to move up and down
El Cupolog
Pan-american Transmissions : The Road to Tierra Del Fuego
Archery Session
This is how they catch fish in the Amazon.
Charka Indigenous Territory in Pilon Lajas Nature Reserve - Amazonia, Bolivia - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Sorata
Sorata, Bolivia - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Sunset Sorata
Sorata, Bolivia - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Strike in Sorata
When we finally managed to escape La Paz, Ania and I went to Sorata, a small mountain village to the north, and found ourselves in the middle of another strike.
Every shop in town was closed. This time, people were rallying against a proposed night club in their village. They felt it would corrupt their children so they surrounded the town hall and demanded a town meeting with the mayor.
It worked. Regardless of the cause, it was good to see townspeople directly confronting their elected officials and expressing their views as a community. It almost looked like democracy or something.
Sorata, Bolivia - © Diego Cupolo 2012
El Camino del Choro
We’d been waiting a long time for this.
El Camino del Choro (aka the Choro Trek) starts at about 4000 meters in the mountains north of La Paz and peaks somewhere around 5000 meters before descending into a long river valley towards the jungles near Coroico. The hike takes 3-4 days, depending on you speed, and best of all, a guide is completely unnecessary.
A good map and a decent tent will do.
El Camino del Choro is an ancient pre-Inca trade route between the highlands and Amazonia. In some parts, it’s paved with stones, making it hard to get lost.
Ania and I set out early in the morning, chased a few packs of llamas for kicks, and started our descent into the valley by midday. Few people lived in the the area. The ones that did would ask for the time or candy or both.
The entire region felt unreal. The rivers were deep blue, the snow-topped mountains were enormous and the Aymara villages were small, sometimes made of two or three stone huts surrounded by twenty or thirty stone walls.
It felt like Spanish colonizers never found this place. For all we knew, everything looked the same as it did five centuries earlier.
The first day of hiking, I saw many objects moving in the bushes around us. My imagination figured it was the souls of dead natives, watching over us, but later on I realized the movements were just birds.
Regardless, there was something in the valley that was invisible to our eyes. I would stare at the stone road beneath my feet, wondering about the people that built it, and then I would look up at the green mountains, imagining a giant llama walking through the valley, chomping down trees along the way - maybe even shooting lasers from its eyes.
Perhaps it was all the fresh air, perhaps it was all the walking, but El Camino del Choro changed something in our brains and I’m still not sure what it was.
El Camino del Choro, Bolivia - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Life under ruins
Ollantaytambo, Peru - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Crate in a Courtyard
Ollantaytambo, Peru - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Invisible Towns, Nowhere People
On the Road, Peru - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Nowhere Towns, Invisible People
On the Road, Peru - © Diego Cupolo 2012
Street Cactus
Barichara, Colombia - © Diego Cupolo 2012
The Switzerland of Central America
It really is.
Unlike its neighbors, Costa Rica is rich, educated and has avoided the political instability and constant warfare that plagued the region over the last century.
There’s no military in Costa Rica. It’s the “greenest” country in the world. By the early 1900s, Costa Rica had free public education, guaranteed minimum wage and child protection laws. The central valley not only produces some of the best coffee in the world, but also serves as a major microchip production center.
Why is there so much contrast between Costa Rica and the rest of Latin America?
I have no idea, but it’s colonial history might have something to do with it. The Spaniards weren’t so interested in Costa Rica and left it alone … relatively, of course.
Less blood. More stability.
Zarcero, Costa Rica - © Diego Cupolo 2011
Hitlercito and Friends
One of the men in Comunidad del Volcan was called Hitler. His mother heard the name somewhere and thought it “had a beautiful sound.”
When Hitler grew up he had a son and named him Hitlercito.
Hitlercito is the tallest boy in the photo.
© Diego Cupolo 2011
