Carnaval in Tarija and Tupiza: Jewels of Southern Bolivia

We arrived in Tarija just after the first big rain in months, sunset tinting the retreating clouds in shades of sherbet. After dropping our bags in a lovely little Airbnb apartment one block from Plaza Uriondo, we headed out into the evening to explore. And promptly fell in love. This small city just north of the Argentinian border was Bolivia’s version of Barcelona, or maybe San Diego. 

We didn’t have many expectations for southern Bolivia. People told us it was “más tranquilo” and the people moved “un poco más lento”. But the big-city residents in Santa Cruz and Sucre seemed a tad dismissive of the smaller Tarija. Or perhaps they were simply trying to keep Bolivia’s best-kept secret. 

We walked through two bustling plazas with white stucco everything, our jaws dropping at the cosmopolitan scene. Coffee shops and wineries. Restaurants of every stripe—even vegetarian options! The mercado was indoors with covered (sanitary!) food. And the cars even paused (briefly) for pedestrians.

Tarija might not have towering Andes or the largest high-elevation lake on earth or the Amazon. But it does have perfect weather year-round, gorgeous green hills, a valley that produces wine that is (according to locals) better than any vino in Argentina or Chile, and the friendliest folks we met in all of Bolivia. Also, it has an awesome museum full of giant sloths, armadillos and saber toothed-tigers.

Our time in Tarija coincided with the start of Carnaval, kicked off by Dia de Compadres. Otherwise known as “men’s day”, the festivities began at 11am with dancing, parades, roving bands of musicians, and colorful gift baskets for the men, many of whom wore button-down shirts embroidered with flowers. 

As the men sat in groups enjoying lunch (and beer, more beer, more wine, then more beer), the children celebrated their male elders by engaging in rousing water balloon fights and shaving cream battles in the plazas. Our kids joined in the chaos, declaring Carnaval the best holiday ever.

On our second night in Tarija, we met a lovely family with four kids from Virginia who were living in Tarija (the dad’s hometown) for a year. Instantly fast friends, we met them each evening for tag and escondidas in the plaza, which inevitably drew a half-dozen other children to play, too. 

In between playdates, we took advantage of the lower elevation (only 6,000 feet!) for family jogs. We earned dozens of curious double-takes en route to the riverside park, since exercise isn’t a thing in Bolivia. Then the kids would sprint to the playground while Rob and I happily completed pushups and lunges in the shade. 

Rob got a new tattoo at the Tarija Tattoo Festival. I wore makeup for the first time in a month. We also spent a lot of time drinking really good coffee, eating chocolate brownies, and drinking homemade fruit sodas in the various plazas. 

TUPIZA

While Talon and Lyra would have lived happily ever after in Tarija, we extracted them after 9 days for a road trip to our next destination: Tupiza, a town nestled high in the red-rock mountains west of Tarija. To get there, we rented a (tiny) Suzuki jeep and spent three days exploring the countryside. This included visiting the 6th deepest canyon in the world, where we drove a dirt road for two hours then hiked for an hour, only to find a Bolivian farmer growing corn on the edge of an improbably steep cliff, his burro grazing beside him.

[Side note: The only thing more astounding than Bolivia’s scenery is the intrepidness of its people. They literally farm anywhere and everywhere. Each time I thought we had driven as far as possible from any town—through streams, over mountains, across massive rocks—along would come a bus. For real.] 

After Cañon Pilaya, we headed to the Reserva Cordillera Sama where we spotted three species of flamingos, a condor, and the ancient highway built by the Inca. We ate llama meat at a one-room hostel in the middle of nowhere and shivered much of the night at 14,000 feet (while Talon had a bellyache and Lyra had growing pains). Then we traversed crazy desert arroyos and washboard dirt roads to arrive in Tupiza, which looks a lot like Moab, Utah without the tourists. 

The first morning, we scaled a red-rock slot canyon and then skedaddled quickly back down when a thunderstorm struck, arriving back to Tupiza just in time for the start of Dia de Comadres. 

As a woman, I was decorated with confetti and streamers by my new friends at our hotel. Along with a delicious drink of singani (made from grapes grown in Tarija), I was gifted a cucumber. Because this hallowed Carnaval tradition reminds women to:

  1. Hold our cucumbers close when men get annoying.
  2. Re-affirm friendships with the women who support us and love us and give birth to us.
  3. Party like it’s 1999.

The parades of dancing women and drum-playing men lasted until midnight. Plus, they passed right under our hotel window, so it was easy to watch loooong after bedtime! (And super easy to sleep, too…) While the costumes differed drastically amongst the groups—from chess pieces to Super Mario Brothers to clowns—the song never changed. We basically heard the same 12 bars of the Tarija Carnaval song for three days straight, as Dia de Comadres transitioned into more celebrations, all of them heavy on the espuma. The kids loved it all.

When we’d had our fill of shaving cream in the face and dodging water balloons thrown from every corner, we booked a Jeep tour through the altiplano to take us to Chile. We drove through incredible high-elevation landscapes that stretched F O R E V E R. We saw vicuña (looks like a deer crossed with a camel), suri (big ostrich-like birds), and endless herds of llamas decorated with earrings (for Carnaval). We gasped for oxygen as we walked at 15,000 feet, visited 500-year-old ruins, and marveled at salt flats. 

Just before we reached the Bolivian border, we stopped to soak in a lovely hot springs below 19,000-foot volcanoes, just a stone’s throw from flamingos. At the Customs building (literally one building in the middle of nowhere), we huddled behind the jeep in all of our clothes while it hailed and blew freezing wind. Of course the kids had to “use the bathroom” while we waited to cross to Chile, which necessitated running behind rocks in the hail. 

[Side note: Rob is debating taglines for our trip. The current front-runner is: “Playgrounds, Popsicles and Emergency Poos — Navigating with children through South America.”]

We transferred to a Chilean minivan and breezed through the border crossing (where a lime was confiscated but not our condor feather). And within 30 minutes we’d stripped down to t-shirts and shorts as we dropped 6,000 feet in elevation into the driest place on earth.

Stay tuned for our multi-part adventures in the Atacama Desert, coming soon in poem form.