Circuito Illampu

: My main interest in going to Bolivia had been to climb Huayna Potosí and to do a couple things around La Paz like watching the Cholitas wrestling and riding on the Teleférico, but those things only take a total of like 3 days to do and I thought the distance between Chicago and Bolivia was too great and too costly to only stay for such a short period of time. As such, I began looking for another hike I could do that would be about 6 or 7-days-long to help me get acclimated to the high altitude so I’d be well-prepared for the 6088m summit of Huayna Potosí. The Circuito Illampu is what I ended up deciding on, but had no interest in doing it solo. So, in order to find a guide, I sent a whatsapp message to one of the lodges in Sorata (a place called Altai Oasis Lodge) and asked them if there was anyone they could put me in contact with. They said yes and passed me the info of a local guy named Eduardo Chura who I then sent a message to and began a dialogue with. I’m not sure how accurate this is or how closely we ended up following this itinerary, but what Eduardo suggested to me looked like this: Day 1: Sorata to Lakatia. Day 2: Lakatia to Ancoma (3800m). Day 3: Ancoma to Cocoyo (3600m). Day 4: Cocoyo to Chajolpaya (4200m). Day 5: Chajolpaya to Lago Carizal (4800m). Day 6: Lago Carizal to Lago San Francisco (4500m). Day 7: Lago San Francisco to Sorata. He said he could do it for about $450USD and the price included a mule and a mulero (the guy who guides the mule) to carry our stuff. The price did not include food. I said that that sounded good and we agreed to do the hike from Monday, September 5 until Sunday, September 11, 2022. In case you’re ever in the area and looking for a guide, Eduardo’s number is +591 7157 8671

: The Sunday before I was due to start hiking is when I planned on traveling from La Paz to the town of Sorata (150km northwest of La Paz) where I’d meet up with my guide, buy food for the hike and spend the night, then the next day we’d get up early and walk out of town. Things, however, didn’t quite work out that way. Turns out that on the first Sunday of every September in La Paz, they celebrate something known as the Día del Peatón (Day of the Pedestrian) in which no cars are allowed on the road from like 6 in the morning until 6 at night in order to raise awareness about protecting the environment. So, long story short, I was screwed and couldn’t leave on this Sunday as planned. But pictured here are pedestrians and bicyclists alike enjoying the car-free streets in the Calacoto neighborhood of the capital.

: When I told my guide that I wasn’t going to be able to make it to Sorata on that Sunday as planned, he said it wasn’t a big problem. He said to just come first thing Monday morning. But he also said that there was no bread in Sorata at the moment and told me to pick up some “pan de batalla” from one of the stores in La Paz to bring with me. I didn’t know what he meant by pan de batalla (which literally translates as “battle bread”) so I googled it and it looked more or less the same as French bread. So I then went to the Ketal supermarket near where I was staying and I took this photo and sent it to my guide for confirmation that this is what he was looking for. He said yes and told me to buy “20 unidades.” So I bought 20 pieces and brought it with me to Sorata and then we started walking and sat down for our first meal and he was like, “This is not pan de batalla. You bought the wrong type of bread.”

: In Spanish “pan de molde” is like sandwich bread or sliced bread like the loaf you see in the photo but…even so, even though it has a totally different meaning, I don’t like seeing the letters M-O-L-D anywhere near my bread

: At the crack of dawn on Monday morning, I took a taxi from the Calacoto neighborhood of La Paz to the area around Cementerio General which is from where the public transportation to Sorata leaves

: The cost for the 4-hour, 150km ride from La Paz to Sorata is 20 bolivianos which comes out to be something like $2.85USD

: No big buses run between La Paz and Sorata. Only minibuses like the one pictured. And there are no set schedules for when the buses leave. You basically just sit around and wait until there’re enough passengers to fill the bus and then you leave. That’s exactly what we’re doing here

: The fog was really thick during most of the ride. Couldn’t really see too much out the windows

: This old lady who had to be at least 70 told the driver to stop in the middle of nowhere where she got out and slung a fully loaded aguayo over her back like Santa Claus and started walking up into the hills there. She was probably bringing back some goods from the capital that she couldn’t get from her village. I mean, that’s one hell of a grocery run. And that’s one tough old broad

: Walking from the area on the outskirts of Sorata where the bus dropped us off down to the plaza in the center of town where I’d planned to meet my guide. The official altitude of La Paz is 3640m and Sorata is almost a full thousand meters below that at 2678m. It felt much warmer here than in La Paz where temperatures were hovering right around freezing when I left that morning

: That’s the plaza over there on the right with all the palm trees

: Before getting down to business, my guide Eduardo and I went out for lunch at a restaurant adjacent the plaza where we’d just met. When he saw me walk into the plaza he’d been sitting on a park bench then stood up and started walking towards me. Since the guy was looking at me, I figured that it had to be my guide but I wasn’t 100% sure it was him because the photo he uses on his whatsapp is old and blurry and I didn’t really know what he looked like. So when this stranger in the plaza started getting close to me, instead of greeting me, he just kinda looked at me out the corner of his eyes and then walked right past. This totally confused me but then I heard a burst of laughter from behind me. It really was Eduardo. He was just messing around with me by walking past like that. Eduardo is in his 50s and is not from Sorata but is a farmer that lives in the countryside outside of town. His first language is Aymara but is also fluent in Spanish and speaks some English (I did not test this because all communication between him and I was in Spanish). While we were eating here I asked him how he became a guide. He said when he was a young man he came to Sorata looking for a job and ended up working in a hostel. He said some tourists there wanted a guide for a hike, so he bought a map and led them out into the wilderness. He said that was the start of his 30-year career as a guide in the area.

: Me following Eduardo down a market street as we stocked up on all the food we’d need for seven days of walking out in the mountains

: Buying oatmeal at a local shop

: Other goods purchased at the same shop

: Picking up some onions, tomatoes and cheese (those stacks of white things to Eduardo’s left are cheese) from a vendor on the street

: Since I hadn’t arrived on Sunday as originally planned and it was already after noon by the time we’d picked up all our supplies from the market, Eduardo said it wasn’t a good idea to walk out of town if we wanted to reach the campsite by sunset. He said it’d be better to take a taxi a bit up out of town to where we’d meet our mule man. As it happens, it rained quite a bit the night before and the road getting up and out of Sorata was covered in mud. This truck in front of us’d been having a particularly fucked-up time getting around this here corner. The tires had no traction so here you see the driver trying to remedy that by tossing handfuls of dirt and stones under ’em

: Sorata as seen from above

: Unloading the taxi before loading up the mule

: Heading out. On the right is a guy named Ramiro who served as the mulero (mule man) only on this first day. The following morning, the plan was for him to go back home after he’d been replaced by his 70-year-old father, Juan

: There wasn’t much to see on this first day of hiking. Most of the day we were going straight uphill and there’d been as much fog as there was during the ride into Sorata that morning

: We did, however, briefly pass through some trees here

: First campsite

: Same campsite the following morning. Looks like the clouds settled further into the valley overnight.

: As it would be every morning of this hike, the outside of my tent was covered in a layer of ice

: Eduardo said we’d have to follow this road a bit before getting off it and heading up towards a pass at like 4700m or something like that

: Following behind Eduardo, Juan and Pepe la mula. Pepe carried our food and our tents. The rest of our shit was all on our own backs

: Pardon my ignorance when it comes to the names of passes we went over and peaks we saw, but I believe that that’s Illampu peak itself straight up ahead of us

: Eduardo explained to me that a lot of these roads weren’t around 5-10 years ago and that, although these developments have made life easier for some of the people in these villages in the middle of nowhere, he was very sad about the destruction of the natural beauty of an area he’s come to know so well. He also said that they’d only introduced cell towers to the area within the last five or so years and that before that the only way to communicate with friends and family in the area was in person. With the new roads and access to the internet, Eduardo explained that more and more people in the area are abandoning the traditional way of life and migrating to bigger cities. His own son, he said, now lives in Santa Cruz which is the largest city in Bolivia.

: Getting off the road and heading up towards the pass

: A steep uphill

: Little break

: Final push to the pass

: Coming down on the other side

: Part of the long gradual descent on the other side of the pass

: A baby goat (I think?) trying to breastfeed from a dog

: Eduardo checking for cell service

: Among other things, the sign on the left says that it is prohibited to fish the trout in the adjacent river using dynamite. Do people really do that? I mean, what’s left to eat if the fish are blown to little bits and scattered all over the place?

: Final climb of the day

: Although I drank one liter of water in the morning before we left and then another two throughout the 7-8 hours of walking we did that day, it just wasn’t enough. I was super dehydrated by the time we reached camp. My mouth was really dry and I had a big fuckin headache. So the first thing I did was filter and then drink two more liters of water and barely pissed any of it out before sleeping a solid 11 hours without having to get up to go to the bathroom not even once

: The guys loading up Pepe for another day out on the trail

: A bit uphill from the spot where we camped, here is a dead deer like five feet away from the stream where we’d gotten our water. Following a few days of decomposition, there’s no doubt in my mind that rotten bits of this animal will begin to contaminate that water source. On another note, those plants are what the locals used to make roofs out of

: Another big uphill climb to reach a pass. Which pass? I don’t know. How high was it? I’m not sure. Well, what do I know about this hike? Not much, truth be told. To me, for this hike, I was just down for the experience. Didn’t know much about numbers or distances and didn’t care. Just wanted to get up and walk each day.

: For a 70-year-old guy, Juan was an absolute beast. He walked super fast and never got tired. Very nice man as well.

: About to sit down for a rest here at the pass

: Every time we took a break, I would snack on some nuts and drink some water. Whereas Eduardo and Juan might take a sip or two of water during a break, they never ate anything. They would instead pull out those little green plastic bags from their packs and get to work chewing on the coca leaves within

: Making our way down from the pass

: Eduardo photographing the valley below

: Descending the steep mountainside

: Stone hut with a thatched roof. Eduardo explained that all the houses in the area were built in this traditional manner up until about 5-10 years ago when the roads were built into the area and people started importing bricks and corrugated metal roofs from the city

: View of the mountain we’d just come down as seen from the floor of the valley

: Eduardo shooing away a group of pigs that were trying to steal our lunch

: Following the river after lunch until…

: …reaching the town of Cocoyo. It’s my understanding that there are gold mines around Cocoyo that all the residents here have some sort of stake in, so they all got enough money to have cars and modern buildings to live in.

: Kid outside a shop in Coyoco where we picked up a few items we were running low on

: Generic Snickers

: Please don’t throw garbage. Let’s take care of our Planet Earth

: In this area a lot of people were planting crops on both sides of the river and here’s a bridge that they were using to get from one side to the other. Eduardo himself said that when our hike was over, he was going to have to get back to his land and plant all his crops for the upcoming spring

: We ended up camping about fifteen minutes ahead of where this photo was taken

: The inside of my tent was pretty cramped every night

: Chef Eduardo’s pasta, tomato sauce and cheese combo for dinner that night at the campsite

: And this day begins where the last one ends

: Ascending

: Eduardo taking a photo of the valley we’d just climbed up and out of

: Coming down the other side of a pass we’d just crossed

: Not the easiest to see here, but someone built a stone fence in the shape of a heart

: Eduardo explained to me that the mountains are sacred to the Aymara people because they provide water to the people and are the physical representation of El Achachila. The earth, he explained, is also sacred. It is the physical representation of La Pachamama which provides the people with corn and vegetables and other life-sustaining crops.

: A series of stone walls at the bottom of the valley shown on the left of the photo previous

: Slowly but surely making our way down to the bottom of the valley

: Eduardo passing some llamas

: Still heading down

: On this day, we got to camp pretty early and it was relatively hot out with the sun beating down on us. So, this was basically the only opportunity I’d have during the 7-day hike to do any personal cleansing. This river here – which was absolutely freezing, by the way – is where I ended up taking a very, very short bath

: Since I thought I looked pretty sexy here, I made my guide take some naked photos of me. He kept taking them at angles I didn’t like, so I would make him take more of me at different angles and… I’m just kidding. That would be very inappropriate of me. In actuality, I set a 10-second timer on my phone, leaned it against my shoes and then stepped back and posed for this here nude nature selfie

: Campsite for the evening

: Good morning to do the misty mountain hop

: A glance at the frozen ground surrounding my tent

: The mood for most of this day was rather melancholy. This is the area where Eduardo seemed to be the most sad about the construction of the road. He said he couldn’t count how many groups of foreigners he’d led through this valley over the years before the construction of this road. And he said that maybe only one or two cars use the road every day

: Flowers

: Juan, el mulero. Juan didn’t seem to speak a whole lot of Spanish and that which he did, he spoke with a very thick accent and didn’t understand much of what I was saying. Eduardo often would translate my Spanish to Aymara and then translate Juan’s Aymara back to me in Spanish. In spite of the language barrier, he was a very kind man and a great guy to have out there on the hike

: Eduardo wistfully looking back at the valley we’d just traversed

: View from where Eduardo was gazing out in the photo previous. I said it was still pretty beautiful in spite of the road being there. He said yeah, but it’s just not the same

: Pile of llama shit. I asked why there was so much and how it got there. And I’m pretty sure Eduardo said they just all get together and huddle there on the road at night. Don’t know if it’s for warmth or to avoid predators or solely for the purpose of all shitting in the same place at the same time. Maybe they dislike the road as much as Eduardo and that’s their way of disrespecting it. No idea

: The final zigzagging stretch of road before reaching the pass

: One last look back at the valley as we walk up one of the aforementioned zigs or zags

: The guys readjusting Pepe’s load up on the pass

: A tiny lake up on the pass

: Making our way across the pass on a route separate from the road we’d spent all day on

: Beginning the descent on the other side

: Continuing down

: Eduardo pointing out to me the route that he used to take before the construction of the road

: This was a pretty tough descent here over some wild terrain

: Back on the road again

: A look back before continuing on

: This was supposed to be a very long day, so we got up at 4-something to start packing up camp to leave by like 5:30. I think the sun was rising right around 6:30 this time of year. So, we packed up and ate breakfast and started walking in total darkness, using our headlamps to guide the way. As it happens, we had to cross a river within five minutes of leaving camp. To get across it, we had to step from one big stone to another. The other two guys got across no problem, but one of the stones I stepped on was covered in slime or ice or something and my foot slipped out on me and the left side of my body landed on the rock while the lower part of my left leg ended up in the river. Needless to say, I wasn’t too pleased about being soaking wet when it was freezing cold out, but I was very happy to discover that none of the bones in my left arm were broken

: Gentle morning light

: Sun coming up behind us

: This mountain was covered in sand which I thought was kinda weird

: Juanito y Pepe

: Following the boys up the sandy mountain

: Wait for me, guys!

: My first glimpse of what would be my favorite view on this whole hike

: Heading towards the view

: So fuckin beautiful

: I set my backpack down on the ground and leaned my phone up against it to take a few timed selfies and all of em turned out shitty the way this one did. My phone kept focusing on the rocks on the ground and that shrub on the right side of the photo instead of on me and the beautiful mountains in the background. And I couldn’t ask Eduardo to take a photo of me here because he and Juan had already kept on walking. Damn shame!

: This pack of horses that were out there grazing in the middle of nowhere were running after us, probably trying to get Pepe to ditch us lame-ass humans to go kick it with them

: Following Eduardo. We’re about to go down into the valley straight ahead

: Down at the bottom of the aforementioned valley was this swampy terrain that we’d been hoping would still be a bit frozen from the night before. That wasn’t the case unfortunately and all our feet got soaked in stinky-ass water by the time we made it up and out on the other side of the valley

: In spite of claiming ignorance about the names of stuff, pretty sure this here body of water is Lago San Francisco

: More climbing

: The terrain. Happy to be walking on dry land after going through the swamp

: Eduardo said that during the wintertime, people burn these plants because it helps them grow back faster and provides their animals with something to munch on

: Eduardo explaining to me that as we begin our descent here, we’re going to be entering this massive cloud of fog and won’t be able to see Lake Titicaca in the distance how we were supposed to be able to

: About to get swallowed up by the cloud

: The guys were having a difficult time navigating in the mist. I didn’t really worry about it and just followed along wherever they decided to walk to

: In the thick of it

: Beautiful sunrise on the last day. I had my alarm set for six but around 4:30 in the other tent I could hear the guys having a full-on discussion about something. So a bit later on, I asked Eduardo like, “What in the world were you guys talking about that early in the morning? At that hour I’m so tired I have nothing to say to anybody about anything.” And Eduardo says, “No, that wasn’t me. I also wanted to sleep. But Juan wanted to talk. He’s a musician, you see. And he was telling me that his wife decided, while he was away, to smash all his musical instruments and his CD player to pieces.” “Oh shit,” I said, “why would she do something like that?” “She said that music is against their religion.” “And what religion is that?” I asked. “He’s Catholic,” Eduardo said. “That doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “Like, they always play music and sing in church and stuff like that. Sounds like a bullshit excuse to me.” “Yeah,” he said, “I don’t know. But Juan was saying that when he gets home he’s going to get drunk and break a bunch of his wife’s things to get back at her.”

: About to pass through a village

: A bit later on, just above the town of Millipaya

: Entering Millipaya

: In the center of town

: The red things in the stream there are sacks of turnips. I was told they’re kept there for the dual purpose of being refrigerated and having the dirt washed off of them

: He is where we sat watching that soccer game between the green and orange teams on the field in front of us while we sat and waited to take a taxi from here back to Sorata. Since Pepe can’t fit into a taxi, this is unfortunately where we had to say goodbye to Juan

: Road back to Sorata

: A car with a goofy-ass license plate near the plaza in Sorata where I’d met Eduardo a week before and now was bidding him adieu

: A cholita sitting in front of me on the 4-hour minibus journey from Sorata back to La Paz. I thought I’d be the stinkiest fucker on this trip but I was wrong. The guy sitting to my left had horrible B.O. that was stinking up the entire vehicle.

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Day 1

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Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7