Do you know how hard it is to get hold of a sieve in Bolivia? Let me answer that one for you: nigh on impossible. That’s not to say it can’t be done: only that buying kitchen equipment in the andes is rather more complicated than you might anticipate.

I like pasta. I’m rather fond of rice. I’m pretty partial to the odd potato. And herein lies my problem.

All of these foods are boiled, which means that they require some form of drainage before being eaten. Trouble is, unless you’re particularly adept with a saucepan lid (and I wasn’t - those bolivian pots are hefty blighters) you need some kind of drainage device. Like maybe a collander, or a sieve.

Ah, a sieve. I must have devoted a fair bit of time during my first few months in la paz hunting for this elusive kitchen equipment. Every time I was in the market, I asked around - “Hay un tamiz?“. Blank looks. Nothing doing. I was destined to consume soggy pasta for the rest on my time in the Andes.

At one point, I tried making a sieve myself, out of the spokes of an old umbrella curled into a circle, to make the outer ring, and then a hollow bowl of tinfoil stretched across the ring, covered with duct tape on both sides and punched through with a hundred holes. A rudimentary piece of intermediate technology, I’ll admit - but I’ve always appreciated a challenge, and thought that the engineering involved in sieve construction couldn’t be far beyond me.

I was wrong.

The first time I used it, it ungraciously bent at the handle and the entire pan of pasta that I’d just poured in got dumped into the sink. Not a good solution.

And then one night, walking home late from the cinema in a strange area on the other side of town, I saw a dazzling light spilling from a doorway on a back street. Drawn inexplicably to the light, I discovered, amazingly, a bright shop inside lined with shelves stacked to the rafters with shiny new pots and pans and tongs and pasta servers and…..sieves. Glorious sieves.

This was a very strange sight - partly because it was open and in business so late in the evening, in a town where they tended to roll up the pavements at about nine. But the main reason it was so strange to see a shop full of gleaming kitchen equipment was that shops - well-stocked points of purchase with their own premises and staff - were relatively thin on the ground in the andes. There were markets, of course - huge sprawling complexes of stalls bearing colourful displays - but shops as I was used to them were few. If you wanted bread or potatoes, you went to the market. If you were after dried pasta or fizzy drinks, you could usually find a little tiendita (my local one in Sopocachi Alta was owned by a mad American ex-pat called Robert who was married to a silent boliviana and who was once sick in my bathroom sink. But that’s another story entirely) but there just weren’t that many shops around.

I took one of the forty or so sieves off the shelf and headed for the cash desk. Four feet from my destination, a woman stepped in front of me.

“You want to buy that sieve?” she challenged in Spanish.

No, I’m taking it for a walk. “Yes, I want to buy it”

She took the sieve out of my hands, scribbled on a scrap of paper, handed me a slip saying “one sieve” and flounced off with my sieve.

Hmmm. I didn’t want a bit of paper which said ’sieve’. I wanted a sieve. I started to feel all ‘ceci n’est pas un sieve’. This piece of paper was not going to drain my pasta.

So I turned around, went back to the shelf, picked up another shiny sieve, and headed back towards the cash desk.

This time my path was blocked by a tall (for Bolivia, anyway) man in a suit.

“Do you want to buy that sieve?” he posed.

As opposed to exchanging it for a scrap of paper? “Sure” I replied. He lunged for the sieve. I held tight. We had a little tug-of-war over it, until he emerged triumphant and grinning. Tucking it under one arm, he gestured towards the bit of paper given to me by the first woman. I handed it over and watched as he wrote “one sieve” on another scrap, scrawled his initials and then carefully stapled his piece of paper to the first with a tiny pocket stapler.

And then he was gone. I looked at the scraps of paper in my hand. I looked at the cash desk, where a huge queue of shoppers was starting to build up, all clutching bits of paper and waiting patiently.

In Bolivia, as in many developing and over-beauracratic nations, you swiftly become accustomed to considering queues (and journeys, for that matter) by their length in time, rather than metres. Who cares if a village is 20km away if it’s going to take the better part of a day to get there? This queue, in the only kitchen equipment shop in the andes, was a good hour long. At least.

With a feeling of deep resignation, I decided I really didn’t need a sieve this badly after all. So scrunching up the slips of paper in my fist, I made a move for the door. A security guard, small but fierce-looking, stopped me and gestured first at the paper in my hand and then at the tail end of the queue for the cash desk. He didn’t use words and I didn’t bother to argue. Apparently I did need a sieve after all.

So I got in the queue.

An hour of tired expectation later, I reached the front of the line-up. By this point it was well into the wee small hours of the morning (la madrugada) and completely freezing. My teeth were chattering, as I carefully separated the two identical slips of paper I was carrying and handed a single sheet to the woman behind the cash desk. After all, I didn’t need two sieves.

The woman took the paper sleepily, said “seven bolivianos,” and then stamped “paid” on the slip as I handed over my money. Then she handed the paper back to me and called “next”. No sign of a sieve. I stood at the side of the cash desk for a while, watching other members of the queue hand over their bits of paper, pay, and then get the paper back with a big red stamp all over it. No pans, not pots, no whisks and most pressingly, no sieves. They quickly walked out of the front door, past the churlish security guard, and then turned left into the inky night.

Puzzled, I followed.

Around the corner of the block, about two-hundred metres from the only kitchen equipment shop in the Andes, was a warehouse with a long counter at one end, and a long queue snaking all the way back to the other. At the front of the queue, I could just about make out a gleam of polished metal through the thin light of a single lamp overhead. A shiny soup tureen! This was my Eldorado, my city of lost silverware.

The queue shuffled slowly forward, and I shuffled with it, gradually closing in on my precious sieve. When I reached the front, I produced the red-stamped piece of paper - “un tamiz, 7Bs, pagado” - and waited for my culinary saviour to be delivered from the back room.

But suddenly, consternation. A mumbling from the shelves behind the counter. A sudden rush by all the present assistants (in matching brown lab-coats) to the origin of the voice. Furtive glances towards me, standing at the counter drumming my fingers on the surface to keep my circulation going in the frozen madrugada.

Finally, one man approached me, with a concerned look on his face. He explained very slowly that the piece of paper I have given him said one sieve, but here, he continued, we had two sieves. From by his side he produced a pair of identical shiny sieves tied together with string, both trailing a little tag with a number on it.

Two sieves. Two attempts to take a sieve from the shelf. Two bits of paper given to me in the shop. One sieve paid for. Two sieves tied together. Problem.

Sheepishly, I produced the un-stamped extra bit of paper from my pocket. I pointed out that it had been a mistake, that I hadn’t paid for it because I hadn’t actually wanted a second sieve - I only needed one, see? - but they were having none of it. A man in a brown dustboat frog-marched me back to the cashdesk in the shop around the corner, where thankfully the queue had almost entirely dissipated, and I shame-facedly handed over both slip of paper and seven Bolivianos in change. The woman behind the register looked at me sternly, and stamped my paper - pagado.

When we got back around the corner to the warehouse, I was taken straight to the top of the queue. My escort handed the piece of paper to another coated man behind the counter, who shouted to another man to get the sieves. Another man brought the sieves to the front desk, passing them to yet another man, who proceded to write laboriously in a huge ledger and on my scrunched up bits of paper the word “recibido - recieved”. He then passed the sieves to a further man, who asked if I would like them wrapped.

I dreaded to think how many more hands the sieve would have to pass though, how many more hours I’d have to queue and how much more complicated the whole process was going to get before I got my hands on the solitary shiny sieve I wanted. I quickly declined his wrapping offer, and finally, amazingly, took hold of my lovely sieves. Bliss.

The whole process had taken three hours and eleven people. My purchase of fourteen bolivianos - about two pounds - would have to stretch a very long way indeed.