Bolivian Highlands Oct 20—Nov 04, 2005
Posted by Steve Hilty
Steve Hilty
Steve Hilty is the senior author of A Guide to the Birds of Colombia, and the recently published Birds of Venezuela, both by Princeton University Press. Other credits inclu...Related Trips
I sit looking out the sixth-floor window of our hotel in La Paz, and I am surrounded by a sight like no other: a 360-degree panorama of red and tan brick buildings that line the near circular cauldron in which this city lies. It is as if I am looking at a modern-day counterpart of the ancient cliff-dwelling Anasazi of Arizona and New Mexico, buildings marching up to the cauldron rim one almost on top of another. It is a remarkable city—congested, busy, noisy, and the highest elevation capital city in the world. In the eastern background, as if watching over this remarkable assemblage of brick that has been pushed upward and now spills westward onto the altiplano in the form of the even larger city of Los Altos, is snow-covered Mt. Illimani, almost 19,000 feet high and, by any reckoning, one of the highest and most majestic mountains in the Andes.
To the east of the city, we have driven over La Cumbre, the 15,322 feet mountain pass that provides a dramatic entrance into the cloud forests and yungas forests of the eastern Andean slope of Bolivia. The road from the pass downward is as magnificent as it is rich in diversity of bird life, and it ended, for us, at a tranquil and uncommonly pleasant country inn nestled in the yungas foothills. The view from my guest room windows at that inn near Coroico was as dramatic as the one in La Paz, but of a very different kind—a panorama of forested slopes and cloud-filled valleys, and with birds all around the hotel grounds. Without leaving the poolside of the beautifully sculptured hourglass pool that graces the front of the inn, we logged such enviable species as Versicolored Barbet, Ocellated Piculet, White-backed Fire-eye, Chestnut-crowned Becard, Two-banded Warblers, Swallow-Tanagers, Yellow-bellied Siskins, and Double-banded Seedeaters, among many others.
Birding and travel in Bolivia, however, are more than simply a birding experience. One cannot travel in Bolivia without seeing, indeed rubbing shoulders with, the rich and colorful cultures of the lowlands and highlands, traveling some dusty roads, and encountering unexpected adventures. This is, in fact, what makes Bolivia so fascinating.
Our trip began in the lowlands at the city of Santa Cruz where a mixture of palm savannas, gallery forests, and chaco-like desert scrub interface to bring together a remarkably diverse assemblage of birds from diminutive tody-tyrants to five-feet-high rheas. Our visit coincided with a huge influx of migrating Eastern Kingbirds that mingled with Chestnut-eared Aracaries and various resident birds along riverine forest.
Our route increased in elevation in steps, first to about 5,000 feet in desert-like conditions around Comarapa where we saw at least six endangered Red-fronted Macaws, then to over 8,500 feet at Cochabamba where we ranged upwards into cloud forests and higher still into Polylepis forest and puna grassland, and finally to La Paz at nearly 12,000 feet for the last several days of the trip. Here, on the altiplano, we searched for the Titicaca Flightless Grebe at Lake Titicaca, and drove higher into the truly rarified air of high puna grasslands and wet bogs at over 16,000 feet—all (thanks to our acclimatization) without a hint of discomfort, even at these extreme elevations.
To say that Bolivia is an easy trip, however, would not be wholly truthful. Some bus drives are long, and the solar radiation at high elevations—as well as the thin air—can be tiring. But, there is no place quite like Bolivia with its colorful markets, snowy mountain ranges, vast panoramas of undisturbed mountain forest, high lakes, deserts, breathtaking scenery at every turn, and large numbers of near-endemic birds. It is truly a land of roads less traveled and places less visited. In Bolivia you will feel a sense of exploration; that pioneering spirit will creep into your veins and, by the end of a trip, you will want to return again. It’s that kind of place.