360 in 365 – Joachim voyage autour du monde

In the Train of the Altiplano

I took the highest train in the world. Where? in Bolivia of course… Between Oruro and Uyuni, to be exact. In the middle of the Altiplano. Between mountains and lakes and wild animals and about nothing else.

As I couldn’t get a seat in the Economy class, I chose the last one in Executive class. Executive means lots of tourists. I was seated near the Brazilian guy who bought the penultimate ticket, and we talked about politics, about how Bolivia and Brazil got new constitutions recently and about how it was revolutionnary and emancipative for the common people and the indegenous peoples and about how the promised reforms had been stopped because of some crisis or some globalisation. So I spoke to him about the big conservative wind that’s been blowing over Europe for the last few years and that it was quite different from the progress from the 80’s (at least in France).

Brazil, he told me, is the country of the future. The sad thing he said then, is that in the future, Brazil will still be the country of the future.

And then the sun disapeared over the faraway horizon.