Dinosaur Footprints , Ukchu Pacha Weaving
Trip Start
Sep 29, 2007
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100
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Trip End
Ongoing
Sucre,
Bolivia
Friday, March 28, 2008
The city is the market centre for a mountainous rural hinterland inhabited by Quecha speaking indigenous communities. These communities are particularly renowned for their beautiful weavings, considered amongst the finest in all the Andes. We visited the Museo de Arte Indigena which is housed in an elegant colonial building. The museum is a not for profit organisation which has been working with the Jalqá and the Tarabuco tribes to revive traditional weaving designs and techniques that had been dying out. The craft is now a source of income for hundreds of desperately poor families. The museum introduced the ethnic groups then explained the weaving techniques and described the plants used to make natural dyes. There were displays of wood and bone weaving tools and some ancient textile fragments. The main attraction was the weavings themselves that are brightly coloured, intricately designed and laden with a complex symbolism
LLama crossing
. They are works of great creativity that express a distinctively Andean artistic vision. I couldn´t go past buying a piece from the Jalqá tribe who live in the mountains west of Sucre. These designs are entirely figurative, eschewing symmetry and abstract geometry. The design which is mounted on fabric with wood is black and red in colour and depicts a kind of chaos filled with a plethora of strange beasts, animals with elongated bodies and multiple heads or eyes sprouting from their tails, birds with puma heads, alien beings, toads with wings etc. The couple of human figures that do appear on the weaving seem lost in this forest of supernatural animals. The meaning is ukchu pacha which means a mythological underworld of extroadinary and untamed creatures. The design was most likely inspired by a dream and i love it. The quality of the piece is exquisite and would have taken months to weave, the money goes directly to the artist who i have a photograph of. Simply beautiful work and aa abosolute treasure to send to Australia.
We also sat around the main plaza taking in the pace of Sucre whilst waiting for the ¨Dino Truck¨ which is really just a painted double decker bus with an open air top that tourists get around in for sight-seeing. The truck would take us out to see Cal Orko Dinosaur footprints
Narco Car wash
. There is quite alot expensive looking 4WD´s getting around and these are the type that the typical Bolivian wage could not afford. These guys would pull up at the side of the plaza so workers could wash and polish them for a small fee. Locals call them narco-cars because they all most likely belong to drug traffikers. We were harrassed constantly by vendors hawking fabrics and machine-made weavings. The ¨Dino Truck¨was very touristy and the driver of it drove like a maniac, the views were good though on the way out to the park. They even had some jurassic park inspired furry seats to sit on. From the top we saw some traffic police with the most hilarious little signs, on one side was a please stop for pedestrians notice and on the other side were yellow and black smiley faces. The fully kitted out like the military police would switch between the two sides and we had fun trying to snap them with their serious faces and little smiley signs.
Cal Orko is home to the world´s biggest known collection of dinosaur tracks which were only discovered in 1994. There were approximately 5000 prints from at least 4 different types of dinosaur. The prints were laid down between 65 and 85 million years ago on a flat bed of mud or sand covered by shallow water and were then covered by a protective layer of ash from a volcanic explosion. The prints were fossilized and so we were able to view them. We thought the prints looked fake however scientists have proven them to be the real deal. There were also some life-size replicas of dinosaurs which were very impressive. Yabba-Dabba-Dabba-Do!!!
