In Bolivia, a Village With Real Staying Power

I took in the ambiance. Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" filled a room draped in '70s and '80s rock memorabilia. One of Georg's biological sons, the hulking Sven, is slouched over a beer, properly sloshed. Mosquito is Sven's brainchild. The 38-year-old is rumored to have been Michael Jackson's bodyguard before returning to the tranquillity of Samaipata.

Proud dad of so many, Georg bade us farewell. Shortly thereafter, Sven's head hit the table with a thud heard even above a Jimi Hendrix solo. Juan started telling me about their family get-togethers, a kind of United Nations in miniature. "We all call him 'Dad,' " Juan said of Georg, "and we love him."

For Love and Money

If you ask the expats why they've settled in the town beneath the giant ferns, they'll talk of love. Frank married a woman from nearby Santa Cruz named Marifé; Silvain, the stunning local Samaipaeña, Lenny. And there's Gerlinda, a German woman who runs a progressive kindergarten here. Like many others, she was just passing through when she hitched up with a Bolivian man. She never left.

Newcomers continue to arrive, among the most recent a jovial 50-something Texan, Trent, who married a Cochabambina. I talked to him and his wife, Rosario (who gives private Spanish classes in the village for $5 an hour), under the freshly painted sign of their new business: "Bolivian Romance B&B." They told me the place has been so popular they have opened another one on the far side of town.

If love is one draw, money is the other. Not needing much of it, that is. Bolivia boasts one of the lowest costs of living in South America. Roadrunners' Frank told me he "lives like a king" on $500 a month. (A typical Bolivian in Samaipata might spend one-fifth that sum.) He said he feels free in Samaipata, working just a few days a week to more than adequately support his wife and three children. Some Samaipata prices: A steaming espresso at the candlelit La Chakana cafe: 30 cents. A heaping ice cream cone at Vaca Loca: 12 cents. A French-cooked meal at Silvain's place, including (ahem, the better) wine: $5. A month's rent in a furnished chateau: $100, utilities included.

Despite a Samaipata real estate boomlet after the Morales victory, as new luxury houses spring up and prices have risen 30 percent, land remains a bargain. Some Dutch retirees I met here calculated that they could sell their middle-class home in the Netherlands and buy some 30 homes of equal size in Bolivia.

Moving On, or Not

Samaipata may not detain you for as long as it did me. A week is more than sufficient to camp in the La Yunga fern forests, bathe under the Pacha or Cuevas waterfalls, sample the town's unique cultural blend, maybe even stretch your palms out to greet the new year's sun amid Inca ruins.

Then it will be time to move on to Bolivia's other marvels: the white city of Sucre, the otherworldly pink and red lakes of the Uyuni salt flats, and Titicaca's Island of the Sun. Yes, time to move on.

But, then again, who knows? I reflected on my last evening in Samaipata, as Pieter played the final notes of a Mahler piece. After all, many others who came before you were just passing through.

William Powers is author of the memoir "Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle From Bolivia's War on Globalization" (Bloomsbury).