Las Vistas Bellezas

I would have liked to make a post on Monday while my thoughts were more fresh on the weekend, but I didn't. Friday morning we took off for a hike down an old Incan trail, being we had our first day off of the year that was called "spring break", a constant joke amongst the teachers. The hike started in the snow capped mountains of the Cordillera Real, a little bit to the southeast of Huayna Potosi. The morning sun glistened off the snow to create an atmosphere that instantaneously energized me, along with the fresh morning air that only mountains can offer. Part of me just wanted to sit and enjoy the beauty around me, watching the sparkling water run down the hillsides from the melting snow, the llamas make the slow but yet graceful journey up the mountains, and the valley below fill with a cold fog that would eventually journey upward. But I knew the distance I had ahead of me, and the time limit that the weekend imposed, so I regretfully but joyfully started down the trail. Down the trail means DOWN the trail. Basically the whole hike is downwards, as it starts at about 4,600 meters and descends to about 1500 meters. Most people take 3 days to hike the trail, and that is what is recommended, but to me it was more advantageous to do it in two days, so that I could get back to La Paz on Sunday and study for the upcoming week of school. The trail, or el camino, amazed me very quickly. Within 6 hours, we had descended into a complete surrounding of green called the Yungas, or pre-jungle. Slick rocks from surrounding waterfulls cut accross the trail to create patterns that my feet magically found. Slipping here and there I managed to keep my balance and descend past villages where people's families have lived for centuries. They were always friendly as they saw us, and never ceased to give us false information on how much farther to the next pueblito. At about 6:30 on Friday night when we were all sore from the rough downhill, we set up camp by the river, ate, and talked for a few hours. Night passed rather quickly, and by 8 am we were all off again, this time a bit slower as our muscles and successfully and painfully tightened over the night. Others were a bit slower going down the slick path, and I found myself walking with a Bolivian and his two horses that were carrying supplies back from La Paz. He told me we only had about a half hour until the next pueblo, and I walked with him for another hour until we crossed it......where I said good-bye and waited for the others. From there I realized how much longer we had. One of the girls had blisters the size of knuckles on her feet, and could not physically make it very long without stopping to ease the pain. The rest of the day was spent walking up and down this cut path in the mountainside, silently enjoying the beauty around us in the forms of birds, bugs, and the color green that marks the sign of life in the wild. We hiked in the darkness on Saturday night, slept a few hours, and finished off the journey early Sunday morning. For me it was relaxing to walk in God's presence and hear Him speak through his creation. It always is. The trail was longer than I had expected, and what got me was the length that the Incans walked at one period of time. Their knowledge of the terrain must have been incredible, and their perseverance remarkable. The rivers they crossed without bridges, the downhill/uphill that their joints endured, or just the pure length of the trail. I could feel them on the trail, and see the roughness that they had to hike through. Though I could always understand how they did it. God had given them energy from the surroudings, in the forms of smooth white rocks cut by years of water, the shades that fell across the mountains as the sun set, or the birds that flew overhead with neon green wings and blue tails. It cleared my own mind of the thousands of things that pass through it in a given school week. I really only thought of one thing when in the beauty of God, and that was of God himself. There weren't any pressing issues or other focuses. How can there when you're seeing God in everything around you, and that's exactly how he designed us. He is in the stresses of everyday life, the pains and the joys of the heart, and the people we are serving. I close with a quote I read on Ethan's Blog, by Dostoyevsky: "Sometimes he longed to get away, to vanish from here altogether. He would have been positively glad to be in some gloomy, deserted place, only that he might be alone with his thoughts and no one might know where he was. Or at least to be at home in the verandah...to throw himself on the sofa and bury his head in the pillow, and to lie like that for a day and a night and another day. At moments he dreamed of mountains, and especially one familiar spot which he always liked to think of, a spot to which he had been fond of going and from which he used to look down on the village, on the waterfall gleaming like a white thread below, on the white clouds and the old ruined castle. Oh, how he longed to be there now, and to think of one thing!"

Sorata

It's impossible to travel in Bolivia without something interesting happening. This last weekend I went to Sorata for the Bolivian Downhill bike race that starts in the Chu Chu pass and descends 4,000 meters on a sing-track to Sorata, in about an hour. The drive to Sorata from La Paz isn't a bad trip. It only takes about 4 hours, and only about 2 hours of that are down the switchbacks into the much lower altitude where you find Sorata. The only thing is that the switchbacks have to be driveable. And by driveable, I mean that have to exist.

About a half an hour into the switchbacks, we come to a point in the road where it had completely caved out along the mountainside. A truck had caved in with the road, and looked like it was built into the mountainside. Unfortunately for us, it was about midnight, and raining. Some guys got out and started searching for other options. Eventually, Andy decided to take our truck offroading down the steep mountainside onto the switchback below. It worked, thank God.

The time in Sorata was pretty relaxing and uneventful (for those of us not riding in the race). Heather got stuck in a trees branches, literally, as we hiked up a ravine. And I found out that the 3 younger Word Made Flesh missionaries (heather, wes, and kara) really like to argue about logical issues-such as when to use Humus ingrediants. I personally think it goes back to the time that Wes told Heather that the "rational mind is clearly superior". no comment.

On the bus ride back from Sorata Sunday, I got sick. I evetually ended up getting off the bus on the outskirts of El Alto to find a bathroom. I found one, and then decided I needed to get back to my place as soon as possible, so I found a taxi driver willing to take me the half hour for only 40 Bs., about $5. As sick as I was feeling, I talked to him the whole way, and it turned out to be rather pleasant. We talked about the politics of the country, what he thought would happen in December, and then about Religion. Although my spanish is still very broken, I told him about the church i attend in El Alto, and what Christianity is really about......because many of the "christian" ideas here are very mixed with witchcraft and pachamama beliefs. It was a good conversation, and he ended up offering me his number to call him for rides, or to go up to the church some Sunday.

I spent the rest of Sunday night throwing up in the bathroom. By the time it was daylight and time to go to school, I had nothing left in me to come out so I was able to make it through a long day of teaching. It was probably the best sickness I've had in Bolivia because it came and went in less than 12 hours, and it wasn't really that painful. Maybe my digestive system is ready for this place this year....

.....or maybe I was just lucky this time.

My Address

I'm heading out to Sorata tomorrow for the Bolivian downhill bike race. It starts up in the foothills of the Mountain Illampu, and descends a few thousand meters to Sorata. I went last year and it was a blast, mostly because someone had an extra bike and I was able to do it on the practice day.

The school just got a new address. And by "just" I mean they got it a few weeks ago, and I've been too lazy to copy it down until now. Anyways, here it is, in case you get the urge to send down a letter or package :)

Jon Watson
Highlands International School
P.O. Box 3-12468
La Paz, Bolivia
South America

Trip down Memory Past

Let's see. This weekend was finally free as last weekend we lost both of our softball games (the first one by 3 and the second one by 2) and got eliminated from the tournament in a respectable third place finish. What I decided to do with my first free weekend was to go into the mountains and spend some time hiking around. Little did I know it would bring back such vivid flashbacks.

On Saturday morning at about 6am I took a bus headed for Coroico, and at a point where the mountains looked interesting, I asked the bus-driver to let me off. I told him I had plenty of food, and a tent, which appeased his inquisitive face almost instantaneously. He said what they always say, "que te vaya bien", and I was off. I had my compass, and what I knew was that I wanted to head North. My map, unfortunately, was up at the Baker's house, but I figured I would eventually hit a place that I knew (which turned out to be a correct assumption), or in the worst case scenario I could always just head West and eventually hit the Altiplano. You see, that's why I had my compass...

It started off as a hike down some valleys. Then I went over some passes that must have been 5,000 meters, or more. Then up another valley, and over another pass. Not too bad, right? Well, coming over this last pass, I came across a trail that looked familiar.....a little tooo familiar. My instinct told me to go back, and go back fast. But my mind reasoned with me and reminded me that the passes I just came over would be real difficult in the opposite direction. AND it said to me, what are the chances that this IS the trail, and that I will have to do it AGAIN.

Flashback: August, 2004
I had only been in Bolivia for 2 weeks. My body had not yet acclimatized, but Drew, Scott, and I agreed to go on a hike with Andy Baker. We had decided upon this at 2 am on a Saturday morning, and left two hours later without any sleep. I borrowed tennis shoes and clothes from Scott and Andy as there was no time to descend to the southern zone and get my own stuff. Our goal was to do this hike that would theoretically take about 8 hours. The bus dropped us off in the Zongo valley around 7am, and we started the hike feeling very adventurous, even with the relentless weather as it poured snow and rain upon us. At about 11 am, we ate our lunch in a cave, feeling very good about the distance we had made. Mind you, this was all the food we had with us, because the hike would only "take" another 4 hours. 15 minutes later we came across the most impressive mountain I had ever seen, Tiquimani (the guardian of the Zongo Valley). The weather cleared for about 20 minutes, and we just sat there and stared at it, before the clouds rolled back in and the weather worsened once more. The visibility quickly reduced to feet in front of us. At this point, Andy says to us, "well we either continue or go back, your choice". Scott, Drew, and I decide that there is "no such thing as going back", so we continue on our course. The only thing is we didn't continue on our course. We went way off course..... a good two hours off course.....in bad weather. At this time I developed the worst headache of my life, probably because of the altitude we were in. By the time we got back onto the course, we only had about 2 hours of sunlight left, and we had to find a pass that Andy had never been to. If we didn't find the pass, we would be there all night. We didn't have tents, and we didn't have more food, because this was only going to be an 8-10 hour hike. Well it got dark fast. We found out we only had one headlamp (again, because we were just going to be hiking in the day) and that the batteries were low (poor planning). We couldn't find the pass, and it was now about 7pm and completely dark. The only thing we could do was to keep moving to keep warm, so we hiked in the direction we thought was correct, using the one headlamp for all of us. We were hiking on the edge, and had no idead where we were. To the left was almost always a fatal drop(probably at the least 1,000 ft), and to the right was just a steep incline. By 2am we heard a river, and the clouds cleared for a second to reveal some peaks, that Andy recognized. We immediately climbed down to the river, which proved to be very difficult with only one headlamp. The river was fairly big, and it took us another hour or so to cross it safely. On the other side of the river is where we came across the most dangerous thing we did. It was an 80, maybe 90 degree in some places, ascent up a bank with nothing to hold onto but grass. My heart as never beat faster than when I was about 30 or 40 feet up and only holding onto grass that was tearing out like crazy. Probably about 50 feet up, it became level, and we were able to stand. Andy immediately recognized that we were on the Choro trail, and only "hours" from La Cumbre, where we could find transportation.

Relief. That's the best way to describe it. It was now 4am, and we had been hiking for 21 hours straight, only one meal. Well to make a longer story short, we got on this trail, and hiked up it (people only hike down this trail, but we wouldn't have gotten to a place with transportation going down for another day or so). Andy went ahead of us, and told us, "when you get to the switchbacks, you're done". About 3 hours later, Drew, Scott, and I hit the switchbacks. THE SWITCHBACKS WENT UP A HUGE MOUNTAIN, ANDY HAD LIED. You see, we were tired. We hadn't slept in 2 nights now, we hadn't eaten since the previous days lunch, we weren't acclimatized, we had been hiking for 24 hours, and we were extremely wet and cold from the weather and the river. Drew could only take about 10 steps at a time before he needed a break to vomit as we ascended the switchbacks, so Scott and I had to leave him because it hurt us too much to stop so frequently. Scott had to frequently wait for me to catch up as he was much stronger than I during this all. About 3 hours later, Scott and I finally summited "la Cumbre" where there was a Taxi. 27 hours straight.

Back to this Weekend
Sure enough, this was the trail. Obviously not all of the dread returned, knowing that I had food, sleep, energy, ya know everything you need for a hike. SO, I started to ascend up this trail once again. It seemed easy, as long as I kept my mind off of the last time. As soon as I would think about the last time, my legs grew heavy, my steps shortened and slowed, and I felt sick. It's funny the tricks the mind can play, because as soon as I would start to forget the past the extreme tiredness would go away. I was still tired, but just not in the same way. I made it up the switchbacks (which I think are 1,200 meters verticle) in about an hour this time. I got some pictures of Llamas and mountains along the way. Very enjoyable.

It made me think. Dwelling on the past obviously didn't help me, as I would start to experience some of the same pains of heavy legs, hungry stomach, and cold feet and hands. But remembering the past helped, because I knew where I was going, and what was coming up. Really, it's the same in life. Without remembering the past, we can't really continue to grow. Our past is what we need to draw on to keep making progress in the future. We must remember the crucifiction and resurrection of Jesus daily to remind us where we came from, the state of complete sin that we were once in and the sin that can so easily bond us again. We must remember, we must not forget. But we must not dwell. How can we grow if we are dwelling on what we once were? We are alive in Him, forgiven of our sins, and it is that freedom from sin that allows us to make progress in this life. We are no longer in bondage to it, as He tells us (dwelling on the past). Always remember, but never dwell.

This is why I am starting a Mountaineering Club for the students. We will learn together the truths that are so evident in the nature around us (Mountains and Valleys) and in our own nature. Next weekend I plan on taking 2 students and another teacher to plan the exact location of our first trip and spend time in prayer for the upcoming months and the direction we want to head. Until next time....

Peace and Love,
Jon

The Wende's

I thought it was gonna be one of those weeks with little to do at nights, but it has turned out to be a very busy, and fruitful, week. Tonight I had dinner with the Wende's, minus Ron because he is in the states. It was something I wanted to do since I first arrived, but I kept putting it off because I was "too busy" until today. It was great conversation at dinner, and let me just say, I will miss them VERY much. They are moving to the states next Monday, and La Paz will no longer be the same for anyone who knew them. They are the family I first lived with when I came last year, and have cared for me since the moment I arrived. It was Ron who took me to the doctors in the middle of the night when I was in more pain than I can ever remember. It was Ron who started the idea of the Mountaineering Club, which will take off this year. Some of my favorite conversations in La Paz happened at the table of the Wende's, whether it was on Bolivian politics, school agendas, micro-economics in Bolivia, or just learning about each other's pasts and how faithful God has been through everything. When the Lord told them to help start the school, they poured everything they had into it, and it was more than visible that they were following God's calling in their lives. And now.... God has called them to another place, in the states, where I'm sure they will follow Him as they have before with the same efforts.

So to Ron, Maria Ester, Ian, Michael, and Dasha, I can only Say Thank You for being faithful to the Lord. God's love has shown thru you, and I am a better person because of you.