February 6, 2017 - Samaipata

February 6, 2017

Samaipata

With great pleasure, I want to introduce you to Samaipata and tell you about my weekend visit with the family of Fernando and Mariela.

In Quechua, the language of the Incas and still spoken throughout the Andes, samay means rest and pata means an elevated place on a shore.  So Samaipata is an elevated place of rest along a shore.  It was the site of the furthest eastward expansion of the Incas.  From the fort here, they tried unsuccessfully to conquer the Guarani in the area of Santa Cruz.  I will give a bit more history when I tell the story of the ruins in an upcoming blog.

Fernando and Mariela live just two blocks from the plaza.  The streets surrounding the plaza are mostly cobble-stone and surrounded by the traditional type of houses you find in eastern Bolivia.  There are many that are very old, even back to colonial times.

The plaza of Samaipata is probably half the size of the main plaza in Santa Cruz, but has much more artwork, mostly statues.  From those I am posting, you can see that some are like the plazas and rotundas everywhere in Bolivia, imposing historical statues of heroes of the past.  But Samaipata has about a dozen small carvings that are easily described as “different.”  There is a frog, a woman that look like she is emerging from an egg, or a man in the mouth of a snake.  In the very middle, instead of a statue of a hero, is a sundial.  Blooming trees surrounded the plaza.

We walked around a little bit on Saturday afternoon looking for some local honey, which we never found.  We did encounter the public library with drawings of “The Little Prince.”  We walked through the market, which is more comparable to a stall at the Ramada, and a lot cleaner. 

Before I headed back to Santa Cruz because of a special service at church the next day, Fernando and Mariela took me to the Pueblito, a reconstructed Bolivian village.  It was an imaginative view of what a colonial village would look like, complete with church, plaza, and shops of all kinds surrounding the plaza.

If I had the money to build a little house here, I would do it.  I could imagine myself living in this quiet, little town, with the perfect weather.  I would have a garden of roses, morning glories, jasmine, daisies, lavender, and rosemary, just for the beauty of the flowers.  I would try to grow a fruit tree or two, or maybe a grape vine, and a few vegetables. I’d get up late, but write half of the day before going on an afternoon hike. At night, in this place far from city lights, I’d look at the beauty of the Southern Cross and the sweep of the Milky Way behind it.

Yes, Samaipata is just that beautiful.

“He determines the number of stars and calls them each by name.”  Psalm 147

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