I've been taking photos in two long-running "albums." The first is called "Nothing to See Here," and consists of black-and-white photos of nothing in particular. This year I took a lot of photos of Bloomington, Indiana for that album. Here are a few:
Here are some more photos from that album taken in Chicago's South Side:
I've also been taking color photos for a different album called "Through an Open Window" . . . Here are a couple from Chicago.
I took some photos in Queretaro, Mexico, for that album, but the camera setting wasn't as high-res as it should have been, so I'll probably toss these. But they're good photos anyway.
Posted at 12:48 PM in Photographs | Permalink | Comments (0)
I’ve embarked on a new photographic project called Nothing to See Here. In a way, I’m attempting to do for Chicago’s South Side what Eugène Atget did for Paris a century ago. But I'm also doing something a little more radical. I’m avoiding pictorialism as much as I can. If something strikes me as wow, that would make a great photo, I won’t take it. Instead I take pictures of what doesn't particularly strike me and see if the pictures strike me afterwards.
Here is a small sample of the images I've made. If you hover your pointer over one, you'll see where and when I took it; if you click on it, you'll get a large version.
Posted at 03:10 PM in Photographs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Public transportation won’t work for me—I would have to stay the night there the night before an all-night flight, and I normally don’t sleep that well in Candelaria (a small town of ninety-six families about ninety minutes from Sucre)—so I hire a taxi. The driver was a race-car driver for twenty-four years and turns out to be the best driver I’ve been with in Bolivia. When I arrive, Carlos (a young man who used to live with us in Sucre) introduces me to a friend of his, Rosario, a professional photographer and web designer. Together they are starting the first website devoted to selling weavings and other traditional arts of the area, and they are shooting photos of hundreds of weavings. After I take a walk around the village, I go with Damien (Carlos’s father) to take the cows halfway up a mountain and into a valley; he exerts his control by pelting them with rocks when they go too slow or wander away from the path. During lunch—a stew made of beef, carrots, onions, peppers, and tomato sauce, served with tagliatelle, potatoes, and freshly made bread—Damien asks me to invite the driver to share lunch with us, but he turns me down, saying he already ate. So Damien gets up and invites him in himself and serves him a huge plate of food, which he finishes with relish. After lunch we hike up a hill and Rosario takes some pictures of Damien weaving up there, wearing traditional clothing (the male weavers make entirely different weavings than the female ones). On the way down we run into a neighbor who, Carlos tells me, lives on the other side of the mountains and owns a hundred cows and sheep and also thirteen dogs to keep the wildcats at bay. When we come back to the house, Santusa (Carlos’s mother) and her mother, who is eighty-eight years old, set up a frame for a new weaving and roll balls of yarn back and forth to set up the warp; when her mother gets tired, Damien takes her place.
The driver told me on the way there that the Chuquisaqueños (the people who live in the region of which Sucre is the capital) are gentle and kind and love to talk to strangers, while the Aymaras (who live in the areas of La Paz and Oruro) are “mal,” not answering strangers’ questions and fighting among themselves. Indeed, there’s something ideal about the Chuquisaqueños and their traditional way of life. I hope that comes across in the photos I took there.
Posted at 06:39 AM in My Life, Photographs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
Las Alasitas (see my previous post) is full of booths like this one.
Fortune-telling near Las Alasitas in Sucre. Notice the pieces of tin in the lower left corner.
If you want to get a sense of how tiny these boxes, cans, and bags are, look at the light blue plastic cup holding the brooms in the lower right.
The courtyard in Cayara. The opening scene of Werner Herzog's Salt and Fire was filmed here. Paola took this photo.
I don’t remember the name of the church in Potosí to which this door leads. It was built in the seventeenth century.
Only three friars are left in the monastery of San Francisco in Potosí. Here’s one of them.
From left to right: yours truly, Ryan, Karen, and Paola on the Torre de la Compañía in Potosí. It's the tower of a seventeenth-century Jesuit church; when the Jesuit order was disbanded in the eighteenth century because the Jesuits were against Portuguese efforts to enslave the indigenous people, the church was burned down. But the tower remained. Cerro Rico is in the background.
Typical Bolivian architecture, Sucre.
Wall art in Sucre.
On Saturday we go hiking in Bramadero, about an hour from Sucre.
Wild agaves in Bramadero.
A wild fuschia in Bramadero.
Posted at 02:51 PM in Photographs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Las Alesitas is a street fair/market that stretches for about half a mile on Sucre’s Avenida Manuel Molina. On Monday we go there with Carlos, the young man from the campo who lived with us four years ago, and a Colombian friend of his. Most of the vendors sell miniatures: houses, pets, food, drinks, cars, trucks, people, money—almost anything you desire can be bought. The idea is to buy something that you desire, place it in your home, and it will grow into the real, full-size equivalent within a year. The origins of the custom derive from an ancient Andean tradition in which miniature animal figures were buried with the expectation that they would grow into real animals.
Downhill from the market fortune tellers sit in a row. Besides cards, they use two other methods. One fills a glass half full of beer, tears a hole in the top of an egg, pours the egg white in the beer, and reads the shapes that emerge among the bubbles. Another pours molten tin from a hot pan into a bucket of cold water, then takes out the resulting mass, which looks a bit like a gondola, and reads the bumps and forms on the strange, glistening sculpture.
On Tuesday, Ryan, Paola, Karen, and I visit Cayara, a 16th-century hacienda not far from Potosí. (Ryan and Paola are close friends: Ryan is an American potter, bodybuilder, and former Peace Corps administrator who has been in Bolivia for twenty-eight years and lives alone in an extraordinary house he has built overlooking Sucre, and Paola is a young Bolivian who was born in Potosí, works as a tour guide, and loves to travel.) Two relatives of the owner, Arturo and Yvette, whom we had met in Sucre on Monday night, serve us a lunch made mostly of food grown on the grounds or nearby and spend a few hours showing us the rooms, books, paintings, furniture, and implements there. The most outstanding for me were the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books bound in vellum, the pre-Columbian pottery and artifacts, and the ornate furniture and paintings. It’s astonishing to consider that all this work, all museum-worthy, is still in private hands—and in good ones.
Potosí is a puzzle. It was once the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, with two-and-a-half times the population of Paris; now it has only about three hundred thousand residents. It is the most labyrinthine city I’ve ever been in, with narrow and winding streets and few thoroughfares. Overlooking it is a mountain, Cerro Rico, which was once the world’s primary source of silver; now there are so many mines in the mountain—some six thousand, with over twenty thousand miners working there—that the mountain has begun to collapse. The highest major city in the world, it is the historical site of almost unbelievable misery, with countless miners losing their health and their lives. This history lends it a kind of tension and excitement similar to that of Rome, Jerusalem, and Berlin.
Of the several foods that are characteristic of Potosí, perhaps the two best known are salteñas and k’allapurka. Salteñas are a lot like empanadas: round pieces of dough filled with meat, vegetables, potatoes, and eggs, folded and crimped on top, then baked in a wood-fired oven. They’re common in Sucre and La Paz too, but the most traditional ones in Potosí have thinner, unsweetened dough, slightly burnt, while the ones I’ve had elsewhere are too sweet for my taste. In the salteñeria we go to in Potosí, they bring them out of outdoor ovens on huge trays and customers take from one to a half-dozen. K’allapurka is a porridge-like soup made of corn meal, meat, potatoes, and spices; a black rock that has been heated in a fire is put in the middle so that the soup bubbles like a volcano. You have to use special igneous rocks, since river rocks, for example, will explode when heated.
On Wednesday we visit the sixteenth-century church of San Francisco, home to the oldest sculpture in Bolivia (a striking 1550 Christ on the cross made of cactus wood and human hair) and an extensive crypt; the tour takes us to the roof, with its dozens of tile-shingled domes. And we climb up the Torre de la Compañía, an eighteenth-century tower in the characteristic mestizo style, with spiral columns and sculptured arches.
Here are a few photos; I will post more soon.
Manhattan, as seen from Bushwick
Jacky in Brooklyn Heights
Thalia in Brooklyn Heights
Ryan's house in Sucre
The roof of the church of San Francisco in Potosí (Paola's photo)
A street in Potosí, as seen from the roof of the church
The Torre de Compañía and surrounding buildings, Potosí
The church of Santo Domingo in Potosí
Posted at 07:30 AM in History, My Life, Photographs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 16, 2014
We’re leaving Bolivia in four days—tearfully.
Friday we take a bus to Candelaria with Carlos for one final visit to Santusa and Damien. There are, of course, new puppies to fondle—just two weeks old—and a new lamb wandering the courtyard, baaing. On Saturday morning the cows come in for water—they walk the two hours from their field every morning, drink, and walk back, alone. We walk about an hour to a newly dammed reservoir hidden deep in the cleft between two hills. The road and path take us to an overlook; Carlos, Jacky, and I clamber down the steep slope and see a fox in the woods near the water. It’s the first Andean fox we’ve seen—a female the size of a coyote, but with pointed ears and snout—a potential model for Santusa’s series of fairy-tale weavings, in which the fox always comes to a violent end. At the bottom the concrete dam perches at the edge of a sickening hundred-foot drop into a canyon, without a rail or even a small wall: I can’t stay there more than a few minutes without trembling. In the afternoon we walk the opposite direction to where the goats and sheep usually go up to the series of cliffs; the only plants there have spikes. Carlos and the kids look for fossils in the rocks—there are plenty—while I walk farther, following the trail the cows take. A lot of Carlos’s family visit in the afternoon and evening, including one of Carlos’s cousins, who needs Santusa’s help choosing and arranging colors for a weaving; they sit at opposite ends of the little hand loom tossing balls of yarns and arranging the threads under and over the cross sticks. Another relative comes from a village an hour-and-a-half walk over the mountain; she suffers from a debilitating ailment in which her limbs swell for periods, and in addition, her oldest son fell down concrete steps and lost his three front teeth (we contribute some money to help pay for their medical expenses). By nightfall there are seventeen of us staying in the house.
Sunday, back in Sucre, after the World Cup final game we host a despedida, a going-away party, to which about thirty people come. Our best friends are all there, including Carla, who has never visited us here before; Paola, who just moved to Incahuasi, twelve hours away, but is back for the weekend; Edgar, Carlos’s brother, and his beautiful girlfriend—also their first time in our house; and so many others we’ll miss.
And now we’re packing. Saturday morning we fly to Santa Cruz; Sunday to Miami; Monday to Chicago. Our adventure is almost over.
Bolivia now seems like a different world from the United States. It’s a place with few traces of capitalism, where nobody has a gun, where the poor don’t take drugs or join gangs, where nobody works overtime in an office, where it never gets too hot or too cold, where the deepest sorrows and joys are openly expressed, where so many people really care deeply for us, even though we’ve only been here a year.
Carlos has a week’s vacation, so he’s spending as much time as he can with the kids. It’s so nice to see them all together all day, working on getting everything in order and having fun in the process. He’s a brother to them, a son to us, and his parents are the warmest people we know. Santusa even made us two small weavings depicting our family, with Carlos, and hers. They’re painstakingly done and lovely.
Posted at 04:17 PM in My Life, Photographs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 08:11 PM in My Life, Photographs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Chiquitania, a vast area, stretches from Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s biggest city, to the Brazilian border four hundred miles east. Its biggest town is probably San Ignacio, with about thirty thousand people; there are only about a half-dozen other towns with over a thousand. In short, this huge expanse is largely uninhabited. Only one road across it is paved, and that only since five years ago; another paved road links Santa Cruz with San Xavier and Concepción, but it’s in awful shape. The rest of the few roads are dirt. Mainly flat, low, hot, lush, and wooded, it does feature some lovely rolling hills with palms and even a few spectacular mountains; to the east and north are tropical wetlands and jungles that are almost impossible to access. But what makes this region so interesting is its history and culture.
In the early eighteenth century, Jesuits, mostly highly cultured and ascetic Germans, established a dozen or so missions there. In each, two priests worked hand-in-hand with hundreds of indigenous people to build wooden churches (one, in San José, is of stone) full of wooden sculptures, with elaborately frescoed walls; in the baroque style, everything was decorated to the hilt. They also collaborated on music that followed the baroque examples the priests brought from Europe, incorporating indigenous elements.
Then, in 1767, the Catholic church terminated the Jesuit order, in part so that the Portuguese could enslave the indigenous people whom the Jesuits were protecting. The Jesuits left; many of the indigenous were taken to the mines in Potosí. But the few who were left maintained the missions, later with the help of Franciscans. The grander stone missions of Paraguay and Brazil fell into ruin. But in Bolivia, the mission towns—and six of the original churches—still survive.
Between the 1960s and 1980s all six, plus one in San Ignacio that had collapsed in 1948, were restored and rebuilt by the Chiquitano people under the leadership of a German Jesuit named Hans Roth. In one, Santa Ana, a huge treasure trove of original music scores was discovered. All of a sudden this remote region became a center for eighteenth-century art and music comparable to some of the towns of Europe. Astonishingly, the Chiquitano people had maintained baroque traditions—of making and playing European instruments, of carving religious figures—through the centuries.
In 1996 a biannual international baroque music festival was inaugurated in the Chiquitania. 2014 is its tenth iteration. More than a hundred concerts are given over a ten-day period in over twenty locations, including in all the original missions, attracting performers and audience members from all over the world. Including us.
Rather than a day-by-day account, I’ll treat our trip topic-by-topic.
The indigenous culture is not as pronounced in the Chiquitania as it is here in Chuquisaca. The only traditional clothes we saw were worn by dancers, who dressed in white cotton, embroidered in pastel colors, with straw hats and no shoes; the dances themselves were nondescript, and the music was fife and drum with a strong beat. Their masks are either wooden, painted with angry faces in black, white, and red; or cloth, painted with landscape scenes, with holes for eyes and feathers on top. The roofs of the village houses are mostly made of grass; the walls of wood and/or adobe. They make wooden sculptures, primarily of musicians and angels, and embroidered clothes.
Our chief difficulty is getting from place to place. I want to rent a car in Santa Cruz, but the cost exceeds $100 a day, so we decide to take buses. To get to Roboré takes six hours in eighty-five degree weather on a barely air-conditioned bus with windows that won’t open. The next morning it takes us an hour to even find transportation to Santiago de Chiquitos, twenty minutes away. There, a guide or hotel owner drives us around, which is pricey. The latter takes us off-road to see some prehistoric wall paintings, then to Chochís to see Hans Roth’s astonishing sanctuary there (we climb to a cleft between two rocks and a rainbow appears), then back to Roboré, where the former meets us and drives us to San José, since the only other way to get there would have been to go early in the morning or late at night: that day’s trip totals one hundred dollars. We want to stay in San José longer, but the hotel owner tells us that the only bus to San Ignacio leaves at six a.m.; it actually leaves at seven, but not knowing that we lug our suitcases for about eight blocks in the dark. That six-hour ride, on a dirt road, is much better because the bus windows are all open and we make plenty of interesting stops to drop off or pick up packages—the transport doubles as a mail service. The next day we want to visit the three mission towns near San Ignacio, so we spend another three hours in a minivan on rough roads—in vain, as it turns out, since it’s a dia feriada, May 1, and two of the three missions are closed. Then getting from San Ignacio to Concepción (a four-hour trip) the next day at first appears impossible—the road is so bad that buses can’t travel it. We hire a taxi for another $80 or so, and indeed, when we get close to Concepción, the road begins to be paved, but the rain has washed out the pavement and left a huge muddy ditch which no heavy vehicle can possibly cross without getting stuck (we all get out of the minivan and it makes it, but a small truck gets seriously mired). Then from Concepción to Santa Cruz is another six-hour, seventy-dollar haul over very rough roads.
We (the four of us and Philly) attend ten concerts featuring a huge variety of music. Every concert is required to include at least one piece written in Bolivia, either from the Chiquitania missions or the astonishing collection of music formerly housed in the cathedral in Sucre. The least satisfying concerts, for me, are either boring (non-choral music by anonymous or little-known composers without the imagination of Bach or Purcell) or hokey (an Argentian group that uses modern instruments and jazzed-up arrangements); a few of the masses too are of the when-is-this-finally-going-to-end flavor. The best are undeniably authentic, featuring truly flavorful music, whether by great European composers or anonymous indigenous ones. And of course there is plenty in-between. A large Polish boys’ choir is one of the major hits of the festival, and their renditions of Renaissance songs are inspiring. A small Chiquitano youth choir sings slightly out of tune but with much spirit and verve. A Cruceño group plays a huge variety of wooden flutes and recorders with a beautiful foresty sound. We hear wonderful groups from London, Belgium, and Uruguay; and in Santa Ana, where a small organ from 1750 is still in the church loft, a young Cruceño organist demonstrates its power and tells us its history. The settings of the concerts are breathtaking, adding to the music’s power. Hearing it has inspired Thalia to once more play violin every day.
The three birds we see most of are toucans, which smoothly fly overhead; roadrunners, which, indeed, love to run across or down the road, zigzagging; and caracaras, mostly black-and-white falcons that seem to be everywhere. Well, actually, we see plenty of chickens and turkeys too. But the most astonishing creature we see is a toad the size of a large turtle, at least a foot long, sitting in the middle of the road after a concert in Santiago; when I point it out to folks, everyone gets out of their little shuttle bus to look at it, and we eventually succeeded in prodding it out of the road so it won’t get squashed. The cattle in this area are mostly brahmin, white with bony humped backs; we don’t see many sheep or goats. And here, unlike in Sucre, the cats seem to outnumber the dogs.
Roboré is the least interesting town we visit, and also the first. Santiago is tiny, with only a thousand inhabitants, and its church is twentieth-century, though a few baroque things are inside. San José is far bigger, but we don’t get to see it much because we arrive after dark and leave before dawn. We only get to spend a small amount of time in San Miguel and San Rafael. But the other four towns—Santa Ana, with about three hundred people, San Ignacio, with about thirty thousand, and Concepción and San Xavier, which are in-between—make a strong impression. Each features a large flat square plaza with the mission church and its complex on one side; in the center of the plaza is often a wooden cross with palm trees at each corner of a small square around it; the roads are mostly dirt and the houses are all one-story with long arcades shading the sidewalks; the rest of the town is laid out in a grid. Practically nobody drives a car here—even the taxis are motorcycles. Santa Ana feels the most unchanged, bucolic; but even busy San Ignacio has many charms.
The churches, except for San José’s, are large, simple wooden structures with peaked roofs. In many practically every surface is painted, sometimes with pictures, sometimes with patterns. Some have mica embedded in the walls, making them shine; many of the altars are replete with gold leaf. The statues of saints and Jesus and Mary are simple but beautiful. Combining baroque and ascetic aesthetics seems impossible since one emphasizes extravagance and ornament and the other extreme simplicity, yet these churches accomplish it. One has a brilliant yet dark painted sun over the altar, both glorious and threatening; another’s massive wooden columns are painted to look like huge snakes. Our favorites of the wooden churches are those in San Miguel, San Rafael, and Santa Ana, but we only have five minutes in the first two, brief stops on the bus from San José to San Ignacio. Santa Ana’s is the simplest yet somehow holiest, the least restored, the most intact, built by Chiquitanos after the Jesuits had been expelled, but following their model. The cathedral in San Ignacio collapsed in 1948 and was completely rebuilt, but faithfully and gloriously; the churches in Concepción and San Xavier were restored and painted in a rather fanciful and much wilder style than the others, and feel less sacred as a result; in addition, the altars and paintings are clearly contemporary, setting the lives of Jesus and the saints in the context of the story of the Chiquitano people. And then there's San José, a massive stone complex whose facade is utterly unlike the others—a great stone wall with a belltower, a chapel, a church, and a parsonage, each completely different, all mestizo baroque.
The hotels/hostals range from filthy, crumbling, and moldy to exceptional, with beautiful gardens, hammocks, a pool, and wonderful breakfasts featuring a dozen different baked goods (cuñapes, cheese puffs made with yucca flour, are ominpresent). We often sleep all five in one room, but sometimes in two or even three. In Santiago we stay in a small house we have to ourselves; unfortunately we leave the windows open during a storm and two of the mattresses and Karen’s suitcase get soaked. The prices are all about $15 a person per night.
The temperature usually reaches the mid-80s at midday except in Santiago, which is a little cooler, and San Jose, which is a little warmer; it’s humid, but not unbearably so. The northern towns—San Ignacio, Concepción, San Xavier—are surrounded by lush, rolling hills, mostly wooded; where cattle graze, the forest has been burned, leaving emerald curving meadows with black tree trunks poking from them, littered with foot-high ant mounds. Santiago, in the Southeast, is in a vast preserve called La Valle Tucavaca; we hike up one mountain there littered with sheer 200-foot-high rocks; it’s unearthly. The forests are “dry forests”: deciduous and flowering, green in the wet season, multicolored in the dry (the wet should have ended by now but it rains some almost every day this week). Swamps and savannahs alternate with the forest; rolling hills stand beside canyons and cliffs. The hotel owner tells us that we could spend two weeks in Santiago, taking a different hike every day, and always see something new and breathtaking. We visit nearby Aguas Calientes, a shallow lake fed by underground hot springs, like geysers, rather than an outside source. When we walk on the sandy bottom we suddenly sink into deep holes of almost scalding water bubbling up with such force that it keeps us from going down too far. The swimming in the deeper parts is the most pleasant I’ve done in ages.
In Santiago we visit an American Quaker who has been living there for forty years—he’s seventy now. He has an American wife, four children, and 130 head of cattle. Warm and wise with a gigantic bushy beard, he and his family give us slightly fermented sugar cane to chew on and fresh raw milk to drink; we delight in talking with his daughter, who is finishing high school and coming to the States to go to college (we hope she visits us!). His place is filthy and smells of a dead chicken he hasn’t yet disposed of; Jack, as usual, delights in the kittens. The Chiquitania, especially the eastern part, is heavily populated by Mennonite communities, some of whom have been there for a century or longer; Bolivia allows them to govern themselves, so it’s a haven for them. The Mennonites, with whom he feels some kinship, are the reason this American first came here; the beauty of the place is why he stays. We, of course, want to stay longer too . . .
Posted at 12:07 PM in Art, Birds, History, Music, My Life, Photographs, Religion, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 11, 2014
On Sunday, March 30 we go with Biblioworks to Tomoroco, a small town about three hours away, to build a playground. There are fifteen of us: three Biblioworks staffers and twelve volunteers—three from Bolivia (including Carlos), four from the US (including Jacky, Thalia, and me), one from Germany, one from France (but who now lives here), and two from Argentina. The road is paved through Tarabuco, but at some point before it gets to Morada K’asa it turns cobblestoned; after Presto, it’s just dirt. Tomoroco is quite small, but big enough to have a central plaza (unlike Candelaria) and a large school, in which is the future playground. We’re a little distressed to see that two large molles (peppertrees) in that space have been sawn down—Zannah’s original plan for the playground was to have them provide shade. But we are told that this was necessary because the roots were undermining the nearby buildings.
Maritza, who runs Biblioworks, introduces us to fifteen high school senior boys, who are to help us, and splits us into teams to build each project. Thalia, Jacky, Carlos, and I are all on different teams. My team’s job is to build a climbing tree out of three truck tires and four seven- or eight-foot poles. It’s a lot harder than it looks. First we have to wash the truck tires and cut out the middle part on one side, which is done with a knife while the tire is wetted (it’s much easier to cut a tire when wet than when dry). Then we sand the poles. We drill holes in the tires and in the poles and fasten them together, which is not easy at all: the bolts to fasten them are usually a bit too narrow to accommodate the nuts inside the tire and go all the way through the poles, which means narrowing the poles with an ax. We use two bolts to join each tire to each pole, for a total of twenty-four bolts, and twenty-four holes to be drilled all the way through each pole, and twenty-four holes to be drilled through the tires too. Sometimes the latter are too big and the nut goes right through, so we cut pieces of tire to put behind the nuts. After we’ve joined the first pole to all three tires, we then have to put the six bolts through the next pole and lift the tires on top of it to maneuver the bolts into the holes and attach the nuts. The whole thing is awkward and time-consuming—it takes all day the first day and part of the second for our four-man team to assemble the tree, roll it onto the playground, dig holes for it, and set it into cement. Meanwhile, the other teams are building, out of tires and wood, various animals for the kids to climb on, an alphabet game, a tunnel, a car, and a little house. And a sixty-something-year-old man is chopping tree trunks, laying down rocks for a path, digging, and doing other intensely physical work with more energy and efficiency than anyone else there.
The seniors we work with amaze me. They’re all good-natured, never complaining; at mealtimes they take off their hats and sit in silence and eat with good manners; they joke around a bit but mostly work hard, contributing ideas to getting things done. I often find myself just watching them, since it’s hard for four of us to work on these things at once, and since they have so much more energy and strength than I have. If I had to work with senior boys in the States, they would complain, mouth off, take lots of breaks, tell dirty jokes, and even jump ship on occasion.
A few high school girls prepare our meals, which are very good—traditional Bolivian food, with soups and plenty of starches. We all sleep in one school room on thin, shabby mattresses on the floor, but nobody complains. Monday morning, Carlos and Mattias (the German) get up at 4:15 to go back to Sucre. Then, before we start work, Jacky and I explore the river next to the town and the opposite bank, which goes up a small hill and is quite wild.
The second day of work is less organized around teams; everyone pitches in to complete the various projects. After the tree has been set up, I mostly work around and in the small house, building walls out of (and sawing) logs and removing debris. Jacky and Thalia have everyone in stitches at the end of the day ribbing each other (in Spanish). Getting a ticket for the early-morning bus home isn’t easy; Caroline, the American volunteer coordinator, and I go to the bus office (unmarked), about four blocks from the school, but nobody’s there; we go back a second time with the son of the bus driver, who is one of the seniors, and he registers us; and a third time to actually purchase the tickets. We then get up at 4:15 Tuesday morning to meet the bus there. So many people get on that everyone is absolutely squished and then we all have to get off so that the bus can climb the hill that leads out of town; enough people disembark in Presto, though, so that we’re comfortable. Halfway back the bus stops for twenty minutes at the top of a hill to add brake fluid; we get out and wander around. It’s unutterably beautiful up there, with views in every direction, tiny ponds, a small wheat field, a path along a ridge, with the hills green and curved like the limbs of a sleeper.
Last Friday, a week ago, we attend a screening, on video, of an important 1969 Bolivian film called Blood of the Condor. A Marxist, anti-imperialist, and pro-indigenous movie, it caused quite a stir when it was released; in one part of the movie, Peace Corps members are caught sterilizing indigenous women. The movie is pure propaganda, with clear good people (indigenous) and bad (rich Bolivians and Americans), and because people believed it, the Corps was expelled in 1971 (it left Bolivia a second time in 2008). A discussion follows the movie, but nobody points out that the Peace Corps did not sterilize anyone and that instead it was promoting contraception. A few older audience members indulge in strong anti-American rhetoric, accusing America of continuing to try to keep the Bolivian population small. What bothers me most is that the large number of students there are going to believe that the Peace Corps actually did do those things.
Early Saturday morning Jacky, Philly, and I take a bus with a Turkish tourist and a Bolivian guide to an Inca trail about 90 minutes from Sucre. We hike downhill for two-and-a-half hours, then walk along a road towards Maragua. The scenery on the Inca trail is rocky and magnificent; we see cactuses called gardenias that will burst into flames when it gets too hot. But the walk that follows is even better, with Shangri-La-like valleys, blue-and-brown striped cliffs, and a river that runs through it. We eat lunch under eucalyptus trees with some wandering cattle, then cross the river and climb steeply to the top of a mountain. From there we follow a ridge overlooking a dramatic waterfall. At one point the trail narrows to about six inches around a curve with a steep drop on one side; the walls and trail are made entirely of purple pebbles. It’s the scariest moment of the trek. We arrive at Maragua at dusk. To the east, opposite the sunset, distinct white rays emanate from the horizon.
Maragua is in a “crater,” though it’s more like a giant depression; all around it are hills with arched rock formations, as if Maragua were the center of an enormous flower. The town itself is tiny—only about eighty or ninety families live there—and gullies run all through it, so that the houses are quite far apart. To get there we walk through corn and wheat fields and say hello to a family plowing with two oxen. Joaquin, our guide, offers coca leaves to everyone he meets, which is the common, friendly thing to do here. The community runs a beautiful set of cabañas, where we spend the night. Our legs and shoulders are terribly sore from hiking eight hours and carrying all our clothes and food. Unfortunately, Joaquin can’t find the key to the cabin at first, and then the propane tank for cooking is empty and he has to hunt down another one; in the end, all we have for dinner is some soup from a package.
The next morning we hike up out of the crater, a very difficult slog that takes about two hours. We continue going uphill over more fairy-tale countryside, green and rocky, with houses that look like they were built by Incas, with the walls made of unmortared rocks and the roofs of grass. Eventually we reach a huge rock slope on which are dozens of dinosaur footprints—petrified mud that looks like it just dried up yesterday. It is at this point that I finally completely run out of energy—my breathing is so labored that I feel like I can’t take another step. But I do, of course, and well up the hill from the footprints we finally relax and have a large lunch. I eat enough to get all my energy back, and then some.
The people in the area are Jalq’a, not Tarabuqueño, and their dress is somewhat different: their helmet-like hats are white rather than black, with colored borders; their white pants are longer and embroidered at the bottom. Little girls stop us and try to sell us homemade woolen, woven bracelets and spiral fossils that they’ve found.
Most of the time Jacky and Joaquin are in front, chatting easily in Spanish, while I bring up the rear (Philly a little ahead of me). I don’t mind. We hike the rest of the afternoon and arrive in Potolo at nightfall—another eight hours of hiking behind us. Three times larger than Maragua, Potolo is in a deep valley, with a plaza, a church, and a museum. The cabañas here are as nice as those in Maragua, and we all sleep soundly again.
In the morning we take a three-hour bus ride back to Sucre. The road at first follows a canyon as impressive as any I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some amazing canyons (especially in Utah). I get the impression that Bolivia has as many and as various natural wonders as any other country, if not more; we are continually stunned.
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March 12, 2014
Before we left Tarija a week ago we spent the morning in the most charming village we’ve yet visited: San Lorenzo, about ten miles from the city. The houses are almost all colonial; in the courtyard of the house in which the revolutionary hero Moto Méndez grew up is an old peppertree with a grape vine growing around it and an old fig tree next to a well. A river runs through the town, and several streams branch off from it; one can follow them away from town past vineyards and wild fig trees (down one of these streams we meet a cowboy and his cow). In San Lorenzo they make rosquetes, large but almost weightless tubular pastries covered in white meringue; according to one legend they’re haloes that the angels left behind.
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March 4, 2014
This is the story of our Carnaval/vacation in Tarija.
On Tuesday afternoon, February 25, Amaszonas, the airline, calls and tells us that our flight the next day has been cancelled and that we have to fly out on Friday instead. This will not work for us, we tell them. We go to their office to see if we can fly to Santa Cruz and then to Tarija, but no. And they won’t refund our money on the spot; we have to e-mail someone at their office. We get, after a couple of hours, a flight on Ecojet instead; it’s in the early morning rather than mid-afternoon.
The Hotel Altiplano is new and very small (four guest rooms), run by a New Zealand couple with impeccable taste. Even at 10:30 a.m., our rooms are ready. We explore the city, which is smaller and flatter and uglier than Sucre. It is, however, full of trees, which Sucre lacks, and, like Sucre, is surrounded by mountains and hills. Fewer campesinos are on the streets than in the other cities here, and it feels more “Western”—perhaps that’s the Argentine influence (we’re only three hours from the border). The restaurants, on the whole, leave a bit to be desired; the service is so bad that at one we leave before I get my meal, and at another my aperitif comes after Karen’s wine and my soup after everyone else’s main course. We do find two good ones, El Fogón del Gringo, where we sampled various organ meats and had grilled goat, and Plaza Mayor, which serves traditional Tarijeño dishes like saice and keperi. The Museo Nacional Paleontológico y Arqueológico displays mainly mammalian fossils from the area, including an entire mastodon, and some smooth and graceful pre-Columbian pottery and small stone sculptures. But there doesn’t seem to be much else to do here.
Thursday is my birthday and also the Día de las Comadres, a festival for women. I wake up around 5:30 because of some noise downstairs; I feel very hungry and go back to sleep to dream about fried eggs and toast. Breakfast at the hotel has no fried eggs or toast but figs and raspberries. We walk down the wide and busy avenue next to the Rio Guadalquivir to get to the parade of Comadritas (little girls), but it’s not where the tourist office told us it would be; after about ninety minutes of walking, we finally find it, but it’s over. We pass by the local zoo on the way back to the center of town and see condors for the first time, up close, along with pumas and jaguars; it’s a pity they’re in such tiny bare cages. After a huge lunch we nap, then walk to the fairgrounds and look at the colorful baskets laden with fruits, vegetables, wine, and bread which the women give to each other and carry around with them today. The main square is full of dozens of women, almost all drunk, many dancing. After a ton of ice cream we visit the ugly cathedral, and finally go back to the parade grounds and sit on uncomfortable bleachers for an hour or two, waiting for things to start. Kids are squirting each other with water guns and shaving cream, drinking chicha de uva (slightly fermented and extremely sweet grape juice), and eating junk food. In the parade hundreds of women, some in traditional costumes and others in tight jeans and t-shirts, dance to a) drums and an instrument made of a cow’s horn with a reed in it; b) marching bands; c) music from speakers mounted on trucks. The groups go by extremely slowly with long breaks between them, and look quite similar to each other. It doesn’t hold a candle to the Entrada de la Virgen de Guadaloupe in Sucre. We go back to the hotel and I open my e-mail to see dozens of happy-birthday wishes from friends and even people I don’t know on Facebook cluttering my in-box. There’s something oddly contrived about it all.
I spend Friday morning at a tourist office booking a couple of tours; in the afternoon we visit Coimata, have lunch at an inn there, then climb to a spectacular waterfall with a deep pool at the bottom. It’s the best swimming I’ve done in Bolivia, even if the water is a bit cold; it’s so clean and clear. A couple dozen others are there too, and it’s fun to watch them dive from the cliffs, get their clothes wet, and play around. We’re the only gringos, which is pretty much a given throughout our entire vacation.
Saturday we visit the Reserva biológica Cordillera de Sama, but the tour disappoints us, despite a wonderful guide. We wanted to see the polylepis forests, but we only saw those from a great distance (one forest is perfectly circular); vicuñas, deer, and condors, but we never made it to the heights; cave paintings and an Inca trail, ditto. Instead we visit three mountain lakes, a few villages, and white sand dunes. The scenery, while enchanting, with clouds spilling over the mountains like dry ice, doesn’t compare to the Reserva Eduardo Avaroa—though perhaps if we’d seen more of what we wanted it would.
Sunday we spend in Tarija again and go to the Carnaval parades. There’s even more water and shaving cream shot and sprayed, and we get caught in crossfire—the crowds are thick and boisterous. The alternation of drag queens dancing to disco and Europop with the traditional dancers in folkloric costumes dancing to cow horns and drums is nuts. The float from Coimata features an actual waterfall somehow constructed on the back of a flatbed truck; other floats feature live vines with beautiful women tossing grapes into the crowds or live peach trees or live drummers, horn players, and singers. It’s dumbfounding how much energy the dancers expend over the course of an hour-long parade through the street, how much elaborate choreography goes with each song, even for the drag queens. We laugh a lot and leave just before it starts raining.
Monday morning we tour two wineries. Casa Grande, in Tarija, is ultra-modern; everything gleams, and even the wine barrels are new. Casa Vieja, in Concepción, is in an old adobe inn, and the wine there is “artesanal” (home-brewed), which means if it’s dry it tastes a bit of vinegar, and if it’s sweet it’s really sweet. The Bolivians are proud of their wine—they have the highest-altitude vineyards in the world. That doesn't make it good, though.
In the afternoon we visit la represa de San Jacinto, a huge reservoir built on the edge of a spectacular canyon, where we take a short rowboat ride and eat cangrejos (tiny crabs about an inch long), misquinchos (minnows), and doraditos (another small fish), sample chicha de uva, and finish with chirriadas (corn crepes) and humintas (sweet smashed corn and cheese wrapped in husks and grilled).
Today is Martes de Albahaca (Basil Tuesday, or, in North America, Mardi Gras); everything is shut down so people can party in their homes. At the markets the stalls are all decorated with corn stalks, basil, and flowers; they sell shrink-wrapped packages of good-luck charms (herbs, paper money, little wafers) that people burn on the sidewalk (along with occasional fetal llamas) as offerings to the Pachamama. One poor woman catches her hair on fire; her friends put it out with beer. The party next door to the hotel goes on all day, with people banging drums, singing, blowing horns, and playing guitar. The music is rhythmic and stirring. But the streets are mostly quiet, deserted; the restaurants and shops are almost all closed. I can’t help but compare it to the last Mardi Gras I celebrated, in New Orleans, where we stayed out all night and the streets were packed.
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December 4, 2013
The Hostal Las Olas in Copacabana consists of seven cabins that seem to have been designed with the help of an imaginative eight-year-old (but were actually designed by the German owner). We’re staying in La Tortuga (the turtle), shaped like the top half of an elongated egg. On the first floor is a huge circular bed; the shower stall is a spiral; up the winding stairs is another bedroom with an eye-shaped bed and a door that opens onto a stone bridge leading to the cabin (El Sol) the kids are in. The complex is set into the side of a steep hill overlooking Lake Titicaca, and each cabin has wide views of it; an eighth cabin shaped like a snail is almost completed. Of all the hotels Karen has stayed in, this is her favorite.
The town’s highlight is its enormous basilica, which houses the Virgen de Copacabana. Sculpted by an Inca, Francisco Tito Yupanqui (perhaps the nephew of the emperor Atahualpa), in 1538, the Virgen has probably been responsible for more miracles than any other sacred object in the Americas. And why did Yupanqui choose Cobacabana as its home? Probably because it’s the jumping-off point for the two most important Inca sites: the Isla del Sol and Cuzco. And so it remains. As a result, the town consists of almost nothing but hotels, hostels, and souvenir shops.
After kayaking on the lake, Thalia and I walk along it out of town. We pass raised lakeside plots that still use the Inca irrigation system to grow crops, a cow skull, a floating island made of reeds with a restaurant on it that serves fresh trout, many cows and sheep, and one llama.
The conventional way to visit the Isla del Sol is to get a boat from Copacabana at 8:30 a.m. and arrive at Challapampa, the northern port of the island, at 10:30. One then takes a long and steep guided hike through a magnificent landscape up to the sanctuary, which is centered around a very sacred puma-shaped rock called Titikala (from which the lake gets its name), and then down to a labyrinthine temple. One returns to Challapampa at 1:30, from which one takes the boat to Yumani, the southern port, which features restaurants and an Inca stairway. If you’re lucky (we weren’t), the boat from Yumani back to Copacabana will stop at Pilko Kaina, a better-preserved Inca temple. This is how we visited the Isla, and it was a drag. We were stuck with masses of ill-behaved tourists, rushed around to the sites, and on top of it all I was sick and the two public bathrooms on the island were, yes, shitty. There must be a better way to visit—perhaps staying on the island overnight, perhaps hiring a private tour, perhaps leaving from Yampupata, a town far closer to the island. We also didn’t get a chance to see the Isla de la Luna, which is supposed to house a better-preserved Inca temple. My enjoyment of the places I visit seems to be inversely proportional to the number of tourists there. I don’t really want to go to Macchu Picchu or Venice, despite their splendors.
December 6, 2013
Yesterday we take a minibus from Copacabana to La Paz, getting off at Tiquino to take a ferry across the lake; we then take a taxi to a bistro for lunch, then another taxi to a neighborhood, Villa Fatima, from where the Coroico buses leave, then a third taxi since the second dropped us off at the wrong place, then a minibus to Coroico, then another taxi to an ecolodge, Sol y Luna: seven transports; nine hours of travel. The road from La Paz to Coroico drops over seven thousand feet in three or four hours, all through mountain views, stark at first, then lush—one of the most spectacular roads I’ve traveled; now we are living in a cloud forest, a densely tangled jungle of flowers, bugs, and birds. I’d thought there would be mosquitoes here too, but at least in this part of the forest there are none; if you sit outside at night with the light on, the most exotic insects crowd around as if showing off. Sol y Luna, like Las Olas, consists primarily of cabins, and ours, Alaya, is one of the highest and most remote, a seven-minute hike straight up a mountain from the restaurant (the kids have a more centrally located cabin called Bamboos). The view is of a great valley and green mountains; clouds almost continually obscure their peaks, even when the sun is shining. The birds include a brown, tailless ground bird called the timanou; the chachalaca, big brown grouse-like birds who fight loudly and often; the oropendola, a large black bird with a bright yellow tail and beak who builds two-foot-high tear-shaped nests that hang from tree branches in groups of over a dozen and has four or five different, brilliant calls; an owl whom we can hear at night; and bright blue hummingbirds. Our cabin is the opposite of airtight—there are no screens on the windows and the walls are of bamboo so that anything can come right in. The toilet, shower, and sink are all outside. It all sounds quite primitive, yet it’s comfortable and somehow life-affirming.
This morning we visit Senda Verde, a refuge for illegally smuggled animals, mostly Amazonian and all Bolivian. As soon as we sit down outside to listen to our guide tell the place’s history, a spider monkey comes up, sits in Jacky’s lap, puts her arms around his neck, and rests her head on his shoulder. He, of course, is in heaven. The place is crawling with macaws, tortoises, and, mostly, monkeys: capuchin, spider, and howler. Senda Verde cares for all these poor smuggled (and often abused or maimed) animals, often with complicated adaptation techniques, their whole lives, since they can never be reintroduced to the wild.
After lunch we decide to visit Munaipata, a small coffee producer that most people agree makes the best coffee in Bolivia. The hotel receptionist tells us it’s a forty-five-minute walk, mostly flat; it turns out to be an hour-and-a-quarter walk, mostly uphill, with breathtaking views the whole way. Everything is done by hand here: the fruits (dime-size round red berries with a sweet juice) are picked and only the truly ripe ones are kept; they’re shelled to produce small white pits; those are fermented for a short time, then dried for a long one; they are then shelled again and roasted. At each step, the inferior “beans” are taken out of the batch and thrown away. All four of us try the espresso, and it’s extraordinary; despite my upset stomach, it doesn’t bother me at all. The manager, a Bolivian, shows us around, displaying pride in everything that’s done; the Swiss owner, Rene, makes an appearance at the end of the tour, then takes to us and drives us back to our hotel, telling us his life story along the way.
We debate staying here an extra few days—we haven’t even used the pools yet, and they’re all spring fed (as is the potable tap water)—but it turns out too complicated. Well, we have one more day here . . . and we’ll probably come back. Imagine a tropical mountain paradise: this is it.
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August 18, 2013
The road to Tarabuco (two hours by slow bus, eighty minutes by a fast one) is paved, but the road from there to Icla (another hour or so) is cobblestoned; Saturday we see two workers meticulously fitting the rocks in. We don’t go the whole way Friday evening, stopping instead at a tiny village called Candelaria, about five miles short of Icla. Accompanying us are Zannah, Carlos, and Paula, who will get her advanced degree in psychology in four months, and is now interning with Biblioworks. The road winds around sparse, steep hills; we arrive after dark.
Santusa, Carlos’s mother, is a weaver, and while Zannah, Paula, and Carlos are preparing dinner, we ask her about a small weaving she has made. She tells us this story, animatedly pointing to the scenes:
The condor and the fox are friends, so the condor invites the fox to a party in heaven. The fox asks how he can get there—“I have no wings”—so the condor offers to carry him on his back. They attend mass up there together; but before they go to the party, the condor warns the fox not to eat too much—it’s impolite. The condor gets drunk, dancing with the stars; the fox sits under the table, eating as much as he can. Night falls; amid the bright stars, the fox is embarrassed and afraid to tell the condor how much he ate, so he decides to go down on his own by constructing a rope out of leaves. On his way down, he makes fun of some parrots, calling them “cacaverde” (green poop). So the parrots chew through the rope. Knowing he’ll soon fall, the fox poops out of fright and calls out, “God is coming down! Bring a bed to cushion God’s fall!” But nobody does. When the fox reaches the earth, his stomach bursts open, and all the seeds from the food he ate fall out. And that’s why the earth produces such wonderful food—from the seeds from the party in heaven.
Santusa, ebullient and transfixing, tells us three more tales, with the fox the brunt of the joke in each. In one, a female fox asks a partridge how her children became so pretty, and the partridge responds that she puts them in the oven so they get nice and brown. Of course, the fox’s children get roasted.
Have I ever met a woman as warm as Santusa? When we tell Carlos that he can live in our extra room in November (Zannah is leaving Bolivia then, so he’ll be alone), she clucks with joy, hugs us all, and says that Carlos and Jacky are “hermanitos” (little brothers). Her loving nature is contagious.
The two major ethnic groups near Sucre are the Jalq’a and the Tarabuco (or Yampara), and the Flores family—Santusa, her husband Damien and his mother, and their three sons, Daniel, Edgar, and Carlos—are the latter. Unlike Jalq’a weavings, which depict a disordered underworld, those of the Tarabuco are multicolored, bright, and tell stories about heaven and earth. Another of Santusa’s weavings tells the complex history of a marriage. Damien, like most Tarabuco men, wears a woven black helmet-like hat with earflaps and a pointed top, leather sandals, baggy white shorts, and a huge poncho striped in black, maroon, and other colors. Santusa wears a simpler black outfit.
During dinner, Carlos tells us that in Quechua there are five completely different k and three t sounds. There are three Quechua words (meaning “together,” “bread,” and “old clothes”) that to us sound like “tanta,” the pronunciation differing only in the sound of the initial t. Then Carlos beats Jacky at chess, and Jacky seems very happy about it.
Carlos’s grandmother, who is around ninety and speaks only Quechua, can name all the constellations and tell time from them. But not tonight—the temperature has dipped into the thirties. It’s no joy visiting the unlit outhouse after midnight.
In the morning we walk past a colonial-era hacienda gone to seed and up a mountain. Thalia feels sick, so she and Karen turn back early; the rest of us spend two hours climbing. The landscape is rocky with various cactii and thorn bushes. We meet nobody on our hike. Jacky and Carlos clamber up like mountain goats while we try to catch our breath; thus exactly how breathtaking the vistas are can’t be determined.
On the way down we cross a tiny canyon whose walls have been burnished into curves by a diminished river. Carlos tells us that after the rainy season (December and January), the landscape is all green rather than desert-like and the water in the canyon is ten feet deep; all the children swim there.
The men of the Flores family built their house themselves about three years ago. They have nine cows, share a flock of sheep and goats with their neighbors (taking turns to take them to pasture), two cats, two or three adult dogs and eight very small puppies, an orphan piglet, an orphan kid (baby goat), and a field for potatoes and corn. Jacky is in heaven, playing with the animals, giving the kid milk in a baby bottle, giving grain to the piglet, horsing around with and helping Carlos. Thalia is still awfully sick, though, which breaks Karen's and my hearts.
The afternoon is largely devoted to baking bread. A big vat of flour (half of it milled from wheat they grow themselves) that has been mixed with water, lard, and yeast is brought into the main (living, dining, weaving) room and large spoonfuls of the mixture are literally thrown onto a sheet on the floor. These lumps dry a little, and then Carlos and Santosa quickly and deftly shape them into balls (I try, but the dough just sticks to my hands). The balls are then flattened into disks and stretched with the fingers like little pizzas. Then masses of branches, many with thorns, are lit and stuffed into the outdoor oven, which is shaped like an igloo. Whenever the fire gets low, more wood is brought, but not big pieces. This keeps up for over an hour. Then Carlos and Jacky go down the street with a machete and cut down a couple of armfuls of fragrant willow branches. These are wrapped around a very long stick with wire to form a kind of giant broom. A wheelbarrow is filled with water, and the broom is soaked. Then, very quickly, Carlos sticks the wet broom in the oven and brushes all the embers to one side. He wets the broom again and repeats the process twice. Meanwhile, the disks of dough have been placed on long boards; we bring these to the oven and Carlos and Santusa place them, two at a time, on a long paddle and then on the hot floor of the oven. Then they close the door; about ten minutes later, they shove all the baked breads into a basket and brush off any embers that have stuck to them. The oven is then reheated with more branches and the process begins again. The result is perhaps the best bread I’ve ever had (they made a small batch without lard for me since I don’t eat pork).
Jacky and I agree: if it weren’t for Thalia’s illness, this would be our best day in Bolivia so far.
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July 28, 2013
The meatloaf I cooked for an hour last night is still quite raw inside, so bringing it as is on our picnic isn’t an option. Instead, we fry it and stuff it in burrito wraps, split a two-liter bottle of water into two, pack two backpacks with those plus carrots, apples, and sunscreen, and head over to Philly’s at 8:30. From there we take a taxi to a place on the edge of town from where trucks leave. Philly asks which truck is going to Ravelo, then asks the driver if we can get off at Aritumayu (Quechua for “Ring River”). He has no idea where that is, so Philly tells him that it’s about twenty to thirty minutes out of town and we’ll pass a white house on the right and a sign on the left. A few campesinos are in the truck; we take our places near the back where a black piglet is crying because it’s in a white sack. The truck is about ten feet wide and eighteen feet long; more and more campesinos pile in. A girl of about twelve who speaks no Spanish (the campesinos here all speak Quechua) rescues the piglet from the sack and attaches a thick leather leash around its neck; he seems much happier. But then someone else stuffs him back into the sack and he starts squealing. Two boards a bit wider than the truck are stretched across the top of the truck’s walls in the front and back; the kids and I climb up and sit there, leaving Philly and Karen standing near the left side. An hour later, there are about fifty of us in the truck; on the board next to us are two teenage girls chewing gum and texting; the piglet has been shoved in a corner and is quiet while huge sacks have been dumped on top; campesinos are sitting and standing pell-mell along with their sacks; the one who has been there longest—since before our arrival—has been chewing coca leaves (I try some too but notice nothing except for some numbness in my cheek), taking pinches of baking soda to prolong the effect, and drinking from a little bottle labeled “alcohol.” At one point the girl who owns the piglet climbs aboard looking concerned; Karen tells her where it is, but she doesn’t understand.
We finally get moving, bouncing right off our board with every bump. But when we get to the airport, the road is closed for a bicycle race. We just stand there for a half-hour or more, watching the bicyclists go back and forth, until we finally lose patience. The kids and I get off the truck, which isn’t that hard since we’re high up close to the back so we can just climb down a ladder on the side; Philly and Karen have to climb over the campesinos and their bags to get off. We discuss going elsewhere and taking a taxi there, but only about three minutes after we get off the truck, the road opens, and the truck departs. We quickly find a taxi, but he has no idea where Aritumayu is either and wants a hundred Bolivianos to get us there (about fourteen dollars). Philly, who’s on a widow’s pension, bargains him down to sixty, which isn’t bad considering the truck would have cost us seven Bolivianos each, and there are five of us. But then we can’t find Aritumayu. We go along a paved road for a while, then through a police blockade, and then along an unpaved road, until we stop at a village and ask some folks where it is. It turns out we passed it, so we go back. I feel like we owe the driver more than sixty, so I give him a hundred and ask for twenty-five in change; he insists that we owe him the hundred, so I give up.
The white house on the right is indeed there, but I doubt we would have seen it coming from Sucre because it’s around a bend (we’ve been traveling through tall hills/small mountains, with winding roads and lots of dust). And the sign to Aritumayu is gone. We walk down a dirt road past some shepherds’ houses. A typical house has a rectangular adobe wall around it, like a small fortress, and inside that an outdoor brick oven shaped like an igloo; the sheep are right outside in an enclosure. After about half an hour down by pine and eucalyptus forests we reach a brick aqueduct, with arches over arches, which we cross, the kids and I on the top level, a straight yard-wide fenceless walk fifty feet above the valley, and Philly and Karen on the middle level, designed so it’s easy to walk through slits in the arches. We continue down to a small clear river full of rocks, which we use as stepping stones to cross back and forth.
We have our picnic under another, similar aqueduct, then explore further up the river, finding one tiny pool that’s at least five feet deep. Frogs are singing lilting melodies; all is at peace. Thalia brought a pack of cards, so Philly beats the kids and I at rummy, though she’s never played before. After a few hours of heaven we start back.
A music video is being filmed along the river, we discover, with about twenty dancers in elaborate costumes. The men’s tops make them look like Superman, with super-puffy shoulders; they also wear fancy boots covered with big bells so that every step jangles. The women’s skirts are so short you can surely see their panties if you get close enough; they all wear little hats on the backs of their heads. A couple of the men have scary masks, one of an old man with tremendously long white hair, and another of a metal jester. We watch them for a long time but, impatient, leave before the filming starts.
The slog uphill is punctuated with rests to catch our breath.
I listen at a shepherd’s hut to someone strumming an out-of-tune guitar in a
steady rhythm. At the top we flag down a small flatbed truck and let the wind
cool us.
Back at home I put the remainder of the meatloaf in the oven for another hour, but it still fails to cook, so I make meatloaf hash. I fry some vegetables, including some red, green, and yellow peppers, but it turns out I accidentally bought locoto peppers (“Es picante?” I asked the seller; “No, no es picante,” she told me), which are, I now realize, as spicy as habaneros. Even though Jack and I spit them out after one bite, the heat lingers, and from cutting them my hands are imbued with it; because I’ve touched my face, during my shower it feels like it’s on fire. I finally manage to cool my lips and nose down with some lime juice.
This was our first trip outside Sucre. I want to do more—perhaps next time we can visit a village: Philly says she knows some Tarabusceña weavers. Gentle, sunny, adventurous, and warm, she certainly has us well in hand.
Posted at 07:59 PM in My Life, Photographs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 11:28 AM in Film, My Life, Photographs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Unlike Săpânţa's more famous "merry cemetery," where almost all the grave markers are painted with full-color illustrations of the lives of the deceased, together with rhymed verses about them, the Jewish cemetery is kept under lock and key, and most of the gravestones have vanished (used for paving stones). Its untended gloom lends it a romance completely opposed to that of its cousin across town, especially near dusk, which is when I took this picture a few months ago, after climbing over a fence.
Posted at 06:42 AM in Photographs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (15)