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NEW YORK CITYLA PAZ, BOLIVIAJAN. 28-FEB. 3 MILES FLOWN: 8,199NAJAF, IRAQJULY 25-30 MILES FLOWN: 14,718ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIAMAY 18-26 MILES FLOWN: 18,768
Go behind the scenes to learn about Aatish Taseer’s pilgrimage, including the dozens of
books he read before his trip.
IN LA PAZ, Bolivia, one afternoon at the beginning of the year, I sat in an aerie of an apartment overlooking an Andean amphitheater of bare scarified mountains. I was in the home of Eduardo Quintela Gonzáles, a 40-year-old musicologist, as he told me how his late father would take him on pilgrimages to the Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana. They would walk for three days from their home in La Paz, the Bolivian seat of government, to the pilgrim town of Copacabana, at the edge of Lake Titicaca, 95 miles to the northwest. “Walking alone at night changes one’s perspective of things,” Quintela said. “When you set out, you think you’re going to talk to the people you’re with. But after the first day, you find you have nothing to say. It’s just you and your will to reach your destination.”
12431 JAN. 29 ARRIVALLA PAZ3 JAN. 30ISLAND OF THE SUN4 JAN. 30-FEB. 3COPACABANA2 JAN. 30HUATAJATA1 FEB. 3LA PAZ
The idea of a sacred destination, reached through penance and hardship, that reconfigures one’s view of reality, is a feature of pilgrimage everywhere, but Quintela’s return to Copacabana later that week for the Feast of the Virgin on Feb. 2 was underpinned by a special sorrow: His father, the man who had made the trip to Copacabana 15 times in his life, had died the year before after a bout of Covid-19, which was followed by a diagnosis of brain cancer, an operation and then six months in a coma. “I prayed to the Virgin because he asked me to, but he died anyway,” said Quintela, who was dressed in a black hoodie and jeans, as we sat on folding chairs in a room hung with stringed instruments and masks. I was headed to Copacabana, too. Quintela and his band were due to play at Mass on the morning of fiesta. It would be his first trip back since his father had died, and he was intent on honoring him at the site of his deepest devotion.
I was on a pilgrimage of sorts myself. From my home in New York, Bolivia would be my first stop in what I had envisaged as three journeys across three great faiths, spread out over a year: fiesta high in the Andes, where pre-Hispanic ritual and belief underlay Catholicism; a spring of pilgrimage through Buddhist and shamanic Mongolia; and lastly, a time of mourning in Shiite Iraq.
The Island of the Sun in Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca, a pilgrimage site since before the Inca Empire.
I was interested in pilgrimage as a kind of ur-travel, crucial to so much that we associate with the modern industry of tourism, from early inns, hostels and brothels to guidebooks and travel writing. In their 1978 book, “Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture,”…
2023-11-09 05:03:39
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