Buying a Car Bolivian Style

I am once again a car owner, after going "dry" for nearly a decade.

As a native southern Californian I have certainly owned other automobiles in my life – most with mixed experiences in the luck department.


The Ghost of Cars Past

My first car was a 1955 Ford, a 20-year-old behemoth of steel gifted to me by my eldest sister after it sat inoperable in her front yard for a very long time. It was a monster in three colors, blue, white and rust, and built like a tank. It was fortunate that it was built like a tank because a few months after I finally got it running an elderly man with failed vision turned left in front of it while I was behind the wheel and, in the process of the tank getting totaled I bit its steering wheel in half.

From there I moved up to my brother's car, a small Opel that I bought from him for $500. Shortly before I sold it to go to college I backed it right on top of a gleaming Yellow Corvette as its owner was showing off the new paint job to friends. I narrowly escaped death at his hands, as well as a striking escalation in my insurance rates.

After college I bought a dark blue 1968 Volkswagen that my friends nicknamed Gumby after the small green figure that I had permanently twisted around its rear view mirror. Gumby (both the car and the green figure) was stolen from me in 1983 after a brief but caring relationship of four years and two rebuilt motors, from a suburban movie theater parking lot in Sacramento. If the person who stole it reads this, I'd like it back please.

It may have been that trauma of Gumby loss that led to a delay of more than a decade before I became a car owner once more. Married and with a small daughter who rightfully disliked long nighttime bus rides in San Francisco, I heeded my wise father's wise advice. "Buy a car that is two years old with low miles." And so we bought the 1992 Toyota Corolla that became known, at my daughter's suggestion, as Emalina. No misfortune there, other than perhaps the discovery that the car we had bought in the dark of night from a car lot in Petaluma, in the day time, turned out to be the mysterious and slightly unpleasant color, 'Rose Tope'.

Car Buying Bolivia Style

All of which brings me back to Bolivia.

For a decade here we never owned a car, making our way through Cochabamba by trufi buses and an occasional taxi ride. Moving to the boonies, to lands surrounded by corn, cows, and mud, led us, however, into the strange world of buying a car Bolivian style.

We began, much to my eldest daughter's stated horror, in search of a used Toyota Taxi, a station wagon. That led us to a place called the Zonafraca, a wide lake of mud on Cochabamba's southside where a ceaseless army of used cars arrives from Japan, without any Bolivian paperwork or license plates, and with all of the steering wheels and other driver accoutrements still on the right side of the car. Here, those who understand a system beyond my gringo comprehension, manage the complicated import process and the more mysterious methodology of 'transforming' the cars, by moving the steering wheel and other driver accoutrements to the left side of the car.

Giving up on that option, we spent several rain-soaked days looking for cars at a place oddly nicknamed la playa (the beach) at the base of the monument to Las Heroinas. This is where the cars that have completed the boggling Zonafraca process get sold to the public. We drove and prodded a collection of used Toyota taxi station wagons and wisely realized that choice was a stuck-in-the-mud disaster waiting to happen in our new mud-paved neighborhood. So we switched our sights on a small used Toyota Jeep.

Test-driving those presented its own adventures. One ran out of gas in the middle of downtown traffic. Another had been 'transformed' in such a way that its steering wheel was now upside down. We finally found one that felt right, a 1995 that is green with sparkles. My youngest daughter approved because of the sparkles.

Driving Bolivia Style

And all this brought me to an experience that I have avoided like tainted lettuce for the full ten years I have lived in Bolivia – driving in Bolivia.

Many years ago, when I lived briefly in Boston, I often heard the local reminder, "In Boston, traffic lights are just advisory." In Bolivia, all the traffic rules are just advisory.

Need to make a sweeping left turn from the far right lane, right in front of lines of properly placed traffic? No problem. Stopping for red lights? I have people behind me honking and screaming "idiota" when I stop for red lights. The only traffic rule in Cochabamba that seems to be mandatory is about pedestrians. That rule seems to be – if you are a driver approaching a street corner and a pedestrian is crossing, speed up right at them. Really, it is like clockwork. I keep a running tab of all the times I have had a car actually stop for me as I crossed the street here. After a decade of keeping track I am running a grand total of two times.

To be sure, I will not be driving our 1995 Toyota Jeep that is green with sparkles into work in the city. For that trip I prefer to walk fifteen minutes past the cows and the corn and take my chances on the crowded taxi trufis that hustle people from the campo to the city and back.

But I do admit, the southern Californian in me feels a certain glee at having wheels once again, even in the face of dubious traffic rules. All that's left now is to come up with a name. I think that "Sparkles" is out.