Hey everybody,
Anyway, as I was saying... altitude. I spent a large part of the last week above 4000 meters (about 13000 feet) and besides the lack of sleep I think it also makes me constantly hungry. On top of that there's the lack of moisture mixed with not drinking enough water and I'm thinking I'm turning into Man Jerky. I'm pretty sure I was designed for sea-level operation. Other than that I feel great, though.
After leaving Copacabana I spent a couple of days cruising around the markets and parks in the Bolivian capitol, La Paz. The city lies in the middle of a valley surrounded by hills and from a distance looks like a vast, orange sprawl. It seems like every single building is made out of bricks so all you see for miles around is... orange. Paris it ain't. I suppose the upside is that it's big bad wolf-proof. I don't know if you need to spend more than a day or two in La Paz. The most interesting parts of the city are easily walkable and if you like items made of alpaca wool... well then you'll be in heaven. I was expecting the Witches' Market to be something more smoky or foggy with strange old women grabbing at you with withered hands from out of the mist and insisting on telling your fortune. Instead it's about one square block of small shops selling stone trinkets, herbal remedies, and yes... animal fetuses. I found a restaurant that served a 4-course lunch for 10 Bolivianos, which is about $1.50, and then took a long walk to a nice little park on top of one of the hills with views on the city. Love is in the air in La Paz... you can tell by the number of couples making out, especially in the park. I sat up there for a couple of hours looking at views of the city and listening to music when "Night Prowler" and then "Livewire" came on back-to-back and I realized I was singing out loud . I looked around and noticed that a couple of older Bolivian women were staring at me. You know... the ones with the hats. That was awkward. Ah, how I miss Colonel Angus!
That night I'm waiting at the station for my bus to Uyuni and making small talk with some of the other passengers before boarding, wondering why there are paintings of the interiors of the buses, including the toilets, in the lobby. I introduce myself to a Japanese guy named Hiro when a woman in front of me turns around and says, "Your name is Dave? Did you book this trip through Coca Travel?"
Me: "Uh... yeah."
Woman: "Great! They told us you'd be our Spanish translator!"
Me: "Wait... what?"
And that's how I met Caroline and Martin. They immediately warned me about the bus ride. The first four hours over paved roads are no problem, but the following seven hours are another story. The road from Oruro to Uyuni has not yet been paved, so it was like spending most of the night on a massage chair set at max power, and not in a good way.
I'm not really sure how to begin to describe the next three days touring around southern Bolivia other than to say that it's possibly the most amazing landscape I've seen anywhere in my life. We set off almost immediately upon arrival in Uyuni after piling all of our stuff on top of a Toyota Land Cruiser (side note: If I ever need to do anything off-road, I'm getting a Land Cruiser. Those things are beasts). It was me, Caroline and Martin, a Dutch girl named Charlotte and a Colombian couple Laura and Sebastian. Our driver and guide Cristobal was a man of few words but man could he drive the shit out of a Land Cruiser off-road. Over the course of the three day/two night tour I got the feeling that Cristobal was sort of a boss among the various guides. He's older than most and when he flashes his high beams the other 4x4s move out of the way. I asked Cristobal how long he'd been leading these tours and he said 10 years. The last three years have been the busiest, however, and there has been a lot more tourist activity in Uyuni. The town only has 15,000 inhabitants and the main industries are mining, salt processing, quinoa farming, and llama herding. I asked him if more tourism was a good thing and he said, "Of course. They're going to pave the road from Oruro to Uyuni."
Our first stop on day one was a train graveyard just outside of Uyuni where old steam locomotives have been left to rust seemingly in the middle of nowhere. If it wasn't for the 30-odd tourists milling around it would've been one of the creepiest sites I've ever seen. From there we drove directly on to the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. It's a bit disorienting to look out on to a completely white horizon and lose all perspective on relative distance. If it wasn't for the faraway mountains it would seem like you were on the edge of the world. Much of the salt processing for human consumption is done by hand with workers digging out piles of salt with shovels and leaving them for pickup later on. We ate lunch inside the Salt Hotel which, as you can imagine, is made out of salt bricks. From there we drove to Isla de Pescado which is an island in the middle of this salt plain made of petrified coral and covered with cacti. That is one landscaping trifecta that I can safely say I've never seen before. We drove across naturally formed hexagons that have been formed on the surface of the salt plains and spent the first night at another lodging made of salt in Chuvica at an altitude of about 3700 meters.
The second day I felt like we were traveling across the surface of Mars. We headed to the small town of San Juan (elevation 3929 meters, 12,890 feet) for a pit stop and from there we never went below 4000 until we headed back to Uyuni the next day. The terrain seemed to change with every mile. I was lucky enough to have the front seat so when you see the photos you'll see a lot of the hood of the truck with the Toyota insignia. I tried to do the best I could to capture what we were seeing but honestly there's no way it can be done through pictures. We saw several active volcanoes each approximately 5,900 meters above sea level. We traveled to four lagoons, most of which were populated by red and white flamingos. At Laguna Canapa I trounced across some black mud which, when it dried, formed this sort of dry, grey crust which looked and felt a lot like cement. I don't know what those flamingos are digging for in that mud. I don't know what could be alive in that lagoon at that altitude. We drove across the red surface of the Desierto de Siloli to reach our highest point of the day, about 4680 meters (about 15,300 feet). By the way, it's not like there are roads up there or anything. All you can see are the tracks left from years of off-road tours... the drivers do this all by feel and experience. One of the trucks in our group didn't make it to a scheduled meeting point so we had to double-back for an hour to look for them. We asked Cristobal why they don't have radios or walkie-talkies or anything like that and he looked at us oddly. "We have cell phones but they don't work out here so we travel in groups." And that was the end of that conversation.
As we continued on toward the Arbol de Piedra we stopped to catch a glimpse of a group of animals that are a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel called viscacha. The arbol itself is a large rock that over the years was formed into the shape of a tree and is surrounded by several other picturesque formations in a rock garden and, luckily, an outhouse. That's one of the reasons why, as I mentioned earlier, I haven't been drinking enough water... lack places to take a leak. As many of you know I am a peeing machine so I've got to keep the liquid intake under control. Anyhow, we ended the day by entering the Eduardo Avaroa national wildlife refuge to a striking view of the Laguna Colorada, literally the Red Lagoon. We spent the night in an inn at about 4300 meters where the red wine at room temperature was still almost freezing, but they gave us a bottle for free so hey, down it goes.
The next morning we awoke at 4:30 to a spectacularly starry night sky. I tried to capture some shots with slow shutter speed but I don't know if my camera is that good. You could see some faint traces of what could be the Milky Way and I saw more than one shooting star. Of course, at 4300 meters before sunrise it's what I would refer to as brutally cold. I wasn't going to stay out there very long to lose digits in the name of photography but I will tell you that alpaca hats are the shit. They totally work. Anyhow, we headed out to catch the sunrise at the geyser plateau known as Sol de Manana at an elevation of a measly 4865 meters (about 16,000 feet). As I mentioned earlier... Mars. A field of steamy sulfur across a red rock surface as the sun rises across the horizon. From there it was on to the thermal pools at the Laguna Polques for breakfast. Normally I would've partaken of a thermal hot tub but a) I didn't have shorts or b) a towel and c) it was fuckin' freezing. After breakfast we drove across the plain known as the Desierto de Dali because of the strangely abstract rock formations and then made a stop at the Laguna Verde, which is not actually green. The upshot of this is that the Vulcan Licancabur casts a spectacular reflection across the surface of the lagoon which, again, I tried to capture in pictures but without much success. From there it was straight to the border crossing between Bolivia and Chile. I say border crossing but it's this hut in the middle of nowhere where trucks and buses from each country congregate to shuttle tourists back and forth. It's cold, windy, desolate and beautiful. We dropped off Martin, Caroline and Charlotte and picked up a couple of Argentinian women on the way to Uyuni that spoke Spanish at about 200 mph.
This last day back to Uyuni was probably the least interesting visually but I managed to get some more information on the area from Cristobal and the rest of the group. Quinoa was the staple food of the Incas because it grows between 3700-4000 meters, is highly nutritious, and only needs dirt and rain. There are several salt mines across the salars which are used for mining chemical salts (borax, etc). The miners live on-site without their families for shifts lasting up to 25 days. There seems to be some sort of child trafficking problem in Bolivia from what the Argentinians were saying. I got that impression at the bus station in La Paz where on the cctv every once in a while they would repeat a public service announcement warning people to be on the lookout for unaccompanied minors for this very reason. It also looks like both Peruvians and Bolivians are fairly politically active. Besides the frequent protests, you can't drive by one house outside of a city that doesn't have one wall completely covered by a slogan for one candidate or another.
Once back in Uyuni I only had a couple of hours left until my bus to La Paz which was then followed by a bus to Cusco, Peru. I don't know if I can adequately describe how my body felt after three days in a Land Cruiser followed by the overnight unpaved hell ride to La Paz followed by another 12 hours in a bus to Cusco so I'll leave it alone. Now I'm down to a measly altitude of 3300 meters. Kid stuff.
Here are the pictures. I don't think they'll do it justice, but it's the best I've got...
https://photos.app.goo.gl/QfZLwdLF7tHqwGpv5
Take 'er easy,
Dave
Anyway, as I was saying... altitude. I spent a large part of the last week above 4000 meters (about 13000 feet) and besides the lack of sleep I think it also makes me constantly hungry. On top of that there's the lack of moisture mixed with not drinking enough water and I'm thinking I'm turning into Man Jerky. I'm pretty sure I was designed for sea-level operation. Other than that I feel great, though.
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| La Paz |
That night I'm waiting at the station for my bus to Uyuni and making small talk with some of the other passengers before boarding, wondering why there are paintings of the interiors of the buses, including the toilets, in the lobby. I introduce myself to a Japanese guy named Hiro when a woman in front of me turns around and says, "Your name is Dave? Did you book this trip through Coca Travel?"
Me: "Uh... yeah."
Woman: "Great! They told us you'd be our Spanish translator!"
Me: "Wait... what?"
And that's how I met Caroline and Martin. They immediately warned me about the bus ride. The first four hours over paved roads are no problem, but the following seven hours are another story. The road from Oruro to Uyuni has not yet been paved, so it was like spending most of the night on a massage chair set at max power, and not in a good way.
I'm not really sure how to begin to describe the next three days touring around southern Bolivia other than to say that it's possibly the most amazing landscape I've seen anywhere in my life. We set off almost immediately upon arrival in Uyuni after piling all of our stuff on top of a Toyota Land Cruiser (side note: If I ever need to do anything off-road, I'm getting a Land Cruiser. Those things are beasts). It was me, Caroline and Martin, a Dutch girl named Charlotte and a Colombian couple Laura and Sebastian. Our driver and guide Cristobal was a man of few words but man could he drive the shit out of a Land Cruiser off-road. Over the course of the three day/two night tour I got the feeling that Cristobal was sort of a boss among the various guides. He's older than most and when he flashes his high beams the other 4x4s move out of the way. I asked Cristobal how long he'd been leading these tours and he said 10 years. The last three years have been the busiest, however, and there has been a lot more tourist activity in Uyuni. The town only has 15,000 inhabitants and the main industries are mining, salt processing, quinoa farming, and llama herding. I asked him if more tourism was a good thing and he said, "Of course. They're going to pave the road from Oruro to Uyuni."
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| A lone salt worker in the distance |
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| Desierto de Siloli |
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| Laguna Colorada |
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| Sol de Manana |
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| Flamingos in flight over Laguna Hedionda |
Once back in Uyuni I only had a couple of hours left until my bus to La Paz which was then followed by a bus to Cusco, Peru. I don't know if I can adequately describe how my body felt after three days in a Land Cruiser followed by the overnight unpaved hell ride to La Paz followed by another 12 hours in a bus to Cusco so I'll leave it alone. Now I'm down to a measly altitude of 3300 meters. Kid stuff.
Here are the pictures. I don't think they'll do it justice, but it's the best I've got...
https://photos.app.goo.gl/QfZLwdLF7tHqwGpv5
Take 'er easy,
Dave
