Off The Beaten Path

5/23/11
Well, it’s been a crazy, crazy couple of days. From La Paz, after getting my camera fixed because the lens was acting up and wandering around the ridiculously crowded streets, I took an overnight bus to Cochabamba. I had a seat that laid back most of the way, but I couldn’t sleep thanks to a very loud couple behind me and some wonderful motion sickness. Felt really sick when I got to Cochabamba so instead of exploring the city as planned, I got a cheap hostel room and slept for the day. Finding the buses to Torotoro was an adventure, going through an awful part of the city and trying to find a bus that still had seats. Eventually got a bus and it was a bumpy six hour ride to Torotoro. I was the only gringo on the bus. It was ridiculously crowded, the aisle filled with passengers and crates of tomatoes and sacks of sugar. When the bus stopped for a bathroom break, people had to climb to the front by standing on all of the armrests and monkeying their way through – it was amazing how all the women with babies were able to do this! It was a super cramped ride, but eventually arrived around 1am, got my bag from the roof of the bus, and knocked on the door of a nearby hostel. The sleepy owner let me in and gave me in a room, and a really sweet puppy followed me upstairs and I hung out with him a bit.
In the morning, I wandered the tiny town to find the tourist office where I could get a guide to see the area. I ended up joining a group that was staying at a different hostel, so went and ate breakfast over there while waiting for the tour to leave. After several days with no English speakers, it was nice again to see other gringos – some from Canada, others from Portugal, England, Ireland, France, and one from the US. Our first stop was the dinosaur footprints and our guide talked about which were carnivores and herbivores and the sizes of each. He only spoke Spanish so some of the technical terms were hard to understand, but I got the gist of it and people in the group translated bits of it for the rest of us. There were some footprints that were indented into the stone as you would expect, and others that sat above the ground, supposedly due to sediment sticking to the bottom of the dino’s foot on one type of soil and then coming off the foot on a drier soil type. We saw quite a few sets of footprints and there are apparently a lot more – those currently exposed are slowly worn away due to erosion and others appear.
Next we hiked up to the viewpoint of the Torotoro canyon. We passed by a stone walkway over a ledge and several of us walked across it, much thicker than a balance beam but a huge drop below. After an exhausting hike in the sun, we got up to the mirador (viewpoint). They recently built a bridge that circled above the canyon – it was really cool to stand on the bridge and see the canyon far below and on every side. The guide (who we later found out was only 16!) talked a bit about the different tectonic layers from all different periods, but it was mostly just an incredible view.
Our last leg was down to El Vergel, a waterfall down in the canyon. We didn’t know beforehand that the hike be so tiring with almost no shade, so preserving water was definitely an issue and I only let myself have tiny bits at a time. We walked down 800 stairs and climbed up and around rocks as we followed the trail. We reached a swimming hole that we thought was our final destination but nope, we kept walking, rock hopping a bit through the creeks and rivers, over more rocks. Finally, we plopped down in the shade by El Vergel, which was a really nice waterfall with areas to wade around and rocks to jump from into the deeper water. The water was cold but was nice relief from the hot sun so I walked under the waterfall, waded around with really soft sand under my feet, and jumped off one of the rocks. I had swam in my clothes so tried to dry off in the sun, but since we were in such a deep canyon, the sun soon disappeared and I was freezing for a bit till we started to hike again. I was really dehydrated on the walk up to the point where my mouth was sticking to itself and little gulps of other people’s water didn’t do much to help. It was a gorgeous hike as we ascended the canyon and headed back to town, but I was very glad to be back and immediately downed a bottle of water. We only walked 6 or 7 km, which was nothing compared to Isla Del Sol, but having more water during the hike would have made it a bit less painful!
I was the only person at my hostel so switched over to the one where the group I had been with was staying. Because I absolutely love zippers, the one of the main compartment of my backpack popped open as I was packing my things to move. Spent a long time trying to get it back on but couldn’t get the zipper to catch, so safety pins it is for now. I just have to hope it can withstand two bus rides and being tossed around without spilling my things all over the place. I’ll be in Sucre for a few weeks and should be able to find someone there to fix it. Still can’t fix the zipper on my jacket either!
We wandered the tiny town a bit before dinner. It’s definitely poor but wasn’t as impoverished as I had expected. There was a nice central area with a big restaurant and several shops, much more modern looking than the rest of town. Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, so he has been putting a lot of money into the small towns, the countryside. There are trash cans around and signs to keep the area clean – though it would have been nice to have them around in La Paz too!
Breakfast and dinner at the hostel are served family style and Lily, the owner, packs us nice lunches for outings during the day. She’s made vegetarian versions of everything for me and helps us arrange the tours for the day. Dinner was a traditional Bolivian dish, paccha manca, which is meat, olives, boiled egg, thick homemade French fries, onions, bell peppers, and tomatoes all mixed together. I had a plate minus the meat with lots of chunks of Bolivian cheese instead, and we topped the dish with a sauce of beer, homemade spicy sauce, vinegar, and salt.
I hadn’t been planning on spending another day here, but really wanted to see the caves, so spent the night and had a really amazing day today. Most of the others had been here longer and left this morning, but I went with two Canadians, Sarah and Georgina, on a tour of the caverns and caves. Our guide for today, Victor, didn’t speak English and had a bit of an accent with his Spanish because his first language was Quechua, of which he taught us some phrases, but I got the gist of what he was saying. We started out with a drive way up into the hillside on winding dirt roads, past a few tiny towns with maybe two dozen buildings, past grazing sheep and herding dogs who decided that our car needed herding too. It was funny to watch the dogs race alongside the car, barking as they tried to keep up but eventually trailing behind and returning to their sheep. We got out of the car and hiked further up into the hills. It was a landscape like I’ve never seen before. People from yesterday who had already done this had said that the waterfall trip was beautiful but the cavern and cave route was breathtaking the entire day; they were definitely right. As we hiked, the guide pointed out different plants and sedimentary rocks. We reached a series of tall caverns and massive rocks called the city of Itas. The area is hard to describe and pictures don’t do it justice, but I still took quite a few. We definitely felt the altitude, but it was a nice cool day so it wasn’t too bad. Endless mountains in the distance with 3D clouds backed by layers of blue sky and other clouds. The hills around the town of Torotoro are one after another, nearly symmetrical and side by side, each with many semicircular layers of sedimentary rocks and plants, each a distinctive color so that you can clearly make out the layers from kilometers away (yes, I’m turning to the metric system). After the caverns, we continued to hike through the area, climbing up to high lookouts and when it seemed like we were as high up as we could get, we kept going and got even higher, towering over the gorgeous landscape below. We scrambled over rocks and occasionally used the strong rope the guide carried as leverage to climb up steep ledges. Canyons and ridges of many shades of reds and greens, endless layers of rocks, canyons, hills, mountains, clouds. Because the land was so sloped, many of the sedimentary rocks were tilted at different angles from where we stood way up top.
Back in the car, we wound back through the countryside, took a different dirt road for a bit, and then got out to hike towards the cave. We spent about two hours caving in the Cavern of Umajalanta, one of the more explored of the 35+ caves in the area. The sunlight gave way to complete darkness in the cave and we used our headlamps to navigate up and down and around all the rocks, to see the stalagmites and stalactites, to avoid steeping in the muddy pools of water. Most areas were large enough to stand up in, though we often had to crouch or crawl as we made our way across the rocks, slippery from sand or water. There were some smooth areas where I crouched down and used my hands to push off as I slid down the rock as if skating, turning slightly to navigate. We used a few ropes and ladders to help with our descent deep into the cave, but mostly got pretty dirty using our hands and knees. There were some really narrow areas that required twisting and turning, stepping and holding in certain locations to make our way through. My favorite parts, though, were the tiny tunnels that we had to shimmy our way through. Some were bigger than others and I made my way through doing an army crawl. One, though, was so small that it didn’t look like anyone could even fit through. We didn’t think that it was the path that we were going to take, but the guide told us to try to crawl through, so I headed in, flat on my stomach, and glided forward bit by bit. From what the others were saying and hoping from the room where I came, I thought that it was a joke and the path didn’t really go anywhere, so tried to figure out how to turn around (not that that was very possible to do!) But the guide sent the others in after me and I continued to slide on through the sandy tunnel headfirst as it gradually headed down and curved at times. I climbed out into another open room and after the other two crawled out, the guide appeared from a different, much larger pathway that he claimed was only for guides! Not that I minded.
..to be continued