zoodles

Here are a few pictures from our trip to Coroico a couple of weekends ago (where does the time go?) Coroico is the little village where Mauricio’s mom lives with her fella, Wilmer, a native Coroiqueno. It’s in the lush tropical valley called Las Yungas. The drive is absolutely breathtaking; the fact that it’s a one lane gravel road makes it more so! This picture is close to the mountain pass that you have to cross, before descending into the valley. We were literally in the clouds. Check out the tiny bit of road in the corner. Eeeeks!

Here is the village of Coroico. I don’t know if it comes across in the picture, but the village is on the peak of a mountain. The green you see is the face of another mountain in the distance. This was taken from a church on top of a hill above Coroico.

We did lots of great things like… we rode in the box of Wilmers gigantic gravel truck, out to the veterinary school in the hills. Riding in the back of trucks is a popular mode of transport here. But we got a lot of stares from locals though. As crass as it sounds, it must be weird to see white people riding in the countryside that way. Here we are looking over the cab of his truck as we leave the narrow village streets. Yes we were able to squeak by the row of parked vehicles!

We also went for a great hike into the mountains one day. The neat thing here is that you hike until you’re tired, or until the sun starts to set (the case that day). When you’re ready to call it a day, you head downhill to the nearest little miniature village and wait on the main road for a taxi, or a big truck, like I mentioned above. Here’s a picture from our hike. You can see our trail cut into the mountain. I love the mountains here, they seem so soft an huggable! And the clouds, clinging to the mountain peaks like bouffant scarves.

Here’s a picture of a typical coco plantation, cut into the mountain like steps. Yes, that’s right, the plant from which cocaine is made!! But before you tut-tut the coco plant has a lot of traditional uses here Bolivia and other Andean countries. It’s used for instance to combat the effects of altitude and it’s supposed to be good for digestion. The leaf itself isn’t harmful though; it would take something like 5000 tea bags of coco tea, I heard, to make just one gram of cocaine.

Here’s one more pic of the creepy trip home. The traffic etiquette here is that vehicles going up have right of way – get to drive on the “inside” – because the roads can be steep. So if two vehicles meet up face to face, the one that is going down has to back up, to the tiniest of ledges, spaced out along the road, in order to let the other vehicle pass.

Well a giant oil tanker was coming down and around a CURVE when it met up with an equally big truck that was going uphill. The tanker going downhill couldn’t backup on the curve, and the truck going uphill wouldn’t back up, so as you can see we got a little jammed. I took the opportunity to jump out and take this picture. The drivers managed to figure something out after about 40 min. and we were on our way again.