Hiking Cordillera de Los Frailes

We set off good an early (5am) on a 4 day hike of the Cordillera de Los Frailles region with Condor Trekkers. There is a blockade around Sucre by the long haul truckers, so you can't drive directly out of the city. Basically, they just parked their trucks in the middle of the roads so that nobody could get by. They are protesting a reduction of tax credits on the purchase of gasoline. Though vehicles can't get out, it's possible to walk past the blockade, so that's what we did.

Pictures are in the Sucre album.

We took a taxi along with Mario, our guide, Edwin, our guide in training and Izzy a volunteer from the UK who in on her gap year and speaks Spanish. At the blockade, Mario went off though the trucks to see if he could secure a taxi for us on the other end. After about 15 min, he came back and said we had a taxi, so we opened up the back of our taxi and had a quick breakfast before walking through the blockade. Of course, on the other side, the taxi Mario had secured wasn't anywhere to be found. Apparently, somebody else came along and was willing to head out now, so the taxi left. As a result, we had to wait around for a while with a bunch of Bolivians until a small bus arrived that we could get on. This was a small bus with a roof that was perfectly fine for the typical short Bolivian, but Catherine and I had to duck. So, we had to stand for most of the 1 hour ride with our necks crimped into the ceiling.

The hike started at a shrine on the top of a mountain. It was a hybrid Catholic & pagan shrine that paid homage primarily to Paccha Mama, the pagan god of the Earth and also one of the trinity according to locals. The first section of the hike along the ridge of the mountain and afforded some spectacular views of the valley and the Maragua crater. It's not really a crater, it's really just a spot that is pulling apart, but it's quite spectacular with scalloped ridges ringing it.

For most of the hike, Edwin, Catherine, Mario and Izzy talked in Spanish, which was actually quite good for me because the conversations where long enough that I could string together enough words to figure out what was being said and as a result, learn new words and improve my Spanish ear. Mario and Edwin are both locals from Sucre who are going to school at the university, which Izzy is in her gap year before university and decided to travel South America for a year. She's planning on being in Sucre helping on treks until the end of June.

After a while of walking along the ridge, we started to head down to the first of two site for cave paintings. This site is hidden in a cleft of the mountain and simply contains a few black drawings. Some of the drawings had been stolen, so the authorities put up a metal cage over the cave to stop you from getting too close. They think that the drawings were painted by people in the area who were sheltering in the cave temporarily in order to communicate with other people who would be coming by later. Or they just could have been bored waiting out the rain. It's always a little bit of a guessing game.

After walking down the hill some more, we stopped for lunch, which was vegetarian and incredibly tasty. They way overpacked the lunch. It was sandwiches for the four of us and just filling options/salad for Catherine. There was roasted vegetables with rosemary, tomatoes, cheese, avocados, cucumber, lettuce, spinnach. They brought enough bread for the four of us to make 4, 10 inch subs each. A little excessive!

After lunch, we had a 20 min siesta and then continued on to the second set of paintings. These are much more extensive and less well hidden. They are just under and overhang. There is pictures of people, gods, animals and more.

After that, we continued down the hill, through patches of Eucalyptus forest and farm fields until we reached the river. We crossed on a suspension bridge and then followed the road to a small town where we stayed for the night. The people in the area are definitely just subsistence farming. They were harvesting their crops when we were there. The crops were mostly small fields filled with wheat or corn, clinging to sides of the hills. The farmers were harvesting using hand scythes the size of their palm, while the leftover stocks were being eaten by the goats, sheep and/or cows.

For dinner, we bought some rice from the local "store", which was really just half of some lady's one-room house. Then Mario made a vegetable sauce with the leftovers from lunch. We were tried and ended up going to sleep around 8:30.

Unfortunately, during the night, Catherine got sick, probably from something she ate. So, in the morning, she tried to eat some quinoa, but it was too salty and she couldn't eat much else. So, we slowly made our way to a rendezvous point. We were supposed to meet up with a group doing the 3 day trek but leaving the next day. Condor Trekers has a minimum of three people for a trek. There were 2 people set to go on the 3-day version on Saturday, but we wanted to do the 4-day version and leave earlier, so we left on Friday. The plan was to then meet the group doing the 3-day trek and Mario, Edwin and Izzy would just head back to Sucre. It turned out that there were two problems. First, Catherine was sick and it wouldn't be a good idea to continue on so we had decided to just head back to Sucre with the others once we let the other trek know what was going on. The second problem is that apparently, they couldn't get through the blockade and had to enter the area from a different location, so we wouldn't have been able to meet them anyway.

So, we waited for a flota to come that we could take back to Sucre. When the flota came, we got on and it managed to move about 10 feet before crapping out. After some diagnostic work, the driver figured that it was out of gas, so a kid was sent back to the closest town to get some diesel. When he got back, they tried pouring the gas into the bus, but the bus was tilted in a divet in the road, so the gas just poured back out again. So, we had to push the bus forward a few feet onto a rock. With more fuel in the tank, the driver tried to start the bus again, but it wouldn't turn over. So, he grabbed some tools and started working under the bus. I don't know what was wrong, maybe a popped clutch or something. Anyway, eventually, he managed to get the engine to turn over and the bus to move.

Oh, and one more thing, flota was so full that we couldn't even fit inside, so we ended up riding on top of the bus along the switchbacks and over the mountain. This turned out to have been better for Catherine because the fresh air and the view was infinitely better than being cooped up in the bus standing for an hour and a half. Also, because the roads wound tightly through the ills, so the bus couldn't go very fast anyway. It was fairly safe as long as you ducked for the low hanging leaves.

We got back to Sucre eventually, after crossing the blockade again and waiting for a while. It was definitely a Bolvian adventure. Though our trek got cut short and we didn't make it to the villages with the fantastic weaving, or to the dinosaur footprints, it was definitely a unique experience.