Probably the worst beer in the World

Whenever I land somewhere new and different, that is, a place big enough to have a local football team and therefore brewery, I make it my business to sample the local cerveza.
Such was the case in Potosi, a town famous or maybe infamous for it´s silver and tin mines. Anyway, it has a local football league and hence a local beer. I can´t tell you how good the football is but I can tell you that the brew is awful, possibly the worst in the world, ever.

I am not kidding, this stuff is only marginally more drinkable than a glass of sweat squeezed from the socks of a thousand Bolivian silver miners. And if you doubt how bad that could be, I refer you to earlier posts on South American hygiene.

The rest of the Potosi experience was largely unmemorable, with the exception that I bought dynamite for the first (and let´s face it, probably last) time ever. You can literally buy dynamite off a market stall and go and blow something up. Which reminds me of a story another gringa told me about a couple of kids who blew their hostal room apart and got 3 months in police cells and a 1000 quid fine or maybe it was dollars, not sure, but it probably wasn´t true anyway... As it seems, the travelling breed are generally full of BS.

The northward migrating herd on the so-called gringo trail have been entirely useless as a source of information on my southward journey. Mostly I think they give you the version of events that they would have liked to have happen (in their super crazy imaginations), rather than the more boring reality. I met a few northward travellers in Peru, who had just passed through La Paz, and had apparently quite literally bathed in cocaine. If you believe all you hear. The reality is that as someone spending a very brief amount of time in La Paz, it is almost impossible to get hold of cocaine.

For a start you would have to know where to look and who to ask. It isn´t like trying to find a bell for a bicycle, there isn´t a yellow pages for coke dealers...or should that be a white pages. In either case, it isn´t all that easy, how do you know that the guy offering you coke at 10.00am outside the cash point isn´t working with the cops?

On a final note, if you have read Marching Powder (by Rusty Young) you´ll know exactly why you do NOT want to find yourself on the wrong side of a prison gate in Bolivia.

I don´t think I want to be on the wrong side of a prison gate anywhere.