A Herzogian Descent...

I'm back in La Paz again as our flight to Rurranabaque (the jungle) got canceled due to inclement weather. Apparently it rains in the rain forest. Who would have thunk it? We'll try to leave again tomorrow, but if the flight gets canceled again we'll just head back up towards Peru. We cannot possibly fill another idle day in La Paz. The only reason we made it through today is that they kept us at the airport for seven hours before finally announcing that the flight was canceled. We only had a half day to occupy ourselves with this time. I bought some presents and got a shave, a simultaneously fascinating and terrifying experience.

Anyway, for the last couple of days ago we had been on a backpacking trek called El Choro, because it loosely follows the Choro River Valley in between La Paz and Coroico. After days sitting around getting jostled in the jeep in the salt flats we were ready to get out and start moving under our own power again.

Leaving La Paz, itself almost 3800 m above sea level, we headed for El Chumbre, also the start of the Death Road that we descended on mountain bikes a couple of weeks ago, 4700 m asl. From here we drove an additional bumpy, agonizingly slow couple of kilometers (seemingly) straight up to the trail head. The trail that we would be following for the next couple of days was an ancient Inca highway. Other than the Romans, the Incas had more miles of paved roads than any other civilization in the ancient world. Lacking the wheel or horses, the Incas communicated throughout their vast empire by sending messages via couriers over these series of roads. I knew the trip would be awesome when, while posing for a picture at the top, a llama train (two girls, ages MAYBE six and eight, walked behind, shooing and hissing at the animals to keep them moving) walked right past us, much the same way they have been doing evey day for a thousand years or so now. We gathered up our packs and our group (Chris, myself, two dutch girls, Dieuw and Renee, and our two guides, Guzman and Alberto) set off down the trail.

Now, I enjoy the back country, and have engaged in some pretty rugged treks in my time, but I want to go on record here and say that there is no way I could have done this trek from the opposite direction. We started walking downhill at 11:00 on the first morning and didn't even reach level ground until almost 24 hours later, well into the second day of hiking.

As you start, you are surrounded by snow capped mountains and the jagged rock edges of the valley. Our descent was slow going (very hard on the knees and the toes) but we made good time despite being awestruck by our surroundings. By about lunchtime we had hiked into the mist that perpetually seems to shroud these peaks above a certain altitude. It was like being inside of a cloud.

As we advances, we began to hike on the actual Inca highway itself. We would be following the route for the entire three days, but for certain large stretches we actually walked on the cobblestones that the Incas themselves had put down sometime between 500 and 1000 years ago. The road was surrounded by stone walls and llamas grazed eveywhere in the valley. Occasionally the mist was so thick that you could only see the road in front of you, but I could always feel a certain weight surrounding us. Then, the wind would pick up, and that tingling feeling would be revealed to be some 6000 m peak gazing impassively down upon us.

The farther down we walked the warmer the weather became and the more evident the vegetation. At one point I thought that the mist had finally burned off for the day until I looked up and realized that we had merely descended through it and it still lay above us, concealing our starting point and any tangible signs of progress we had made.

By the end of the third day we were in a sort of cloud forest that you see a lot in Central America. There were trees and green green green life everywhere. After the arid sparseness of the Salar and the insane urban sprawl of La Paz (google image search it sometime, because I still don't think I've captured the insane assylum like way the slums are just built right up the sides of cliffs. It looks like someone built a city inside of South Dakotas Badlands, that is if the Badlands were all 15,000 ft high) it was a welcome relief to be surrounded by vegetation again.

We spent the first night in a village by the river we had followed since that morning. We were at about 2700 m, well over a mile lower than we had begun the day. While it was nice to see trees again, I did not relish the return of biting insects. However, Chris had some New Zealand Army issue insect repellent that was 100% DEET and that seemed to do the trick. (Unfortunately, we would run out before the end of the trek, and my lower legs can attest to the voraciousness of the appetites of the local entemological population.)

Up early the next day to continue our descent. Now that we had entered a little more lush environment, I can give you a bit of a description beyond my own meager expository abilities. Watch the opening scene of Werner Herzog's classic Aguirre, Wrath of God, and you'll have a pretty exact picture of what that second day looked like. In the movie, Spanish Conquistadors, and their Indian slaves descend the eastern slope of the Andes into the Amazon. I know Herzog shot his film somewhere in Peru, but for all intents and purposes, it might as well have been Bolivia. Beautiful, awe-inspiring, almost to the point of numbing us to its grandeur. There were so many spectacular vistas on that initial part of the second day that we almost couldn't appreciate them anymore. THAT'S how beautiful Bolivia is. Its majesty can beat you into submission just through sheer consistency.

We finally leveled off at about 10 that morning and had a wonderfully refreshing swim in the river next to a village almost too picturesque to be believed. (Thatched roof huts, chickens wandering about pecking in the dirt, a shirtless boy practicing, how could I possibly make this up?, kickboxing with a two liter bottle as a punching bag.) After that, it was time for our first ascent. It was relatively tiring, but since we had left the truly thin air of the high Andes and altiplano, it wasn't too bad. The sun was high in the sky by now and I was sweating freely. (Thanks Dad, if our overwhelming physical similarities weren't enough to prove our paternal bond, our proclivity towards perspiration eradicates even the most miniscule shadows of doubt)

At lunch, Chris and I managed to mismange our water supply and ran out two hours away from the next resupply opportunity. Fortunately, after our ascent, we had been following a relatively flat ridgeline that not only made for easier hiking, but also continued to afford us spectacular views. The farther we walked, the more were were able to look back upon the trail we had already covered, an opportunity denied to us the first day due to the perma-mist of certain altitudes. We can also see across the valley to waterfalls, crashing down hundreds of feet into the river clearly visible in the valley floor below. The main drawback of Bolivian scenery (other than its occasionally mind numbing consistency) is that most of the time you need to watch where you're putting your feet. This trail was not one where you would want to misstep while contemplating the juxtaposition of shadow and light upon a moss covered rock jutting out from the side of a sheer cliff covered in tropical vegetation.

Ended the day with the Subida de Diablo (Devil's Climb) a series of about 20 Incan stairs arranged in a series of switchbacks. By this point in the day (a solid 8 or 9 hours after we set out) I was less concerned with the fact that maybe I was putting my feet on the same stones that Tupac Amaru had done while leading resistance against the Spanish, and more concerned with just getting to camp.

We made it no problem, although to call our camp a village was to be a little generous. It was, in fact, one family's home on the side of the trail. According to Alejandro, they made their living through subsistence agriculture, but they seemed nice enough and let us set up their camp in what was essentially their backyard. Like Alejandro and Guzman, they spoke Aymara better than Spanish.

Last day we descended even further into a region known as the Yungas. Not a rainforest proper, but definitely semitropical in nature. We hiked two hours to The Japanes House, the home of a man of, surprise, surprise, Japanese descent who had been living in Bolivia for close to 60 years. We tried to figure out what would bring him to the middle of nowhere Bolivia, and because were dispassionate and callous at times, the best we could come up with was on the lam war criminal.

Regardless of imaginary past misdeeds, he was a wonderful man who, despite his advanced age and rather enormous hunchback, kept an immaculate garden full of flower entwined trellises and sober, reflective pathways that eventually lead to a panorama of the entire valley where for the first time we could see our complete route: the snow capped peaks or origen, the first days valley, and then the ridge that we had been following for close to 25 miles at that point. From there it was another two hours down (An interesting question for the backpackers out there, which is worse, up or down? I find that up is harder muscularly and cardiovascularly, but the wear and tear down puts on your body, once again, especially the knees and toes, is pretty intense.) to the end. We had another wonderful swim in the river, and after lunch headed back to La Paz.

Much like the Tupiza Tours Salar de Uyuni trek, I highly reccomend El Choro to anyone who is ever lucky enough to find themselves in Bolivia. Hopefully, when you next hear from me I'll have narrowly survived an encounter with an annoconda, or wrestled a caiman, or some other could only happen in the jungle proper type of escapade. If not, its more Inca stuff from Isla del Sol as we head back to Titicaca and Peru.