In Bolivia, a Village With Real Staying Power

"Wine?" Silvain asked me when I'd settled into a fireside table with a friend from New York. He's the owner, a handsome 30-something Frenchman.

I named an inexpensive southern Bolivia merlot. Silvain eyeballed me for a full five seconds before commencing to wince. Then he was shaking his head feverishly and repeating the word "vinegar."

My friend whispered to me in English: "If the wine's so awful, why'd he put it on his menu?"

"I understood that," Silvain snapped, switching from Spanish to English.

"I'll just have a Coke," said my friend.

"We do not serve Coca-Cola products," Silvain stated. "A Mendocina cola for you. And Bill, you'll drink a better merlot."

The front door suddenly burst open, and in walked my 6-foot-3 German friend, Frank. He stuck a Camel cigarette in his mouth and called to Silvain for a cold Ducal.

"How about Huari?" Silvain suggested -- and I had to admit that Huari is the better of the two Bolivian beers.

"Huari it is!" said Frank with his trademark little kid's grin, his clothes still covered with dust from leading a two-day jeep tour. Frank owns the small, Samaipata-based tour company Roadrunners and was just back from the Che Guevara Trail.

The U.S. charity CARE inaugurated the trail a couple of years back; I drove it once in search of the Che legend. The museum in the remote La Higuera, where El Comandante was executed in 1967 by CIA-assisted Bolivian soldiers after a nine-month chase, is unremarkable. But it did prove fascinating to chat with the old folks in the city of Vallegrande who had known him. One woman let me touch a venerated lock of Che's hair that she'd clipped while his corpse was on display behind the town's hospital.

"Che was a loser," piped up Olaf, a local Austrian, from the bar. "He only captured Samaipata for his pathetic asthma medicine." Yes, Che and his comrades took this village only long enough to secure medicine from Samaipata's pharmacy. (He paid for the drugs in full.) Guevara tried to bring socialism to Bolivia four decades too soon; it wouldn't happen until 2006. Abandoned by local Communists and even Fidel Castro, he finally met his death in the seemingly endless Bolivian wilderness.

What's Biodiversity Worth?

Twelve miles up a dirt road from Samaipata is the hamlet of La Yunga and Amboro National Park. I took a taxi up there the next morning to visit cloud forests packed with thousands of tree ferns.