Urkapiña

A view from the top of the hill, this line of people went on my miles and miles and people were still arriving in the thousands when we were leaving at 11am.

A view of Cochabamba from Christo.

This week has been a fairly quiet week following the weekend. In Cochabamba it was the festival ¨ Urkapina¨, which is basically a festival for the Virgin (I think it’s the Virgin Maria), and people from all over the country come to celebrate , many people say that everyone once came for their faith but its fast become a business for a lot of people.

So, I didn´t make it to the festival on the Friday which is the day that thousands of people dance through the streets from 8am until midnight, but I didn´t feel too disappointed as I had at least seen the practice a few weeks earlier, and I happily watched it on TV with the family.

However weeks earlier I had for only god knows what reason agreed to do ¨the walk¨with my host brother on the Saturday night. Now what this ¨walk¨consists of is getting up at roughly 3am on Sunday morning and walking 16kms to the suburb Quillacollo and climb a small hill. Now as some of you know I´m not exactly the most chipper person when my sleeps been interrupted, so waking up at 3am and walking in the pitch black while it is freezing is not exactly my idea of a good time, but this was something else. I mean they block off an entire side of the highway for people to walk on and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people walking this walk. There are families with small children and so many women carrying their babies, at this point I realized it was not going to be possible for me to complain, and aside from my freezing butt, there wasn´t anything to complain about. There were bands playing on the side of the highway, people selling food and drinks and plenty of promotional people handing out freebies.
Now I´d like to tell you that we walked the whole 16kms because the idea is that the walk is your sacrifice so when you reach the final destination(the name has escaped me) you can ask the virgin for whatever you need and it will come true. But once we reached km 12 and the boys saw a truffi that was heading in the right direction needless to say they weren´t going to get any complaints from me and my legs were happy once again.

And it really was truly amazing when we reached the top of the hill and could look down and see all the people walking from miles away. At the top of the hill you can buy token objects of the things that you need. To begin with I was being all moral and telling Marcelo that I was a truly happy person and that I didn´t really need anything and blah blah blah, but when we both saw the fake $$$ we both thought, it couldn´t hurt could it??? So fingers crossed people!!

Also at the top of the hill there are areas where people get a pick and hammer the rocks, the idea is that the bigger the piece of rock you break off the more money it represents. Then you must carry the stone home and walk back with it the following year to return it to the virgin. Given the small possibility of bringing the rock back next year I declined, but inside had my morning shower when some priests blessed me with peace, so as far as I can see I´m set now, I mean I´ve got my peace and money should be on the way anyday now……………

So all in all it was a really great day/night and I am happy I gave up some sleep for it. The only thing that was missing was breakfast which I had been dying for since the wee hours of the morning. Marcelo and his friend Jose decided to take me to this stall and assured me that the stall was ¨clean¨what they neglected to tell me was that they had ordered me soup for breakfast, needless to say when the pepsi arrived at the table it was rapidly returned for beer for the 3 of us. Marcelo says to me, ¨Sarah its 8am in the morning you can´t have beer for breakfast, what would your mum say¨? I said ¨Marcelo its 8am in the morning if my mum saw us now she would say ¨I can´t believe your trying to feed Sarah soup not I can´t believe you´re drinking beer¨. And now it’s any ongoing joke as Marcelo as kindly told my host mum that soup is my favourite food, don’t worry revenge is a dish best served cold………………