Dancing girls strut their stuff at the Oruro Carnival Parade in Bolivia.
With water fights, costumed parades, dancing girls and blood rituals, Bolivians really know how to celebrate carnival in style.
nly seconds after we left the hotel, the attacks began. The first hit got me right in the face, a direct shot from a passing car – a drive-by. A second came from a gang of youths hiding in an alleyway. Then the bombs came thick and fast. As we edged towards the centre of town, they pelted us from hidden corners, and bombarded us from unnoticed balconies. Within an hour we were drenched.
Sequins, beads and feather headdresses have their place but, in Bolivia, carnival time is celebrated first with water fights. From late January and throughout February, Bolivians young and old take to the streets for spontaneous water fights, using water balloons, spray cans of foam, and semi-automatic-sized water pistols.
"I'm sorry," Javier, our contact in La Paz, had warned my friend Anna and me before we set off to Sucre, Bolivia's attractive judicial capital, "but as tourists you will be targeted even more!" He wasn't wrong. While exploring the colourful buildings, craft markets and cool little bars of small, neat Sucre – very different from vast, rambling La Paz – we wore cagoules with the hoods pulled tight, and wrapped our cameras in carrier bags.
Being drawn into a giant nationwide water fight wasn't the only festive fun. Though our month in Bolivia began a week before the big carnival parades, the country was already in party mode. Balloons, flags, flower garlands and streamers decorated every building; bands were playing their way around town on foot; and at weekends it was hard to spot a child not in fancy dress.
One morning we were buying textiles in one of Sucre's craft stores when we heard a brass band outside. Poking our heads out, we were swept along by a dancer who took us by the arms and twirled us along for several blocks.
Days later, we arrived at midnight in Uyuni, the desolate outpost town near the country's incredible salt flats, in a terrible storm after a grim 10-hour bus journey from Potosí. We were amazed to hear the strains of folk music floating out of the darkness from a little brass band playing their hearts out in the rain in the deserted street.
While these small celebrations add a joyful dimension to South American travel at this time of year, we would have been mad to miss one of the continent's biggest carnival parades, El Carnaval de Oruro, a week-long Rio-style procession of dozens of dancing troupes from all over Bolivia who gather in an isolated mining town on the southern Altiplano. Performing in fantastic costumes and huge masks, they continue for several sleepless days and nights, fuelled by strong spirits and chicha, a thick bubbly slop made from fermented corn.
The celebration is shown continually on Bolivian TV and becomes the focus of the nation's attention while it's on. Traditional dance groups and Oruro's own Diablada ("devil" dancers in special costumes) rehearse all year and spend hundreds of dollars on each costume, forming a parade thousands strong, with thousands more spectators travelling to attend.
It is a complex mix of Christian and indigenous tales and rituals, an expression of good over evil, of native groups over the Spanish. The dominant explanation says it commemorates the Virgin of Candelaria who, legend has it, helped an injured thief reach his home in Oruro to die and left her image in a cave where she has been worshipped by the mining community ever since.
I had imagined a quaint folk-dancing show, but then I exchanged emails with travel blogger Jamie Lafferty, who sent me a link to his report of the previous year's event. This rather literally pissed on our parade: he described being beaten up and robbed at knife-point, waking up in hospital, and wild drunks peeing in the streets (and on his girlfriend). We bought waterproofs and went anyway.
The rest of the year, Oruro is just a poor unvisited mining town, with few recommendable sights, redeeming features, or hotels. The lack of infrastructure means it is not the easiest festival to attend, and those who turn up without a hotel room booked months in advance might be lucky to share a room in a private home with dozens of others.
Carnival time in Sajama, Bolivia.
Another overnight bus journey (they're unavoidable if you want to see Bolivia properly) from Uyuni had taken us right through Oruro the night before the main day of the parade, but we were warned not to get off as it was the middle of the night, dangerous, and there would be nowhere to go. So we stayed on until La Paz and arranged for a driver to take us back to Oruro the next day.
Even in the morning the atmosphere was frenetic. We had to push through crowds covered in foam to get to the parade, then wait ages for a space to become free on one of the rough tiered benches set up for spectators. As we took our seats, the Bolivians seated around us shouted "no! no!" and tried to shoo us away, worried we would attract water attacks. But several hours later we were sharing beers, crackers and coca leaves with them, singing and cheering the energetic procession. Dancers in glittering thigh-high boots, ra-ra skirts and feathered bowler hats strutted by, dashing drummers leapt and jangled their ankle bells, and suited band members, too drunk to keep their eyes open or play their instruments, wobbled along hilariously, all creating a spectacle.
After seeing another similarly noisy, sparkly big-city parade in La Paz, we felt we'd like to see how people celebrated in their normal lives, too.
Throughout the carnival period, but particularly on Shrove Tuesday, Bolivian families gather to perform cha'lla, a ceremony of thanks to Pachamama, the earth mother. Blood and alcohol are sprinkled at the corners of their homes, villages and sacred sites, sayings are repeated, streamers hung and fire-crackers let off.
Cha'lla is part of life whether you're Aymara, Quechua, or mestizo, and most folk are Catholic, too. In La Paz, I saw cha'llas on battered old cars, fast-food joints and dirty street corners, and Javier told us one day he was off to bless his office, including the computer (presumably without the llama blood).
To witness more traditional cha'lla ceremonies away from the cities, we drove south-west across the Altiplano, to a village called Curahuara de Carangas. In the sunny square they were blessing trees festooned with balloons, and preparing for a feast to be thrown by the mayor.
"I'm so sorry," he said when we met, "you have just missed the sacrifice of the llamas!"
How disappointing. Instead, we accepted an invitation to a village council meeting. He and his wife, dressed in their finest red and green ponchos and woven shawls, sat at the head of a table upon which lay a big bowl of coca leaves and the heads of 30 llamas, gifts from local families. We chewed our leaves politely while the council decided a suitable punishment for a man who'd got drunk at the party and hit his wife (a certain number of bricks would have to be made for the village, they agreed).
Houses in sleepy Sajama, at the foot of Bolivia's highest mountain
Next we reached Sajama, Bolivia's oldest national park, near the Chilean border, where Bolivia's highest mountain, Nevado Sajama (6,542m), rises up as a perfect snowy cone. Sajama village was so sleepy we thought we'd missed everything, and we were the only guests at the Albergue Ecoturistico Tomarapi just outside, jointly owned by 36 families.
But the area is also a spectacular place for hiking. To go high-altitude trekking in Sajama, we only needed to step out of our door: the village is at 4,200m. We roamed higher, over plains of green moss and quinoa fields, among herds of llama and alpaca. The world's highest forest – of underwhelming dwarf queñua trees – grows here and there were bubbling multi-coloured geysers and hot springs where we swam down peaty channels.
And then, one late afternoon, as the sky turned purple behind the snow-capped volcanos, the village suddenly came out. The boys mounted wild-looking ponies, women in frilly shiny skirts began to dance, and the men got out their quena flutes. They all formed a small but beautiful procession on the cold muddy streets and we followed them as they blessed each corner of their shabby little village for what had passed that year, and what might lie ahead.
The trip was provided by High Lives (highlives.co.uk). Its seven-day Oruro Carnival trip departs on 4 February and costs from £950pp, excluding flights. Return flights from Gatwick to La Paz via Madrid and Santa Cruz with Air Europa (aireuropa.com) cost from £1,000
