What did you do Friday night? I was a pilgrim. This was Dan´s brilliant idea for cheap entertainment and... you know... a cultural experience. He, Susan, Winston, and I set out from Tarija city at five pm with only a vague idea of the road but confident that there would be abundant help along the way. That being the first night of the month during which Tarijeños walk in the name of the Virgin of Chaguaya, there actually weren´t many people on the road, but at the first questionable fork in the road we encountered Manuel, a PE teacher who had made the journey seven times before. He had invited his PE classes to come with him, and not a single student showed up. Not that I would have accepted such an invitation from my gym teacher, but that was warning number two to turn around.

Warning number one was an omen from earlier in the day. Dan has a necklace with a St. Christopher pendant. Well, St. Chris decided to mysteriously remove himself from his post that morning. No signs of breakage. Just a pendant detached from its chain. To me, a firm believer in jinxing and the like, this seemed like an obvious sign for someone who was about to embark on a very very long journey and might need some saintly protection.

By the first town, Tolamosa, three hours down the road, Dan menioned a pain in the arch of one foot. No big deal. He would be fine. After a quick dinner of sandwiches and bananas, we set out again. By now our party had grown to eight, with the addition of two men from La Paz about an hour before Tolamosa and another we picked up in town. Three hours later at the halfway point, Pampa Redonda, Dan removed his shoe to reveal a monster blister developing on one foot as the result of compensation for the arch pain in the other. Manuel offered him a bandage, and Dan tried to rig up an arch support system using an extra sock.

This story is not meant to be all about Dan, but throughout the trip I was pretty grateful that his pains seemed to be greater than mine. It kept everything in perspective and kept me from feeling too sorry for myself. By Pampa Redonda, I was convinced by a blister on my big toe that my shoes were too small. Similar acts of compensation, combined with general shoe tightness enhanced by the extra pair of socks worn to prevent said blisters led to the formation of more blisters that now adorn my feet. If anyone has advice about healing larger-than-life blisters quickly, please share: I have to get back to my running. I know Mom´s needle tunneling trick, but I´ve always been curious about the drainage versus non-drainage debate. Maybe I´ll research when I finish writing this.

Shortly after Pampa Redonda, the moon went down. It was one of those ¨God´s toenail¨ moons, but it was still amazing what a difference it made in visibility. The path was a fairly wide, sometimes-dirt-sometimes-gravel-sometimes-sand-sometimes-rock road, so it was distinguishable from the surrounding pitch black, making it necessary to switch on the flashlight only for particularly sketchy parts and stepping stones in streams.

Had it not been for the ever-increasing muscle and blister pains, it would have been a lovely walk. Imagine valleys populated by towns of a couple hundred people placed three hours apart. Imagine a gigantic Milky Way sky, fringed with mountainous silhouettes. There is nothing like being in the middle of nowhere with a great view of the cosmos to make you feel tiny and insignificant but so fortunate to have a place on this beautiful planet. When the road conditions didn´t require constant foot vigilance, my eyes were on the heavens or the vast, silent darkness surrounding us. Mostly I kept them on the sky though, because pitch blackness doesn´t provide much entertainment and so that I could rub in Susan´s face every shooting star she missed by keeping her eyes on the ground. I´m probably lucky I didn´t sprain an ankle on a rock with how much I ignored my steps.

And so went the night with me obnoxiously pointing out every shooting star, Dan providing occasional pain status updates that put me in my place, and all of us sharing stories and occasional, inevitable ponderings about the universe, our place in it, and why the hell anyone would ever want to walk for twelve hours on end. As the journey progressed, ponderings of the latter type became more and more frequent.

At a largely practically deserted, makeshift, 2 am rest stop, Dan had had enough. An old woman tending a simmering pot of something on a fire spoke of an encouraging hour and a half to Juntas and an hour and a half from Juntas to Chaguaya. For someone in intense pain, news like that is hard to react to. For one, you´ve already walked nine hours, so what´s another three? But when every step is a dreaded chore, the promise of thousands more of them is, well, just plain awful. Every single step is too painful to bear. Taking thoussads more of them means thousands of individual conscious decisions and efforts towards self-inflicted pain. It seems rather stupid. Dan decided to stay at the rest stop until morning when there would surely be a car to take him home. No, the old woman informed us. There would be no cars until Juntas, and even there he would have to wait until morning.

The most fitting word to describe the period between that rest stop and Juntas is ¨torture.¨ There were pains I had never felt before even after the most gruelling rugby games. Dan, who decided an hour and a half more that night would be better than the same walk in the morning, fell into limping stride with me. But as our leader with one of the flashlights quickened his pace, and the space between the light and I expanded, I chose light over Dan and left him with Arturo, the younger man from La Paz. At that point the group was as follows: Susan, Winston, our flashlight-toting guide, and I formed the first party; Dan and Arturo fell farther and farther behind us in the dark; and Manuel and the older La Paz guy, also with flashlight, brought up the rear. I spent the entire walk to Juntas silently cursing the man with the light who seemed to be continually quickening his pace and making my life a living hell. At least he gave me something to think about: Which is better, a shorter, more painful hike or a longer more comfortable walk I could have if I slowed down? Considering that the slower walking would also be painful, I continually made the decision to stay with the flashlight.

After only forty-five minutes, the lights of Juntas appeared on the our right, and the road forked into the tiny, silent town. We found no simmering pots of something but a couple chairs and a pile of rocks for sitting. Since it had been excrutiatingly painful to force my legs back into a walk after the rest stop, I chose to keep pacing. After all, we would only be waiting ten minutes or so until the rest of the group arrived. Manuel and Old La Paz Guy arrived soon. Where were Dan and Arturo? Old Guy shouted his friend´s name into the darkness. No reply. We speculated. Manuel and Old Guy swore they hadn´t passed anyone. We who had been in the first group swore nobody had passed us. We all knew Dan was in a lot of pain, but if he had stopped to rest Manuel and Old Guy would have seen them. It was suggested that maybe Dan changed his mind and went back to the rest stop, but again someone would have passed him, or he would have told us. And then what about Arturo? There were only two plausible options: Something happened to both Dan and Arturo without either the front or rear groups noticing, or they ingnored the lights of Juntas and continued straight. Considering that we had reached Juntas in half the time the old lady predicted, and it seemed unlikely that both of them could have fallen off a cliff, the latter option seemed more probable. What would happen if they kept going straight? They would hit Chocloca... in a few more hours.

Manuel, who seemed to have limitless energy, went out to search for them while the rest of us built a fire. Did I mention it was freezing outside? While we were walking it felt like a beautiful, perfect night. But once we stopped, the cold ate through us, and we all huddled around the fire for warmth. Good thing Juntas is in a wooded area and it hasn´t rained in months, making the fire easy to build and feed.

After about half an hour, Manuel returned. Alone. The speculation began again. All of the aforementioned possibilities were again brought up and, one by one, ruled out until we arrived at the same conclusion that they must be on the road to Chocloca. Neither of them knew the road, so if they didn´t realize they were lost why would they turn around? Manuel went out again to look. We remained huddled, asking every pilgrim we saw if they had any information.

After two hours of waiting, one lone pilgrim came down the road and reported that he had seen our friends. He had been more lost than they and was on his was back from Chocloca to Juntas when they stumbled across each other asking for directions. At that point Dan couldn´t walk another step on his blistered feet, and he decided to stop right there and wait for morning, then only a couple encouraging hours away. Arturo, not knowing what to do, stayed with Dan. The other lost boy continued back toward Juntas, came across Manuel, and Munuel subsequently found Dan and Arturo. What a relief!

Dan, for the the final time that night, refused to take another step, and we found a family in Juntas to take him in until we could return with a taxi. Dan spent the next few hours awake on a chair while the family slept on the floor in a corner of the one room house. He was so grateful to be indoors. I, after forcing my stiff joints into motion again, cursed every step between Juntas and Chaguaya. Winston, grateful to be on the road again with so little road left, started skipping. I wanted to break his legs.

The old lady had overestimated the time to Juntas and underestimated to Chaguaya. During those last two hours, I felt so much blind anger and hatred that I surprised myself. I was angry at the rest of my group for constantly quickening their pace, which I am sure was just an illusion. I won´t list the things I hated during those hours because there were so many, and yet at the same time I knew I didn´t hate anything at all. I put myself in the sutuation. I chose to do this stupid pilgrimage. I wouldn´t have given up even if I had had a choice, yet I was angered that I didn´t, which made no sense to me. I was angry with everything and nothing, and looking back on it kind of disturbs me. I´ll leave the self-evaluation and soul searching to myself and move on.

We arrived in Chaguaya exactly at sunrise, so getting a picture of that blessed church in the distance would have meant a lot of camera adjustments and... um... stopping, which I clearly wasn´t willing to do. But we were greeted by smoking fires and steaming pots of breakfast and what would be lunch. The church was 300 years old but renovated in the 80s, which was weird. I would have been happier with something that was still ancient, but I suppose it wouldn´t have been big enough to accommodate the unbelievable amount of people that will be doing that pilgrimage during the next month to this town where the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared multiple times hundreds of years ago. The town pretty much is the church. Or the church is the town. Whatever. For the next month, Chaguaya is the place to be. So we left, paid a taxi an exorbitant amount to go back on that horrible road (Usually they go back to the city by another paved route.) to collect our friend Dan and take us back to Tarija.

Seventy kilometer, all-night pilgrimage? Done. Check. I can say I did it. Am I glad I did it? Yes. I would habve been curious forever if I hadn´t . Or I would have forgotten it was ever an option. Would I do it again? Not any time soon. I could go with Manuel when he does it again next weekend, but there´s this thing with my feet...