Bolivia

Sur Lipez Tour

Thermal springs pool

After reading about all the horror stories of peoples misadventure on this three day tour across southern Bolivia I was somewhat apprehensive about picking a tour company. In the end I asked a few questions at my hostel and took their word (which matched my information to some degree) and went to talk to the tour agents themselves, which even with my limited Spanish was not so bad. All seemed ok, so I booked with one.

Two days of driving across several deserts and mountain ranges (including the Cordelera de Lipez, which in part explains the tour name) and we arrived in the town of Uyuni on the edge of the Salir de Uyuni. Our tour group agrees to get up at 5:00am in order to be on the salt flats in time for the sunrise. At 7:am the sun is up and our driver has still not arrived. When he does finally show he is drunk. After sending him away we manage to contact the tour company who (to their credit) does set things right and by 9:00am we are on our way, but no sunrise photos! :(

Bolivia border control

The tour itself is really something else; the first portion is through the Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa and then it is on to the Salar de Uyuni. When traveling from San Pedro, Chile, you immediately climb from 2500m to 4600m and then spend most of the next 2 days at about 4200m looking up at the snow capped mountains that are another 1500-1800 meters higher. (Jumping up to this elevation and staying there for a couple of days is a great way to test for an aptitude for altitude sickness).  

This elevation is too high and the climate too dry to support much in the way of vegetation, so the landscape is somewhat reminiscent of old science fiction movies of the surface of Mars. The mountain ranges are both sandstone and volcanic and the desert plains between them match. (In places there is actually a visible line stretching across the plain where the sand and rock on one side is sandstone and the other volcanic.) 

The famous Rock Tree
(or in this photo Loco Pollo)

The sandstone deserts come complete with gullies, outcroppings and areas of boulders that have been eroded by wind into fantastically shapes.  

The mountains look like huge piles of multi-coloured gravel, some of which are high enough to be still be covered in snow in the middle of summer. The volcanic ranges have peak after peak of the typically conical volcano, many of which have blown their tops off millennia ago, but almost all are high enough to have snow-capped peaks. 

Blue Lagoon

At first it isn't overly apparent you are passing through mountain ranges as all of the mountains are quite widely separated with broad sandy, rocky or rock strewn plains between them. The lagoons are also vary varied, most being very shallow and some supporting life while others are totally dead, and hence the wide variety in their colours for which they are named (white, red, blue, green, stinky...).  All but the dead lagoons had a good variety of bird life, the most obvious being the flamingos, which were present by the thousands.

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world and you truly do see only a salt desert all the way to the horizon. It is deceiving however, as it is really a lake with all its water saturated in the salt. The water can be seen in the many small deep holes that are scattered all over the plain which are just big enough to reach your arm down into (and not find a bottom). You can break off some of the salt inside these holes however, and get perfectly square or rectangular crystals a centimeter or more in size.
At the the edge of the Salar, the locals mine the salt by shoveling the top five or so centimeters of salt into piles to drain off most of the water, then load it into ancient trucks and take it back to salt yards in town where it dries further.
The rainy season is just ending, and there is still a lot of water on the surface causing a mirror effect that goes to the horizon and makes it difficult at times to actually perceive the horizon. (Sunrise would have been spectacular!). Several years ago a hotel was built entirely of salt out on the flats, and operated for five years before it was realized their waste was poisoning the environment. It now operates as a restaurant, museum and gift shop, but with all the dirty white salt around, it had a way of feeling like a very displaced ski hut.

Salt Hotel

Uyuni exists for the salt 'mines' and a place to stay for tourists going to the Salar. At the edge of town however is a very interesting graveyard. The old steam trains that transported silver out of the hills have been left here on a couple of sections of track, perhaps a kilometer in length. Some of their parts have been salvaged, but for the most part, the shells are more or less intact.

Train graveyard

The 3 day tour is marked as the
yellow, green and violet lines

It was market day when we were in Uyuni, so that added a bit of interest, but on the whole it is a rather nondescript town of mostly dirt streets that wasn't really inspiring, so when we returned from the Salar I booked a ticket on the overnight bus to Sucre. Actually, everyone that was traveling in the group that came across from San Pedro with me felt the same way and were booked on a bus to somewhere else that night. So, at 3:00am  the next morning we found ourselves in Sucre.
--Section; 542.5km -Trip total; 24470km

friday, march 1, 2013

Sucre

Sucre is very much what it is billed as - a clean, pretty, colonial city. The sidewalks are in good condition, the roads are paved and there is a significant amount of appealing architecture surviving from the early colonial days. I am always amazed to note that some of these buildings date back to the mid 1500's and are nearly 500 years old. Most of the buildings are white (at least on the street side) which adds to the whole cleanliness aspect. In fact, this is the cleanest town I have been in yet, with very little litter visible and in the morning the people can be seen sweeping and washing the sidewalks and gutters in front of their shops and residences. The parks and plazas are not just concrete, grass and dirt like other places; here they have lots of sculptured gardens (and almost no dirt) and are all perfectly maintained. The potted plants hanging in the street are watered. The cemetery is kept picture perfect.


Walking around town today I once again noticed that shops of similar nature seem to always be in close proximity, if not next door to each other, and in this case it was funeral parlors. I suppose it makes it easier to shop around, but in this case I was somewhat amused thinking of things like why the street wasn't named Calle Muerte, until a moment later when I realized the hospital was across the street. It wasn't really amusing after that.
As with many towns I've been in lately, walking is always an exercise in awareness. Most streets are one-way, but occasionally a two-way pops up with no center line, and often the sidewalk peters out or because a building was built a bit deeper than the others there is hardly any sidewalk in front of it, or when there are traffic lights, often you cant see them because you are walking the opposite direction to traffic.

Pedestrians do not have the right of way and many times I've been rather startled when I'm in the middle of the intersection and a car decides to turn the corner right in front of me, and of course they are very adverse to braking for pedestrians, preferring instead to just honk their horn. Having grown up with the car horn being used mostly for near emergencies, it is difficult to get used to the idea of it being used for conversations...like, "Hey there, I'm coming up behind you", "I'm not slowing down so you had better speed up", "Hi everyone, I'm coming through the intersection!", and of course, "Whats going on up there?".

Central Park

 All towns have a food market hidden away somewhere and I always love finding them, because this is where you get the freshest fruit, vegetables, meat, fish or even flowers and often there are treats like fruit smoothies available. I am always amazed at the quantities of food available in these markets, but I suppose the vendors wouldn't bring it in if it couldn't be sold. On a side note, one of the cheapest drinks available (cheaper than pop anyway) is fresh squeezed fruit juice from one of the street vendors. In the market you get a good taste for the traditional, and in the case of Bolivia, traditional is multi-layered, bright coloured clothing and bowler hats. I notice that in Sucre however, only a small minority of the people seem to be wearing hats of any kind.

Child Artisans

On a weekday evening after work, the people that aren't out in the parks are out in the streets shopping for dinner or sundries or clothes or maybe just an ice cream cone. On a nice Saturday afternoon they are out in the parks with their kids where there are all kinds of activities available like painting pictures, train rides, peddle cars, pony rides and for the bigger kids, quad rentals, and of course there are always the food vendors.

Courtyard of the $10 hotel I stayed
at in Sucre

I think if I was to spend an extended time in any place, this would be at the top of my list, not only because you can get a Chinese food meal for $3 and 1/2 kilo of mozzarella for $4, but there is something very appealing about the town. Perhaps it is the palm trees.... The people at first seem to be very distant, but in reality are very nice and even occasionally try to talk to me, which unfortunately due to my limited vocabulary usually doesn't get far. (I guess I'll have to work on that one for next time!)
--Section; 380km -Trip total; 24850km

monday, march 4, 2013

La Paz

those are sports courts
along the roadway

I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but although I had read some descriptions of La Paz and El Alto, the reality was quite different. I found passing through El Alto very depressing, with the dirt streets and dirt parks and dirt yards and a literally endless, two lane stream of combies stuffed to the gills with people heading to work.  Eventually we dropped into the very steep valley where La Paz is located and suddenly the dirt was replaced with grass and trees (and concrete). I knew LaPaz was in a valley, but I wasn't expecting to see the houses seemingly stacked one on another as they crawled 3000' up all sides of the valley to the very top.

I call this 'Golden Street'

This is just a lay-over as my bus from Sucre arrived at 9:00am and the bus to Cuzco leaves at 8:30am, so I used the day to have a walk around. I also had to visit someone in the Witches Market.

yes those are dried llama fetices
(they actually look a little
like miniature dragons)

One thing I noticed right away is that there are a lot more bowler hats here, but I only saw a couple of younger people wearing them. It is a very peculiar tradition as one of the characteristics seems to be that the hat should be too small so that it is not worn so much as it is perched on the head.
The other thing that struck me was the amount of pavement, although I did manage to find a couple of plazas and there is the little bit of vegetation along the center of El Prado, the main road through the center of town. Street vendors and market stalls are significantly more evident here than in Sucre as well.

Iglesia San Francisco

Iglesia San Francisco

The markets behind (uphill of) Iglesia San Francisco (which includes the infamous Witches Market) seemed to go on forever.
And of course there is the whole altitude and walking uphill thing. It is a bit of a catch-22 , in that if I breath deeply, I find I can get enough oxygen to keep a good pace, but the problem is the vehicles belching all their smelly exhaust which makes it really hard to breath deeply.  (I am so going to enjoy the clean air when I get home!)

--Section; 697km -Trip total; 25547km

Chile

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

I decided to do the alternate crossing into Bolivia by going west to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, rather than going north to the Argentine border crossing into Bolivia. The reasoning was fairly simple. I wanted to do the Tour del Sur of southern Bolivia and it is a little more direct to do it this way.

some reconstructed buildings

still lots of original ruins...

For a bit of sight seeing on the way, I visited the town of Tilcara, a couple of hours north of Salta, where there are some Inca period ruins of a townsite at the top of a hill.  Some of the buildings have been rebuilt as they were likely originally constructed.

interior showing how only
rock and cactus were used

I have read some reviews that are not full of praise about the reconstruction, but I found it very nice to see and be in the actual buildings rather than having to use imagination whilst viewing lines of rock piles. For the purists, there were still plenty of lines of rock piles still untouched. On the return trip I unexpectedly got to visit the town of Purmamarca which is famous for it seven coloured hill.

Purmamarka's hill
(or at least part of it)

Next morning, bright and 1/2 hour early, I was at the bus station for my trip over the Andes to Chile. Fifty minutes later and I not having seen my bus, I was getting worried.  If you haven't been to a bus station in Latin America (and likely a whole lot of other places) you can't appreciate the uncertainty involved in catching a bus from a company you don't know to a destination you don't know. The buses do display a destination, but it is the last town on the route, so if you are going somewhere closer, you guess, or ask (if you can). The station may also have up to 30 platforms and you don't always know which platform it is arriving to, so you have to watch them all. On the upside, the bus company logo is usually well marked on the bus so that makes things a bit easier, but on the downside, the buses come and go every 10 minutes or so. Long story short, I went to a ticket counter where I knew the girl spoke good english and asked if she could make a phone call for me.

People live here! Lots of them.

Instead she closes her booth and takes me upstairs to the control tower (which I didn't even know existed) and explains my situation. After some back and forth, she turns to me and says "Its just late" and then with a laugh, adds, "Like everything in Argentina!". The controllers then go on to offer that I should stay upstairs with them and they will tell me when my bus does arrive. The girl then gives me a hug and goes back to her booth, and when my bus arrives some time later, one of the controllers comes out, tells me, gives me a warm handshake and pat on the back and off I go, thinking very simply, "Wow!" Everyone I have met has been so friendly and helpful, it is truly something.

...gravel for as far as you can see

...salt flats

As for the trip itself, it was an odd mixture of exhilarating and mind numbingly boring. We went back to Purmacara again, so I got to see the hill of seven colors in the morning sun this time, and shortly after this we began to climb. Much like the climb to Cachi a few days ago, except this time we went to 4300 meters and then slid to 3500m (and then to 4000m and finally to 4400m) for the long and sometimes very dull trip across the plateau. This time we were too high for much in the way of vegetation  but amazingly enough there we people living here and a lot more Lamas and even a few Alpacas.

and after the gravel...volcanoes

To break up these study (nap) times traveling hundreds of kilometers across this barren gravel yard, there were hills and hoodoos and canyons and more switchbacks and salt lakes and then volcanoes.

and people live here also

Perfectly shaped, conical, snow topped volcanoes everywhere. And then the decent down. From 4400m to 3700m, not with switchbacks this time but rather 50km in a relatively straight line down a plain tilted at  10 or 15 degrees. Although the driver kept the bus in third gear the whole time, those brakes got a good workout!

...and just a few more switchbacks

Now I am in San Pedro de Atacama, a rather dusty, windy town in the middle of nowhere with a really big reputation a a tourist destination. In fact the entire town is pretty much made up of tour operators, hostels, hotels, restaurants and artisan shops. The town center is rather quaint however with the plaza park, church and white painted adobe buildings. And when I get tired of looking at the town, I turn around and gaze at the all the snow topped volcanoes for a while.
I didn't book my tour to Uyuni in time however, so I have to spend an extra day here anticipating all those lagunas, geysers, arbols de piedra, and of course, salars! The final sight being the most spectacular, the Salar de Uyuni.

--Section;820km -Trip total; 23928km