El Toro Toro
This past weekend, 7/2–7/3, we all went to El Toro Toro. Toro Toro is a national park here in Bolivia and it is one of the coolest places that I have ever been to in my entire life. Located approximately 4 hours away by car, on the bumpiest, unpaved road that I have ever seen. Our entire group, including Paula, Jocelyn, Onno, Juliet, Karen, Hailey, Danny, Charlene, her friend, and myself, went to Toro Toro for the entire weekend. It was actually a pretty cool because we had our transportation, lodging, food, and excursions for $100 each. Pretty good deal if you ask me.
After our crazy bus ride that had every one of us bouncing in our seats the entire time, we arrived at Toro Toro at around 12:30 PM. We had lunch, which consisted of soy hamburger patties, tomatoes, homemade fries, bread, and guava ice cream, we got settled in our rooms, and then at around 2:30 PM, we set out for our first adventure.
The first day, being Saturday, we went to the caverns. I don’t really think that any of anticipated that this excursion would be as hard and as cool as it was. So, we went to into this cave, not sure what it is called, but it is the largest cave in all of Bolivia. It began with just some rocks that we needed to climb through to get to the main part of the cave, and it soon became a cavern where we needed to turn on our headlamps. With absolutely no light except for the lights on our head, we headed deep into the mountain. I thought that this cave exploration would be us just climbing over rocks through dirt and stalagmites, however, I was not right. There were many times where we had to repel down steep cliffs in the mountain with only us holding onto a rope, with no attachment to this rope whatsoever, slide down other steep slopes, and again, climb laterally along a cliff while only holding onto a rope for support. It’s interesting because there was no signing of Liability forms or what not here in Bolivia, and I know that this excursion would not have cut it in the US without more safety precautions. But that’s what made this exploration so cool. There were times where we crawled on our hands and knees to get to places, others where we had to lay flat just to get through the hole, and other times where we had to squeeze through other holes to continue on the path. I, unfortunately, stepped in water multiple times and my shoes were soaking wet by the end of the cave exploration. We also saw fish that were completely white and blind, and these other animals that were kind of a mixture between a rabbit and squirrel. They were awesome.
The second day at Toro Toro was even better than the first. We began our day at around 8:30 am and we went and saw dinosaur tracks that were so cool! After we saw these tracks, our guide, Gabriel, took us to the canyon. After walking for about 20 minutes we got to the see main part of the canyon and I can honestly saw it was one of the most beautiful landscapes that I had ever seen in my entire life. We were at an altitude of 2700 meters (I know because I asked our guide in Spanish lol) at it was amazing up there. After we saw the canyon, we began a trek down to see the waterfall. We had to climb down 800 steps to the get the waterfall, but again this place was awesome. We could walk through the waterfall, dive off of rocks, and go bouldering all over the place. The only bad part of this trip was having to climb up the 800 steps to get back to the main city.
Words learned at Toro Toro (no idea about this spelling):
Hummingbird = picoflor
canyon = canyon (with an accent)
waterfall = la cascada
altitude = altitud (with an accent)
