In the Mountains of Bolivia, Encounters With Magic
March 23, 2016 -NYTimes
A trek through Bolivia's dramatic Cordillera de los Frailes reveals the fantastical culture and art of the indigenous Jalq'a people.
By MICHAEL BENANAV
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 Virgin 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 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 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, we decided 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 coca leaves. 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 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, switchbacking down 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 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 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 yarn through 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 fair prices 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.
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.