La Paz- part 3

We last left the story at the point at which the girls went to the bathroom and vowed to meet up with everyone soon.

Monday (just after midnight Sunday):

We walked in the direction of all the people and found the plaza. At the front of the large plaza was a stage with a band playing indigenous music and there were tons of vendors on the ground selling warm clothing, and just as many vendors with carts selling various hot food. The majority of people were Bolivian but there were also plenty of American and European 20 something hippie tourists. We found an alcove with stone benches and a bathroom, which we took turns using. After we put on all of our layers, we called the boys and within ten minutes Javi, one of the French Canadian girls named Ali, and Javi's two friends we'd met at the slides (who had said Saturday night that the Tiwanaku celebration was too cold and they weren't going to come) walked toward us and said they could take us to where the French Canadians had gathered.

We started following them toward the front of the plaza, and once we reached the stage on our right, we took a sharp left onto a path that lead to seemingly nowhere. When we asked where the French Canadians were, Javi's friend with the dreadlocks said that one of the Canadian's grandpa had a house here or something, and that's where they were. We walked down the path were there were no people and streetlights were sparse. Down the next path to our right there were no streetlights at all and we walked into an enormous field that can only be described as the end of civilization. I don't mean that as a joke, I mean, that straight ahead at the end of a field several miles long, were the dark outlines of mountain ridges. I can say with almost certainty that there were no more people out there. We quickly took a left and soon came upon a low mud wall and entered through a 4 foot tall "door." We passed by the shadow of what may have been a tiny room and behind this wall was where we found the French Canadians, and the Idiot, gathered around a fire. After failing to get them to join us at the celebration, we took our drinks and left them.

Sarah went off looking for anticucho "cow heart" and Maren, who had brought a hula hoop, began an impromptu performance that attracted a pretty large crowd. I even saw one person videotaping it. Apparently she is so good at hula hooping that she has a hula hoop that lights on fire! Javi's dreadlocked friend walked around with a hat and made about 12 bolivianos off of her. He gave most to Maren but kept some as his commission. We soon ran into the rest of the Sustainable Bolivia volunteers who had arrived in La Paz that morning and went straight to Tiwanaku. At this point they had all been there for over 12 hours and most of them just wanted to get on the first bus back to Cochabamba. Half an hour later, all the French Canadians showed up with the Idiot. Idiot was surprisingly quiet, and probably incredibly drunk, and he convinced Sarah to take him to find some food, and I didn't see him again until we found him asleep in the van the French Canadians had taken to get there, at 8:30am. We all decided to go back to the alcove (where we'd found the bathroom) to sit down, now that we had met up with everybody. As we walked over to the alcove, I was talking to Elizabeth and at some point I said the word "kiss" in a sentence. As I said "kiss" some Bolivian dude next to me said "kiss?!" After ignoring him, I finished my conversation. I grabbed onto the person in front of me to keep track of everyone, and I thought I felt Elizabeth grab onto my sleeping bag to keep track of me. It wasn't Elizabeth however, because she immediately grabbed my arm and yanked me to her other side. The only other person it could've been was the random dude that was following us. He followed us to the alcove with this big goofy grin and told this Sustainable Bolivia volunteer, Davy Jones, that he liked Americans. He tried to give everyone mints, which we all refused. After a 30 minute queue for the public bathroom (our secret bathroom was locked), Francesca (an Italian Sustainable Bolivia volunteer) and I returned to the alcove to find the random dude gone.

We decided to go dance with the crowd to keep warm, and somehow we'd dwindled down to me, Maren, Elizabeth, an 18 year old Korean French Canadian girl, Sarah, Francesca, and another Sustainable Bolivia volunteer Kim. We'd lost over half of our group again. It was 3:30am and Sarah asked us to wait right there so she could go to the bathroom. We knew it would be another half an hour or so, but they didn't open the gate to the ruins (where the actual sunrise celebration occured) until 4:00am, so we said no problem, "we'll be right here when you get back."

She never came back.

Just after 5:00am Maren told us to go ahead and she'd follow us in 15 minutes if Sarah didn't show up. We decided to head over to the gate to get our tickets into the ruins and hope that we met up with them later. Oh by the way, Sarah didn't have a phone, and the signal up in this town was horrible anyway. Once we bought our tickets, Elizabeth got an angry phone call from the head of the French Canadian group, looking for the Korean French Canadian girl. She had us leave this girl at the ticket booth until the French Canadians left their hut and met up with her. The frustrating part was that they were mad at her for splitting up, when all they were doing was sitting in a hut in the middle of a dark field of nothingness.

Now me, Elizabeth, Francesca, and Kim, continued on through the gate on a path lined with little fire pots. We joined a mass of people lined along a fence that surrounded the ruins. In the dark we couldn't see the ruins at all, but there were two huge lights turned to face us that effectively blinded us when we looked toward the Incan ruins. The lights were in the fenced in area next to cameramen, reporters, and a couple of indigenous women. We sat down amongst the standing crowd and dozed for a few minutes until Kim thought she saw something happening around 6:00am. It was a false alarm but we remained standing waiting for sunrise. As the sky started to lighten, everyone realized that the huge lights could ruin the effect we were all waiting for. Shouts of "apagan las luces!!" (Turn off the lights!) occurred every now and then for over an hour. Around this time we looked over and saw Davy Jones standing about 10 feet away from us. He'd been there the entire time we had been, but we couldn't move closer to him because of the crowd. Around 7:15am I started to wonder what counts as sunrise..because the sky was very light already, but there was no sun in sight. The sky was also very cloudy and blocked most of the sky. The President, Evo Morales (who is the first indigenous president of Bolivia and who made this Aymara new year celebration a national holiday this year), came and joined in the ceremony, which involved standing upon one of the ruins tossing things into a fire. A band played the national anthem and around 7:45 we decided this counted as sunrise and we left the crowd. As soon as we got out of the crowd Francesca and Kim found the rest of the Sustainable Bolivia people they'd come with, and they all left. Elizabeth and I still needed to at least find Maren so we could get back to Javi's house, where all of our things were. As we waited at the gate, the sun peeked out from behind a cloud, and everyone in sight put their hands up to form a triangle around the sun. (This is what is supposed to happen when the sun peaks over the horizon, but we missed that due to the clouds). We waited at the gate for 20 minutes or so and at this point the French Canadians passed us, having lost Ali, and then a minute later Maren, Javi, and Ali walked up to us. We all walked back to the van that the French Canadians had taken to get to the festival, and there we found Idiot asleep across one seat, and Sarah asleep across another seat.

As Sarah got out of the car, the dog that I mentioned in "La Paz- part 2" jumped out of the car and trotted off. Javi chased after the dog, and the 3 girls I'd come with (plus Idiot) found a taxi van and headed back down to La Paz. In the car we found out where Sarah (my roommate) had been all night. She said that after she went to the bathroom she decided to start walking. She showed us from the van where she'd been, and it was about 5 miles from the celebration, on a highway road with no streetlights in the middle of nowhere. She said she liked being out where no one else was, where she screamed and cried and "it was amazing because no one could hear me." She explained that no cars would stop for her, and that eventually she caught a taxi trufi that took her back to the city. She recognized a sign and found the van, got in without seeing idiot, and went to sleep. When I pointed out that she could've been hurt during this excursion, disregarding the fact that we'd waited an hour and a half for her to return from the bathroom, she replied "yeah I was lucky, but lots of stuff can happen at any time." She is sort of like Luna Lovegood; sweet, oblivious, and a bit eccentric.

As we lowered our elevation returning to La Paz, and as we got closer to noon, the van got ridiculously hot. I was famished and ate 3 packages of Chips Ahoy cookies, which came out to 12 cookies. I stripped off my coat and sweatshirt, but I still had 4 pairs of pants, 3 layers on top, a hat I refused to take off for fear of what my hair looked like, and two pairs of warm socks on when we got out of the car to climb up to Javi's apartment. Idiot helped me roll up my sleeping bag and offered to help carry it, which at this point I was more than willing to let him do. I took back my sleeping bag when Elizabeth and I stopped to pick up some yogurt, and we finally got back to the apartment, an inch away from heat stroke, to shower and eat our yogurt. I tried to roll up the sleeping bag and put it in its bag, and to do this I took it into the living room which was empty but for the Idiot.

I saw him out of the corner of my eye watching me attempt to stuff this thing into it's bag. It had taken the store owners 20 minutes to do this when I bought it, so I didn't have high hopes that I'd be able to. As the bag ripped as I stuffed the sleeping bag inside it, I looked up at the Idiot, who winked at me. I couldn't decide if I was amused..or just creeped out. I think it was both. Javi's dad Gaston ended up showing the Idiot how to get home or something, because they both left. Javi and the French Canadians returned soon after this, having found the escaped dog in a field. Javi's mom served us soup and rice with chicken and vegetables for lunch. After some soccer viewing and a rest, we headed to the train station and caught a 4:00pm train due into Cochabamba at 11:00pm. On the train I realized I'm missed father's day and frantically tried to send apology texts to Dad and Daddy Greg. Surprisingly, there is no signal in the Bolivian mountains.

I went to sleep Monday night with a sore throat and a stuffy nose, reminiscing of the unfair beauty of the obnoxious Idiot.

And so ends the saga of La Paz and the Aymara New Year/Winter Solstice celebration!!

I had a really good time and am so glad I made that last minute decision. The cold I got was worth seeing La Paz, meeting more people, and having a great adventure. And I'm finally caught up on sleep!

Besos,

Hillary