Speak of the Devil

The best thing about Copacabana, Bolivia, is the Virgin. The Virgin of Copacabana is almost as great a miracle-worker as the Virgin of the Holy Water in Ecuador. People bring miniatures of their houses and cars, bus drivers bring miniature buses, and have them blessed before the statue of the Virgin to protect them. Apparently this is more effective than insurance.

It’s a good thing there is this omnipresence of Virgins in Latin America, because, as Jodi pointed out to me one day, by the time we left we had almost seen the Devil. They have this habit of naming features of the landscape after parts of the Devil’s body (never after God’s. But of course, that would be sacrilegious). So we saw the Devil’s Nose (the switchback-ridden train trek down a steep mountainside in Ecuador), the Devil’s Tooth (a mountain overlooking La Paz), the Devil’s Penis (a plant in the jungle said to impregnate young maidens), and the Devil’s Pailon (a roiling waterfall near Baños). We’re not sure what a pailon is, but I guess that if we’ve already seen the Devil’s Penis it can’t be anything worse than that. Right? Guys??

We climbed the Devil’s Tooth on Easter after visiting the Valley of the Moon. Wouldn’t that be a great first sentence for a sci-fi/fantasy trilogy? It’s hereby up for grabs, as I won’t be writing one anytime soon. And don’t worry, we didn’t attempt to scale the fangs of Satan alone—we rounded up reinforcements, in the form of Reto and Claudia, the wry and apple-cheeked Swiss couple from our Galapagos tour who (perhaps unfortunately for them) ran into us as we were leaving Copacabana, and allowed us to follow them around La Paz once they got there a few days later. It worked out quite well—we let them find and taste-test an excellent Italian restaurant, and then we let them invite us to it (twice!). They didn’t feel like biking the World’s Most Dangerous Road with us on Good Friday (what could they have been thinking?), so we made an Easter date instead, and what an adventure it was. The Valley of the Moon was a hot, dry canyon filled with what look more like drip-sandcastles than anything else. It was sort of interesting, but on a scale of one to moonlike it was probably only about halfway. The best part were the rules and regulations, which were helpfully translated into English: Poner basura en los basureros disponibles became Place garbage in the willing trash cans.

From the Valley of the Moon you were supposed to be able to get to the Devil’s Tooth. You could see it, anyway, looming over the horizon ominously—although if I were in charge of naming it, but had to choose a Devil’s-body-part name, I think it bears far greater resemblance to the Devil’s Middle Finger. We got directions from one of the moon-men: they involved two buses, getting off at the end of the latter, and walking Up.

Suffice it to say that directions are never that simple. The first thing we were supposed to come to was a cemetery, and from there the hike was about an hour and a half. It took us that long to find the cemetery, after asking every local we met including children and cats, wandering through what was either the town garbage dump or a messy person’s backyard, and probably arousing quite a bit of amusement or suspicion: 4 gringos, wandering through the dump and politely asking where they can find the cemetery.

We eventually did make it up to the Devil’s Tooth, after huffing and puffing for some amount of time far greater than an hour and a half. And it was totally worth it. After hours of hot sun and garbage dumps and slums and cemeteries, we ended up in a tiny settlement on top of the mountain, removed as though by miles and decades from the urban sprawl below. Children ran around playing soccer and asking us for candy, women tended gardens and other children tended animals, trying to get an obstinate burro to continue down the path or a herd of sheep to hurry up. At this town, the dusty road turned into a grassy path, and we headed up through fields of wildflowers, heady with altitude and dehydration and the determination that the view would all be worth it. And would you believe it? It was. On one side, La Paz, spread over the immense valley like a large birthmark—one that is not ugly, but so noticeable as to become a defining feature of the person whose birth it marks. On the other side, a wilderness of mountains and valleys, some snowcapped in the distance, and just below us, the Valley of the Moon. The name made sense after all—it was truly as though something had bitten through the earth at the point where city became country, valley became escarpment, earthscape became moonscape. But for me, on top of the world, there was nothing devilish about it.