Canyons and Countryside

Today, as I may have mentioned in a previous blog, we plan to travel to Toro Toro and spend a few days there. Toro Toro is a national park, only recently designated as such, surrounding a small village.

To get there, we need to take a Micro at 6am.  This is a challenge, because the place we have to get the Micro from is considered ‘’very dangerous’, especially in the dark early hours.

Our host, Will (pseudonym), who I realise I haven’t talked about much before now, has not only booked us a taxi to take us to the Micro, but gets up and comes with us himself to make sure we are OK! He stays with us all the way until he has seen us safely loaded onto a Micro, and only then does he leave us. It’s lucky actually, because there is initially much confusion over which Micro is going to Toro Toro today, and where it will leave from. Without him I suspect we would have been a bit stumped.

Of course, Micros only leave when they are full, so we sit there until 7.20, because the Micro leaves, clattering and jerking its way along the road. I suspect that the seats we are sitting on have been removed from another vehicle and screwed on to make additional seats in this one, so it’s a little cramped and wobbly. Which, after all, is part of the fun.

The scenery is both beautiful and fascinating. Huge, still lagoons lie in the shadow of the grassy mountains the more distant of which are made surreal and blue tinged by the drifting smog which hangs low in the distance. A lady drives a donkey, loaded with a bale of hay, across the road in front of us. A family stand outside their isolated house, staring, a flock of geese around them. It’s very remote here. We pass tumble down houses made of adobe mud and clay, half built or half destroyed, taken over by the thick green, spikey leaves of cactus plants. Goats, sheep, pigs and even dogs, run around, painted with bright pink paint to denote ownership. They graze and leap about, their fluorescent heads incongruous in the brown, green surroundings.

As we drive, there are less and less people, less even of the isolated smallholdings. We drive on windy, cobbled roads, here and there the roads lose their cobbles and seem to be disintegrating into the valley below. I judder along, the driver is more careful than I had dared to hope and I am actually feeling quite safe in the Micro, despite the sheer drops, though the winding and bumpy surfaces combine to create a distinctly queasy feeling in my stomach. I find myself wondering why they don’t pave the roads rather than cobble them, which would be smoother, and then realise the cobbles probably create better friction and grip, making it less easy to skid over the edge. It’s funny how patronising you can find yourself being about another country, particularly one you have been told is ‘poor’ or ‘not developed’. In actual fact what I have mostly found in such countries is that they have got right things that we, in the ‘developed’ west, have not, or have long since forgotten.

We are driving very high now, M mostly asleep, but I am too captured by the scenery to close my eyes. At one point the rattle of our van startle a flock of tiny green parakeets, at another we drive with six huge eagles soaring majestically above us.

All the same, when we eventually arrive, five hours later, find a hostal and buy our tickets, arranging to meet our guide later and then embarking on a nearly entirely fruitless search in the village for something we can (being vegetarian), eat, my stomach and my legs are quite pleased to be out of the van. We order, not quite the only thing we can eat, but the only thing we can afford, in a rather expensive restaurant, having drawn an absolute blank in the market – an egg sandwich.

As it happens, the egg sandwich is huge, involves two fried eggs, four pieces of bread and some chips so it is substantial, if not exactly healthy.

After much faffing around and trying to understand the Spanish explanations about which tour includes what and for how much, we team up with another, Bolivian, couple and set off with our guide on an afternoon tour.

We start walking straight out of the town and I am pleased that we don’t seem to be using any kind of motorised transport. It professes to be approximately a 4k walk, but I am suspicious of this, given that it apparently takes 5 hours. I challenge anybody to take 5 hours to walk 4k.

“It depends,” says our guide (in Spanish), “on how fast you go.”

By which, as we will discover, he means not how fast you can walk, but how fast you can scramble up and down rock faces.

The scenery is beautiful. We begin walking along near a gorge, and then quickly dip into it, to examine the ‘dinosaur’ footprints. There are, unmistakably, huge indentations in the rock, that look very much as though they might have been made by a huge mammal.  Indeed, because of the nature of the landscape, so barren and isolated and so devastating it is not so difficult to imagine dinosaurs running along here.

This would have been a beach, our guide tells us, but movements of the plates of the earth over time shifted its location, until it became a plate of rock in a gorge in Bolivia. He is explaining in Spanish and so I don’t quite understand the reason why the footprints would have lasted long enough to harden from mud or sand into rock. M suggests that an earthquake or similar swift and drastic change in the landscape may have slid the plates over each other so quickly as to preserve the prints, but mostly its conjecture. I am not sure of the scientific evidence here, but I don’t really mind. As I’ve said before, in these dramatic landscapes everything seems plausible. And the dinosaurs, as with the Inca ruins a few days earlier, are not the main point of this excursion, but the walk itself is. And, as I believe I was also saying of the Inca ruins a few days earlier, what a walk!

In this case, to be fair, I don’t think it could really be called simply a ‘walk’, more of a scramble and climb. As we continue, we start to descend into the canyon, some 250 metres high. We cannot immediately see the size of the canyon we are descending into, but the path becomes narrow, steep and slippery, with the steep drops, covered in greenery, to the canyon side. It doesn’t feel especially exposed, my feverish height sensitive brain has already calculated that, were it to slip, I could probably cling to a tree or a bush or two, but the sliding loose stones make us very careful where we put our feet.

A little further down, we begin to clamber over and around large boulders, sometimes to jump between them, sometimes to scramble up them, more or less vertically, where the boulder in question is larger than twice our size. I am a little afraid, but mostly it is exhilarating rather than excruciating, and M has a huge grin on his face.

“Isn’t this amazing!” he says, and I rather agree with him. Nowhere in England, quote possible nowhere in Europe, would you be permitted such unadulterated casual hands on experience with this kind of landscape.  If sitting on a rock in the Andes desert mountains felt like ‘touching the world’, without a blanket or chair or some other man made intervention, then how much more so is this scrabbling, teeth gritted, hands gripping directly onto the ancient rocks, soils and slippery surfaces of the huge canyon in the national park?

There are moments, I admit, especially as we emerge more out of the greenery and the height and nature of what we are descending into becomes more obvious, when I have serious concerns about the safety precautions, or lack thereof. We are not wearing hard hats, or any kind of rope and our guide, though quite hands on in the more obviously difficult parts (“put your foot here, now put your other foot there” etc) he is often so far ahead as to be out of sight of us, seemingly impatient at our apparent ineptitude when it comes to scaling cliff faces.

In fact, when I have passed whichever particular hurdle it us, and look back to watch the Bolivian couple handle it, I find that, whilst she in particular is showing much of the sort of mix of tentativity and doggedness that I suspect I do, the heights are not quite as steep as they seem when you are making the climb. The canyon itself is enormous, but we are never right on the rock face. The most we would ever fall in each section we climb is a few metres. I calculate that it wouldn’t kill us, maybe we might twist an ankle. It’s a lot better in context.

Even so, when we reach the base of the canyon, and are climbing along the edge of a shallow stream, edging along the rock face, I have one panic stricken moment when the guide says something I don’t catch in Spanish and M helpfully translates, ‘he says up’’.

I look up.

The sheer rock face of the canyon looms above me. On no other tour would I think it believable that the guide might suggest we simply climb up the rock face without safety equipment but for this tour it does not seem at all unbelievable.

“En Serio??” I say, (Are you serious??). I am trying to work out what would be more sensible, to flatly refuse on the grounds that it is not safe, rendering me stranded in the bottom of a canyon just before dark, or to grit my teeth and do it.

“No,” says M, seeing my confusion, “not all the way up. Just up a bit and along that more helpful ledge just above you.”

Ah. Well that, I admit, does seem more reasonable.

The scenery itself, which is the main reason for all this adventuring, is stunning. It looks like something out of a film, or better, a brochure or an advert. In fact on of the main sights on this tour is a waterfall which looks, as M points out, like something out of a Timotei advert.

Water pours down the canyon, which at this point, opens out slightly, and allows the light to reflect off the streams of water. And they are multiple streams, cascading down and dripping off the many, verdant green plants, trees and hanging mosses which adorn the cliff face.

“You can just imagine it,” says M, “there would be a model in a bikini under each of those streams of water, washing her hair and throwing it about in slow motion.”

I can indeed just imagine it. But I chose to lie back on the rock and contemplate my scenery without the addition of shampoo.

It seems much later when we begin, slowly, to wind our way back up the canyon, this time using rock steps carved out of the cliff. It’s hard work though, we are all sweating and breathing heavily, though we watch our guide leap, mountain goat like up ahead of us with apparent ease. Despite the fact he apparently recently hurt his leg falling off a motorcycle. And the fact that he still has another hour to walk home, even after he returns us to the town.

The rest of us limp a little in his wake, and we fall more or less silent, the gaps between us growing wider as we plod our way home on feet and limbs that we only now notice are aching.

It’s twilight now and very quiet. We can hear crickets humming and sheep and pigs grunting and baaing on the hillside. We pause on the way, to stop at a viewpoint looking out over the canyon, and are treated to a flock of tiny green parakeets with red beaks flying over the canyon to perch, so well camouflaged as  to be almost invisible, on the outcroppings of small green trees on the rock.

Home – and exhausted – we somewhat successfully navigate the evening market and eat a plate of pasta with a potato on the side. It’s essentially a plate of everything the lady has that’s not meat. She is most suspicious that we don’t want chicken. That, in Bolivia, is truly unheard of.

We fall into bed at barely nine o clock and are asleep almost immediately.

There is even more fun to be had tomorrow.