Choro Trek

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Here´s the description of the Choro Trek hike:

I´ll start with introducing my hiking partner. His name is Sebastian, he´s 28, German and is doing his final internship in Bolivia before graduating with an civil engineering degree. He´s been in Bolivia for a bit more than 3 month now and his Spanish is already really good. Hopefully I´ll do just as well. For that we only knew each other for a few hours before we decided to go on this hike together, we got along really well.

The night before we left, we packed our backpacks, stored everything we weren´t gonna bring in the hostel locker and then went out for a big dinner and some drinks - already in our hiking gear, including boots and everything. Early in the morning we caught a taxi to Calle Fatima where we got a bus to La Cumbre, the location of the trail head. At La Cumbre we signed in at the registration hut. In the summer (rainy season) a handful of people, maximum, do the trail per day, compared to an average of 50 in the winter.

The first hour we had to climb uphill on a snow covered trail. This must have been one of the toughest stretches of the trail. Partially because of the altitute (4,850 at the high point) and our heavy backpacks. We started out with food for 3 days and 4 liters of water each. After a while we got tired of carrying so much water and started to fill up our bottles in the river so that we only had to carry 1 liter at a time.

After about half an hour another hiker, an Argentinain called Sebastian as well, caught up with us and stayed with us for the next 1 1/2 days or so. He was the only other hiker we met during the whole trip. The rest of the hike was mostly downhill with some minor uphill stretches once in a while. The first day it pretty much rained constantly and the trail was quite slippery at times, which made walking very tiring. The rest of the time it was mostly cloudy but hardly rained at all.The first night we camped at a tiny village and the second night we slept on a suspension bridge (so much fun!!!) since it got dark before we reached an official camping site. We crossed many rivers and passed many waterfalls, which was to our advantage since it gave us the chance to wash all the dirt and sweat off our bodies - thank goodness! I have to admit that it was very tough at times, you can almost call it torture! ;-). We all got plently of blisters and our legs were so sore that it really hurt when first getting up in the morning. But it was so worth it. The landscape was so incredibly gorgeous that it made up for everything.

I put some pictures up this time. I have many more but since it takes forever to upload them I´ll leave it at that for now.

After we finished the trail, we took a taxi to Coroico (a beautiful little town), which was another adventure. First they didn´t have telephone reception to call a taxi at the village where the trail ended, then part of the road was flooded and we had to take a long detour. Finally at Coroice we were able to relax at a beautiful Ecolodge. Unfortunatly I got sick from the food and had to throw up and all the other fun stuff associated with it. Also, we got a ton of mosquito and sandfly bites, despite using mosquite repellent. In Chapare it will be similar I assume, just that there they may not just iche but also transmit Malaria.

Sorry if this blog reads a bit chaotic, I´m still a bit under the weather, but getting better.............

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Comments

[anonymous]

Wow! Thanks for the report, that sounds extremely nice (and also challenging). Good job. The highlight is the tent on the bridge, but all other pictures are great as well. So beautiful scenery. Que lindo... (Do they say this in Bolivia as well?). By the way, I hope you filtered/bleached the water from the streams ...at least when you were in lower altitudes.

[Leini]

Si, creo que puede decir ¨Que lindo¨ en Bolivia tambien.