Words & Picture - Jake Brennan

: The gringo trail. You've heard of it, maybe even ridden it – long on comfort, short on authentic local flavour.

You know you're on it when, halfway around the world, you keep seeing a disproportionate number of whiteys (tall , sunglasses, pale skin). You may even have made this correlation: the poorer the country, the more ingrained the gringo trail.

A poor country's few beautiful or interesting sights have infrastructure for travelers in spades; the rest? bubkiss.

In a country like Bolivia, the second poorest in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti), you start seeing the same travelers in four, five, six different places – a sure sign you ARE the gringo trail.

Sure, I'd love to make an effort, clotheswise, to blend in, but who am I kidding? I'm not going to look Bolivian in this lifetime. Don't get me wrong: I'm not ashamed to be white. But my skin is definitely colouring my experience here.

Most Bolivians you'll interact with are quite polite. But judging by their actions, some of the locals seem to assume that we, the very visible minorities, just decide one day to shake the money loose from the trees growing all over Gringoland and go a'travelling.

"Where's my share?" ask many Bolivians, from the persistent six-year-old shoe-shine boys leaning on your thigh in Sucre's otherwise pleasant central plaza, to the hobbling, toothless beggars who hook your sleeve with a crooked finger.

Many of the shopkeepers even get in on the act. And that's where it gets interesting.

Shops here rarely bother with price tags. Where money is scarce, most people know the value of most things. They're likewise attuned to what we gringos don't know.

A traveler who was in Argentina yesterday and Chile last week won't know if Bolivian oranges are one-tenth or one-thirtieth the price they are in Canada. And what's the difference? A few cents.

This is how many shopkeepers try to spend your money for you – but with varying success. For what unites humans the world over is that in every population, a significant portion believe themselves to be better liars than they really are.

A bright young lad in a small town recently jumped up to help me to the produce in his mother's shop. "Green peppers? Six Bolivianos a kilo, señor."

"What?" piped up his mother from behind the counter. "Silly boy, you know those peppers are 12 a kilo."

The boy, puzzled, stared at his mother, then slowly turned back to me. "Sorry, se ñor, they're 12 a kilo." I felt like I was on Candid Camera.

But there was no one else in the store to witness this, and the woman knew she had the best peppers in town. To me, therefore, 12 Bolivianos was the price.

This "gringo tax" can also take the form of restricted services. There'll be milk in plain sight in the kitchen, yet no milk for your coffee or tea when you ask for it.

A fellow traveler reported he was refused the soup everyone around him in the restaurant was enjoying. "No soup" was the entire explanation given him, while piping hot bowls were still coming out of the kitchen.

In a chicken shack in Uyuni, I asked my server where the toilet was. Awkward pause of a bad liar..."There is no toilet." "No toilet?" "No."

Dubious but desperate, I went out to relieve myself in the alley (which wasn't an original idea, the smell told me), and returned to hear the owner asking the server, "Why did you tell him we had no toilet when you know it's right back here?"

I'll tell you why: resentment. From the Spanish Conquest to the finagling of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, whites have been screwing over countries like Bolivia for half a millennium.

So why not get something back, be it a few cents here and there, or the pleasure of watching a Canadian cross his legs in discomfort?

You travel in poorer countries to broaden your horizons, to have authentic interactions with locals, to learn about their opinions and mindset.

But on the gringo trail, the gringo tax often makes what the locals think of Westerners the most obvious lesson of all.