The Sun Rises on the Andean New Year

5am in Cochabamba: garbage trucks and shamans.

That pretty much sums up what was going on in the streets of Cochabamba in the most wee hours this morning. There I was, up well before dawn, to climb one of the city’s darkened hills and join in marking the opening moments of the Andean New Year.

The trek to the mountain top began oddly. Thirty of us crammed onto a hired micro bus to make the journey up the hill, a bus adorned with bunting around the windshield made from an American flag, matched by two stars-and-stripes decorated air fresheners dangling from the rear view mirror (shaped like two Christmas trees).

Our destination was a hill near the world’s largest Jesus (well-illuminated at night, by the way) which involved negotiating our way through a locked gate controlled, evidently, by the Bolivian Catholic Church. I doubt it was spiritual rivalry that kept out our busload of indigenous musicians, dancers, and native healers. More likely it was just some confusion, which the gatekeeper in the church’s employ seem to resolve easily with the passing of a few coins.

In Aymara culture the new year begins with the emergence of the sun’s first rays at the end of the longest night of the year which, here in the southern hemisphere, was last night. The leaders of this morning’s annual ritual picked this high hill because it would be one of the first places in the long Cochabamba valley that would feel those rays.

There were about 150 of us up there as the night sky started to show its first stripes of “celeste” (light blue), including just a tiny handful of foreigners. Several huge wiphala flags waved in the light pre-dawn breeze. Ten musicians, all men, filled the air with the deep and forlorn sounds of long flutes and the steady beat of an enormous drum. Six women – dressed in woven blouses, rich green skirts, and gray hats with blue ribbons at the brim – twirled and danced to the beat, making their skirts swish in a blur. They danced to steps they had surely known and danced to since they were children. Three modest fires burned in preparation for the ritual to follow.

Did I mention that it was cold? Butt-freezing cold? Okay, this is “cold” by Cochabamba standards. That means that it maybe dipped to 30 degrees Fahrenheit. In places like Minnesota and upstate New York they call that summer. But still, the cold gave everyone there ample reason to join in the dancing and a real and practical desire for the sun to finally make that awaited appearance from behind the mountains.

The pale blue sky brightened. The sun’s rays could be seen splashing the tip of the valley’s tallest peak, Mt. Tunari. A bright patch just at the horizon’s edge pointed to just where that far away ball of gas would make its first peak over the side. Flutes still playing, amidst loud group chants of “jallalla” (hiyiya, long live…), we faced the spot where the sun would rise and held our open hands up to catch the warmth of the first rays. It is mostly ritual, but after an hour standing around a cold and dark hillside, most of really were getting pretty excited about the sun coming up.

Cheers greeted the first bright beams and soon the whole lot of us were dancing and weaving together in a large circle of held hands, moving around the fires which burned a careful mixture of coca leaves, spiritual symbols made from hardened sugar, and a llama fetus or two. By 8am people started to make their way back down the hill toward the city. With an early appointment to keep I headed down myself, slowly and alone, pondering a new year that begins in late June.

When I was much younger, growing up in southern California, a New Year’s rite of passage was sleeping the night on a Pasadena sidewalk with a million or so other people, waiting to watch the Rose Parade the next morning. Imagine, if you will, about a million US teenagers all simultaneously going nuts at midnight. I may have kissed a cop in 1974, but my memory is a little fuzzy.

Dawn on a hillside in Bolivia with flutes and fires. What a long way from that. What a different tradition. Jallalla los dos!

Happy New Year to all our readers.