I robbed an Incan grave.

I hike like it’s my job.

Oh wait, it is! As a tourism volunteer, I have to get to know the tourist attractions in the Samaipata area. Little by little I’m getting there. There are just so many- Cuevas and La Pajcha waterfalls, Amboró National Park, El Fuerte Incan Ruins, the trails through Bella Vista, the Volcano Refuge, the Condor Nests…the list goes on an on. For the last few weeks I have been averaging three to four hikes a week, and when I say hikes, I mean 4-6 hr ones.

I sometimes work as an interpreter for groups which allows me to go for free to the attractions and also meet people from all over the world. Last week I went with a group made up of a couple from Israel, a couple from Finland, and a couple from the US. It’s so interesting that our common language is English. It’s also interesting that in other countries, being bi or tri-lingual is not only common, it is expected. In the US on the other hand, it is a novelty for people to speak something more than English. Someone once told me that you can identify a person from the States by their limited linguistic abilities. Though it may be just another ugly stereotype, it is a shame that there is such little emphasis placed on language learning in the US.

Anywho, my beloved Bella Vista has two hiking trails open to the public. I had only hiked one of them and while I was there, a guy who used to live there was back home visiting his family. He took me out to see the other trail but we only walked a portion of it before we decided to take a detour. Gonzalo looks at me and points at one of the highest mountain peaks and asked me if I’d like to hike up there. Well, I’m pretty much game for anything, so we do it. The final 100 meters to get to the top of the mountain is literally 15 degrees from vertical. We’re climbing it and the only reason we didn’t go sliding down was that there were weeds knee high. We’d start to slip and grab hold of something and we were good to go.

My “guide” was telling me the history of the area. We were climbing up a mountain that used to be inhabited by the Incas. As we’re walking, we’d find areas where grooves were carved into the rock just exactly the length and width of a foot, and as it moved upwards, the sequence of grooves formed a rudimentary stairway. I’m climbing and Gonzalo pauses and looks at me a second, and whispers, “Look, you’re walking exactly where the Incans used to walk. This was their path up the mountain.” How crazy is that? I can’t exactly grasp the fact that over 500 hundred years ago Incans walked the same ground that I am walking now.

We get to the top, behold some breathtaking views, and begin walking towards the other side of the mountain for even more beautiful views as the sun sets. We are making our way through weeds just over knee deep, and Gonzalo begins talking about all the Incan artifacts that can still be found right there. I must not have looked too impressed because he begins moving some grass aside and says, “No, really, if you get lucky you can just dig in the grass a bit and you’ll find something.” Sure enough, about 10 minutes later he stops, reaches down, and comes up with a broken piece of old Incan pottery about the size of my palm. It’s still got all the carvings visible on the side. My skepticism of finding real Incan artifacts is fading and I slip the piece into my pocket as a souvenir. Every few years the grass in the area is burned down to keep the cows from moving too far up the mountain, and he says that when the grass is gone it looks like a sea dried up and you can just walk around looking at all the old artifacts.
We walk a little further and again stop. Gonzalo tells me in a low voice that we are now in the area of the Incan cemetery. I am wondering how he knows it’s a cemetery. Obviously this is an unprotected area, no archeologists have ever done any kind of excavation, and so how would anybody really know what’s going on? “Well,” he explains to me, “I know it’s a cemetery cause my brother and I found a body here. An Incan. His remains.” I look at the guy and I’m not sure if he’s joking with me or not. “How do you know it wasn’t just some random guy who happened to die here on top of the mountain? It’s possible, you know, that somewhere within the hundreds of years since the Incans disappeared from around here, that some poor soul just wandered up here and died.”

He whispers to me, “We know because Incans buried their dead with their treasures. And we found all kinds of things buried along with him.” I still look at him disbelievingly, not knowing if I am supposed to take him seriously or not, and he says, “I can prove it to you.”

“How?” I ask.

“We stole his teeth,” he tells me.

Now if you grew up in my family and heard all the ghost stories my mom has to tell, you get creeped out hearing something like this.

“YOU TOOK HIS TEETH!?!?!?”

I start walking away from the area quickly, more than a little disturbed by the fact that there was a dead Incan laying at my feet. We watch the sun set, admire the beauty of God’s great creations, and start walking back down the hill. At some point I feel something hit against my arm and remember that I have a piece of Incan treasure in my pocket. And then I realize where it came from and I look at Gonzalo and say, “I just stole from an Incan grave. I hope this guy’s ghost doesn’t come after me looking for what I took from him.” He laughs and says, “Well I have his teeth, so I think you’re safe.”

The day after we return from this hike, Gonzalo goes and asks his mom whether she still has the teeth they took from the Incan’s grave. She walks into another room and pulls out a dusty box, and they show me molars and incisors from the skeleton. I am amazed. Also in the box were pieces of pottery- bowls, pitchers, cups- completely intact. There were also small statues surmised to be replicas of their gods among a great many other things.

I could not believe I was looking at something so old outside of a museum, much less understand the fact that no one could care less that up on this hill were so many amazing discoveries to be made. But I guess that’s the way it is around here. Robbing an Incan grave- one of the many marvels of Bolivia, but just another day in the life of a Peace Corps volunteer.