OK. We have a lot to get through. Its been about 3 weeks since our last update due to the unreliable Internet and electricity in Bolivia and due to my lack of faith in public computers. Since the last update we have acquired a netbook due to the number of viruses I have been getting on my SD card. Anyway, due to this lack of updating you are getting not one but 2 blogs over the next couple of days. I am writing this offline so things may jump from future, past and present tense depending on whats happened. These have both been written for some time. Here’s the first:
As you know the last entry was called Living the High Life. We should have saved that one. Since then we have been to the highest city on Earth, Potosi (4090m):
The highest Capital city, La Paz:
Drank beer from the highest Brewery:
And Wine from the highest vinyard:
But I’m getting ahead of myself. More of all that later.
From San Pedro De Atacama we travelled with another two couples Noel and Kate, and Mark and Karen, by 4×4 to Uyuni in Southern Bolivia. Here we are at about 4500 meters
The imigration building at the Bolivian boarder is impressive:
As are their toilet facilities:
Seriously.
The tour was a convenient way for us to carry on moving north, but what we were not told when booking it in Chile was that the salt miners who work the worlds largest salt flat, Salar de Uyuni, basically the whole point of the trip, were on strike. This meant that rather than having hours to gawp at the hallucinogenic perspective mangling vast white salty emptiness we spend hours and hours in a jeep at well over 4000 meters, so still unable to breath/think properly, driving on a huge a detour to avoid being blockaded by the protesters. It meant the trip was cut short by a day, but we still saw some amazing stuff, on the odd occasion we could stop.
The main problem with the tour was that we were meant to have a whole day on the salt flats themselves, but we arrived there at about 6pm on the second day and only got out of the jeep for 10 minutes. It is an incredible place though:
In the end I suppose we were lucky as the second day of our tour 17 jeeps full of tourists were stopped and held for 10 hours by the disgruntled miners, which doesnt sound fun. It was made tolerable by the excellent company we had, had we been with randoms it would have been a total nightmare.
After this relative ordeal we decided to stay for 2 nights in Uyuni itself, partly so that we could see the Train Graveyard I initially thought this was some PR persons excuse for dumping a load of rusting metal in the middle of the desert, but it did prove have a certain beauty
Uyuni itself is nothing special so we moved onto Potosi, as previously mentioned the highest city in the world at 4090m. It is a chaotically beautiful, with some fantastic colonial architecture. Due to the silver mines Potosi became the most important city for the Spaniards in their American territories, and a lot of money stayed here, but today it has a neglected feel to it.
One funny thing we noticed is that all the buses here are old Japanese imports. This lot passed in the couple of minutes we stood waiting for the ATM:
Although we love camping it is nice to be in a country where we can afford to eat out all the time and stay in hotels. We found an amazing restaurant here where a couple of bottles of wine, a fondue (in Bolivia you say?) and a desert comes in at about a tenner.
Our next stop was Sucre, again a nice colonial town with a rich cultural heritage.
By this point we had firmly decided to get this netbook, so spent a lot of time looking around the worlds most useless electronics stores to try and find one. We couldnt. This led to a strange set of events. Through some online research we discovered that the only place in Bolivia to buy any kind of PC is Santa Cruz, a 20 hour bus or only 40 minute flight away. The flight was only about £30 so it seemed a no brainer. We booked this and an onward flight to La Paz through a travel agent. Everything seemed fine and the prices were cheaper than buses were in Argentina so it seemed a bargain to boot. It was only when I was trying to find out our baggage allowance online and found that the airline didnt have a website that we started to panic. Turns out that we had been booked on with the Bolivian Military. What concerned us more was that the only web reference we could find only had a list of all that airlines accidents with details of the numbers of fatalities. Needless to say there were enough of them for us to cancel this flight and fly with AeroSur on a 727.
We didnt have long in Santa Cruz, less than 24hrs so the race was on to find the market where all computing stuff is sold. We did and I found almost the model I was looking for so that was that. The only other thing to report in Santa Cruz is that we woke to find a toucan in our hostel’s kitchen, which was a first.
It turns out his name is Simone and he is the Hostels pet, and very tame indeed
After all this we caught our flight to La Paz where I shall pick up from again in the next Blog.