Three Days (Part 1)

---

The traveler stopped at the side of the road where a man wrapped in a heavy fleece and an aging hat pulled down low over his brow stood adjusting the straps of the bundle piled on the back of his pack mule.

"Buen día, Señor. Do you know the way to Bolivia?"

Not looking up, the man swung an arm out behind him. He pointed with a stubby, worn finger to the West. He then lifted his arm to not only point west - but up at a 45° angle to the tops of faded, hazy mountains in the distance. Pausing only to move a wad of coca leaves from the inside of one cheek to the other with his tongue, he responded, "There. Arriba."

We look at maps of the world and see two-dimensional sets of shapes. We tend to think of them as such. Mississippi is next to Alabama. Sudan is south of Egypt. Portugal is sandwiched in between Spain and the Atlantic. They all fit together in a flat jigsaw puzzle.

This is only partially an illusion. A nation really is two-dimensional. It is a virtual fabric woven of culture, laws, history, and ideas - a civic simulation running on a massive neural network made up of millions of human minds.

But reality itself is three-dimensional. The land is mountains and valleys, lakes and rivers, forests and deserts. It is oblivious to the national construct projected onto it. Like an enormous bed sheet, the cloth of the nation is draped over the land and conforms to its contours. The real and the simulation coexist. In places like Western Bolivia, the social fabric wears thin at high altitudes. It snags on trees. It catches on jagged peaks and volcanoes of over 6,500 m (21,000+ ft). It tears and becomes nearly meaningless. Here, the balance of the coexistence swings in favor of physical reality.

Western Bolivia is not next to you. It is not over there. It is up there. Above you.

The traveler rolled a cigarette of black tobacco, offered to the man in the low hat, and rolled another for himself. The man nodded in thanks and produced a long wooden match to light them. The two spoke softly for a few minutes while they smoked. Afterward, the man refilled the traveler's water skin from a large canteen slung over the back of the mule, and they parted ways.

The traveler made his way several yards toward the base of the mountains, stopped, and looked up once more.

For one brief moment, a single node in the network simulation faltered and dimmed as it beheld the Real.

Sorata

After a beautiful and slightly harrowing ride through narrow mountain passes, the micro arrives in the main square of the tiny town of Sorata.

Anna and I tumble out of the side door and stretch our legs.

"After that two-hour card game last night competing for the window seat, and you sleep most of the way?" I whine, stretching my hamstrings by bending over to touch my toes.
"Well you just had to have that second round of beers. I told you I can't drink!"
"But you're Polish!" I exclaim, and, after a pause, "And you live in Ireland!"
"And you suck at Yaniv."

Good point.

The driver lowers our packs down to us from the roof of the micro and we head across the plaza to where Lonely Planet says there is a nice place to stay. The air is a fresh change from the polution of La Paz and smells of evergreen. Along the way, I notice that the street is lined with several very nice SUV's. Strange. Sorata is inhabited by 5,000 people and can't possibly be a major center for finance and business. The average Bolivian doesn't own a vehicle - let alone one of these that would easily cost $20,000 in the States.

We find the Inn in the corner of the plaza. A man standing outside informs us that there is no availability. So we walk downhill out of the plaza along a road that is supposed to have a few hostels. Two of them tell us that they have no rooms.

"Looks like Lonely Planet lied about this not being overrun by tourists," I say as we walk further down.

At the third place, we get the same story. But this time, the guy running the hostel explains to us that the town's lodging is a little crowded because there is a large film crew here making a movie. That probably explains the SUV's. Fortunately, the man gives us the name of a hostel back in the square that will very likely have rooms. We puff our way up the hill and back into the main square.

We find the hostel, Panchita, and get a room. We drop our heavy junk to the floor and take a minute to organize a few things and rest from lugging all that gear around for half an hour. Then we return to the street for a quick lunch.

Stretched, cooled off, and no longer starving, we walk into the tiny tourism office just outside the main square. A mustached, bored looking man in a blue jogging suit and a baseball cap sits behind a desk with a huge map of the region spread out before him. At the back, a few younger men slouch in chairs. They sit silently and watch a TV set perched on top of a cabinet next to the door.

We ask about information for doing treks. The man switches off the TV with a small remote next to him and sits up in his chair. Using a dull pencil, he shows us Sorata on the detailed topographic map and shows us the various options for one, three, and up to ten-day hikes. He explains that each hike comes with a guide who knows the path and cooks meals. We can also rent a tent, sleeping bags, and bedrolls if needed.

It occurs to me that this isn't really a tourist information center - the guy is trying to sell us a hike outright. But that's what we wanted, and we definitely haven't seen anything else in town, so ok.

Anna and I have been assuming we would do a three-day hike. A one-day trek would be a bit wimpy. More than three is pushing it - Anna has to be in Bogotá in a few months to meet friends from Ireland, so she is getting pressed for time. Besides, I'm no Grizzly Adams. Ten days? See previous comments about showers and wine.

The three-day hike the man shows us looks rugged, but should be interesting. We would start here (around 2,500m (~8,200ft) and climb for a day and a half to around 5,080m (~16,600ft). Steep. Along the way we'd see pristine valleys, mountains, and lagoons.

After translating it all to Anna, we discuss it for a moment. Still decided on the three days, I ask him how much it will be. He takes a notebook from the far side of the desk and scrawls down a list of figures. He turns it around for us to see and explains the items. Base price plus the guide, a pack mule for carrying the gear and food, the food itself, a tent, and a sleeping bag and bedroll. The last two are for me since Anna already has her own from her hiking in Asian and New Zealand. At the bottom of the list we see the total - 1,500 Bolivianos. 750 Bolivianos each. This works out to exactly $100 each for the three days - less than $35 per day.

Anna shakes her head, "Imposible," she says in Spanish looking at the man with an apologetic expression. She is nearing the end of her year-long trip and is being careful with money. Ireland's job market has been hit by the current global economic crisis ('crisis' being a euphemism for idiotic, greed-driven screw-up), so she has to keep a contingency for when she gets back. I'm a bit more wreckless with my future, so the price is ok with me. Although to be fair, $35/day is almost three times what we've been spending so far in big Bolivian cities.

I explain the situation to him, and he thinks for a minute.
He writes down another number, "Ok, what we can do is take the cost of food out. One of us will go with you to the market and you can pick out the food yourself to your own budget."

The new number says 1,300 Bolivianos. I do the math in my head and translate to English again. Around $28 per day per person.

Anna thinks, and slowly shakes her head again, "No, I'm sorry, but that's just too much."

To put things into perspective, the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu (which requires an official guide by law) with a reputable agency costs around $400 per person. That's $100 a day. But again, to be fair, Inca Trailers are limited to only 500 per day, and the demand is astronomical due to its fame. So, they can afford to charge that much.

I'm getting nervous. I'd hate for us to have come here for nothing. I don't want to waste this guy's time, so I try a different approach.

"Ok, sorry, but I guess our situation won't work for that one. How much were the one-day hikes?"

The man starts to make a bunch of dizzying remarks about the mule, and the food, and tapping a few places on the map with the eraser of his pencil.

Huh?

He writes something else down and shows it to Anna. It now says 1,200 Bolivianos.

"100 Bolivianos is not much of a difference. No good," she says, "Ask him about the one-day trek again. I don't think he understood."

I ask again. He starts babbling again.

Before my retail, shopping-mall-trained brain can comprehend what is happening, Anna reaches across the table and snatches the notebook from the talking man's hands. She picks his pencil up off the desk and writes something below all the other figures. She replaces the notebook in front of him and looks at him with her eyebrows raised.

The man looks down at the notebook for a moment. He raises his right hand to rub his temple, lifting the ball cap up off of his balding head. He lets out a deep breath.

"Yeah, ok," he says in English.

Still in shock, I look at Anna, "What on Earth did you write?"
"800," she says with the ghost of a smile.

Triumphant, we give our information, pay, and agree to meet the guide here at 7 in the morning for our three-day trek into the Andes.

"Later, you're going to teach me the Polish anthem so that I can sing it in your honor over glasses of your country's finest vodka," I tell her as we walk out of the office.
"Yuck, vodka."
"...Are you sure you're not from Utah?"

Day One

By 6:45, Anna and I are standing outside the locked door of the tourist office waiting for our guide. The morning is cool and gray. We have just our daypacks with us stuffed with large bottles of water, sweaters, cameras, a few snacks, and coca leaves for the altitude that lies ahead.

Sorata is built on the side of a fairly steep mountain, with the main square close to the lower end. Three or four streets ascend from the plaza up the side of the mountain toward the residential neighborhoods. At just after 7, a short man of around 35 comes walking down the steps of the street in front of the office. He approaches us and smiles.

"You two are doing the three day hike?"
"Yep."
"Ok, I'm Sixto. I'll be your guide."

He opens the office to retrieve the food we bought at the market last night and some supplies.

"Ready? Let's go get the mule."

We trudge up the street to the top of the town. On the corner is an old, plain, concrete house of two stories. The house is surrounded by a crumbling adobe-style wall. Outside the wall, a few pigs wander around nosing through clumps of grass and grunt happily. Not far from them, a young goat stands and occasionally bleats.

Sixto opens the metal door fixed in the wall and invites us into the inner yard of his house.

The yard is cluttered with various work benches, planks of wood, propane tanks, and various supplies. At the rear corner next to the house, the wall has a large, curved chunk missing - as if a dinosaur bent down and took a big bite out of it. From the gap, we can see all of Sorata further down the mountain. Sixto asks us to wait and walks into the house to get some things. He comes back with his arms full of sleeping bags, bedrolls, a portable stove, and a few tents. His wife follows him with a large cloth tarp and his backpack. She smiles to us and we wish each other buenos dias. A little girl of about four years wanders out behind the two of them in a white nightgown. She looks up at us with a curious and intensely shy expression.

Speaking to each other softly in Quechua, the couple spread the tarp and begin piling all the supplies in the center in a pattern they know by heart. Anna hands him her sleeping bag and bedroll to be wedged into the mix.

All arranged, they stand. Sixto scratches his head.

"You have water?"
"Four liters total," I respond.
"Ok, that will last until tomorrow afternoon sometime," he says, not knowing that Anna drinks enough water every day to run Hoover Dam for a week. "After that there will be a river. Do you have purification tablets?"
"She does," pointing to Anna.
"Ok, no problem then."

He looks around another moment.

"Oh," he chuckles, "we may need fuel for the stove."

He steps over the corner of the tarp toward the house, momentarily cupping the back of his daughter's head in his large hand.

Once everything is in its place, the four corners of the tarp are brought together and tied in a tight knot. Sixto crouches down to lift it. I step forward to help from the other side, but he waves a dismissive hand.

The five of us file out the door and into the street.

On the other side of the walled house stands a mule tied to a post. Sixto's wife lays a few alpaca blankets over its back and he gently positions the bundle on top. He then runs a long rope a few times around it all and begins to tie it into place. The stubborn mule begins to hee-haw and shuffle about on his feet.

"Qué pasa? Carajo!" exclaims Sixto, momentarily abandoning Quechua.

Eventually the mule allows him to tie the pack down snugly. Tight is better for the mule's own comfort.

The husband and wife speak for a few minutes more. We wave goodbye to her and the small girl and the three of us plus the mule start heading up the dirt road toward the large cluster of mountains beyond the main edges of Sorata.

-

We follow the road for the first hour or so around the sides of a few mountains with an impressive view of the enormous valley below. Anna and I walk side by side ahead of Sixto, who leads the mule by a long rope. Occasionally, he stops to adjust the dial on the portable radio he has slung over his shoulder playing at a barely audible volume. The grumpy mule is sometimes reluctant to start moving again.

"Vamos!" complains Sixto.
"What's the mule's name?" I ask.
"Doesn't have one."
"Ok, I'll give him one. Cabrón."
Sixto responds with a short burst of laughter, "Cabrón!"

Sorry, not sure how to translate that for the Spanish impaired.

Eventually, we leave the road and descend down a faded footpath to a shallow, rapidly moving stream. We cross it with a narrow but sturdy bridge and begin a gentle ascent up the other side of the valley.

Along the way we pass through a small village of simple houses. Small plots next to the houses have just been plowed for subsistence crops for the growing season. A few cows and bulls stand around next to the path watching us, and the occasional chicken crosses in front of us leading a line of tiny chicks.

Once on the other side, we begin a steep climb up the mountain along a zigzagging footpath. It takes about an hour for us to reach the top, and Anna and I are completely out of breath by the time it's over. Sixto and Cabrón seem to barely notice.

At the top, we make our way across a flatter landscape and over to the base of the next climb. We drop our stuff and sit down on the soft grass for lunch. The view before us is breathtaking. The stream we crossed earlier runs down next to us, and the mule makes his way over to it for a long drink of water. We do likewise from plastic bottles. We slice up a few tomatoes with my knife, open a tin of tuna, and make sandwiches. For dessert, we have a few bananas. Then we just sit for a while, rest, and look down on the distance we have covered in the past few hours.

While resting, we hear the sound of a bleating lamb. We turn and see at least fifteen little lambs coming toward us followed by a sheep dog and a woman dressed in the now familiar traditional clothing. She carries a long, thin stick with which she occasionally smacks the rear of lagging lambs to keep them moving. Seeing the water, all the lambs start to bleat and cry, and scurry over to the stream to rehydrate. Afterward, many of them prance around and play. One of them sneaks up on the dog and bumps into him. Startled, he yelps and runs a few steps away. This won't look good on his next employee evaluation.

Needless to say, they are ridiculously cute. After several minutes, the woman and the dog round the lambs up and herd them back along a barely visible trail to whence they came.

Taking a cue, we get to our feet and begin another brutal climb that lasts 45 minutes. We plop down again for some water, a quick rest, and an even more spectacular view of everything below. We have already ascended about a kilometer to 3,500m (11,400+ft), and can feel it. It's nothing very intense, but I am running out of breath just a little bit faster than normal when climbing nonstop for a period of time.

I open my pack and pull out a large plastic bag of coca leaves. I offer some to Anna, and then Sixto.

"No, thanks," he says, looking at the bag. He doesn't need them.

I take a wad of them out pinched between my thumb and index finger, and begin stacking them neatly together. Sixto looks away to the view, but suddenly does a double-take back to the bulging bag of leaves.

"How much did you buy?" he asks, his eyes widening.
"Half a pound," I reply, folding the leaves over a few times to make a small, compact brick of them, "The snot-nosed kid in the shop wouldn't sell me any less."

Sixto laughs, and looks back out at the valley, shaking his head. I shove the leaves into my mouth.

"I know, I know...tourists," I say with a muffled voice as I position the wad in my right cheek. I take another swig of water to moisten them and we start walking again.

Rounding the mountain, we walk along it's long, deep side. We are still ascending, but the way is much easier as it is fairly gradual. The difficult part is comprehending the view on our left. We are walking along a sort of gorge between two sets of mountains. It is one of the few times in one's life where the scenery is so incredibly immense and so unexpectedly beautiful that it doesn't quite look real. Your retinas capture the light. Your brain processes the patterns. You see it. But your higher levels of consciousness analyze the image like a reconnaissance photo and say "Very nice, but that's not real. It's a painting or CGI or something."

The photographs are good, but our cameras are having an even tougher time assimilating the information. A two-dimensional, 8 megapixel representation just isn't going to cut it. Megapixel? Pathetic.

Current theoretical models on how memory and consciousness work describe the mind as a complex hierarchy. 99% of the time, sensory data comes in and is handled by the lowest levels as perfectly predictable and recognized bits and patterns - unconsciously. Recognizing an object as a truck, the smell of your bed, the tactile sensation of your own breathing go unnoticed unless you concentrate. Higher levels do much of the same, but with a little more involvement from your attention. Go see your 17th Adam Sandler movie and you'll remember the idea - but forget most of the jokes within a few days or weeks. At the very top of the hierarchy lies the hypothalamus - a mechanism reserved for the most novel of experiences. This is where truly new and impressive experiences are processed and pondered by your most acute levels of consciousness and subconsciousness - You. Experiments have shown that sensory information in the hypothalamus can linger for up to several weeks. This is why you remember your first day of a new job, but not the 74th day.

The image of this gorge will be stuck to the refrigerator door of my mind for quite some time.

At around 4pm, we reach a rocky outcrop at the end of the long gorge. We walk around to the right and start making our way up the gentle side. We reach the top and start heading back toward the rocks. Some ten yards away, we see a yellow tent with two men sitting outside of it with their guide. They shout out a hello. We wave and shout back. Aside from the woman sheppard at lunch, these are the only people we have seen all day since leaving the farming village.

A few minutes later, we see a lagoon on our right with a small jagged peak just beyond it. We turn to the left through a break in the rocks and into an open area for setting up camp. Anna and I crash down on our butts to drink some water and toss back handfuls of Muesli that I bought eons ago in Sucre.

"We made it," I sigh as we clunk plastic bottles together in a toast.
"Don't worry," says Sixto as he unties the bundle from Cabrón's back, "tomorrow will be much more difficult."
"Oh, good."

Sixto leads the mule back down to the edge of the water where he can graze and drink for the night while Anna and I begin to unpack the tents.

The three of us set up the two-person tent near the opening in the rocks away from the depression in the clearing. It might rain, so we don't want to be right in the center. Afterward, we help Sixto set his smaller tent up on the other side.

Anna goes into our tent to rest and delete bad and duplicate photos to make room on her camera's rapidly depleting memory. I would offer her one of my spare CF cards, but her camera is a Sony and uses the Memory Stick® cards.

Hey Sony®: Stop being jerks and do some reading up on Eli Whitney®.

While Anna struggles with her camera's proprietary hypothalamus, I stand outside chatting with Sixto. Like a lot of Andean people, he is a bit quiet and reserved with outsiders. But there isn't much else to do at a campsite but talk.

We're now at a little over 4,000 m (13,100+ ft). The temperature is dropping. Looking out over the rocky drop, I can see clouds directly in front of me. Sixto now has a wool hat pulled down over his head - the kind that have flaps to cover the ears and cheeks. Smart man. I pull a sweater over my thin long-sleeved shirt along with the modest fleece I bought in Chile. A moron by comparison; but my excuse is that I was living at the equator for eight months. Not a lot of Gore-Tex lying around.

"Ok, so what's the deal with the 'tourist information' office down there?" I ask. "It's not exactly a chamber of commerce program to help agencies - it is an agency."
He smiles, "There is a reason for that. About ten years ago there were two, maybe three agencies offering hikes to tourists. But since then, it has grown a lot. Until about two years ago, there were around ten agencies - each with a handful of guides. So it started really getting crazy. Prices kept going down because of too much competition. So less money came in, and that only hurts the town. Plus, we're a tiny community. We all know each other, you can't really have it that way. They don't want a dozen different people taking up shop space and being all flashy to get tourist attention. So the town voted to force them all to combine into one. So now there is just one entity that does the hikes, and they took the information office there in the square, and there are some 70 of us that do hikes."
"70? That's a lot."
"Yes, but we have other work. Obviously there aren't that many out here. Who does what trek at any given moment just depends on who is available from farming, or whatever else they do."
"How often do you do them?"
He thinks, "Personally, I'll do one maybe once a month. Depends on the time of year."

I walk over and stand on the edge of the rocks to look out at the scenery. The clouds are getting thicker as the temperature plummets. Within ten minutes, our small rocky area becomes an island. We are completely encased in clouds and surrounded in white. I can't even see the bright, yellow tent of the three guys just fifteen meters to my left.

Nothing else exists.

While Sixto begins to unpack and setup the stove for dinner, I crawl inside the tent next to Anna to lie down for a bit and rest.

"If there is enough light later, we can play cards," she says as she cycles through her plethora of photos.
"Ok, but not Yaniv. I need a break."
"Do you know any ghost stories?"
"Ghost stories?"
"Yeah, it's not camping unless you tell ghost stories. I want to hear some before going to sleep."
"Ok, I used to know hundreds. I'll try and think of some."

We relax in the tent while Sixto prepares everything for dinner and listens to Cumbia music on his portable radio.

"Soup!" he calls after about twenty minutes. We put our shoes back on and scramble out into the now very bitter cold. Sixto hands us bowls of hot tomato soup made from an envelope we bought yesterday. I don't think I've ever eaten tomato soup hot, but I'll eat anything hot at this point just to keep warm.

After the soup, I get my knife and Anna rummages around for her Swiss Army knife for cutting up tomato, cucumber, and onion for a simple sauce Sixto will make to go over the pasta he is boiling.

By the time we finish eating, it's around 7:30. The three of us agree that we'd prefer to get up at 6am tomorrow to get an early start. The cold is stacking itself up on top of our physical exhaustion, so everyone climbs into the tents for the night.

Anna shivers as we slide into our sleeping bags, "Don't be surprised if I end up right next to you later to keep warm."
"Won't be necessary. I'll probably just set myself on fire at some point."
"Ok, ghost stories!" she says, clapping her hands.
"Ok, but don't you dare wake me up in the middle of the night with nightmares."
"No, they actually help me sleep."
"You're weird."

Strategically positioning the bottomless bag of coca leaves inside my backpack to use it as a makeshift pillow, I take a deep breath and sift through the tattered scraps of stories in my head. I run through all the childhood standards, high school stories of Gravity Hills haunted by victims of Oklahoman race riots in the 1950's, and eventually end with a haunted house in the Brazilian rain forest.

We sleep.

---

Photos

Farming Village
Photo by Anna

Cabron
Cabron, the cranky mule

Cabron, Sixto, and his Portable Radio
Photo by Anna.
She takes fantastic photos of people.

Getting Ahead of Us
Photo by Anna