Katherine Browning visits the world's highest skate park to roll around and chat to one of the guys who made it all happen.

Photo: From the Levi's Documentary ""Skateboarding in La Paz""

It's 2:30 on Wednesday afternoon and we're waiting for the vice-president of the Skate Association of La Paz to give us a ride up to the new skate park located inside the Parque Ecológico de Pura Pura in the city’s north.

Inaugurated in June of this year, the entire park was constructed in just four weeks with the help of professional skaters and volunteers from 15 countries around the world. With 2,100 square metres of smooth concrete--made by skaters, for skaters--it's needless to say that I’m pretty psyched to check it out. An hour later, our guy arrives. By the time we crawl through peak-hour traffic and arrive at Pura Pura the park is about to close, storm clouds are threatening and suddenly my chances of carving up some pavement aren't looking so great.

Luckily, we catch Milton Arellano on his way out, who is the president of the Skate Association of La Paz and the guy who got the whole skate park rolling. Arellano is a US-born-and-raised Bolivian, who, sick of his New York lifestyle, decided to move to La Paz almost four years ago. Interested in developing the rather marginalised local skate scene, it wasn't long before Arellano got involved with the local government.

Change came in 2011, he says, when the Association presented a 40-page document to the local government based on the City’s plan for the year 2040. The aim was to advocate the benefits of alternative sports like skating. Not only does skating offer a healthy alternative to at-risk youth with plenty of idle time on their hands, but due to the geographic features of the city, downhill skateboarding can even reduce pressure on public transport, as you only need to catch it one way.

The project initiated a dialogue about plans for a skate park in La Paz but, whilst pragmatic issues such as budgets and potential locations were more easily negotiated, one big problem remained: who would actually build it?

‘Every previous civic construction for skateboarding has been a failure…’ Arellano says. ‘The measurements are wrong, the surfaces are messed up. Typically the best skate parks are made and designed by skaters.’

Literally a week later, Arellano got a call from Arne Hillerns, a representative of Make Life Skate Life, which is a German NGO that builds skateparks in underprivileged communities around the world. It turned out the organisation was looking to develop its next project in South America.

‘I was like, holy shit, thank you skate Gods for falling from the sky!’ Arellano says.

The skateboarding branch of the company Levi's then came on board and agreed to pay for the flights and expenses of international volunteer skaters who would then build the park using materials provided by the City. In October 2013, representatives from Make Life Skate Life and the with the support of the German NGO Soforthilfe, based in La Paz, visited the city to finalise details concerning the project. Their visit coincided with German Reunification Day celebrations, which is why Arellano and the guys found themselves invited to ‘a huge drunk meeting’ in the German Ambassador's house.

‘So many people kept coming up to us because we stuck out like a sore thumb... Suddenly we were these skaters in ripped-up jeans and sneakers and everyone else is wearing suits, you know? But the more we talked about it, the more people were really impressed with the project.’

The Skate Association was encouraged to apply for a microgrant and was consequently awarded 10,000 euros from the German Embassy. The money, in addition to other funds raised online, helped pay for the park’s Skate Haus, which is now an integral part of the Pura Pura skate initiative.

Within the Skate Haus is a skate school, always attended in the park's opening hours by two international volunteers -skaters who have pledged to stay in La Paz for a one year period. The school is stocked with one hundred skateboards which were donated by the German organisation Skate Aid, and are loaned out at no cost. According to Arellano, weekends are crazy, apparently there are so many kids lining up to borrow skateboards that sometimes they have to use a roster system so that everyone gets a turn.

Today, though, is not one of those days and, as the hail starts to fall, I run back to the car to find it filled with adolescent skater amigos who seem to have come out of nowhere. And what do they think of the park?

‘It is incredible. It's like nothing else. It really has helped us a lot,’ says 16 year old Juan José Gutiérrez.

Juan José’s older brother Raul, 23, is currently the vice-president of the Skate Association of La Paz and the owner of a small, kick-start skate shop in the Zona Sur. How does Raul describe the vibe of the La Paz skate scene?

‘The park project really captures the essence of the sport,’ he says, ‘which is unity, zero discrimination, inclusion of everyone. When someone is trying to learn a new trick, it doesn’t matter if they're from El Alto or the Zona Sur, there's always someone who is going to be there to help, to show them, because I think we all want this sport to grow collectively.’

I'm convinced. Come next weekend, this wannabe skater-girl will be lining up at the Skate House, patiently waiting to borrow a board, along with the other hundred-something young paceños.

The world’s highest skatepark is open Wednesday through Sunday, 09:00 to 18:00. Use of the skatepark is free but there is a cost of 1.50 bolivianos to enter the ecological park.

Finding Love in the Palm of your Hand

Swipe left, swipe right; left, right, left, left, right. Anyone who’s been looking for love in the past couple of years (and hasn’t been hiding under a rock) will realise what I’m doing. Yes, it’s Tinder. And it’s landed here in Bolivia.

I find myself being indulgently judgemental as I flick through the profiles of potential date matches in La Paz. Swipe left, no. Swipe right, like. Sure, I’m a foreigner in this city, but whoever said you can’t judge a book by its cover?

The mobile dating app Tinder is deliberately designed for that purpose. Its unique formula has catapulted the application to global success since its launch in 2012. In essence, Tinder has turned online dating into a game. It allows users to search casually for a romantic interest without the risks traditionally involved in online dating. You just never know if you’ve been rejected.

In the US and Europe, the long-standing social stigma of online dating is finally fading. When I arrived in Bolivia I simply assumed this would not be the case here, due to limited access to the Internet and cultural differences. More and more people across the globe are turning to the web to find love and other interests, but has this trend stretched as far as Bolivia?

In an interview with the magazine TechCrunch, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen revealed that his company is ‘really focused on international growth right now’. The numbers speak for themselves. Daily swipes on Tinder across the globe have doubled in the past six months, from 600 million to 1.2 billion. But how many of these new swipes are happening in Bolivia?

There’s reason to believe that more and more people in Bolivia are looking for love from the palm of their hand. The number of smartphone users in the country has more than doubled on a yearly basis since 2011, according to the Autoridad de Regulación en Transportes y Telecomunicaciones. This kind of rapid growth seems to be fueling changes in the dating scene here, giving thousands of people access to mobile dating apps like Tinder.

At least it felt like thousands of people when I went undercover, launching a profile of my own on Tinder for the very first time. “Congratulations!” became the only thing my phone could communicate for the next few hours. “You have a new match!”

I’d obviously swiped right too many times. As my phone pinged and whirred at minute-intervals, it didn’t take long for me to realise that I was in over my head. After the initial ego boost, trying to juggle conversations with thirteen different men at the same time became overwhelmingly stressful. The fact that they were all located within a 3km radius of me triggered a worry that I’d be recognised by them simultaneously the next time I walked down the street.

Whilst wading through some of the more inappropriate comments that were invading my cellphone screen (‘yo te podría calentar’, for example), it became obvious that most Tinder users are all about fast love. In fact, everything about the mobile app is fast: from launching your profile at the touch of a button, to swiftly swiping the screen to play the game. Love matches pop-up instantaneously. You could go from ‘single’ to ‘in-a-relationship’ in sixty seconds.

Behind the guise of my brand new profile, I quizzed a few of my online “dates” about why they were using Tinder. One user in La Paz, who wished to remain anonymous, confided that ‘it’s important for your self-confidence and ego, to know that people are interested in you.’ This must be part of what makes Tinder so addictive. Unlike other platforms for online dating, Tinder is like a game, which is what hooks its growing number of users. Ironically, even though the app is designed to help people find a date quickly, it actually entraps its users into spending more hours staring into a screen.

In Bolivia, the lucky ones who manage to find love through this novel platform must go on to face the prejudice of the world beyond their cell phone screen. As one of my online courters told me, ‘relationships that start by these online means are still not well seen in Latin America’. This hasn’t detracted from Tinder’s popularity in La Paz though. It seems the promise of finding love in a hurry, has captured the open minds of a young and curious generation.

Thirty journalists, armed with tripods, microphones and stage makeup, are sent into the jungle by the Ministry of Tourism to see what Bolivia’s Amazon has to offer.

T-shirts, bare legs and high humidity: We’d arrived in Rurrenabaque. ‘Where?’ you might say, and you wouldn’t be the only one. If we were playing the word-association game for Bolivian-travel hot spots, you’d probably shout out ‘Salt Flats, La Paz, Copacabana’ before running out of ideas. That’s why the Ministry of Tourism sent us journalists on a mission to promote Bolivia’s ‘Heart of the Amazon’.

Foreigners like myself are often unfamiliar with Bolivia’s Beni department, just to the northeast of La Paz and where Rurrenabaque is located, but it’s even less visited by Bolivians.

Flicking through the aeroplane magazine as we take off towards the unknown (on the kind of plane where you can glimpse the cockpit as you duck to enter), the statistics suggest that this story is a common one. Even though Beni is Bolivia’s second-largest department, only 5 percent of its yearly visitors are Bolivians, the rest being from abroad.

So why is this the case?

‘It’s a question of accessibility’, a journalist from the Bolivian newspaper La Razón says as he stares out the open bus window onto the dirt track we’re travelling along. To cross one of Beni’s numerous rivers, all of which are tributaries to the Amazon, we have to wait to board large wooden rafts that ferry us and our bus across. As the location of the river banks is variable depending on the rain, no bridges can be built and, when they have been proposed in the past, those who privately own these ferry systems opposed them.

Later at lunch, an ATB Santa Cruz journalist says that ‘it’s also an economic issue’, since the easiest way to get to the area is not by bus but by a rather more expensive plane. He finishes his mouthful of fish and picks some more out of the patujú leaf it was cooked in. The patujú, being red, yellow, and green like the Bolivian flag, is one of the national flowers of Bolivia, native to the Amazon region.

 Speaking to some representatives of tour companies that afternoon in Rurrenabaque, I hear some ideas about why there are so few Bolivian tourists here in Beni. A representative from Madidi Travel, a local eco-tourism agency, comments, ‘It’s sad that foreigners enjoy the area but that many Bolivians don’t know the beauty of the region. For this reason we have a special price for nationals.’ 

However, it’s all very well going on about how no one comes to visit Beni, but there are plenty of reasons why people don’t visit many locations on this earth—one being that there just isn’t that much to see. But this is most definitely not the case in this region.

Against a background of ink-shadowed mountains, we are welcomed into a former Jesuit mission town, San Ignacio de Moxos, with indigenous dance, dress, music and a wooden bowl full of chicha de jamón, which is part of a tradition that shows the locals’ hospitality.

Wearing the community’s traditional male garments (long white overalls with delicate red embroidery around the edges) the sub-gobernador indígena introduces us to ‘the living, rich culture of the Mojos’. The Llanos de Mojos is the savannah-like area the Sirionó, Cacyubabas, Movima, Itonama, Canichana and Baure indigenous peoples call home. This indigenous diversity is offset by mission architecture that is still preserved in the town. 

Sheila Villar, the head of culture in San Ignacio, describes life here: ‘We still live by our traditions today, for example, our Semana Santa and the Fiesta Patronal festivals.’

But Beni isn’t just small towns in the middle of the llanos. In Trinidad, motorbikes whizz around a busy plaza mayor, and sloths, which inhabited the area long before humans did, hang from the surrounding trees. There, you’re given a plate of lagarto to eat, and can listen to live music influenced by the region’s close ties to Brazil.

And then picture jumping onto the Flotel Raina de Enín (a floating hotel, or ‘floatel’, if you will) to follow the ruta del bufeo, spotting pink dolphins and fishing for piranha, before heading on a jungle tour and being introduced to ants that can inflict 24 hours of pain with a single bite and to the tree from which cacao, the precursor to chocolate, is harvested.

After exploring all day and heading back to the rooftop terrace of the floatel, I talk to Jaime Ballivián, head of the Community Tourism Unit of the Vice Ministry of Tourism, about the motives behind this publicity project, as the sun sets behind the Bolivian flag flying from the floatel’s stern. ‘We’re innovating in the form of promotion’, Ballivián says. ‘We want to show our diversity. Bolivia is not just the altiplano…. This is a determined campaign at an international level.’

Ballivián continues while keeping one eye on the waters to try and spot more of Beni’s famous pink dolphins: ‘The idea of tourism is really only just being born in Bolivia. Money was an issue before for Bolivians, but now the standard of living is rising, so people are starting to travel a little more.’

On the issue of accessibility, which seems to be a recurring theme amongst the issues travel agencies face, Ballivián says that ‘Although it does not fall under our domain, by showing these regions in the press we hope attention will be brought to the problems of accessibility. It’s a process.’

On our final day being herded around Bolivia’s Amazon, it hits home how foreign the presence of cameras is here. While one TV presenter applies her bright pink lipstick to match her sheer neon pink shirt and starts to walk animatedly towards the camera, a group of Trinidad locals look on bemused. Their expressions match what mine must have been when we were wandering around the preserved fish museum earlier that morning.

But tourism is new here, and that’s a fact. With increasing publicity, spurred by the national and departmental governments, these collisions of different cultures will continue and, perhaps in the not too distant future, will become part of the norm.

Maybe Beni will be the new salt flats tourist destination in a decade’s time. Who knows?

Photo: Vicky Roberts