Around 9.30am in the morning after 2 hours in a queue to get out of Argentina.
How about that for a road?
There were Lamma´s everywhere.
One of the many mineral lagoons in the around the Salt Flats. This one had a dormant volcano behind it.
Was it Kat letting off wind or the geysers that smelt of Sulphur?
Apparently this was once a tree. I´m still not convinced but it´s beautiful nontheless.
As the Salt Flats are so huge, there´s next to nothing on the horizon at some places. Hence some classic perspective photos. In this case, pocket size me for Kat on her Birthday. Pity that my feet have gone missing. The sun was so strong on the salt flat that I managed to get burnt through my t-shirt. Altitude was around 3000m.
A bit of a surprise on the way home, 10minutes from town. The cliff´s fallen on the road! A quick reverse and a detour by Alfredo and we were back on track.I finished the last post thinking that things were going to get very interesting as we entered Bolivia. Well, I weren´t wrong. It took 2 hours to clear Argentinian immigration to get out of the country followed by a meer 5 minutes wait to get into Bolivia. We were in, and as soon as you crossed the border it was obvious that this was a very different place indeed. The women dressed in the traditional Bolivian gear (bowler hats and all), the feeling of slight chaos and a strange smell that Kat told me was the ´Bolivian smell´, a strange mix of cocoa leaves, sweat and that kind of muggy smokey smell you get the morning after a wood fire when you´re camping.
We needed to get to Tupiza so this was going to be our first intoduction with Bolivian buses. It cant have been more different to the last bus where we enjoyed champagne and whisky and the comfort that we´d been used to. As only 3% of Bolivian roads are paved the buses are jacked up with high suspension and off road tires and the general idea is to get as many people in as possible. So you end up with passenger in the isle standing and sitting trying to hold on as the bus rocks back and forth on dirt tracks. It´s also not guaranteed that the driver will be awake or sober so it feels like a bit of gamble at every turn. To sum up Bolivian public transport, we heard through a French tourist at the hostel that the train drivers were on strike due to a fellow driver being caught over the limit while driving and being sacked. Now they weren´t striking because of unfair dissmissal, they were striking because they thought they SHOULD be able drink while driving the trains!
So eventually we made it Tupiza in one piece. We booked a 4 day jeep tour of the Salar de Uyuni (Salt flats) so the next morning we were off. There´s too much to tell on here but what followed was 4 days of amazing otherwordly sights, the worst headaches in our lives due to altitude (kat was sick one night due to the pain were we slept at 4500m), nosebleeds, cocoa leaf teas, a bunch of great people, and a fantastic guide and cook in Alfredo and Marlena. It was truly an amazing trip but after consistent 5am starts (although I admit that all we did was sit in the jeep all day) we were shattered when we returned to Tupiza to our hostel.
The next day I fell ill, along with others from the group, with a strange stomach bug which put me in bed for most of the day where I was cared for by a lovely nurse called Kat. Still recovering 3 days after, together with a lack of time and not feeling great about travelling on Bolivian buses (especially at night) has meant that we´ve had a change in plan. We´ve decided that it wasn´t worth the huge distance up to La Paz for the sake of 2 days in the capital before a massive 35hour ish journey on the buses back along the same route to Argentina. So, we´ve headed back to Argentina early and are now in Salta (again, 5 minutes to get out of Bolivia, 2 hours into Argentina). It´s a shame that we didn´t manage a visit to La Paz but I think we´ve been pretty lucky so far with doing everything we wanted so you win some you lose some. It´ll have to be next time!
Bolivia was really a great place to visit but is by no means an easy place to visit and travel in. Nothing is easy and you really do feel like a gringo or tourist wherever you are. However, with more time it is somewhere that I´m sure has a lot more to offer than even the fantastic time we had.
Now that we´re back where communication and access to email is easier, doesn´t take 15mins to load a page and that we´ve only 3 WEEKS left, I´m hoping to post a bit more regularly. It´s the home run now.
We needed to get to Tupiza so this was going to be our first intoduction with Bolivian buses. It cant have been more different to the last bus where we enjoyed champagne and whisky and the comfort that we´d been used to. As only 3% of Bolivian roads are paved the buses are jacked up with high suspension and off road tires and the general idea is to get as many people in as possible. So you end up with passenger in the isle standing and sitting trying to hold on as the bus rocks back and forth on dirt tracks. It´s also not guaranteed that the driver will be awake or sober so it feels like a bit of gamble at every turn. To sum up Bolivian public transport, we heard through a French tourist at the hostel that the train drivers were on strike due to a fellow driver being caught over the limit while driving and being sacked. Now they weren´t striking because of unfair dissmissal, they were striking because they thought they SHOULD be able drink while driving the trains!
So eventually we made it Tupiza in one piece. We booked a 4 day jeep tour of the Salar de Uyuni (Salt flats) so the next morning we were off. There´s too much to tell on here but what followed was 4 days of amazing otherwordly sights, the worst headaches in our lives due to altitude (kat was sick one night due to the pain were we slept at 4500m), nosebleeds, cocoa leaf teas, a bunch of great people, and a fantastic guide and cook in Alfredo and Marlena. It was truly an amazing trip but after consistent 5am starts (although I admit that all we did was sit in the jeep all day) we were shattered when we returned to Tupiza to our hostel.
The next day I fell ill, along with others from the group, with a strange stomach bug which put me in bed for most of the day where I was cared for by a lovely nurse called Kat. Still recovering 3 days after, together with a lack of time and not feeling great about travelling on Bolivian buses (especially at night) has meant that we´ve had a change in plan. We´ve decided that it wasn´t worth the huge distance up to La Paz for the sake of 2 days in the capital before a massive 35hour ish journey on the buses back along the same route to Argentina. So, we´ve headed back to Argentina early and are now in Salta (again, 5 minutes to get out of Bolivia, 2 hours into Argentina). It´s a shame that we didn´t manage a visit to La Paz but I think we´ve been pretty lucky so far with doing everything we wanted so you win some you lose some. It´ll have to be next time!
Bolivia was really a great place to visit but is by no means an easy place to visit and travel in. Nothing is easy and you really do feel like a gringo or tourist wherever you are. However, with more time it is somewhere that I´m sure has a lot more to offer than even the fantastic time we had.
Now that we´re back where communication and access to email is easier, doesn´t take 15mins to load a page and that we´ve only 3 WEEKS left, I´m hoping to post a bit more regularly. It´s the home run now.
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