Takesi trek - Palca Canyon to Yannacachi
Trip Start
Jan 26, 2000
1
19
30
Trip End
Jun 14, 2000
La Paz,
Bolivia
Monday, May 1, 2000
We stopped for lunch in the town of Palca before continuing up another valley in search of a campsite for the night. It was Sunday and funny to see all the rich families of La Paz out in their 4WD (everyone we saw has a 4WD) and sat by the riverside eating their picnics.
We pitched our tent that night in a farmers field as Manny was suffering with the altitude and didn't really feel up to going any further. I was a bit concerned about this thinking the farmer wouldn't be too happy. This fear turned out to be unjustified and we ended up with half the local village walking past our tent that night and waving and laughing at us like we were royalty. The night was beautifully clear and not so cold and we spent most of the evening laying on our backs looking up at shooting stars, the milky way and the odd satellite as we discussed the meaning of life and put the world to rights. One of the great things I like about traveling. The next morning I paid a trip down to a stream to fill our pan up with water for the morning tea. I must have been half asleep because the strong current pulled my flashy teflon camping pan out of my hand and under a rock. We spent the next half hour prodding these rocks with some long branches we found. When this failed I decided to strip down to my undies and try the direct approach. I didn't last more than a minute wading in the freezing glacial melt water up to near my waist before I was completely numb and had to give up the search. A few of the locals who saw the performance certainly got value for money.
We left our camp at the perfect time, just as all the locals were walking their animals to the fields for grazing, so we spend our first hour walking along in a big convoy with them all. That day we had a big pass to negotiate, what was really special about this trail was a lot of it was over Inca paving built up to 700 years ago as part of the Incas communication network. Later that day after we descended into an Irish looking valley I saw the perfect photo opportunity, a herd of sheep wandering along the Inca paving with the mountains in the background. No sooner had my camera appeared then a Aymara woman appeared from behind a rock swinging a sling above her head with a big rock in it and shouting 'no photo', this seemed like a convincing argument to me and I soon put my camera away. The sling was actually used to round up the sheep, by throwing stones close to the sheep it was possible to make them run in the opposite direction, but the stones were landing rather too close to us for comfort.
An hour further down the trail we arrived at the village of Takesi, I was gob smacked, this village with its grey stoned housing and walling looked like it had stood still in time for the last 400 years. We had been told that we could stay on the floor of some building somewhere in this village and immediately decided it would be a great experience, the only problem was the village was deserted. After about a half an hour wait an old woman came hobbling across the fields from nowhere, so in my best Spanish I asked her where we could get a room, to which she replied 'I don't understand' and wandered off in the opposite direction, oh well she must have only spoken Aymara! Five minutes later and who should we see but the sling wielding lady coming down the hill towards us with all her sheep. We didn't have much choice so we shyly asked her if there was anywhere to sleep, to which she pointed us to the only new looking building in town. The house even had mortar between the stones and electric lights, but where did the electricity come from? A look around the house reveled solar panels and we found out later the building had been built by a German alpinist association.
A discussion with one of the locals later helped us divulge that only 6 people lived in the village even though there were over 20 houses. I wondered to myself if the sling lady had got her attitude toward foreigners because she thought that their presence with all their swanky clothes and gadgets had driven all the local people to leave the village for the cities and what they thought was a better life.
Day three and we just kept going down and down through a geographical area called the Yungas (the steep hills between the high altiplano and the lowland rain forest). We dropped from 4600m to 2000m again over a lot of Inca paving and it was amazing to see the light green sparsely vegetated land change to lush thick dark green forest full of banana trees and rubber trees. The temperature also changed from cold and dry to a sweaty humid heat. We eventually arrived in a gem of a town, Yannacachi. The town reminded me of what an old English village would have looked like 150 years ago (not that I knew what an old English village would have looked like then!) with old rustic houses all different colours, but all with only remnants of their paint remaining. All the housed were lined up in terracing which stretched the length of each block of thin streets, and there in the middle of the village was a picturesque main square with the church overlooking it.
That evening we went to the one local restaurant looking for a big after trek feed. We arrived only to be told the town had run out of meat and the next shipment wouldn't be arriving from La Paz until the next day. So that evening we had to make do with egg sandwiches, a plate of rice and of course a couple of cold ones to wash it all down.
