Sucre, artisans, and La Paz

Since we last blogged about our whereabouts, we have been to a few more interesting places. We will tell about it first, and ty to add some photos.

From Potosi we went to Sucre. A very old colonial city with amazing architecture and an overall good vibe, we enjoyed hanging out there for a few days. Great museums, a fantastic square and thousands of locals who helped us ring in the NEw Year in fashion. Sucre is known for its parties, and the square was packed full of people celebrating with live music and general fun. Also had a good fireworks display over the beautiful whitewashed colonial government buildings.

While in Sucre we stayed at a nice little backpacker hostel where the owner had a couple of her friends over to display some of their weavings. The couple are considered to be master artisans in weaving. Weaving is a strong tradition dating back to earliest known indigenous people in the Andes. The weaving techniques as well as the wool spinning techniques have not changed in 3000 years. The woman, Santussa, was saying that she only had sons, so unfortunately did not have someone to pass on her work to. Adam jokingly said that he would gladly offer Tracy to her in order to pass the tradition on. This joke turned into an invitation to their home for a few days to see them at work. We decided we could not pass it up. We travelled by bus about 4 hours down a muddy road and literally through a couple of rivers to arrive. The family raises sheep for their wool and dyes the wool from roots, fruits and other natural products. One weaving, about 1.5x2.5 feet takes about 2 months of daily 8-10 hour work days to complete. The work is intricate and truely amazing. In the vein of our interest in agriculture, we got to help plow to fields and plant potatoes, peas and wheat. The fun part is that we got to plow the field with a mule. We were shown wonderful hospitality and ate rather well, albeit monotonously (lots of meals consisting of pasta, potatoes and ketchup...we think this might have seemed like what Americans like...Atkins diet it was not).

From there (there being Candelaria, where the artisans live) we headed to La Paz. An enourmous capital city, and the highest altitude capital city in the world (at about 3900 meters...you do the math), it was surprisingly enjoyable. We spent an entire day wandering through street markets. Some markets had clothing, some had raw materials like yarn and fabric. There were art markets with weavings, carvings, masks and the like, and the best, there was a witches market. This is where witch doctors actually offer their services and they sell anything and everything you might need to cure and ailment, make someone fall in love, or any of the other things that witch doctors purportedly do. Our favorite item, present in all of the stalls in the witch market, was llama fetuses. From our understanding, one is supposed to bury a llama fetus under the front part of a home for good luck. Dried llama fetuses come in many shapes and sizes and every varying furriness. For those in the market for a llama fetus, they cost about 6 dollars for a medium sized one.

La Paz sits in a bowl shaped valley with houses climbing the hills surrounding it and it can be dizzying to try to wander this high altitude, smoggy city for too long.

Today we arrived in Copacabana. This is the original Copacabana and the Brazilian Copacabana of Barry Manilow fame was actually named after this small town. It is on Lake Titcaca, a beautiful lake, and the highest navigable lake in the world (noticing a trend?).

On to the photos:

This is beautiful colonial Sucre from a lookout on the eastern bank of the city.


This is the main cathedral in Sucre. The banner announces that this is the bicentennial of Bolivias independence from Spain:


This is Tracy learning to spin wool old school. You hold the wool or thick yarn in one hand, tie a knot of sorts on the top of the spool and then spin the wood like a top. We saw many women walking down the street doing this in their spare time.


Adam learing to plow with a mule. This mule lived well above its reputation as stubborn and was actually a great plow mule in regards to listening and following rows.


Adam and Damian modelling the traditional poncho. One can know where a man is from by looking at the seams and the color patterns on the poncho. It was really cold the whole time, so this poncho came in handy.


Damian and Santussa modelling their weaving, 2 months of hard work. Absolutely beaufitul. The weavings depict anything from local folklore to times of year, such as harvest, Christmas, Carnival, etc. There are no written patterns and the designs come from years of tradition, memory and amazing talent.


Photos can be a sensitive thing with people, especially those of indigenous groups, so photos of the witches market and the likes are unwise. But this is a nice photo of a typical street and you can see the houses built on top o one another in the background.