Let’s talk beverages. The national drink of Bolivia has to be chicha, a fermented draught most often made from corn, or maize. Chicha goes all the way back to the Inca days, when it was used in rituals and consumed in vast quantities during religious festivals. Milky and sour, chicha is generally made the same way you make beer: germinating the maize, extracting the malt sugars, boiling the wort, and fermenting it in large earthenware vats for a few days. Of course there’s also the old-fashioned way, still practiced in some quarters, where by which the maize is ground, moistened in the chicha-maker’s mouth, and spit out into small balls, the natural enzymes in saliva having the ability to break down the starch into maltose.

Chicha’s not for everyone, but sometimes it’s better to suck it up than risk being impolite; in 1867, when the British ambassador to Bolivia refused a glass of chicha offered by then-president Mariano Melgarejo and requested cocoa instead, the hot-headed caudillo made him drink a large bowl of liquid chocolate, paraded him around La Paz’s main square tied up backwards on a donkey, and shipped him back to London.