I had just landed in La Paz, Bolivia, from my other adopted country - Thailand - when a friend invited me to join a delegation from the Lutheran Church to Ayata.
"Where is Ayata," I asked.
"Next to Chuma," was the prompt answer.
Feeling doubly ignorant, I accepted the invitation. Next day I loaded a few blankets and a small backpack to a mighty truck and after picking up the last member of the expedition, we left the city in the direction of the Titicaca Lake. After leaving La Paz, the Andean Plateau has very few views to offer until the lake is reached, except for the Cordillera Real, which is the western part of the Andean Range. It includes such imposing mountains as the Illampu and the Condoriri, the last shaped as a condor spanning his wings. Covered with snow, they helped to pass the time until we reached the town of Huarina, next to the lake.
There, we stopped for an invigorating "café con leche" and to buy some last, perishable, supplies. Due to Ayata's conditions, we brought almost - and I would be sorry later for the almost - all our supplies. The weather was clear, the snow in the mountains was sparkling white, the ground was the usual naked brown of the plateau and the lake showed one of its glorious dark-blue moods; things couldn't get better. We left Huarina through the route advancing north along the lakeshore and soon we were covering unexplored (for me) regions in the Bolivian map. After crossing the town of Carabuco and taking a quick look at its famous colonial cathedral, we reached Escoma, the biggest town in the northern Bolivian side of the lake and said goodbye to the lake. From there, we began climbing the mountains to the east. The pavement disappeared and the population became scarce.
At Willacalla we stopped for lunch; the village was placed midway along an impressive brown slope that seemed to climb forever. The counted adobe houses were scattered around with significant distances between them; a colorful well supplied drinking water to the inhabitants. I was surprised to find the only dish they were serving was trout. "It's from the mountain rivers, not from the lake; it's safe," I was told. A whole, rosy trout cost $1.25 and was served with rice and chuño - a local, dehydrated, black potato.
As soon as we left, the way began following a deep cliff; at its other side a black, frightening mountain blocked the sight. We stopped to take a few pictures. "That's the Socosani Mountain, we will climb it; Ayata is on its other side," my host said.
I could see only a black mammoth sprinkled with snow on its mighty back. Being close to the equator, the snow meant that the mountain was next to five kilometers height. No roads were visible; but I trusted my friends and re-entered the truck.
Slowly, we made a semi-circle around the cliffs and reached the mountain; the ground turned black and we crossed a small village. "How do they live here?" I asked; herding llamas and alpacas was the obvious answer.
After the village, when we reached a point where the road split, the truck began climbing. "Are you sure?" I asked. "The other one is older and longer, we need to cross the mountain," was the fast answer to the too inquisitive foreigner
My hosts weren't very imaginative; if they said something - they meant it literally. And so, we climbed. The fine weather turned into a hailstones storm. The black earth was transformed into mud mixed with ice. At one side of the truck were cliffs, at the other side was a stonewall reaching the skies. Ice and snow, hailstones and mud, the truck conquered them all. Just below the top, we began surrounding the summit and at certain moment it was clear we had crossed to the other side of the mountain. There was no snow; the storm was over. After a while we began descending and the narrow road opened into a narrow valley with no visible bottom. Somewhere along the middle was a small village. "That's Ayata," I was told.
But I couldn't care less. Unknown to my hosts - none of them had been outside the southern subcontinent - the views took me half a world away to the Himalaya's southern slopes, which I knew from a long trek I took there in the past. Narrow green valleys with cultivated terraces, fierce white streams trying hard to erode everything in their way and the obvious insignificance of humans' presence in a landscape that was shouting at me: "We have only one Earth!"