In the Mountains of Bolivia

8/19/2019 In the Mountains of Bolivia

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In the Mountains of Bolivia,Encounters With Magic

A trek through Bolivia’s dramatic Cordillera de los Frailes reveals

the fantastical culture and art of the indigenous Jalq’a people.

Explorer

By MICHAEL BENANAV MARCH 23, 2016

With a face as creased as a walnut shell and a smile as gleeful as it was toothless,

98-year-old Augustina Lamagril welcomed us into the small shop inside her adobe

home. Rickety wooden shelves were stocked with sardines, cigarettes, beer, soda,

kitchen utensils, light bulbs and other household goods. Beneath posters of the

V irgin Mary and baby Jesus, two metal-framed beds were heaped with blankets.

From the ceiling — rice sacks that had been stapled together — the corpses of

hummingbirds dangled from strings, drying.

In addition to being one of the few storekeepers in the village of Chaunaca,

Augustina is one of the most highly regarded curanderas, or traditional healers, in

the Cordillera de los Frailes, a serrated sub-range of the Andes in south-central

Bolivia. Despite her remote location, the ill and the injured make their way to her

door, traveling for hours or even days to get there. The dead birds were part of her

natural pharmacy.

My girlfriend, Kelly; our 9-year-old son, Luke; and I, along with our guide and

translator, Rogelio Mamani, were invited to sit on low stools. As a black and white

cat padded around our feet, Augustina explained the uses of the plants and animal

parts that she kept around the house. Speaking in Quechua, she said aloe was good

for throat problems; rosemary could heal bones; rue was prescribed “when the

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wind makes you sick.” She held out an enamel pot half-full with beige powder — a

combination of black corn, barley, wild herbs, frog and owl parts and bat blood.

“Three drops of bat blood,” she said, “can cure heart problems.”

None of us required treatment, so we left the shop with bottles of water, a wool

hat knit by Augustina, and a sense that we’d been very lucky to have had this

encounter with a master of the old ways.

Chaunaca is on a well-established trekking route through the Cordillera de los

Frailes, a jumbled geologic mass that rises just west of Sucre, Bolivia’s official

capital, best known for its whitewashed Spanish colonial neighborhoods and

universities. Though the edge of the mountains can be reached from the city in

about an hour, the villages within them feel worlds away.

The scenery would have been enough to draw me to the cordillera, with its

upthrust layers of multicolored sedimentary rock set around a crater that’s

encircled by rugged river canyons. But I was equally intrigued by the indigenous

Jalq’a people who live there and who are known for intricate weavings that

represent a fantastical underworld filled with spirits and mythical animals. In the

same way that a place like Varanasi exudes a distinctly Hindu aura, and Cairo is

palpably Islamic, I wondered how it would feel to be in a place where the culture is

strongly associated with strange, subterranean dreamscapes.

Though I’ve trekked alone in remote regions around the world, I decided to go

into the cordillera with a guide. If I hoped to talk to local people, I would need help

from someone fluent in Quechua, the area’s native language. Additionally, I had

heard that some Jalq’a were extremely reluctant to be photographed (I met one

French couple who had stones thrown at them when they aimed their cameras at

people), and I figured I would have a better chance of shooting pictures without

upsetting anyone if I was accompanied by a guide who had local connections. It

also sounded as if walking the entire route with a backpack would be a daunting

prospect for a 9-year-old, so I wanted vehicle support.

When I asked around about trekking companies in Sucre, travelers and locals

alike pointed me in the same direction: Condor Trekkers. Their guides were

reputed to be top-notch, and the company’s profits support projects in the

cordillera communities. To me, this meant that not only would my money be

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helping the villagers, but that the guides were likely to have positive relationships

with them.

I found the Condor Trekkers office inside the Condor Cafe, a restaurant run by

the by the same nonprofit that is a magnet for travelers to Sucre, thanks to its

cheap and delicious vegetarian food. There, I met the director, Alan Flores. After he

described the standard two-, three- and four-day treks that Condor offers, wedecided that none of them were right for us. With typical days involving eight or

nine hours of strenuous hiking, Alan agreed that it would be no fun for my son.

Additionally, I wanted to add an extra day to the four-day itinerary, so we could

stay two nights in one place.

Alan said it would be no problem — just a bit more expensive — to be

accompanied by a vehicle, reducing our hiking to about three or four hours a day

and eliminating the need to carry our backpacks.

In early November, Rogelio met us at our hostel in Sucre, along with our

driver, Luis Ibarra, known as Lucho, who was behind the wheel of a green

Mitsubishi Montero. Rogelio was born in a village in the cordillera, and is Jalq’a

himself. He was studying tourism, English and French in Sucre, and was Condor’s

most experienced guide, having been with the company since it started in 2008.

Before we hit the trail, we stopped at a roadside stand to pick up bags of cocaleaves. A mild natural stimulant that’s normally chewed or brewed as tea, and from

which cocaine is derived, it’s considered to be a gift from the Inca sun god, Inti,

and is the essential social currency of the region. “With coca, anything is possible,”

Rogelio said.

We turned off the highway and followed a dirt road into the mountains,

through pungent groves of pine and eucalyptus, until we reached a place called

Chataquila, where a church sits atop the eastern ridge of the cordillera, at 11,800

feet above sea level. It was there, in 1781, that Tomas Katari, the leader of an

indigenous rebellion against Spanish rule, was executed, adding to the spiritual

and emotional potency of an important place of pilgrimage.

Local people flock there in August to make offerings of coca leaves, incense

and alcohol to Pachamama — mother earth, in Andean religions — in a shrine

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dedicated to the Virgin Mary. “We believe that if you feed Pachamama, she will

feed you,” Rogelio explained.

From there, we began hiking into the heart of the cordillera, down the so-

called Inca Trail, which is believed to have been built about 550 years ago (though

may be much older) and was used during pre-Hispanic times for communication

and trade. Paved with smooth stones, it descends some 2,300 feet, switchbackingdown rocky slopes speckled with cactuses and shrubby trees, into the Rio Ravelo

canyon. Skies were sunny, and temperatures were in the upper 70s.

In two hours, we reached Chaunaca. A patchwork of fields — some blanketed

with purple potato flowers, others sprouting young corn stalks, and many barren

and brown, waiting to be planted — terraced the hills and spread out on a plateau

that overlooked the river about 25 feet below. Most of the villagers were

campesinos, working small family plots, perhaps keeping goats and sheep along with rabbits, guinea pigs and cows.

After lunch at a nearby waterfall and an exploration of the grounds of a

magnificently derelict adobe hacienda once owned by the 26th president of Bolivia,

Gregorio Pacheco, we checked on a new project that Condor Trekkers was funding.

Three men were trying to hoist one end of a black polyethylene pipe from the

riverbank up to the plateau. Their goal was to span the canyon with a drinking

water line that would run from the main village to households across the gorge.

“The families over there haul their water from the river, and sometimes it makes

them sick,” said Benigno Romero, one of the workers, who also happened to be

Chaunaca’s mayor.

Condor bought the materials and the village supplied volunteer labor; other

crews would dig a trench to the village’s main well and lay the pipe to the homes

that needed water. Mr. Romero explained that being mayor was also an unpaid

position, and that he saw it as a privilege. Jalq’a people, he said, work together for

the good of the whole, and would not expect payment for doing so. It was just part

of life.

We spent the night in a community-run tourist cabana, several of which have been

built in villages in the cordillera. All are variations on a theme: whitewashed stone

walls, ceilings of wood and bamboo, liberal amounts of dust and dirt, and

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bathrooms with a variety of plumbing problems, but comfortable enough, and

equipped with simple kitchens. Rogelio proved to be an enthusiastic and talented

cook, improvising recipes around pasta, potatoes or quinoa.

The next day, a combination of hiking and driving brought us to the village of

Potolo, set in an undulating, Martian-red landscape at the base of a sharply hewed

massif. One of the largest towns in the cordillera, Potolo is well-known for the weavings that women produce there.

Jalq’a weavings, called axsus, are made from sheep wool dyed black and red.

In fact, the word Jalq’a means “two colors,” in reference to this distinctive palette.

Few details are known about the evolution of Jalq’a weaving over the ages, but it’s

clear that it was first used to decorate clothing before the idea of making tapestries

took hold in the 1990s, when a Sucre-based nonprofit called Anthropologists of the

Southern Andes (ASUR) began a program to revitalize Jalq’a textile traditions, which were on the verge of disappearing. It’s also known that, over the last few

centuries, ancient geometric patterns were supplanted by representations of a

psychedelic spiritual underworld called Ukhu Pacha.

Swirling chaotically across the tapestries, animals with wildly exaggerated

features are shown alongside mythical creatures called khurus, which include

hunchback dragons and griffin-like bird-things. Within larger animals, smaller

animals — called uñas, or offspring — are woven, but earthly laws of biology don’t

apply: Condors can give birth to cats, monsters can give birth to men.

According to the anthropologist Veronica Cereceda, the founder of ASUR, the

Jalq’a believe that Ukhu Pacha is the locus of the world’s primordial creative

energy, “a space of constant gestation of life,” which may stay in the underworld, or

emerge into the surface world (Kay Pacha) or the sky (Janaq Pacha).

The ruler of Ukhu Pacha, who is often woven into the axsus, is a powerful

spirit called Saxra or Supay. Often equated with the devil because of the location of

his realm, Saxra is not evil, though he does have demonic aspects, derived in part

from the fusion of Catholic ideas of hell with ancient Andean beliefs. If Saxra goes

unappeased, he may kidnap people and bring them down to the underworld or

cause mining accidents or other disasters. If the proper offerings are made —

typically coca, liquor and cigarettes — Saxra can show people where to find silver

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and gold.

Though the underworld is a ubiquitous feature of the indigenous Andean

cosmovision, the Jalq’a are the only people in Bolivia who depict it in their art. I

was curious to talk to some of the weavers, so Rogelio led us to the homes of a few,

including Juliana Choque, who looked to be about 30. She set her simple loom up

against the wall of her adobe courtyard and began weaving finely spun yarnthrough the strands of the warp, adding to an axsu that was nearly finished. Ukha

Pacha was taking shape before our eyes, and the effect was magical.

Juliana said that she had been taught to weave when she was 9 by her mother,

who had learned her craft in workshops organized by ASUR in the early 1990s.

While the motifs she works with are traditional, each design is unique, a product of

her imagination.

Like other weavers I spoke with on the trip, Juliana said that, for her, weaving

is not a spiritual act, it’s a purely artistic, and economic, one. There’s little doubt

that the resurgence in Jalq’a weaving in recent decades owes much to the money

that women earn from it.

If you’re interested in buying any weavings, as we did from Juliana (paying

900 Bolivianos — about $132 — for a medium-size piece), visit shops in Sucre

before heading to the cordillera, to get a sense of what high-quality work and fairprices look like. A nonprofit cooperative of indigenous weavers called Inca Pallay

runs a shop a block off Sucre’s main plaza, offering Jalq’a axsus and other regional

textiles, as does the shop at ASUR’s excellent Museo de Arte Indigena.

After a night at Potolo’s tourist cabana, we set off for the village of Maragua,

driving, then walking, then driving again. We hiked past dinosaur footprints, laid

down some 65 million years ago by sharp-toed carnivores and round-soled

herbivores, and Luke thrust his hands into the tracks with wonder.

It wasn’t hard to picture dinosaurs in the surrealistic setting that we were

trekking through, with its layers of purple and green rock and oddly shaped

boulders that seemed to have fallen from the sky. Even a khuru wouldn’t have

seemed out of place, and the Jalq’as say that they may be seen when one is alone in

a mountain mist, or in the crepuscular light of dusk or dawn.

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To reach Maragua, a small farming community, we climbed to the top of a

ridge, then dropped down into a bowl-like crater formed by an unusual

combination of geologic uplift and erosion. Garnet-colored earth covers the floor of

the crater, which is ringed by pale chartreuse walls with arched tops that resemble

a series of massive flower petals — imagine a giant greenish-yellow daisy with a

dark red center.

Since we had planned our extra day for Maragua, we had time to explore and

visit with locals, including a self-taught historian named Crispin Ventura. In the

modest museum that he runs in an adobe shed, he explained that since Maragua is

set inside a crater, it’s thought to have a special association with the underworld,

and he told tales of people who’d had encounters with Saxra and the khurus. With

these legends fresh in my mind, it was easy to imagine that a nearby cave, the

Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), which looks like an open, toothy mouth,

might actually swallow anyone foolish enough to sleep there.

Rogelio also introduced us to the more earthly side of life in Maragua. We had

breakfast at the home of Victoria Cruz, who taught Luke how to make buñuelos —

Bolivian doughnuts — over a fire in a soot-covered, chimney-less room.

Later, we helped a family plant its potato crop. Following a pair of bullocks

that pulled a wooden plow, a couple of the women dropped seed potatoes in the

furrows, which the rest of us covered with manure. Though they had never worked

their fields with foreign travelers, we quickly settled into a comfortable rapport

and, as soon as Rogelio told them that he would bring them prints of my pictures,

they were happy to be photographed.

We took several breaks to reload our cheeks with coca and to drink chicha,

sprinkling fermented corn alcohol over the ground as an offering to Pachamama. It

seemed as if our gifts had been received: A pregnant spider scurrying over a freshly

planted row was seen as a sign of fertility, and an omen of a good harvest.

IF YOU GO

The best time to visit the Cordillera de los Frailes is during the dry season,

from late April to mid-November.


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Hiring a Guide

Condor Trekkers can be reached by email ([email protected],

condortrekkers.org); phone (591-728-91740); or in person at Condor Cafe, 102

Calle Calvo, in Sucre, Bolivia.

Standard two, three and four-day treks cost from 500 to 750 bolivianos ($70

to $113) per person, which includes food, guide, lodging and transportation. For

our customized five-day trek with vehicle support, we paid 1,400 bolivianos per

person.

Where to Stay

Staying in Sucre, we liked La Dolce Vita (dolcevitasucre.com), where room

rates range from 60 to 210 bolivianos.

Tourist cabanas, for visitors without a guide, are 60 bolivianos a night per

person.

Correction: March 24, 2016

An earlier version of this article repeatedly rendered the name of an indigenous people

incorrectly. As accompanying captions correctly noted, they are the Jalq’a, not the

Jal’qa.

Michael Benanav is the author of three books and founder of the nonprofit Traditional

Cultures Project.

A version of this article appears in print on March 27, 2016, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the

headline: Hiking in the Home of the Spirits.

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In the Mountains of Bolivia