Be a part of Bolivia’s outstanding cholitas climbing Andean glacial peaks

“People are always amazed how good my food is,” says Dora, her blueberry-coloured pollera coming up and down from a stomach snigger. Married to climbing information Agustín González, Dora joined the household enterprise because the expedition prepare dinner 30 years in the past. But it wasn’t till 10 years in the past — on the age of fifty — that she summited her first mountain. She’s now made it to the highest of all of Bolivia’s highest peaks and has plans to climb Mont Blanc within the French Alps later this yr.

“The first time I climbed was out of curiosity, just to see if I could,” she tells me, flashing a silver-toothed grin, chewed coca leaf — a local Andean plant the Aymara have used for hundreds of years to fight altitude illness and enhance power — stuffed beneath her higher lip. “I went up with boots that were too big, but I made it. After that, I wanted to conquer more summits.” As she provides carrots and parsley to the soup, her pink-rimmed glasses fog with steam.

Orphaned younger, with no formal schooling and dwelling with poor eyesight, mountaineering wasn’t a straightforward pursuit for Dora. “I’ve felt discrimination because of my age, for not knowing how to read and for my eyes,” she says. “But the mountain doesn’t discriminate. Every time I climb, I feel stronger inside. For me, the mountains are also family. It’s where I’ve found my friends, my sisters, my reason for being.”

Before we sit all the way down to eat, our group huddles round a small wood desk contained in the refugio, packed shoulder to shoulder to maintain heat. There are girls from Japan, Mexico, France, the US and the UK, all with very totally different lives again dwelling, but dialog flows freely between us and the cholitas. There’s a relaxed intimacy right here, with the form of belief that will not have surfaced in a combined group — tales swap backwards and forwards about mountains, motherhood, and hopes and desires for the long run.

The Aymara — notably girls — have traditionally been a personal group, and travellers have hardly ever had the possibility to get to know their lives up shut. But right here, huddled in a stone hut at 4,700 metres, sharing soup and coca leaf tea with no web or telephone sign, the same old distance dissipates. It looks like a uncommon privilege to be invited into their world.