That trek

I have a travel buddy who likes to wake early. Those of you who know me well would understand my problems with this. Most of the inhabitants of Sucre understand my problem with this. You see Sucre is primarily a university town. And anyone at all familiar with university students would know how they like to party. To cater for this, Sucre has many lively nightspots and is a town that only wakes up at 6pm. But I can’t tell you about the night life because of my travel buddy who has organised a series of 4am starts. Though this is somewhat necessitated by all roads out of Sucre closing between 7am and 7pm for road works, it is still a little extreme methinks.

So there we were, at dawn, 3760m up, drinking cocoa tea with a young French couple, Nelson, our guide and William the driver, contemplating a trek on an Inca trail. I do admit that dawn was rather beautiful with the crosses of the tiny church silhouetted against the lightening sky and the Klimt style virgin wishing us well on our journey.

Then off we went, boulder to boulder...then boulder to boulder....then more bloody boulders, stepping carefully for hours and hours and hours – afraid to look at the sensational views without stopping first, for fear of losing one’s footing and sliding down into the depths of Bolivian nature. Hard to believe these paths have been here for thousands of years. Nelson was great, patient with the old gringo bag who was slow, and very informative about all things cultural, historical and natural. Really interesting plants, used by the Jalqu’a people for medicinal purposes and textile dyeing. And the scenery was mind blowing, all the way down into the caldera and then onto the tiny native mud brick village of Maragua. So many soaring craggy mountains, striped and folded with the many colours of myriad minerals, and other weird and wildly varying landforms with Inca legends to explain what geologists are still trying to.

Time for lunch and a little bum slide onthe river bank to check out the hardness of the earth – no wonder nothing grows here!

Now Maragua was connected to electricity one month ago. To celebrate they had a week long party. I suspect that they are still recovering as we saw hardly a human anywheres about. But we did meet a young woman who demonstrated her amazing weaving to us. The people here are very poor, hardly growing enough wheat and corn for their own use so selling weaving is the only source of income. And given that it takes a whole day to make 7cm of fabric, it is a very lean income that is earned. I bought a small piece (about 30cmX10cm) for around $A15.

And then we walked some more, and some more and some more, along a river bed until finally finding the car again and heading back to Sucre. But even this was a great adventure, with the single lane road reminiscent of some seen in central Australia, but with the switchbacks and altitude of one I remember from Srinigar to Jammu in the Himalayas. Add to this rock falls, river crossings, culverts going across the road, landslides, donkeys, goats, chickens and barking dogs, and you will have some understanding of the adventure. Luckily, the Nissan we were in was a tad more robust than ours (currently in hospital at Port Macquarie) and carried us regally back to base.

There was nothing left to do but have a beer and a good lie down – a fitting end to a fabulous day.