Well, that’s it! Month one is done! Over, finished, finito!
Bolivia was quite an incredible month if I do say so myself! But along with some incredible times came some challenging times.
We started out the month with quite a trip. It all started out with an 18 hour travel day from Atlanta to La Paz, Bolivia, the worlds highest international airport at over 13,000ft. From there we had about another 16 hour ride in a Toyota Land Cruiser with 11 people and many backpacks from La Paz to Apolo. With a nice long, rather beautiful drive and just a few times where we almost flipped the car off a cliff in the dark with rain and mud, we finally arrived to Apolo at about 10pm. Upon arriving in Apolo, we met up with our ministry host, Phil, as well as about 30 other people from Illinois, and were told that we would be waking up the next morning around 4am to get ready and leave for a 31 mile hike to one of Bolivia’s most remote villages, Mojos. We were a little bit hesitant about the idea of waking up at 4am after about 34 hours of traveling but this was something that we were looking forward to ever since we found out about it so we decided to definitely make it happen!
So the next morning we woke up, packed up 2 pickups with gear and 15 people in each bed, and an SUV with 8 people and hit the road for about a 3 hour drive to the Tuichi river. We were supposed to begin hiking at 7:30am but we didn’t arrive until about 8:30am and then had to transport 38 people, plus backpacks, plus food and gear across a river via a 3 log balsa wood raft or by wading across the river. So myself and a few other guys decided to wade across the waist deep water to the other side and wait until everyone else and the bags came across. Once everything was across we had to wait until a few people from Mojos with mules arrived to help us carry some gear. Once they arrived around 12:30 we were finally able to begin hiking. We started out our trek and hiked for about 4.5 hours of a relatively brutal hike. Then we arrived at a beach for the night and we dropped our bags and immediately went for a nice cold swim in the river to cool off. Then we ended up just hanging out, eating dinner, and then crashing out hard and having the best sleep we have had in about 3 days.
The next morning we woke up, had breakfast, and began hiking around 9am and spent about 8.5 hours hiking that day. Throughout the hike we experienced brand new, pink, pineapples and I almost fell off a cliff…but it was another great day of hiking even thought it was long and kind of intense. Upon arriving to camp that night we just repeated the previous night and hung out, ate dinner, then passed out. Our final day of hiking to Mojos, we woke up super early and had a 6 hour hike with about 2,500-3,000 elevation gain. We arrived in Mojos around 1pm and as exhausted we were, we immediately blew up some beach balls and soccer balls and grabbed some frisbee’s and began playing with the kids.
Our main goals for visiting Mojos were to encourage the 14 of the 17 families that were believers as well has provide dental, medical, and vision work for the locals and some toys for the children. It was absolutely incredible to see the joy that simply showing up brought to the people of Mojos. One of the older men expressed that having us there allowed him to experience the most joy he’s ever experienced. As soon as I heard it, it immediately brought tears to my eyes. Unfortunately we were only able to spend about a day and a half in Mojos. On Thursday we packed everything up and hit the trail back. It took us two days to hike back and we really booked it back. Upon arriving back to the village at the Tuichi river, we had lunch just before we realized that they were drying out meat on a tin roof with flies all around it. Definitely an interesting experience! After lunch we took another few hours to cross over the river and a few more hours to head back to Apolo.
It was such an awesome experience and a great bonding time for our team! This was only the first week of our time in Bolivia, but in order to keep your attention, I’ll save the rest of the month for another blog! Be on the look out for Bolivia pt. 2!
