Que onda!

A little delay in uploading my thoughts here, but hey, it's Bolivian time now, right? It's Monday, and has been a week since I was restlessly shifting in the claustrophobia of the nightmare we tend to refer to as Miami International Airport. I feel as though a world of time and space has passed between then and now, especially as my 30 hour trip left me hardly any time in La Paz before a group of us set out on the Choro trek. When I separated from Chris, Sonja, Richie, and Carol in Miami to find my own flight to Lima, I felt as though this leg of the trip was my time to finally let go of any inhibitions I might have had over leaving my zone. Not necessarily a comfort zone, but what I had been getting used to at home after being away for nearly two years in Boulder. I tied up a lot of loose ends this summer and made some special connections, and while it was hard to tear myself away from that, it was certainly time for a new zone. I wrote pages of usually-but-not-always coherent thoughts and feelings, lost myself in between my headphones, and tried to picture what lay ahead of me. Planes, airports, sleeping on benches, dazedly sipping my first chicha morada at 5 am in Peru, it´s all pretty blurry now.
Getting into La Paz, I was struck by how cold it was. Der, Lex, it's winter, actually. Not something I had really planned for, having packed as my warmest article a North Face fleece. Got my shivers out and decided I would acclimate and not let the cold bother me. And it hasn´t really since. The shuttle that was supposed to pick me up and bring me to Hostal Republica, where everyone was staying, never showed up, so I hailed a friendly looking taxi driver and asked him in my hesitant Spanish if he could take me to where I needed to go. I guess my general vibe is that of naivety, so the 20 minute ride cost me $20 USD, but whatever. He dropped me off right near the square where the last vestiges of the TIPNIS protest I was soon to learn about were dying off, and I skirted armed military personnel and the presidential palaces, dying to get some film but probably rightly deciding it wasn´t quite the time. I promptly got lost traipsing up and down the steep streets looking for the hostel, loaded down with backpack (oh, was I about to learn about being loaded with backpack), but eventually found it, checked in, and after a freezing shower, almost started to worry about meeting up with my group. Bundled up in my fleece and beanie and adventured out into La Paz to the restaurant where they were supposedly eating, but either due to my inability to express what I wanted or the hostess' unwillingness to let random boyish-looking, nose-pierced girl into nice restaurant, did not end up finding them. We met up later though, and bless their hearts, the girls had bought food for me and rented camping gear. Eternally grateful, felt the team spirit right away and we all went to bed with mixed feelings of what was to come.
El Camino del Choro. Three days and two nights of the most incredible mountain spirits and tree songs that I have ever experienced. Saw the Southern hemisphere planetarium for the first time, blown away by the similarity to the stars at my home, in terms of clarity and spiritual power, but so different in terms of community and organization. Smiled at llamas, awed at lambs, watched birds soar in the vastness that were the Andean mountain valleys, and ran my fingers across moss, boulder, bark, and petal. For me, this backpacking trip wasn´t really about the physical feat or the infamy of having completed one of the 10 most intense treks in the world (or whatever it was), it was about simply being where I was, feeling the ancient power that the Andes hold and feeling humbled by the vastness and wisdom encapsulated in the peaks, tree trunks, and eyes of the villagers living there. Yeah, I got super sick the second night and will not be partaking of chorizo or quinoa for a good long time, and yeah, I flared up old injuries and blew out both my knees, but such things can be overlooked when thinking back to what a learning experience this trek was. Not learning of the researched or necessarily tangible, but learning experienced by the soul, captured only by sleeping under the Andean stars, listening to Aymara vernacular, and watching llamas scramble up a rocky hillside. And now we are here, in Coroico, simply taking in the new sounds, smells, daily way of doing things, and tentative smiles of the locals. I might not be able to walk down stairs without hating my joints, but I am able to be grateful and happy of the days that have passed and the days that are to come. And I am quite joyfully able to escape the confining world of facebook, phones, schedules, and stress over things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of life. Peace!