By my second month in Bolivia, I was living in a chalett in Sopocachi Alto, a relatively good neighbourhood of La Paz close to the canyon wall. A chalett is not a Heidi-log cabin type affair. It’s a prefab, freestanding house (in my case, free-standing only by about six inches on all sides. I swear, if Bolivia had anything like the trade descriptions act) with a big sink on the roof to do the washing, and a view out towards mount Illimani on the other side of the canyon. I would stand on the roof in the early morning beforte heading into town for work, having huffed and puffed my way up the spiral metal staircase through thin Andean air and cold morning wind, and watch the city waking up in front of me, with the cold shadow of the canyon wall only a hundred feet behind.

To get into the centre of town, I could walk for half an hour or so (which was fine on the way down the hill, but hellish coming back up, especially tired at the end of the day and at 11,000 feet above sea level), catch a cab, or take the Trufi - a converted VW combi van capable of carrying thirteen people, squashed in tight, and travelling a fixed route through the city. My local Trufi started at the bottom of our road, and traversed the centre of the city to get to La Ceja (literally, eyebrow), a satellite development clinging to the top edge of the canyon wall above La Paz.

The Trufi team consists of two people - the conductor (driver) and the niño, the boy who collects fares from the passengers and operates the sliding door on the side of the vehicle. Back then, each ride cost between sixty centavos (about 7p) and one Boliviano (about 12p) and could take anything from ten to forty minutes, depending on the traffic and other passengers. See, the Trufi may have had an established route, but it stopped wherever the passengers dictated. Even if you were wedged firmly between two cholitas on the back seat, with nine people and an awful lot of shopping bags and skirts between you and the door, when you wanted to get off, you had to call out “bajaré en la esquinita!” (I’m getting off on the corner), “me lo para!” (stop for me!) or “voy a bajar!” (I’m going to get off), and then clamber forward over the laps, seats and heads of the other passengers, chanting the whole time “discúlpame…con permiso…perdon…” to squeeze through the sliding door on the side of the vehicle. The thing is, you couldn’t call out too soon, because you’d end up being ejected from the Trufi before your intended destination, and you couldn’t start getting up before the Trufi had stopped, because you would be quite literally wedged into your seat by the huge and expansive skirts worn by the cholitas who frequented the route. So you had to wait until the last possible moment before yelling out, and then the vehicle would suddenly stop, and you’d all be hurled forward, shopping, small children and everything. The the process of self-extracation would begin. See, the thing is it was relatively easy for the people in the front two rows of seats, and even easier for the ones who sat up front with the driver. But if you were stuck in the back seat, especially way off in the back corner, you were pretty much screwed. Also, if you were a good six inches taller than the average Bolivian, headroom was always an issue, most especially when removing yourself from a crowded and tiny van, but also when sitting in the Trufi, and every bump and pothole in the road (and there were many) caused you to make the sudden and uncomfortable vertical journey between sparsely-sprung seat and hard metal roof. Yowch.

Since the Trufis have no numbers by which to identify them (partly because of high illiteracy rates, and partly because of flexibility), one of the niño’s main jobs was to intone the places through which the Trufi would be passing on its route, shouted out repeatedly against an ear-bleedingly loud cueca or merengue compilation tape blasting tinnily from the driver’s stereo. But in the same way that Evening Standard salesmen on Tube stations who say the same thing again and again throughout the evening begin to sound like they’re shouting “Stennah!” or “Ay-lay!” for “Paper Late”, the Trufi boys manage to turn their litany of destinations into a mesmerising mantra “S’pcachi-Plaz’spaña-IsabellaCatolica-Praaaa-do-Estaciónes-AltaCeeeee-jaaaa…” All the places through which the Trufi passes - Sopocachi, Plaza del España, Plaza Isabel la Catolica, El Prado, train station, bus station, Communidad El Alto and La Ceja, but rolled together, like a long and strange name, as odd and yet as strangely familiar as every journey.

That’s what’s been in my head this evening. That litany, especially the way the boy intoned AltaCeeeejaaaa. And suddenly, without realising, it’s time for bed, where I’ll listen to another litany as I fall asleep - the shipping forecast, circumnavigating the country, calling in safety and security to those on the sea, and those tucked warm and fluey under dreamy duvets and over clean, cool egyptian cotton sheets.

[Incidentally, here’s a site about the extensive and efficient Micro and Trufi network of Cochabamba, Bolivia, which is the second city I lived in, for nine months, although I never took a Trufi there, because by then I’d bought a bike. And all I can remembver of public transport in that city was that they seemed very keen on running me over….]