Bolivia
April 5, 2015
My last trip while I lived in Paraguay was to our neighbor to the north, Bolivia. To be honest, Bolivia wasn't a place I'd ever spent much time thinking about. As I met other travelers, though, and my fellow teachers started venturing there on breaks, I realized I was missing out. For Easter week (semana Santa), I went there with 2 other teachers.
Bolivia is truly magical.
Part 1: Trekking
So you may or may not know that La Paz, at 12,000 feet above sea level, is the highest capital city in the world. Asuncion is 141 feet above sea level. This will be important soon in our story.
The two other teachers I traveled with are quite outdoorsy and active. One has even climbed Mount Kilimanjaro! We decided to do some hiking to start our trip. Unfortunately, due to a really wacky election law, NO vehicles of any kind are allowed on the road on election day, which was our first full day in Bolivia. So we really needed to be at our hiking destination by then, giving us basically no time to acclimate from sea level. We all knew it wasn't ideal but it was the only way we were going to get to all of our "must do" spots. Long story short, we were picked up from the airport in La Paz in the morning, stopped for some supplies, and drove to an even higher elevation-I'd guess between 13,000 and 14,000 feet-to start our hike.
It was stunning. After being in flat Paraguay, it was great to be back in the mountains hiking. We had a guide,and a woman with 4 mules accompanying us so we didn't have to carry too much, which is good. Hiking was hard work! We went over a pass that was 4900 meters high (over 16,000 feet-way higher than I've been before in Colorado! Then we went down a little bit and set up camp at a beautiful lake at 15,700 feet.
The reason I keep bringing up the altitude is one of us ended up getting pretty severe altitude sickness. We had dinner and spent the night (IT WAS FREEZING!), hoping she'd feel better in the morning, but it just wasn't happening-she was miserable. We had a powwow in the morning and decided we needed to tell the guide we had to go back. At first he didn't want to-probably because he thought we would want our money back and they'd already bought all the supplies. We reassured him (all this happened in Spanish, by the way) that we were not worried about that, we just needed to get our friend to a lower elevation so she could start feeling better. The second reason was the driver had dropped us off and left, and our guide Felix couldn't get cell reception until he was back up on the ridge. He eventually did reach him though, and we started heading back. It was still an absolutely gorgeous hike and night in the wilderness. We didn't see a single soul outside of our group while we were hiking.
Once we got back to where we started, we had to wait an hour or two for the driver. We rested, soaked up the sun, and ate some food they fixed for us.
My last trip while I lived in Paraguay was to our neighbor to the north, Bolivia. To be honest, Bolivia wasn't a place I'd ever spent much time thinking about. As I met other travelers, though, and my fellow teachers started venturing there on breaks, I realized I was missing out. For Easter week (semana Santa), I went there with 2 other teachers.
Bolivia is truly magical.
Part 1: Trekking
The two other teachers I traveled with are quite outdoorsy and active. One has even climbed Mount Kilimanjaro! We decided to do some hiking to start our trip. Unfortunately, due to a really wacky election law, NO vehicles of any kind are allowed on the road on election day, which was our first full day in Bolivia. So we really needed to be at our hiking destination by then, giving us basically no time to acclimate from sea level. We all knew it wasn't ideal but it was the only way we were going to get to all of our "must do" spots. Long story short, we were picked up from the airport in La Paz in the morning, stopped for some supplies, and drove to an even higher elevation-I'd guess between 13,000 and 14,000 feet-to start our hike.
It was stunning. After being in flat Paraguay, it was great to be back in the mountains hiking. We had a guide,and a woman with 4 mules accompanying us so we didn't have to carry too much, which is good. Hiking was hard work! We went over a pass that was 4900 meters high (over 16,000 feet-way higher than I've been before in Colorado! Then we went down a little bit and set up camp at a beautiful lake at 15,700 feet.
The reason I keep bringing up the altitude is one of us ended up getting pretty severe altitude sickness. We had dinner and spent the night (IT WAS FREEZING!), hoping she'd feel better in the morning, but it just wasn't happening-she was miserable. We had a powwow in the morning and decided we needed to tell the guide we had to go back. At first he didn't want to-probably because he thought we would want our money back and they'd already bought all the supplies. We reassured him (all this happened in Spanish, by the way) that we were not worried about that, we just needed to get our friend to a lower elevation so she could start feeling better. The second reason was the driver had dropped us off and left, and our guide Felix couldn't get cell reception until he was back up on the ridge. He eventually did reach him though, and we started heading back. It was still an absolutely gorgeous hike and night in the wilderness. We didn't see a single soul outside of our group while we were hiking. Once we got back to where we started, we had to wait an hour or two for the driver. We rested, soaked up the sun, and ate some food they fixed for us.
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| This is where we camped-at 15,700 feet |
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