Challacota

Challacota in the distance

Yes, we did reach the eclipse. We hired a local boy to guide us, and we departed. At first we retraced our route past the Aymará tombs, but soon we turned westward. The road became yet worse, and sometimes we were surrounded by Saharan sand dunes. Vicunas, so graceful compared to the ungainly llamas, occasionally bounded across our path.

The weather was ambiguous. We saw storms in the distance and massive cloud formations above us. We'd be crushed if we came all this way and couldn't see the eclipse because of bad weather.

We passed through Belen de Andamarca, dropped our guide off with his bicycle, and hired two young brothers to take us on to Challacota.

Challacota was much smaller than Andamarca, and seemed mostly to be in ruins. This town looked like seven- or eight-hundred people may once have lived here, but now there couldn't be more than fifty. Challacota is surrounded by salt flats stretching out toward distant mountains. Again, we stayed in the local schoolyard. This had only a small one-room schoolhouse, so we set up tents in the schoolyard.

Barbara and I wandered to the local cemetery with Nike, who speaks fluent Spanish. We talked with some Aymará women. Nike asked how they felt about tomorrow's eclipse, and one responded that normally they'd be worried, but were reassured because American scientists were there to make sure everything went alright.

The church bell tower

As the sun began to set, Barbara organized a basketball game with the American and Aymará women. The Aymará women doffed their bowler hats and played with a surprising skill. They are not tall, but they handled the ball well and were very fast, with their long braids flying behind them. And their endurance showed us why the Bolivian national soccer team, whose home stadium is in La Paz, has never lost a home game.

The promised dinner of T-bone steaks turned out to be tough slabs of some unidentifiable meat served with rice and boiled potatoes. There was no sauce and no spices. As hungry as we were, it was still difficult to choke down this dry, flavorless stuff.

That night in our tent, we vainly tried to sleep, but all night long we heard our worried co-travelers mutter about the weather as they observed the darkened heavens. In the morning we climbed out of our tent to view a threatening sky.

After breakfast our group carried the astronomical paraphernalia out onto the soccer field, where the salt crystals crunched underfoot. There were breaks in the clouds; there was cause for hope.

The Challacota town square