Two days ago we arrived in Mizque because our guide book knew that a festival was taking place there until the 19. September. And it also mentioned that there would be bull fights and dances with masks everyday of the festival, which was not quite right...
But maybe I should start from the beginning. On Thursday morning I went to by a ticket for one of the two busses that are going to Mizque daily. The busses both go at twelve noon, are run by different companies and do not leave from the bus terminal but from a street corner near the market in Cochabamba. So on my way I walked across the market where everybody was busy putting up their stalls or cleaning them and arranging all the goods in the right order. Everything was being sold in a sorted way, so there were half a street full of fruits, the other half full of herbs, another street with metals or clothes and so on. But the most outstanding corner I saw was a roundabout that was totally occupied by potato sellers. The mounted sacks of potatos were already visible from quite a distance since they were towering up high. Just before the corner of "Respublica" and "G. de Augusto" - where the buses are leaving from - I asked one more time for the way to the bus company office. The woman I had asked was busy doing her laundry in the little cart she most certainly had used the night before to make hamburgers. But why just use the sope only once for the laundry - why not clean the pan with it at the same time!? ...
To actually buy the tickets was quite simple in the end. The only little problem was - as always here in South America - to spell my name.
We started our journey to Mizque pretty much on time and at first it all went well without any incidents - until we suddenly heard a loud fizzling that seemed to come from the wheels. But at that very moment the driver did not take any action. Only in the next village - which was not just a kilometer away - we changed the wheel that was pretty flat for another one, whose tyre was ripped quite badly already... Shortly after this incident we stopped again. But this time it was not our bus having problems, but the bus coming from Mizque going the opposite direction. Anyway, it seemed that our bus driver was a bit more experienced in fixing mechanical disorders than the other one, and so he helped his collegue while we were all waiting - and we ended up waiting for a long time! In the beginning the problem was a hole in an oil pipe, which they tried to fix. When this was done, water started leaquing out of the radiator and so this needed our bus drivers attention another time. He fixed it again with rubberband and some wire as he had done before with the oil pipe. And last but not least they discovered that the right front wheel had lost its air during all this time of reparation and needed a change too. When finally everthing was done, the bus driver started the bus - only to turn it off again straight away. The oil pipe was still looking like a fountain... But this time the two bus drivers decided to take it out and our bus would take it to Mizque to be fixed. And so we left this spot, including the bus and it's passengers after two hours to finish our ride to Mizque, that was only another 45 minutes away.
When we finally arrived, we went to the "Residencial Graciela" to get a room. All doors were wide open, but no one was around. So we asked the neighbours who advised us just to take a room, the owners would be coming sometime. And somehow it really worked like that, but we found it quite strange. The rooms were very nice in this "Residencial". Besides having a privat bath we even had a balcony - and all that for 25 Bolivianos per night for the two of us together. But the house had a water problem (say: shortage) which after a while started to walk on our nerves.
When we got hungry that night we went to the popular restaurant "Seņor de Burgos" one block north of the square where we met some people again that had arrived with us in the sam bus. Both the bus drivers were there, too, having dinner without any hurry - two more hours had passed since our arrival in town...
Oh, I almost forgot. The festival! The passengers from the broken bus had already prepared us a little. The truth was, that the mainpart of the festival was over. It had been celebrated from 8.September until 15.September. But there was still hope. On the coming weekend there were supposed to be some parades and other things to celebrate the 401 anniversary
of Mizque. The activities were due to start again on Friday night. And so we used the time until then to organize a guide who could show usn two nearby sights of the Inca era. To find a guide was not as easy as one might think. In the office of the mayor nobody seemed to know much about guides in Mizque, and changing their minds all the time we could not quite trust them. that a tour would work out well. So we kept on asking the office of the church which sent us to the radio-station - both are situated at the southwest corner of the square - which sent us directly to a guide further down the street. The guide was willing to show us around, even though he was busy preparing things for the festivities. And so we left the village at around 1:30p.m. and drove to the apparently only gate of the Inca empire that is still existing in its whole. Our guide reckoned that it was even older than the Incas. Though completeness of that gate seems quite threatened by a try that is growing exactly on top of it and looks like it is tearing it appart. Locals dig for any remains of this ancient settlement in the nearby area and by doing so they leave deep pits behind. The drive to this site had been quite adventurous. Often we had to cross riverbeds with big boulders and the road altogether was narrow and bumpy, but we were travelling in a 2-WD , so our maximum speed was something like 30km/h - but only for short distances of maybe 200m, then slower again! The car had been built originally to drive on the left side of the road, but the people here had just brought the pedals and the steering wheel to the other side (who needs instruments like a speedometer!?) and now it was good enough for driving on the right side in Bolivia.
The second place we visited was a star chart of the Incas written on a big stone. Unfortunately this one is really damaged a lot by wind and rain. We were just able to make out some dots and faded figures in the rock. But it was not quite clear if these things were really supposed to be images of stars or not.
When we got back from this little excursion, we had a very needed cold drink - the temperatures had surely been over 30ēC, and higher in the car.
In the evening the festivities started to celebrate Mizques anniversary and we were quite surprised that festivals were held in such different ways in one and the same country. While in Guanay we had seen people singing, laughing, dancing, and drinking merrily for their town's anniversary, here it was a rather serious happening. In the beginning, clubs and schools of Mizque had to stand still having an appeal where some important people of the town held boring speeches that obviously not everyone agreed to. And two songs were sung - of which we assume one was the national anthem. These songs were accompanied by a pretty nonmusical little band. While I was rather amused by this bad musical performance, the Bolivians took it very seriously and stood still - but singing only half-heartedly and badly tuned. I am not saying that I would do it better, but that is why I let singing be singing in the first place.
When the appeal was over, a parade followed consisting of the same people that had taken part in the appeal carrying lights and torches. Everthing was taken really seriously and there were even people at the side of the parade to show the participants in which line they had to walk, for in the morning people had been busy drawing lines on the streets surrounding the square.
Only when this boring parade was finished it got a bit funnier. Cars and other vehicles had been decorated and had their own little parade now. There were even donkeys and bulls inbetween the vehicles. Bull fights and cook fights were played by kids in costumes in this parade, as well as scenes out of rural life. After the parade the happenings at the square were finished for that night. By the way, do not think that the whole square had been used for the parade - the formations of people only had to walk down along one street framing the plaza, passing the tribune with the most important people of the town, before the formed parad vanished into thin air.
But the evening had not been finished yet. After the parade the 4th festival of dances started in the theater and so all the people went from the square to the theater. On a sign I had read something about "Traditional dances", which was true for the beginning of the show. Children, Teenagers, and grownups were performing different dances - really quite interesting. This show had started around 10p.m. but when it got to half past 11 people started to get really tired. The "showmaster" could not think of anything better than demanding an "aplauso fuerte" after every performance or even when the music got stuck or some dancers had missed their turn to get onto stage... Meanwhile the dances were not all traditional anymore but rather a mix of Rap songs, Pop songs out of the 80's and even something that to us looked like Erobic. When it came to the Erobic part we decided it was time to leave, by that time it must have been past midnight anyway. And so we went back to the "Residencial" that again did not have water nor attention to ask to switch the water on.
In the morning the parades picked up again. It was just around 6a.m. when we woke up to lots of noise on the streets. But this noise was only practise, for the parade started at around 10 o'clock. This time it was the students turn to march across the square under a burning sun (most likely more than 30ēC). The groups that did not have their own little band were accompanied by the same bad musicians from the night before. But this time they were playing a song that I recalled from the movie "The pirates of the Carribean" - and so the "little pirates" were marching across the plaza - some in really elegent clothes, some in rather dirty school uniforms - forcing their teaches to put them into right order constantly. The only thing missing were pirate flaggs - but they had been replaced by the red-yellow-green Bolivian flag.
In the afternoon we left Mizque and took the bus back to Cochabamba. We had expected quite a different war of celebrating and so we were a bit disappointed. On the way back we had to change yet another tyre of the bus. How could it had been different? ;-)
Suse
