YA LEUM.63 — Sucre, the white city… our beginning with an indigenous family
After a few days exploring the city of Laz Paz, which is the most famous city in Bolivia, we hit the road towards Sucre, the white city.
Before getting to Sucre, we stopped in Cochabamba, a much calmer city than La Paz.
We rented an Airbnb for a few days, simply to rest and not do a thing! Put your backpack, put it back, tidy up your clothes, take out your clothes, rent a bedroom, change to another location… it is not the worse thing in life, but it still is exhausting!
In that Airbnb, we met a couple of Argentinian actors who organized performances for audiences who were blinded! I had never heard about such an idea. I loved it! Still today, they keep traveling throughout the world and organizing such performances.
While we were in Cochabamba, we went to visit Torotoro National Park. This Park is close to Potosi and is known for its more than 3.000 dinosaur footprints.
Getting to the Park was hard! Although we only had to travel for 150 km from Cochabamba… it took us 5 hours traveling to get there. This was a new reality for me, but it is quite common in South America.
Small distances can result in long and difficult trips due to the mountains, the dirt tracks, or the lack of proper accesses. Until then, I had never really felt the importance of transportation… yet, in this side of the world, for the majority of the people, this is the only reality they know.
When we got to the park, we started a 3 km walk before getting to a wonderful gorge, surrounded by mountains with many layers! We went down 800 steps to get to the bottom of this exuberant gorge, we walked on the riverside, saw bushes and vineyards, and got to a whimsical lagoon and waterfall. We stopped to have lunch and enjoy that wonderful piece of nature.
By then, we were already in the middle of the day! The afternoon was spent walking over the footprints made by the dinosaurs who were there 66 million years ago and through the natural park, which has plenty of cone-shaped rocks with earthy tones. A unreal scenario…
After a few more days in Cochabamba, we travel to Sucre, the white city! It is a city filled with life, with its beautiful colonial-style houses, a center with plenty of things to do, and a place that makes you wish to live there.
We booked two nights at a friendly hostel, at the top of a hill. The environment of the hostel was just like us, proper for young travelers and backpackers who have not been at home for too long.
The last weeks were spent with more time to relax than usual. The days were dedicated to visiting the city and resting. Mathieu was away from home since January 2016, and I was since April 2017. And believe me, traveling and being on holiday are not the same thing. There is all the necessary daily management, which can be quite tiring! Especially for us: we always tried to see as much as possible of the local life of the places we visited.
Yet, the desire to dive into and continue to learn about the stories of people from all over the world overcame any physical or even emotional fatigue.
We started to think about how we could meet the Bolivians from Sucre. We walked through the city, researched some organizations, talked to a few people but we still had no ideas… Sometimes, that is how it is, the more you look for something, the harder it is to find it.
If you go to Sucre, you have to visit the market of Tarabuco. The market has the typical arts and crafts and Bolivian textiles, those colorful ones you see all over the world. Tarabuco is also a special village because it survived the Spanish invasion, and this very typical market is its cultural landmark.
And in each store, you can find a cholita and all the places sell wallets, sweatshirts, towels, suitcases, and everything else you can imagine. All these items always have that colorful and warm pattern! During the entire trip, we had not bought a thing, to avoid the added weight… but here, we made the exception.
We went through all the stores, chose what we liked the most, and did not thought much about the money. It was time to buy the gifts we would bring home!
We went back to one of the stores we had already visited to buy something else. The owner, who liked us or maybe because Mathieu rarely goes unnoticed, started a conversation with us.
Hipólito, the owner, was from Sucre and only went to that market from time to time. He was married to a cholita, Fabiana, and had to share the work with her because they also had a small street stall in Sucre where they sold typical arts and crafts. It was quite close to our hostel!
He invited us to visit him, and we promised we would!
We were about to leave his store when I had an idea… What if we helped them working on their street stall in Sucre?
He loved the idea and even added… “if you want, you can come with us because we are going to work on the farms. It is time to harvest the potatoes. The farm is far away from the city… but you could meet my family there!”
We did all that… plus a lot of other things with him and his indigenous family…
February 2018,
Patricia Assis
