Tarabuco - Pujllay festival

Every year in Tarabuco, a farming area and local market near to Sucre, a huge festival happens in March to celebrate the timing of the harvest. ´Puillay´ translates into English to play or dance and the festival itself attracts all the different tribes and farmers from all over the country. 

We had booked a trip to stay in Tarabuco for the night, the Saturday would consist of drinking and a concert and the Sunday more celebrations and dancing from all the tribes. 

We hop on the bus, most people from our Spanish school are on this trip so a merry time already as we crack on with drinking the rum and tequila we brought along. As we leave Sucre we head further and further into the countryside. We arrive in Tarabuco, which I can imagine on a normal weekday is a quiet little farming village with a market, festival weekend was a different story altogether with hundreds of buses and cars cramming their way through the narrow dirt roads. 

Wise to the situation our bus driver made us walk to our accommodation. We had been told when booking the 5* package that we would be sleeping on floors as there were no beds left. Arriving at our new home for the night, we walk through an arch and into a little courtyard, our names are called out and we are ushered into our room for the night. We walk past a pigs head hanging from a metal hook, through the door and into our barn, we are sharing with about 15 other people, 12 of whom have beds, and 3 who on the floor, Jo, Paulina and myself. 

Our 5* accomodation

Paulina and Jo making our floor beds

Godfather part 4

Green with a little envy I already plot a Godfather style bed scare with the pig head….

We get invited to a party from our hosts, we walk round the back and in a shed we can hear loud foot stamping, hooraing and accordians playing. We go in and immediately we are all given a warm hello, a glass which is filled with an alcoholic drink. Not wanting to be rude I take a sip and say gracias, the woman looked at me with disgust and told me to down the drink, which of course I did, with the hope that she would leave me alone so I wouldn’t have to ever drink this stuff again, it was pretty disgusting. As soon as my glass was empty it was filled again, after six or seven the taste wasn’t so bad so I got into the swing of things. All the people were absolutely smashed (it was only around 6pm), all elders, and you could tell that this weekend was a time when everybody let loose, some too much, with one bloke shouting at the top of his voice in an aggressive manner at all westerners, at which point we vacated the shed.

My new bud, she is happy honest

The girls tucking in on none homebrew booze

 

Later, I was told that aggressive Victor was actually welcoming us all to Bolivia and that he loves the whole world as one.

I also got told at this point that the local homebrew I was drinking was fermented using human spit! Nice!!!

We head out as a group to the streets to look for the concert which we had heard about. The streets are filled with local vendors selling all types of street food, beer, booze, clothes etc, the atmosphere is pretty good and most of the locals at this point already are well on their way…

We find the concert hall and find two huge queues, we jump in the shorter one of the two and wait in line. As we get nearer to the front of the entrance a copper swipes out of my hands the can of beer and rum I had and starts to drain them away in the gutter. Bastards, everyone around us is drinking and we get picked on, but I keep my mouth shut as these police aren’t the same as the politically correct please can you not drink here sir British police officers. The funny thing was the bottle of rum had a pouring stopper on it so it took him about ten minutes to empty it! 

Anyway we finally get into the venue with no booze to watch the Bolivian bands, one of which was the most famous in Bolivia. The venue is pretty packed and all the locals are going crazy for these bands who play on their pan pipes, string instruments and drums… Us westerners are looking at amazement and wondering how this music is so popular, but hey we all joined in with the fun.

We leave and end up in someone’s living room/front yard for where locals and westerners party the night away. A couple of beers more and we leave as at this point the locals are too pissed and we could feel the tension rising.

After a perfect night’s sleep! Not! We head out into the town. This is better we say to ourselves as we see people in the streets, in their areas outfits, singing and dancing to pan pipes and drums. What a great atmosphere and great to see how they dress and celebrate.

We head to the center where the locals have erected a huge wooden tower called a ´Pukara´ where locals offer produce, food and meat as an offering to mother earth to ensure the land is fertile for the next harvest. Around the pukara all the different tribes dance in their outfits and various styles, endlessly chanting to the tune. We had a great day, an improvement from the day before. There was also a local market which was great to see. We stop off for lunch somewhere and we ended up talking to a couple of Bolivian guys, all in Spanish, which was really cool.

All in all a real cultural experience.