Three-toed footprints sat side by side, followed by a widespread pair: They hopscotched across the clay earth. “Pterodactyl,” Juan our guide said. “Look, this is how it used its wings to jump.” In Torotoro National Park, Bolivia, a giant winged carnivore flopping around on land is easy to imagine.
The footprints of dinosaurs who walked here hundreds of millions of years ago have been imprinted in a lost world of canyons and triangular hills.
How to arrive at Torotoro, Bolivia?
Getting to the park was its own adventure. Cochabamba, Bolivia is a hipster’s paradise of cafes, Spanish colonial arches, gastronomy, and crowded markets selling electronics and studded cell phone cases. Yet just a few hours away, you step back in time and out of Bolivia’s most modern city.
I flagged down a taxi. “Bus to Torotoro,” I said, the driver nodded. He let me out in a low lying suburb with dusty streets and pastel adobe walls. A van wore a neon green banner that read “Torotoro” in bold retro fonts.
“There,” the driver pointed at men gathered around, sipping instant coffee down the road. A bicycle cart had wheeled up and was pouring cups out of plastic gasoline containers used as pitchers.
What looked like a laundromat beside them also sold tickets to these van buses.
“Torotoro is more accessible than it was before,” I laughed at a review I’d read. This was easy, if you spoke Spanish and were used to approaching a laundry service for a bus ticket.
A woman at the desk, which also sold stationary, snacks, and phone plans, sold me a passage by writing my name onto a piece of graphing paper. I sat on the bench in front of her and asked about the park.
All hikes require a guide
“You need a guide to enter the park, but the more people you get the cheaper it is,” she tossed her tight black curls to one side and bit into a disk of white bread stuffed with cheese.
The park has a flat rate for most tours, which is great unless you’re travelling alone.
The bus was the type that left “in the morning” whenever it filled up. Thankfully, a vacationing family from Bolivia’s tropical city of Santa Cruz rolled up. We filled the seats and I claimed a window. Two more people showed up, and the women moved their eight year olds onto their laps.
Everyone crammed in and we began the 4.5 hour, 140km drive.
The highway hadn’t met its first earthquake yet, and we flew down the smooth asphalt. How could it take us hours longer?
Half way, we turned off the main highway and slowed to a crawl. Incredibly, for countless kilometres, people had laid a cobblestone road. The added hours now made sense.
Torotoro Town
After 1:00pm, we jostled into the park. Torotoro us a charming desert clay town that is slowly being invaded by steel and concrete.
Giant dinosaur statues bared their teeth and whipped their tails like a Vegas show. Even the town plaza, colonial with palm trees and its required fountain, had painted dinosaurs.
It was as if a rustic village had built over top of an abandoned theme park.
Another guest checked into my hotel.
“Tour?” He asked me. He was German and spoke no English, but did speak some broken Spanish.
“Yes, let’s go,” as we walked, we spoke messily in this middle language about travelling. He was alone now but meeting his brother in Peru. He wanted to see the caves and canyon, too.
We’d split the costs.
The ranger station was on the far side of town. All tours left from here. It’s easy to think you’d walk into the shining, brand new Municipal Museum.
Instead, the park office is in a tiny house around the corner. It could be confused for a parking lot for the tour vans lined up outside.
Into a lost world
“Juan is free in one hour,” a ranger told us, taking our names and money. Several beige suited guides waited around to be called on. We’d do the canyon tour today, including dinosaur footprints, 300 metre canyon walls, and waterfalls.
Down the dusty roads I went to find water. A few homes had half gated and half barred doorways: a sign of a shop. One even had a Coca Cola sign. An elderly lady sat outside of it on a step, wearing a long white blouse and colourful layered skirts. Her skin was as layered as the rocks, and showed her years in the sun.
“Good day,” I said in Spanish. She looked at me startled. Her eyes searching back and forth. She almost looked ready to run away when another lady appeared.
“She doesn’t speak Spanish, many here don’t,” the woman explained. The people in the town were Quechua, indigenous descendants of the Inca. Their culture and language had been isolated here, in another a pocket from the past.
“Alleyanchu,” Hello, I said one of the few words I knew. She smiled a small smile, rose, and walked quickly around the corner.
“We don’t trust foreigners here,” the woman said, stepping inside and grabbing me some water and bread. From the way she said it, it sounded like anyone from outside Torotoro Town was an outsider.
It struck me as a very wild west point of view. It fit the town.
Frontier land tour
“Hi, I’m Juan, let’s go,” our official tour left the station.
Juan stood about five feet tall, looked rail strong, and spoke through a few gold teeth. All the tour guides had been given khaki coloured uniforms with “Parque Nacional Torotoro,” written on them.
As we walked out of town he pulled his button down out of his waistband. It was far to hot for formality in the desert.
Juan’s job was to bring us to each sight, say two sentences about it, and lead us to the next. I attempted small talk on route and learned he had a pregnant daughter, his first grandchild. He’d lived in Torotoro his whole life and didn’t like Bolivia’s capital La Paz because there were “too many thieves.” He’d only been there twice.
We followed Juan out of town into a rocky desert, but it was far less barren than the Atacama. Shrubs and even stunted trees puffed up on the landscape. Here, we met the pterodactyl footprints.
I asked about the abundance of plants.
“It floods here often, usually in this season,” he stopped us. “It’s very dangerous if it starts to rain, the waters can rise in 10 minutes, the ground won’t absorb them.”
Footprints on the riverbed
Yet, we continued to hike down a rock walled tunnel, with dark stripes marking water levels and geological ages. The sides grew around us as we descended. Dark clouds and lightning hovered on the horizon.
Juan watched them and moved quickly on with the tour.
“This is a natural theatre,” he said. A half circle cut into the dried up riverbed we were walking down.
“It becomes a waterfall when it rains,” he looked again to the horizon. We moved on.
The desert surrounded us in subtle sepia shades, blotted with weak greens of plants, as desperate for the rain as we were to avoid it. The ground held clay in it and looked like it had been shattered by water soaking in and heat cracking it dry.
“Brontosaurus,” Juan didn’t need to point them out. Saucer shaped footprints, big enough to sit cross-legged inside, walked without legs across a rocky outcrop. I’d seen their skeletons before but footprints gave the dinosaurs a sense of movement, a kind of life.
I felt a strange loneliness. All of these massive creatures disappeared in a flash. Yet this catastrophe allowed the surviving mammals to thrive. Their absence had led to my presence.
Time is layered into the rocks here. It’s how the footprints had been preserved. Even the distant hills had swirling, fingerprint-like geological patterns.
“Torotoro means ‘clay like earth’ in Quechua, stacked in layers,” Juan explained placing one hand on top of the other for emphasis.
Torotoro Canyon
Our walk down the riverbed finished where it dropped off into what must make a thundering waterfall, hundreds of metres into the valley below. Tototoro Canyon is over 300 metres deep in parts.
The gorge looks unnatural, as its symmetry is so precise. Towering golden walls run parallel to one another. Their valley base forms a perfect upside-down triangle.
“Look, there are some red-fronted parrots,” Juan pointed and wings shimmered at a distance too far away for my camera lens. We watched as movement disturbed the cliff-side air.
“They only live in Bolivia, they’re special here.”
A metallic mesh sidewalk made a half loop out into the canyon. The barrenness of the desert, its cobblestone highway, and people who lived in earthen homes and didn’t speak Spanish, clashed with the shining new developments.
“Go out on the cliff walk, if you’re not afraid,” Juan taunted. I’d stopped in awe of how this little-known Bolivian park had so much funding.
Even in tourist laden Cusco, Peru I hadn’t seen such infrastructure.
So few people came here, yet the rangers had uniforms, the town had glass hotels with dinosaur staircases, and here was a mass of steel bars and rivets suspending visitors out over the canyon.
Wind hit my face on the platform and I held onto my hat. It actually felt refreshing, this air had some moisture, even an earthy smell. It smelled of rain.
I looked to the darkening horizon, the air pricked my skin.
“Vamos,” Let’s go, Juan led us away.
El Vergel “The Cow’s Nose”
“It’s about 800 steps down into the valley,” we were now walking a staircase switching back and forth down a canyon wall. Plants clung to the sides, a new tourism building with washrooms was boarded up for the season. Everything was new, but nothing was open.
As we reached the bottom thunder echoed, shaking the walls. We followed Juan down the river valley, walking around hundreds of two ton boulders.
“They fell from up there, during floods,” Juan said.
“This is El Vergel waterfall,” Juan didn’t real think it looked like a cow’s nose even though that’s what it’s name meant.
“The water has a lot of minerals, my mother always said it was like vitamins for the body,” Juan smiled. I went for a swim.
After a snack, we took the stairs out of the canyon and arrived at the dinosaur fields.
A dinosaur dancefloor
“We’re here, wait for me,” Juan led us to a sprawling fenced-in area. From outside, all we could see were bushes. He went to a small station and snatched a hidden key from underneath.
The fencing had a simple padlock on it.
“These are from theropods, long necked dinosaurs,” more dinner plate sized footprints walked to the horizon. Like the tracks of a modern day elephant, or the Mastodons skeletons in Canada.
“These here are from another type of plant eater,” he explained.
Some thick, three pronged footprints leapt away from us.
“There are over 300 different footprints in this park, we keep this area enclosed to protect it,” obviously the others tracks were not part of the tour.
Juan exited the grounds and we waited outside while he returned the key.
“Tomorrow, come meet me to go to the City of Ita and the caves,” Juan had claimed us as his group.
Minutes after we arrived in town, the rain began to fall. It seemed to create a cloud of dust at first, stirring up the roads. Then, it down poured. Juan had ensured we had perfect timing.
I wondered if our path had become a river again.
I fell asleep as the thunder continued. It sounded like roaring.
City of Itas (Cuidad de Itas)
“10 Bolivianos,” the sign read on what once had once been a wheeled popcorn machine but now sold breakfast. I got a cheese sandwich, a banana, and sweet instant coffee. The German and I walked up to the tour office to try our luck today.
If we could get more people to go, we wouldn’t have to pay a quarter of the tour price.
“If no one comes by 11:00am we’ll go alone,” Juan said as we arrived. It was 8:30am. Like the buses, everything waited to fill up.
Thankfully, a group of American college students wanted to go caving. We split the cost and hopped in a 4×4 with Juan.
“Vamos,” Let’s go. Another prehistoric adventure began.
The rain had brightened the leaves in the desert and the land shifted to red the farther from town we went. Near the City of Ita, a series of above ground caves, I noticed delicate white flowers with no stems or leaves that seemed to float on the hard earth.
We hiked between rust coloured rock formations.
“That is a turtle,” Juan said pointing to an aptly shaped boulder. Today, his commentary today was by the book. Though, he smiled when I asked about his daughter.
“Two more months,” he said and hurried onward.
The fresh shade inside the caves felt like a gulp of water. The rocks still gave off the cool air of the morning. Today’s clear skies offered no sun protection.
“We are in the cathedral,” Juan explained. Natural stone pillars rose to the a ceiling more than 10 metres high. But, to me it looked less like a church.
“It looks like we’re inside a giant nose,” I said. Juan smirked and nodded.
You couldn’t deny it. I remembered watching The Magic School Bus as a child, when the animated students would shrink down in their bus and ride through the human body.
Caverna (Cave) Umajalanta
“Here’s your helmet and headlamp,” Juan made sure we had gear at the next stop. We were about to go caving under the earth.
He stopped us beside an explanatory billboard and took a seat in the shade. We read about the stalactites and stalagmites that had formed over millennia from underground waterways.
The mouth of the Umajalanta Cave was massive, but we’d leave out another exit. Walking in was easy, until we began sliding down sandy rocks into tighter and tighter spaces.
“This is the praying Mary, or a Christmas tree,” Juan pointed out a few stalactites. “This one is the willow tree.”
We ducked and shimmied through a stone forest. A few times, we had to take off backpacks, pass them down, and crawl on our bellies into smaller spaces. Often, these sections were downhill and managing your inevitable slide was the only option. We wedged ourselves through 300 metres of passages.
Finally, relief. The cave opened into a room of natural chandeliers. Some were half white.
“There’s a bacteria that lives off of minerals and without light. Aliens on other planets might get their energy in a similar way.”
Juan had been a jack of all trades before. Now, he was explaining biology while leading a caving tour. He said he missed his cattle herding days sometimes, but tourism money was more consistent.
Dark descent
Parts of the caves were sketchy. Back home, there would be a lot of legal forms and ropes and bolted fasteners, and you’d probably get a safety course, or at least some “how to” tips. Here, you were more free to explore.
Sometimes Juan assisted with foot placement suggestions, less out of formality and more from care.
“Turn off your lights,” we switched off the headlamps and the world ended. At first my eyes strained to catch light, creating their own fireworks in the process. Eventually they surrendered to the blackness. The only way to tell that they were open was the brush of my eyelashes with each blink.
The damp cool air soaked into my button down shirt. The rocks and water had created their own cooling system. My cracked lips begged to stay as we exited into the bright hot desert.
Carreras Pampa (Flatlands)
Lunch was served in one room adobe home where a woman with dark braids walked around her children in the kitchen, and made us rice with beans. This scene felt like it belonged here.
We relaxed in the patchy shade of an awning made of desert brush.
“Now, Velociraptors!” Juan proved the innate enthusiasm all humans share for raptors.
“You can tell because the toes and their ends are thinner, for claws,” Juan explained making a swipe with his hand and pointing out footprints.
The pampas red clay fell into cracked chasms all around.
Back in town, our group walked together to grab a bowl of soup. Juan said goodbye and walked like a lone khaki cowboy down the sandy streets.
“A T-Rex is bursting out of every building here,” I pointed out.
Torotoro, Bolivia has become the closest thing to a real life Jurassic Theme Park. It’s a time warp to have craft cocktails in Cochabamba, transition to the wild west in Torotoro Town, and then walk with the shadows of ancient monsters.
The daily lives of dinosaurs have been forever cemented into the layers of Torotoro.
Getting there
In Cochabamba, take a minibus:
Where? Av. Republica near Barrientos
When? Mornings “when it is full”
Park fees
Admission:
100 Bolivianos / $15
Guides (required by park):
100 Bolivianos / $15
In Park Transportation (not included with guide, divided by number of passengers):
City of Itas: 150 Bolivianos / $22
City of Itas and Umajalanta Cave: 330 Bolivianos / $50
More information:
Official government website (Spanish but very detailed)
