hiking in the Andes

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On Sunday the 17th my friend and I took the bus an hour and a half north (and uphill) from Mérida to stay overnight in the lovely mountain town of Mucuchíes. We stayed in an international tourist-class hotel with a medieval castle theme. Here’s the view from my window…people here still plow with oxen because the hills are too steep for tractors. Over the next couple of days, as we hiked, we saw that potato fields were sown right up to the border of the national park, and were it not for the park, the land would probably be cultivated even higher.

Mucuchíes is as rich with political graffiti as anywhere else in Venezuela. “There is no 11 without 13” refers to the April 11 2002 against Chávez, and his April 13 rescue and restoration to power. Notice that the 13 is painted with the Venezuelan flag…and the 11 with the U.S. flag. In Mérida, I picked up a book in Spanish by a Venezuelan university professor about the history of the CIA in Venezuela. His reason for writing the book, he says, was that we all know the CIA was behind the 2002 coup, but rather than wait thirty years for the documents to be declassified, as was the case with Allende in Chile, let’s look now at the entire breadth of the CIA’s malign history in this country.

The other mural—“No to the closure”—refers to the government’s decision to refuse the renewal of RCTV’s broadcasting license, which I discussed in the post entitled “Media.”

We visited a small art exhibit in the Mucuchíes cultural center—all the art, some figurative and some abstract, in a variety of media, was about the importance of the potato for Andean culture. There were only about fifteen works in the exhibit, but some of them were really high quality, and all, as far as we could tell, were by local artists.

On Monday the 18th we proceeded further uphill to the hamlet of Mitibibó, where we stayed in the mucuposada there. Mucu is a local indigenous word meaning “place of,” and posada is Spanish for inn. Mucuposadas are local Andean homes refitted for guests, and strategically located in places where hikers need to spend the night. The network of mucuposadas and guided hikes is a program of a non-profit called Andes Tropicales, which receives funding from the EU, the Belgian government, the Venezuelan Ministry of Tourism (I think), and other sources. The mucuposada in Mitibibó was the first, in operation since 1999, and Irene, the proprietor, talked with us about the gain, not just to her, but to the community. She has guests all year long, high season and low, and has prepared meals for as many as thirty people at a time. The local producers from whom she buys provisions, as well as the women she hires to help her cook when there’s a big group, all benefit from the eco-friendly, culturally sensitive tourism that Andes Tropicales brings. The visitors come from all over the world, as well as from within Venezuela; Europeans predominate. The food is delicious, simple, local fare; we watched our hosts bake arepas from scratch each morning.

Andean homes consist of rooms that open onto an open courtyard, and indoor heating is not part of the local culture. If it’s in the 40s outside, it’s in the 40s inside. No problem when you’re sleeping under multiple heavy wool blankets, but it can be really tough to get out of that warm bed. The mucuposadas have electricity and hot water…but getting out of the shower, wet, on a cold morning can be…bracing. It’s especially cold when it rains (a couple of hours every day this time of year…there’s also bright sunshine every day, and you warm right up when you start hiking uphill!). Unlike Mérida or Caracas, one can drink water right out of the tap up in the mountains without boiling or filtering, because it’s pure mountain water. We also filled a water bottle from a high-altitude running stream during one of our hikes.

On the first day, we passed a gate to a paddock with a red United Socialist Party of Venezuela flag on it. I asked out guide, Lolo, who’s from Mitibibó, and he told me that the upmountain farms are like the rest of Venezuela: a majority of people are Chavistas, and some support the opposition.

We hiked for two days, staying in an Andes Tropicales rustic shelter the second night and a mucuposada called El Nido del Gavilán (The Hawk’s Nest) in Misintá, a little farming community right next to Mucuchíes. On the second day, the hike was strenuous, and my friend and I spent more than half of the day on horseback. Our guide, Daniel, is from La Toma Alta (where the Andes Tropicales shelter is), and is sixty-one years old. He took the entire trail on foot, while managing two horses and a mule loaded down with our stuff. After he dropped us off in Misintá, he walked the animals by road three hours back to La Toma Alta…and did it all over again the next day with other tourists!

He told us that Andes Tropicales had lent them the money to buy the animals used on these hikes. For the entire six hours of walking/riding, we saw no other human being than the four of us—three tourists and the guide. When we broke for lunch, we were at nearly 14,000 feet. It was breathtaking. Well, except for the brief hailstorm.