Sucre to Potosí by Taxi: A Bolivian Shortcut and the Spanish It Taught Me

The three-word sentence Hay un atajo, there’s a shortcut, is one you will hear sooner or later if you travel by road in the Andes. I heard it about twenty minutes out of Sucre airport, in a taxi I’d taken instead of the bus to Potosí. What followed was a lesson in Bolivian driving, Bolivian lunch, and a few points of Latin American Spanish that a course designed in Spain would not have prepared me for.

Two cities, one mountain in between

Sucre is Bolivia’s constitutional capital, a white colonial city of courtyards and churches at about 2,800 metres above sea level. Potosí lies roughly 150 kilometres to the south-west and sits at over 4,000 metres, which makes it one of the highest cities in the world. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was also one of the richest: the mountain above it, the Cerro Rico, held some of the largest silver deposits ever found, and the wealth it produced funded a large part of the Spanish empire. The phrase vale un Potosí, “it’s worth a Potosí”, survives in Spanish for something of great value; Cervantes used it in Don Quijote. The mines are still worked today, largely by hand.

The journey between the two takes about three hours by bus on a paved road. There are also unpaved tracks through the hills that cut the distance, and that is where this story takes place.

The taxi

I had just landed, I was tired, and rather than wait for the bus I took a private taxi straight from the terminal. The car was an older Toyota; the rear seatbelt was present but not attached to anything. The driver — I’ll call him José — was friendly, and for the first twenty minutes we followed the main road.

Then he said Hay un atajo, and turned off the tarmac onto a gravel track.

I had Google Maps open. The track was not on it. For a stretch the blue dot sat in unmapped grey, and the app, having no road to route me along, could only suggest turning back. The track was a single lane with no barriers, steep drops on one side and often both, and we were travelling at around sixty kilometres an hour on loose surface.

At intervals along the roadside stood small white crosses with fresh flowers. These are a feature of roads throughout the Andes. They mark the places where people have died in accidents, and families maintain them for years, replacing the flowers, repainting the names and sometimes building a small shelter over them. They are a quiet memorial and, on a road like that one, a plain statement of the risk.

The phone call

For much of the track José drove with one hand, because the other was holding his phone to his ear. He was not on hands-free. He was talking to his family about what they would eat when he got home: what had been cooked earlier in the week, whether there were enough potatoes.

Speaking Spanish meant I understood all of it, and there was no comfort in that. Had I not understood, I could have assumed the call concerned the route or the road conditions. It did not.

What I could have said

I said nothing for the whole journey. I had the sentences. Más despacio, por favor — slower, please. Sin prisa — there’s no rush. ¿Es seguro este camino? — is this road safe? Any of them would have been understood. None of them left my mouth.

That gap, between having a sentence ready and actually saying it to a stranger, is one of the most common things learners describe, and it is not a vocabulary problem. It is the difference between knowing a phrase and being used to producing it under pressure. It closes with practice — specifically, with practice speaking to real people, often enough that the phrase stops feeling like a confrontation and becomes an ordinary request.

Arrival

We reached Potosí about forty minutes faster than the bus would have. As I was getting out, José’s phone rang again and he answered: “Sí, ya llegué. Sí, el gringo está bien. Sí, llego a la una.” Yes, I’ve arrived. Yes, the foreigner is fine. Yes, I’ll be there at one.

The shortcut, in other words, had not been for my benefit. It was so that he would be home for lunch. In Bolivia, as across most of Latin America, el almuerzo is the main meal of the day, eaten at home with family, and it typically begins with a soup course — sopa de maní, peanut soup, is a national standard, usually with potato in it. It is a sit-down meal, not something taken at a desk, and arriving late for it matters. From his point of view, the fare to Potosí was a job to be finished in time for it.

The grammar in that phone call

Three things in those nine words are worth a learner’s attention.

Ya llegué, not ya he llegado. In Spain, an action that has just been completed is normally expressed with the present perfect: ya he llegado. Across most of Latin America, including Bolivia, the simple past does the same job: ya llegué. The meaning is identical; the choice of tense is one of the clearest markers of where a speaker learned their Spanish. A learner taught in Spain who arrives in Bolivia saying he comido and he visto will be understood perfectly, but will sound as though they come from Madrid.

El gringo. In Bolivia, and in most of South America, gringo is a neutral word for a foreigner, particularly a fair-skinned one. José was not being rude about me to his family; he was identifying me. In Mexico the word carries more edge and is used mainly of Americans. Further south it is ordinary description, and it is worth not taking offence at it.

Llego a la una, not llegaré. Spanish uses the present tense for a near, arranged future much more readily than English does. Llego a la una, literally “I arrive at one”, is the natural way to say “I’ll be there at one” when the plan is settled. The future tense, llegaré, is grammatically correct but sounds more formal, closer to a commitment or a prediction. For a fixed plan, native speakers reach for the present.

The vocabulary

Español	English
Hay un atajo.	There’s a shortcut.
el atajo / el desvío	the shortcut / the detour
el precipicio / el barranco	the cliff edge / the ravine
el camino de tierra	the dirt road
Más despacio, por favor.	Slower, please.
Sin prisa.	No rush.
¿Es seguro este camino?	Is this road safe?
Por la carretera principal, por favor.	By the main road, please.
Ya llegué. (Lat. Am.) / Ya he llegado. (Spain)	I’ve arrived.
Llego a la una.	I’ll be there at one.
el gringo / la gringa	the foreigner (neutral in Bolivia)
el almuerzo / almorzar	lunch / to have lunch
la sopa de maní	peanut soup
Vale un Potosí.	It’s worth a fortune.

If you’re doing the journey yourself

Take the bus. It uses the paved road, it has working seatbelts, and the three hours of Andean scenery are worth the time. If you do take a taxi, agree the route as well as the price before you get in — por la carretera principal, por favor — and be prepared to repeat it. Once you arrive, take the first day slowly: Potosí is above 4,000 metres and the altitude affects most visitors.

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The sentences you don’t say in a taxi are the ones you haven’t practised out loud. Parlazo connects you with vetted native Spanish tutors from Spain and Latin America for one-to-one video lessons, so you can hear the difference between ya llegué and ya he llegado before you need it. Book a lesson when it suits you and pay only for the lessons you take.