Eclipsed

We escaped Santa Cruz's stifling heat for the cooler air of the Andean foothills. Samaipata is the kind of sleepy rural town that looks like it hasn't changed for hundreds of years. The roads leading off the main square turn into dusty gravel tracks after fifty metres and are lined with ancient single storey mud brick homes. It reminded me of the sleepy French villages that have been bought up by British investors. Here it´s Dutch and German immigrants who form a large ex-pat community. They´re not that noticable but have a hand in most of the tourist-related businesses. We camped at a place run by a Dutch couple who bought a huge chunk of land on a hillside years ago. It was a nice place but they were a bit smug about their herb garden, vegetable patch and the 'slow food' they served in the cafe. There was a communal locker for the campers and the key was kept on a kitchen shelf. One night the owner took away the key saying there had been some thefts in the past and he had to be careful. He seemed a bit jittery like he was making the whole thing up. The more likely explanation was that he didn't trust a gregarious Polish bloke who had kept him up the night before by talking too loudly. In the morning I went to see the owner about the key. He asked where I was from and appeared to confide in me as a respectable Englishman. 'Oh, it´s back on the shelf,' he said, in a strange Cary Grant accent. 'I can smell the people better now.' I felt like being sick all over his slow food breakfast. The Pole was away for the day but returned late in the evening, raving about a lunar eclipse. Within minutes the shadow of the earth started to move across the nearly full moon. Horses whinnied, dogs barked and thousands of stars appeared. I´d never seen the Milky Way so bright, but then something strange happened. When the moon was completely obscured most of the stars vanished and yet it was a cloudless night. They reappeared about 30 minutes later. Any explanations on the back of a postcard please.

We spent a week in this town taking it very easy, mainly because there were no banks and we hadn't brought enough money. We walked up to a pre-Inca fort called El Fuerte where a huge rock is covered in intricate carvings, mostly to do with astronomy. While we stood there a huge swarm of bees droned towards us about 10 metres up. Staring up in disbelief at this dark cloud, we froze in panic aware that we could do nothing if they decended on us and stung us both to death. (Alright, it might seem dramatic, but these things flash through your mind). But they flew on leaving us jittery, jumping each time we heard an insect fly by. El Fuerte was the eastern-most point of the Inca empire before the Spanish arrived and claimed the site for themselves. We were heading west to the city of Cochabamba and caught a night bus through some isolated villages on some hairy mountain roads.