Passengers stuffed cheek to jowl, bulging mantas and boxes underfoot, an implausible number of sacks and bags tethered to the top, the small, cranky red van finally rattles off toward Sajama National Park and its namesake village. The 6’5” tall German in the rear has the worst of it, his head rammed against the unpadded roof, his knees stabbing his chin for three unrelenting hours.
Only one van runs each day between Patacaya and Sajama and everyone must fit in somehow or wait until the next day or the day after that. The few tourists who find their way to this remote corner of Bolivia compete for seats with locals who absolutely depend on this van and others just like it to conduct business outside their villages.
“Buenos Dias”, people smile and nod as they muscle their way on or off the overstuffed vehicle. The more cramped and miserable a ride on public transport in South America, the politer everyone seems to become.
At nearly 14,000 ft above sea level, the tiny hamlet of Sajama huddles at one edge of an old caldera beneath a string of volcanoes. The tallest of these, Mt. Sajama at 21,562 feet is a towering gauntlet of unconsolidated burnt orange and molten black rock left behind by the receding glaciers.
We arrive in Sajama on an impropitious evening. We are hungry but restaurants and stores are shuttered.
As we wander forlornly along the dusty street, a blue-eyed waif dressed in baggy sweats with wild chestnut hair unfazed by a knit hat, stops suddenly and greets us in English.
“Everyone is at the community center for high school graduation”, she informs us.
Indeed, a brass band-compounded din emanates from a squat building on the main square as the essence of dinner and stale beer seeps from the doorway.
“Don’t worry. You’ll get something to eat but it will be simple”.
At the end of the street, she conducts into an unmarked building with a spacious main room with grain sacks, crates of soda and a miscellany of other goods stacked against its walls; several long tables and benches arranged in the middle and a door at the rear leading to living quarters.
Elsa is a french vagabond who admits to some trouble with the police back home for helping migrants. She worked her passage from Europe through the Caribbean to the South America coast.
“I came to Sajama with my boyfriend – a little black boy I picked up in Peru”, she giggles. “The owner of this place was playing his trumpet in the jungle when we met him. I think he felt sorry for us. He and his wife have so little themselves but he invited us to come stay with them”.
In exchange for room and board, the couple cook and clean at the nearby llama camp and work in this restaurant/store combo in town. But Elsa’s most critical task is caring for a newborn llama rejected by its mother. She’s a good parent, feeding it every couple of hours day and night. The leggy infant totters after her pretty much convinced she is its mother.
“When it’s bigger it will go back to the herd and will eventually be slaughtered. I feel bad but the lives of the people and the llamas are completely entwined”, she shrugs. “I had to come to terms with that.”
The world is full of mysteries. How did Nicolai, Elsa’s boyfriend, get such an improbable name? He’s a wisp of a boy, thin, wiry, athletic whom she found on the tropical coast juggling machetes for spare change. And, he is a fine cook – specializing in Thai cuisine, of all things! From almost nothing, he conjures up a small miracle of a meal, lulling us into the illusion we are in a Lima bistro and not on the harsh Bolivian steppe. We won’t bother eating anywhere else during our stay in the village.
Wind scours the altiplano, kicking up dust devils that whipsaw across valley floors, driving dust through ill-fitting windows and doors and into your eyes, ears, and every pore of your body. A hard land – high, dry, stingy with its gifts. Only the toughest of living things manage here.
Twisted, gnarled Kenua trees, the red bark peeling in paper-thin strips, grow in small clutches to over 17,000 feet above sea level in the Sajama region – the world’s highest forest.
Ubiquitous Yaretas, ancient survivors of the Andes, hunker in low, lime-green mounds so dense they can support the weight of a man but are harvested as firewood, threatening its continued survival as a species.
Hardy grasses, especially in the nearby valleys fed by thermal springs, support the llamas people have tended from time immemorial. The deep, layered Andean culture inextricable, almost inconceivable, without them. But the meager grasslands are now so over-worked that it is increasingly difficult to maintain the animals.
“Last year our friend lost 50 head of llamas because of poor forage and cold temperatures”, Elsa says of her patron. “He wants the government to do something. But what?”
“The bus leaves at 6:00 am sharp from the main square”, the van driver told us when we first arrived in Sajama. After three days in Sajama, we’ve spent most of our Bolivianos. Since there are no ATM’s or bank, we have no choice but to leave.
At 5:50 we are on the main square in the cold and dark waiting fruitlessly for the rattle of bus tires on the cobblestones. Finally, well past dawn, a passerby informs us that the bus has already left.
“When it’s full, it goes”, he says.
The following day we arrive well before 5:00 but the bus is already nearly full when it lumbers into the square.
“Buenos Dias”, we grin as we shovel our way on and settle in for the long, bumpy ride back to Patacaya and later to La Paz.
