Yunga Pampa: where the high plains meet the deep jungle

Towards the end of September, Tom and Ruth, two long time friends (note, Tom and Ruth, I didn't say old friends) came down to spend the week with Collin, Matias and I.  We decided to take them to Yunga Pampa, a rustic hut built on the edge of the altiplano where it plunges down into the jungle several thousand feet below.  Including the guide we had to take with us, there were six people and 5 seats, so Collin started out riding in the back.  We wound our way up and out of the city, half an hour up a dirt road, when my eye caught an orange light in the lower left hand corner of the dash.  THE GAS LIGHT!!  We weren't running on fumes yet, but were close, and had to drive all the way back down into the city to fill up.  Grr.

Back on the road again, we drove up and over a mountain pass, over 15,000 ft., through llamas and more llamas, as well as past a few stone hut villages.

The high mountain pass was covered with rock piles that dated back to pre-Incas times, according to our guide.  In keeping with tradition, travelers would place a rock on the highest point on the pass as a good luck charm, asking Pachamama (the earth goddess) to protect them on their journey, often leaving an offering of coca leaves for her.

After almost 7 hours in the car, we finally arrived.  The hut itself was beautiful from the outside, but quite rustic on the inside.  It'd been built several years before in conjunction with the municipality of Tiquipaya, but had never fully functioned regularly with tourists and the elements had begun to take it back over.

There was no electricity (although the place was completely wired for it, they just didn't like to use the generator to run it and hadn't hooked the solar panel up to batteries) and it was COLD!  At least there were flushing toilets:)  We did a lot of our eating and washing dishes by light of the one candle and our headlamps.

The next morning we set out on a series of hikes to explore the area around the hut.

It was like walking into C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair, where Jill and Eustace find themselves at the edge of an interminable cliff upon arriving in Narnia.  It felt like we'd arrived at the edge of the world and the area at the bottom of the cliffs was a faraway land.   The high altiplano suddenly dropped away into the jungle with thousand foot cliffs.

It sometimes felt like we were about to walk off the edge, as mist swirling up from the jungle often shrouded us and kept us from seeing much further ahead.

The further down into the jungle, the greener everything became and the softer the edges... from the spiky, sharp paja brava of the highlands to the spongy, soft moss of the jungle.  The harsh, bitter winds of the mountains to the all-enveloping warm moisture of the forest below.

Matias was a great hiker, calling the trail we were on a "black diamond," in reference to the difficulty level of ski runs back in Colorado.  He scrambled up rocks, slid down steep, grassy hillsides and walked the entire day by himself.

When we got back, Matias made friends with the caretaker's donkey.  I think the pictures below tell the whole story.

After the first carrot, the donkey was Matias' new best friend, hee-hawing every time Matias walked outside.  The last day, when we crested the last hill, several hundred feet above the hut, the donkey saw us and started calling with his loud bray, sending Matias into a fit of giggles.

The last night, Matias decided to keep me warm by sharing my small twin bed with me, both of us precariously balanced in our sleeping bags.  About an hour after falling asleep, cocooned in my warm sleeping bag, I heard a "slither, slither, PLOP."  Through my fog of sleep, I opened my eyes and realized I was the only one on the bed.  I leaned over and saw Matias on the hard ceramic floor, fast asleep in his sleeping bag.  Leaning off the bed, still in my own warm bag, I managed to pull him back up, and he remembered none of it the next day.

Our last day, we hiked about a thousand feet up above the hut to Calzón Qhocha (Underwear Lake).  It was a grunt up a steep, misty valley, but Matias was a trooper.  He hiked all but about 15 minutes of the uphill climb to the lake above.

The lake itself wasn't that spectacular, other than being in the shape of a pair of underwear, but there was a kewiña (native high altitude tree) forest next to it that seemed to be transported straight out of a fairytale.  The light was softer, everything was draped in moss and as Matias said "It was greener than you would think."  No pictures could capture its allure.

The hike back down made my fingers tingle the way they do when I'm on the edge of a cliff.  Our game trail path contoured the steep, steep grassy slope, quickly falling away below us into the deep valley.  I was glad when we popped over the ridge and could see the hut again.  Matias scampered across it like a mountain goat, trailing the caretaker like his shadow.

Once down, we packed up and started the long drive home.  Before Yunga Pampa was completely out of sight, we took one last look back down the valley as we drove away...

As we drove out over the 4WD road, Marcelino, the hut caretaker, passed us on his horse, riding with his donkey the four hours up and over the hills to his village nestled in the Andean mountains.