Torotoro, The Land Before Time

Yesterday was my last day in Cochabamba. While I was sad to go, we left in a chartered six-seater Cesna, flying over the lush green countryside and the flooded fields of Cochabamba and into the red canyons and rugged rock formations of Torotoro, a fitting exit.

Visiting Torotoro is like time travelling in so many senses.

The town is absolutely tiny, with small adobe houses and sagging tiled roofs, mud tracks that can hardly be called roads, a few stores and only one working phone. When I arranged the flight, the pilot assured me that he would have the townspeople clear the animals and tall grass off the pista before we arrived. When we landed on the dirt airstrip, we were greeted by a gaggle of village children, who had run up to see the plane. As we walked through town everyone would greet us from their front stoops, sitting, spinning, chatting in Quechua, mending tools and watching naked toddlers play in the mud.

The town is the center of Parque Nacional Torotoro, sparsely populated, arid scrubland and Andean foothills, broken up by deep red ravines and slabs of grey stone turned skyward as the Andes pushed upwards. Torotoro takes its name from the Quechua TuruTuru Pampa, which translates to mud-mud-valley. All that mud created an idea environment for preserving a huge number of dinosaur footprints.

Unfortunately, Torotoro’s remote location and Bolivia’s lacking scientific community leaves little reliable information about the palaeontology. For instance, many townspeople believe that the footprints were left in hot lava by dinosaurs fleeing a volcanic eruption. One guide even told us that the red rocks were the result of the lava. We can be sure that the tracks were made in the cretaceous period, from 145 to 65 million years ago. Ankylosaurus, velociraptor, and sauropod tracks, the family that includes the Apatosaurus and Diplodocus, have been identified.

The bizarre geological formations, including immense canyons and rushing rivers, sheer cliffs, limestone caves, and natural stone bridges add an antediluvian ambiance. Prehistoric looking plants with giant thorns stud the stony ground, making it seems like the land before time. There were also fossilized seashells, shark teeth and trilobites from drier epochs which I found particularly ironic, in a landlocked country at 2600m. We even met an elderly man who collected meteorites from the earliest epochs, among other geological oddities. Torotoro’s pre-Inca peoples also left rock paintings, a reminder that we are only the most recent residents.

The immensity of geologic time and the tectonic force left me feeling very small, yet at the same time, like an Allosaurus!