Salar de Uyuni - the Salt Flats et al

Just finished a three day off-road trip of the salt flats in South Bolivia. Had such a good time, and the sights were beautiful. We were in a group of 7 in a Toyota 4x4 truck thingy, stayed the first night in a hotel made of salt. Yes, made of salt. I have the picture to prove it, and I even found a scorpion in my room in the morning! We had quite a drunken night there as bottles of wine were suprisingly reasonably priced - considering we were tourists stuck in the middle of nowhere. - I came to the enlightened idea that steak and battenburg cake would taste great if served together (remember you heard it here FIRST), someone tried to steal a stuffed armadillo, and our driver said he had to go and find some tourists who had got lost in the desert - so we were a bit worried for a while that we would be stuck in the salt hostel forever, but we did get a new driver the next day, who got us scared again by dropping us off at the toilets in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and then disappearing with the truck and all our bags...but it turned out he´d "just" gone to the hospital (round the corner) to pick up some medicine...and that turned out not to be so serious either.

Anyway, apart from those bits, the actual sights were amazing. We saw flamingoes, the laguna verde - green because of the copper or cobalt in it I think, a pinky-red lagoon, where the flamingoes fed on the pink algae, volcanoes, geysers of boiling mud, stone "trees", and, of course, salt flats, which were huge and carried on for miles. We also went through a desert named after Salvador Dalí because of the way it looked. We got a lot for our money. We ended up in Chile, in a small border town called San Pedro. It is SO HOT here, really a big difference from Bolivia, as La Paz was so wet and miserable most of the time, and the Salt flats trip took us up to 4900m in the mountains, where it was pretty cold, although it was sunny. So I´m sweating in this Internet café waiting for my bus to Santiago which leaves in a couple of hours. Everyone I´ve asked about Chile has said "it´s expensive" and I was desperate to know what else was good about it, but I spoke to a German girl today who is studying in Santiago, and she said pretty much the same: although there are beautiful places to go, it seems that you might as well go to Argentina to see similar things at a fraction of the price. It really is a shock to come from Bolivia, the poorest country in the continent, to Chile where the prices are just like English prices, which I guess isn´t so shocking in itself, but for me on a budget it is, so I´m going to travel through Chile fast. Also, the German girl said Santiago is full of people trying to be western, and lots of them actually are German or American, so that´s another reason to hurry through...

Anyway, hope you like the photies, of course the photos don´t do justice to the place, but it really was a trip worth going on. Lots of driving on bumpy ground, but we were able to plug in an ipod so had good music part of the way. BTW, warning: ipods break at around 4800m, but as long as you don´t go higher, they can come back to life when you get lower down. Up to 6000m though, and they break properly.

Potosi

Went down a working mine today in Potosi! It was really interesting, and you have to go there if you come to Bolivia. People usually die after about 10 years working in the mines, largely because of respiratory diseases caused by all the dust, asbestos, cyanide and arsenic etc that they either work with in the refinery, or in the mine itself. Of course there´s always the risk of the ceiling collapsing on you and you not getting rescued for THREE DAYS too, which happened to someone just 5 or 6 weeks ago! Most people still work by hand too. We saw soem people working with pneumatic drills, but not only are the expensive, you can´t actually see a thing when you´re using a drill coz of all the dust - impossible to breathe too!

You could stand up in the mine a bit, but some bits we had to crawl through and it was really horrible and claustrophobic. It was also really warm. The maximum it gets is 45c but we only went to about 25-30. We were lucky enough to have an stupid guy asking stupid questions in our group. He kept asking if he would die in the mine, as he couldn´t breathe properly because of the dust, and then he asked if this miner, whose job every day for about 3 months was to tap holes in the wall with nothing but a hammer and chisel and only himself for company, got bored. And, "Why doesn´t he have a cd player or something with him?"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah, like, how come they don´t get cable down there?! Why don´t they build a games room?! What a goof. What they did have for fun was chewing on coca leaves, and drinking 96% alcohol - seriously, we got there at 10am, and some of them were already drunk, and it was a Monday! Apparently by Friday they´re a bit rowdier, and there´s somewhere near Potosi where they go and have real "fight club" type fights. That´s their recreation for you! They supposedly worship this devil too, since they´re working underground. I say supposedly, but actually I think they do offer coca leaves to him, maybe not this one precisely, but they have their own pictures or icons that they use. We talked to some of the miners, and our guide was also an ex-miner, and some people do actually work in the mine for 25-30 years - its pretty amazing, as we spent 3 hours down there, and I couldn´t wait to get out at the end, it was so hot and enclosed and difficult to breathe - just walking around was hard work, but these guys had to load 200-400 baskets a day with rubble from the mine. It was a mix of silver, tin, and minerals - as well as asbestos etc. It was pretty impressive how hard they worked. They got paid relatively well, but for the price they paid with their health it didn´t make it much of a desirable job! None of them wore face masks either - it wasn´t really practical with all the physical work they had to do, but how much more crap they must have inhaled! We joined them chewing coca leaves all day, and it made our tongues go numb and our teeth green, but it was fun when you got over the horrible taste. You actually have to keep a ball of the leaves in your cheek like a hamster so that the saliva mixes with the leaves and after about 40 mins you start feeling a bit perkier, but you need to keep that ball in your cheek for about 3 hours, yum.

Sucre

Bloody hell! Nearly got my bag stolen on the way here! This man who I thought was the bus driver made me put my backpack on the rack above the seat on the bus, and I was sitting near the front of the bus. I didn´t want to put it there, but he kept saying something about there being water on the floor, so I just let him put it up. Next thing I knew, this woman in traditional dress was yelling and being all stressed out, and she had a plastic bag, and was pulling my backpack out of it, asking whose it was. I didn´t know what the hell was going on for ages, then a policewoman got on the bus and asked me if I wanted to make a report, and I eventually learnt that the woman in traditional dress had caught a man running off with my bag hidden in a plastic bag! I hadn´t even noticed it had gone and it was right above my seat! So I was really lucky the woman caught him, and he was taken off by the police too. That bag had loads of important things in it, like my passport, diary, glasses, and plane tickets!! I think the guy who I´d thought was the bus driver was working with the thief, as I couldn´t find him after that.

Anyway, Sucre was eerily quiet, the whole day and night we stayed there. It was a Saturday, but there was hardly anyone about all day and night. Think it was Holy weekend or something, was it? So that may have been something to do with it. There wasn´t much to do there, but we went in a museum displaying masks that are used for carnival, and that was really cool. Some of them seem to be very oriental influenced, and some of them are well scary. Also got a photo of the city from above, it was very pretty, and is a UNESCO protected site.

PHOTOS WILL COME ONE DAY

La Paz

From Cusco I got the overnight bus(es) (and boat over Lake Titikaka) straight through to La Paz. We stopped in Copacabana on the edge of Titikaka for lunch and it seemed like a hellhole to me, absolutely nothing good about it - just a place where tourists stop off for lunch or on their way to an island on the lake.

Anyway, La Paz was impressive on the way in to the city, as you can see the entire city all in a valley in the mountains as you drive in. Its really obvious how much poorer it is than Lima and Cusco, as there are more people begging on the streets (in Lima and Cusco I found that rather than beg, people would find something to sell, like penny sweets, postcards, polishing shoes, just get on a bus and sing for money etc, but in La Paz there are more people just holding out cups/hats, which is sad but also bloody annoying, when they start tapping on the window for three hours when you´re in a cafe having lunch, asking for money. I know that the kids in Cusco were forced by their families to go out selling finger puppets/cigarettes/chewing gum etc, and they had to sell everything they had before they were allowed home at night, or before they were allowed to eat - its kind of difficult to get your head round - is it good that at least they´re not getting something for nothing by selling stuff, or should you refuse to buy anything, because then their parents might not send them out anymore if no one buys anything from them?), and parts of the city - like where I´m staying, are pretty grubby. However, I have discovered nicer bits.

Also, for my first few days, I felt much more worried about my safety etc in La Paz: we met this guy who had his pocket picked in the market, and I had also managed to lose/have stolen my cashcard just before leaving Cusco, and $300 taken out, which pissed me off, and the bank (HSBC) were useless at helping me out - refusing to send my new card to a safe address here, and making me spend hours on the phone listening to musak - just bloody cancel the card!!! It didn´t help that I was blubbering my eyes out I suppose, but they didn´t have any sense of urgency or sympathy. Anyway. After the first few days, and, I realised, after the new year holidays had finished (I forgot about them as every day is a holiday to me), I realised that the town isn´t that bad, as shops don´t always close at 3pm, and also, it doesn´t ALWAYS rain (although it does rain pretty much every day), the sun does sometimes come out - its out now for example... etc. Also, importantly, we discovered the nice end of town, and, even more significantly, they have a huge cool multicoloured icecream parlour there, where you can eat every E number under the sun - and some! - in the form of banana splits, pineapple splits, papaya splits, cherry derries, merry berries, uva exceptional, and manzana, for example. Very nice.

Have started Spanish lessons, doing 4 hours a day for a week, and we get homework too. They´re going well. Mi gusta! Quiero me ducho pero el baño esta occupado! Hablo español muy bien! Este blog es muy dificil a comprender! Estas son mis mochilas! I could go on, but its probably pointless. When I can say something useful, I will let you know. The good thing is they don´t bother using vosotros (plural form of "you") here, so there´s less to learn! They also use verbs for ´to be´, estar and ser, more sensibly than they do in Spain, so its a bit easier.

We visited a place just outside the city called Valle de la luna, as it looks a bit like a lunar landscape, I guess. It was quite eerie, and I saw a huge spider in its little home in the ground.