A little piece of paradise

“You can’t say you’ve seen the world until you’ve been to Moro Moro.” My coworker Sandra and I spotted this slogan in large block letters parading across the windshield of a truck on the side of the road. We were hiking along a dusty road on the outskirts of Moro Moro at the time—a town of a couple hundred people that’s nestled among the green hills between the departamentos (provinces) of Santa Cruz and Cochabamba.


From an economic, political, social, or almost any other standpoint, this slogan seems ridiculous: Moro Moro is a two-hour bus ride over dirt roads from the nearest urban center, and the farmers, teachers, and few storeowners who make up its population are hardly the leading edge of society. But if you’re looking for natural beauty, Moro Moro (whose name means “many mountains” in the local vernacular) may well be the center of the universe.

I’ll write more in the weeks ahead about some of my experiences there—the workshop for teachers Sandra and I gave in the even-remoter village of La Laja; our hour-long hike over the foothills to visit the family of a young Bolivian volunteer; the hospitality that left our hearts and our stomachs full. But for now, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

When I told my housemate Danitza, who’s from another small town in the valleys, about how much I’d enjoyed Moro Moro, she smiled knowingly and said, “Now you’ve seen a little piece of paradise.”