It was time to get out of La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. I had spent around a week there doing... well, basically nothing. Anita would head out to her Spanish lessons leaving me in bar eating breakfast. She would return in the afternoon where I would be in the bar eating lunch. Then after a shower and siesta she would come down to find me in the bar eating dinner. I had been suffering from travel lethargy by this point and I was very happy just taking some time out.
We took a bus from La Paz to the city of Cochabamba ,the jumping off point for the little visited National Park, Torotoro, 140 km south of the city. We disembarked at 12:30am in the middle of a road without a hostal booked and in a rather dodgy looking part of town. There seemed to be no official taxis in this city so we reluctantly took an unmarked one to various hostals in the guidebook. All were closed and as we were feeling uncomfortable roaming around this desolate city at such a late hour so we finally settled on the only place that seemed to be manned, a place called Hostal Malibu which had what can only be paralleled to asylum with creepy rooms off in an echoing and hollow corridors.
The following day we headed out through town to go in search of tours to Torotoro, on the way back through one of the markets I was happily and absentmindely ambling through the streets when suddenly a man grabbed me by the arm and said something hurredly and panicy in Spanish. Oh my god! I thought, he is mugging me!! My heart flipped... Actually turns out he was warning me that someone had opened my bag and was about to take my wallet, thankfully I had some crackers on top of my valuables so he didn´t manage to get anything. Thank god for crackers, I´ve said that more than once in Bolivia! A few minutes later huddled together I was walking behind Anita and saw that her rucksack had a slash right across the middle and all her stuff was hanging out. We were thoughroughly shaken by the experience and headed quickly back to the hostal to calm our nerves.
Anita in her ever positivity was determined to get to this national park now to make the trip to this town and such an awful experience worth it. The next day we headed not to the regular bus station, but to a collection of local, run down buses on a random road miles away. We were the only Gringos on the bus and we sat in our seats at the front of the bus, scrunched in on ourselves as we had our backpacks in front of us on the seats and Anita had bags of random grains and corn stuffed under her seat by a Bolivian woman who started shouting at her in spanish for taking her seat. A boy of about 14 was running up and down the corridor of the bus, through windows up to the top of the bus and jumping down again like a monkey strapping all sorts of goods for the ride to Torotoro. After ages of faffing, and around 2 hours after the scheduled departure time, we headed for Torotoro. Uncomfortable as we were in our cramped seats, in front of me was a woman of about 80 years old sitting on an upsidedown dustbin with her legs around her ears. Yes I confess I did not give up my seat and sat for seven hours feeling guilty and wondering in what horrible fashion karma would pay me back.
One thing with Bolivian buses, they don´t ever have toilets and we could never figure out how the locals could hold in their pee for so long. Between 5pm and 2am this bus stopped only once for a toilet break. The worst we had was 12 hours straight without stopping. Buses crowded of the full spectrum of ages from children to old people all with bladders like concrete dams, however Anita and I had to fall in line and surprisingly after a while we could hold ourselves without it bringing tears to our eyes. We arrived at 2am having been abruptly awoken from quite deep sleep and a lady greeted us freshfaced at the hostal saying she was waiting for us. I went to bed that night in complete nervousnous wondering if she was really who she said she was and clinging my Swiss Army Knife. Not that I could have done a single thing with it if someone decided to break in, except for telling them to wait while I try and open the correct flip for ´knife´and probably settling for the wine opener (since that was all I had used it for so far).
We were up at 7am the following day, collected by the renowed Torotoro guide Mario Jaldin, a timid skinny little old man with small kind eyes and a cheeky grin. It was the usual ridiculously greasy fried bread for breakfast then we started the walk into the park. Within a short time Mario was point to the ground to show us the footprints of a three toed dino, from the Spanish I understood it to be from a velosoraptor. The scenery soon opened up to sparse and yellowy scrubland with pretty undulating sedatary rock hills in the background rolling concentrically into the distance. We walked for around 2.5 hours and were shown various footprints of dinosaurs along the way, and everytime it fascinated us! We were the only people that were around for that entire time, which was peaceful and refreshing to be so away from the tourist trail where treks can sometimes feel like processions.
We arrived at the Humajalenta cave and Mario lit a flame on the front of his helmet. We were given hard hats and left our belongings at the entrance of the cave then started descending down, just us three still for miles around, above and below. What makes Bolivia so fun in many ways is its god-awful health and safety policies. Mario would hand us a rope and tell us to just climb down it, a drop of dozens of meters on one side, no ceremony or prep, just go for it, nevermind if you slip you might break your leg or neck. Cave Humajalenta is one of the longest and deepest caves in Bolivia so we spent a good hour going down 164 meters, sometimes opening out into vast, echoing caverns, sometimes funnelling to the smallest crevice where we had to shuffle on our belly to get through. At the bottom, still completely alone, we reached an underwater lake in the pitch dark that had fish swimming in it! I felt like Bilbo Baggins from the hobbit in search of the Ring and expected to have gollum creeping out of the shadows at any moment!
We spent an hour ascending, clambering over huge rocks, ducking under stalagmits and finally came out of the cave, squinting in the sunlight. It was incredible! The best was yet to come... we headed back to one of the dirt roads in the middle of the park and then three incredibly cool dirtbikes pulled up with hunky Bolivians driving them.. this was our ride back. I hopped on the back and then clinging for dear life, no helmet as usual, we sped off through the rolling dunes of the park, downhill, the wind in our hair, chucking dirt up and the mountains flowing past us in the distance. It was dangerous but thrilling!
After lunch and a siesta we headed out for a short walk just outside town where there were massive brotosaurus footprints! As cool as they were, the trip was cut short by a fierce thunder and rain storm that we could see fast approaching from the distance beyond the hills outside the village. We then had dinner at our guide Mario´s house, incredibly hospitable as his family was, then we were walked back home to our hostal by his dog, which was very sweet.
The next day we headed a different way in the national park toward the Gran Canon Torotoro. We saw some massive Brotosaurus footprints and from their structure and angle you could tell the movement the dinosaur had been doing and where he was walking - incredible! There were also some interesting natural bridges along the way and after about an hour we reached the Torotoro canyon. It totally took our breath away. The viewing platform went right out over the canyon and the sheer drop below was like the scenes from the Wile E Coyote cartoon when he would each time go plummeting to the bottom of the canyon after another failed attempt at catching Road Runner. Colourful parrots flew through in packs and we could see a flowing river way below running through the canyon. Once again we were the only tourists we had seen at all so far that day, which made the experience so much more special.
We descended down into the canyon to a fairly dry river bed, then did some rockhopping until we reached a lush oasis in the canyon where a subterranean waterfall flowed out in thin streams into the river. It had created tropical vegetation all over the walls of the canyon and beautiful isolated fresh water pools amoung the rocks with little rainbows catching in the sunlight. It really was like a little paradise and we froliced on our own amoung the various waterfalls for a good hour, totally isolated from the world.
Feeling refreshed, it was then back up the canyon again in the blazing heat, which was very tiring then we had a late lunch at Mario´s with animals of all sorts, dogs and puppies, cats and birds running around the yard. We then had your standard extremely salty Bolivian meal of reconstituted meat, rice, chips and a fried egg. Always a fried egg. It put Anita and I in a bit of a hysterical mood so we just sat at the table while our bodies attempted to process the salt giggling a lot and repeating the word "caka", which for some reason we found was hilarious as the Spanish word for ´cake´. It got even worse when an even more intense thunder storm than the day before descended upon us and all the electricity cut out. Still hysterical, we counted down from three in the door of the restaurant then legged it across in the pouring rain to our hostal, screaming at the fun of it all.
The following day we caught the bus at 6am back to Cochobamba. Even though I was tired I forced myself to stay awake as the scenery was the most beautiful I may have ever seen in my life. Low lying clouds floated amoung the hills and the deep yellows of the canyon started to come alive as the sun rose. Continuing through the countryside every colour on the spectrum existed in the scenery, the rich autumnal reds of the rocks, orange of the stones and yellows from scrubland, all kinds of green in the foliage, blues of the sky and the rivers across the plains, the purples of the flowers on the trees, and whites and browns in the chalky soil. This part of Bolivia is truly capitivating.
Arriving back in Cochobamba we wanted to get out of that city as fast a possible. We were also amazing that a place as beautiful as Torotoro could be such a short while away from a city as rough around the edges as Cochabamba. We then took a 5.30pm bus overnight east toward Santa Cruz.
