the great cheese adventure

Been working hard here in Oki the last few weeks and so, looking for an adventure and a brief getaway, Tom and I, along with our friends Jeremy, Marie, and Elizabeth, the three Salesian volunteers that live in Okinawa with us, decided to hitchhike our way to San Xavier, Jesuit Mission town and home of the San Xavier Cheese Factory.

It’s a six hour trip by bus from Oki to San Xavier, but we’d heard that you can cross the river on a ferry and cut the trip in half. No public transportation goes that way, but plenty of cars do, so we figured our charm and thumbs might get us there. At 7:30 on Saturday morning we met in the plaza and headed for the river in a cab, just 15 kilometers down the road from Oki.

The cab stopped where the road ends, and we trekked across a kilometer of river bed through dust a foot deep. Got to the river where there were a number of wooden boats ready to take cars and passengers across.

Once across, we were 20 k from the next paved road, but after walking just a few kilometers we waved down a car coming by and the five of us piled in. The rest of the journey, two cars and a bus later, went off without a hitch, and we were in San Xavier by 10:30. What a beautiful town. Their church, built in 1691, is the oldest of the Jesuit Mission churches in Bolivia, and it is beautiful. Breathtakingly beautiful. And OLD. Really old. Older than America.

After we oohed and ahhhed at the church, visited the host family of another peace corps volunteer (he was out of town), and grabbed a bite to eat, we headed up the hill to the cheese factory. Oh man, they brought out one of everything that they make for us –yogurt, cheese, ricotta, dulce de leche- and we pretty much bought it all.

The trip back home wasn’t quite so smooth. We did a lot of waiting around for a ride, paid twice as much as we did on the way there, and had to get some beers to keep our optimism about us, but we made it home by nine that night. Crossing the river in the dark was even cooler, as was the trek through the black, dusty river plateau back to civilization. I’ve never seen stars so bright. We were filthy and exhausted by the time we reached Oki, and to celebrate our successful journey, we went to the Japanese restaurant here in town, had some yakisoba, and went to bed.

It was a good trip, a fine adventure, and now we got a fridge full of cheese.