The Wrong Andamarca

Everyone is in the graveyard celebrating

Dust devils spun continuously on the horizon. We were now near the largest salt flats in the world, the Salar de Uyuni. Beyond those flats, to the west, lies the Atacama in Chile, the driest place on earth, where no rain has ever fallen in recorded history. We could see the snow-clad peaks of the Occidental Real floating in the distant east. We stopped at another village to ask directions but found no-one. We wandered past the church into the open Altiplano and saw a crowd of people celebrating Dia de los Muertos in the cemetery. As we approached, they beckoned us to join them. One thoroughly-drunk young man offered us a liquor which he poured into plastic cups from a large green plastic jerrycan. It tasted very good, like mezcal, but I soon found myself trying to explain, in English, why I must refuse a second cup while he eloquently argued, in Spanish, why I should drink more. The villagers insisted that we were many miles from the correct route. But whenever the sputtering radio made connection, La Paz insisted that we were still on course. At last we left the village, still trusting the La Paz radio. The sun was close to the horizon, and we had to hurry to reach our destination before nightfall -- driving in darkness would be foolish in this terrain. We passed some low hills, each one topped with a small stone silo-shaped structure. Our guide explained that these are ancient Aymará tombs, never excavated, and carefully avoided by the living.

Our road viewed from the bus window

Soon after, we reached Andamarca. But it was the wrong Andamarca! The road, such as it was, ended here. Our driver at last discovered that our route should have been through Belen de Andamarca, many miles to the west, not here in Andamarca de Santiago. The locals had been right all along. It was twilight, and we could go no further. Worse, our dinner was in Challacota. We had been on the road for fourteen hours.

The locals were surprised at our presence, and someone told us that the village had never before seen foreign visitors. This was a bit hard to believe, since the colonial church whose bell tower overlooked the schoolyard was dated 1728.

Our guide negotiated with a local official and arranged for us to sleep in the school compound. The school had three classrooms with adobe floors thick with dust. Many of the windowpanes were broken. We moved the wooden benches up against a wall and lit candles against the deepening darkness, for Andamarca has no electricity. The outhouse toilets were squat-style, holes in the ground straddled by two concrete tiles to stand on.

The schoolhouse in Andamarca I slept in the room to the right

Our guides found some chickens and rice and started to make a dinner. Someone started a brushwood fire in the schoolyard. Someone else discovered a small shop across the street which usually operated on the barter principle, but was willing to accept our bolivianos in exchange for beer. At this elevation the freshly-opened beer foamed ceaselessly, but it tasted wonderful. The stars came out, and in the absence of electric lights and at this altitude, they blazed with knife-edged brilliance.

Four or five young men of the village joined us, and we shared our beer with them as we stood around the fire. One of them, inspired, told us that they would play us some of their music. They left to fetch, we thought, their instruments, and we eagerly anticipated hearing some of the beautiful, heartbreaking Andean music. But when they returned, one of the young men proudly held a cheap boombox playing syntho-pop music! After some negotiation, we prevailed on them to play a tape of indigenous music, and soon they were teaching us dance steps, and under those stars, with the eddying sparks from the fire, warmed by the beer, we danced.