited, I didn’t know anything about this. But I ended up going into these mines, which are centuries old, now they call them rat runs, they’re very claustrophobic and simultaneously thousands of meters above sea level, and hundreds of meters underground, and you’re crawling on your stomach. And then there’s all these poisonous dusts around.

There was arsenic dust everywhere when I visited. It’s a very unsettling place. And you see the miners who still work there now the silver has largely long gone. But many miners still work there hoping to strike it rich in very, very difficult conditions. It’s incredibly intense experience.

That started to give me an idea and an interest in the history. And then the more I read, and the more I learned, and the more I spoke to people in the city, I realized what an influence of this city, once on of the richest and biggest on Earth, but now forgotten, that had on the rest of the world.

It’s stories like that, that helped to spur me to write the book, because I thought these are just fantastic stories. And they deserve to be better known beyond Bolivia’s borders.

Joanna: Wow, that is so interesting. When you look into history, and you realize how far things travel, it’s incredible. What you’re talking about there is essentially pillaged out of Bolivia and taken across the world. I wonder how much of our silver that we look at here even in England is from there. I presume it doesn’t have a mark.

Once things are made into things we wouldn’t know, would we, how far the silver has gone?

Shafik: Absolutely. People listening to this podcast will have silver, they got old heirlooms, family heirlooms perhaps, or things that are made a few 100 years ago, they may well have something made from Potosi silver.

And I should say at this point that, of course, all of this wealth came at a great cost. It was borne by the indigenous peoples of the Andes.

And it was also born by enslaved Africans who were trafficked over to labor in the mines, and in the smelting plants and so on. But definitely Potosi silver, people will have seen it, and some people may have it in their possession without knowing it.

One other side kind of quirk

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