Planeta de luz, les [brainwashed] Schtroumpfs, and Chamalu

It is going to be a challenge to describe the rest of the night, because you really had to be there to understand what was waiting for us at this eco-hotel in Tiquipaya.  As I describe the site you may think I was tripping after the 52-hour trip but I assure you I was not, and have a couple of witnesses who can back my story up! 

Back to the plaza Tiquipaya: we were picked up by the so-called eco hotel's guide there and drove further away from the city.  15 minutes later we stopped in front of a big wooden door, on both sides stood 5 feet long human faces carved in stone! It seemed a lot like a temple of some sort. The door opened and we entered to a dark forest like place, walk through the little alleys with our suitcases and told to wait up to fill out forms to check in. People who work there were annoyingly peaceful and slow. 

Finally they split us in groups and took us to our "cabins". These randomly built structures were planned to host 10 to 16 people each, luckily ours had its own bathroom. I dropped everything, showered and chilled out with a couple of other folks from the bus, we were all thinking, where are we? Sleep and exhaustion took over and we all went to bed. 

Next morning someone woke us up, knocking on our door, both Joseph and I were so out of it, we could not move too fast, but after the third warning we got dressed and got out of our casita. 

In the day light the premises of the hotel was in front of my eyes and it looked a lot like somewhere I have seen before: le Pays Maudit! (French for "the Cursed Land"), where the Smurfs lived! 

In case you don't know what I am talking about, the Smurfs are the little blue people created by belgian cartoonist Peyo. These cute little things were my favorite cartoon characters when I was a little kid: they lived in a small town, far away from people.  No humans could find it without being taken there by one of them. It required magic or travelling through massive forests, deep marshes, even a desert and a mountain range to get there. They used storks in order to travel long distances. Their village was made up of mushroom like houses of different shapes and sizes in a desolate land with threes. And at 7:30 in the morning without a cup of coffee, Planeta de Luz (in the mountains of Cochabamba) looked as if I was in Pays Maudit.  We were told by one of the volunteers (later we found out that everyone who work there was a volunteer and most of them are not even Bolivians) told us to rush to the breakfast room. 

As I was walking there, I could not help but murmur the song from the cartoon: "la la lallalalalalaaaa" while skipping and jumping,  Joseph was cracking up. 

Our bus mates were already finishing their breakfast when we got there, we both run to the coffee fountain only to found some diluted soluble shit. The menu consisted of stale wholewheat bread (one of the volunteers, who seemed way to cheerful at 8 am, explained to us that they make everything themselves, I wanted to respond "so it seems!"), salty nasty cheese, and some raw papaya. Hoping to find real food in town, we skipped Chamalu offerings. Right when I was trying to erase the smurf song from my brain, we heard a horn blowing!  The bus was leaving to take us to the registration. 

In the bus Joseph told me that the same volunteer who showed us around told him that there was a possibility that people would say weird things about them back in town, but we should not listen to them. Of course this aroused even more curiosity for these two journalists and we started asking questions. Here is what we gathered: Once upon a time there was a little sick boy (in chile), all the doctors said he was going to die. His native grandmother on the other hand refused to accept this situation and saved him with natural and indigenous medicine, and after that, only when he was 4 years old he became a guru who helped people! This guru, CHAMALU,  who "helps people", has 2 eco hotels in Bolivia where he charges 35 dollars a night for a bed with shitty breakfast (price goes up if you stay in a nicer room) and he is nowhere to be found, because he gives lectures traveling around the world of course charging people for that too. All the volunteers seem high as fuck and have the same expression in their face all the time, no matter what. They all told us that they arrived there for a couple of days for vacation and never left. Cab drivers who fetched us back and forth told us many stories about what they do when no one is around: rituals, orgies, etc. 

I wish I could stay there another day (JK) but we had to check out and move to an apt downtown with internet access and no Chamalu the next day.