San Ignacio de Moxos 31 de Julio Fiesta

On Wednesday, we went to the nearby town of San Ignacio de Moxos for the 31 de Julio Fiesta. It's a 3+ day festival that's a little like Carnival in Spain. It celebrates the anniversary of the founding of the little Jesuit mission town 324 years ago and mixes Spanish and indigenous cultures. The fiesta has rodeos, people dressed in indigenous clothing, dancing, singing, eating, and drinking.

On our two and a half hour taxi ride (that left two hours late), we noticed that the size of a town in the Beni is closely related to the size of its ditches that transport rainwater, sewerage, and waste through the city. Trinidad has a large system of ditches that run between the sidewalks and streets. These prove challenging for us as tourists - you have to be very sure you can clear the ditch before you make the jump. In San Ignacio de Moxos, the ditches are much smaller (population of ~15,000) and in San Borja (population ~30,000) they are larger than SIDM but smaller than in Trinidad. Here is a picture of the large water system as we were driving out of Trinidad.

During the rainy season (Nov-March), much of the wetlands flood - these people who live outside of Trinidad build their houses on stilts to avoid the flooding similar to other monsoon prone areas.

The road around Trinidad is beautiful and the region, the llanos de moxos, is part of the largest protected wetlands in the world. You can easily spot many different species as you travel along it. Here is a man-made lake outside of Trinidad. As we'll discuss in a future post, many of these man-made lakes were created more than 1,000 years ago.

We got to cross the Mamore River (the largest Bolivian tributary to the Amazon River) on boat again.

When we got to San Ignacio de Moxos, the town was bustling with activity. Funny enough, in the lonely planet guide that we found online, they say that San Ignacio has zero things to do and three places to stay. However, for one magical week each year, it is transformed into a fiesta for the ages. After the fiesta, San Ignacio goes back to being a sleepy, dusty town.

They had a stage set up for speeches and announcements. A crew was filming some of the festivities as they are clearly trying to promote this fiesta for future tourism efforts in the region. The poster reads "Bolivia waits for you".

The indigenous costumes were really interesting as different groups had different colors, which you can particularly see in the brightly clad headdresses with feathers.

Like the other mission towns in Bolivia, there is a church on the square. This church seats 3,000, so it's one of the larger ones we've seen.

Alongside with the dancing and singing, they have a huge rodeo. This stadium was constructed for the fiesta. The grandstands were pretty interesting with various ladders placed up to the intersections for people to climb up and down.

We got a good spot on the other side of the stadium right against the fence and were able to see most of the action pretty well. Inside the stadium were brave young men, who may have had some of that courage fueled by alcohol as we saw vendors inside selling pacena beers and others with bottles of alcohol.

The spectacle was pretty remarkable. They had one or two bulls out at all times and a somewhat chaotic process of letting the bull go wild as various men got in front of it momentarily trying to draw the bull into charging at a shirt or towel they were waving.

Anytime the bull got close to hitting or actually hit someone, the crowd would roar in anticipation, wonder, and amazement. Asher felt like he was in the midst of a Hemingway novel and at one point asked Kelly if he should jump in the arena, to which Kelly looked at Asher, shook her head, and bluntly said, "no."

A tangible feeling was in the air, as young men would work up the courage to jump into the arena while sitting in the stands and dreaming of immortality. This courage rose and waned quickly as we saw boys and men jumping in, getting somewhat close to the action, and then seemingly running for their lives and jumping back into the stands as the bull got close.

In the event of an injury during the rodeo/bull festivities, a really nice ambulance was parked (albeit empty) outside the stadium. It seems that the EMT here may have been participating in the festivities as well.

We had a great time. It was nice to get out of Trinidad for the day and experience one of the best fiesta's  in the Beni of the year.

On the next blog post, we'll write about the ethnoarcheological and fish museum in Trinidad (teaser: yes they have the little fish there that swims up the penis if you urinate in the water).