Fun at INESAD Serious fun at work
One of the best one-day hikes from La Paz is the one from the Valley of Spirits to Palca through the Palca Canyon. It has to be done on a sunny day, as you walk in the river bed and don’t want to be surprised by a flash flood from behind. The best time of the year to do this hike is just by the end of the rainy season when the fields are green and the meadows full of flowers. This year the rainy season was unusually long and unpredictable, so we didn’t get to go until the 4th of May, by which time most of the fields had been harvested and the flowers disappeared. Still, with the Illimani mountain in the background and the impressive red canyon walls, it is always a beautiful trip.
This year we put together a diverse INESAD-CARE-CAF-GoB-family group of adventurers, and here is the group at the start of the hike:
The amazing thing about this hike is that it is different every time. You just send the kids off in the direction of Illimani, and a new trail will be made every time.
Sometimes, however, you end at a steep cliff and will have to backtrack a bit in order to continue.
It is a relatively easy 5 hour hike downhill most of the way, but it wouldn’t be fun if it didn’t present some challenges.
Fortunately, we had four perfect gentlemen on this trip, always ready with a helping hand.
The photo below was taken so that CAF would know who to sue if Carolina Gutierrez didn’t make it out of this canyon. She didn’t really think that through, did she?
But everybody made it out of the canyon safely.
Since the main purpose of the trip, apart from enjoying nature with good friends, was to take photos for the next INESAD Policy Brief about irrigation programs in Bolivia, we were lucky to see both tradicional and modern irrigation systems in Palca. This one was wonderfully refreshing in the midday sun, and the fields looked extraordinarily green compared to the ones without irrigation, but it did seem to violate one of the basic principles of irrigation.
