For those of you who didn't know, I have had chronic tendonitis for a year now and even though I was doing my exercises during the trip, they were simply not healing. I have decided to come home inorder to do intensive therapy and hopefully go to europe this spring when they are completely healed. It made me really sad to make such a deccision but I think it is in the best intrest of my future. Love you all, and hope I can continue writing come a few months. Chou. [View Full Entry]

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La Paz is the craziest city I have ever visited. It blankets two huge ridges and the valley between. All the streets are steep which makes it really anoying to get around. The place is packed full of people and van-busses each with its own person constantly yelling the destinations and prices of the bus creating a syphony of constant noiose. Every night peasents rip open the neatly bagged trash in search of food and inturn spread trash every where. You constantly smell exhast. Snow capped mountains complete the horizon and the chilly nights remind you that you are at nearly [View Full Entry]

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Russ and I left Santa Cruz for a small jungle town in called Samaipata 3 hours west. In between two towns on the way there were 116 speed bumbs. We took a sweet hike through the mountainous jungle and we met an awsome french couple with whom we left the next day inorder to make it to a music festival on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca for new years. The festival was a bit underwelming because there were not that many people but the location for new years was unto itself a once in a life time experience. Russ [View Full Entry]

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Russ and I took a 16 hours bus ride from Sucre east to Santa Cruz, the largest city in Bolivia. I eat a nasty soup before getting on the bus that had a chiken foot in it, not a nice meaty leg or anything, but a straight up foot with like the taloons and everything. This combined with an incredibly bumby, stuffy smelly buss ride made me feel really sick and I puked twice durring the ride, and I was kinda sick for the next couple days, but all good now. Santa Cruz is super hot casue it is smack in [View Full Entry]

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The bus ride from Potosi to Sucre was alas paved and smooth, my bum surely apreciated such a thing. And it was again very beautiful giving the passengers sweeping views of vast valleys below. Sucre is, however, completely different then the rest of Bolivia. It seems as though all of Bolivia´s money found its way to Sucre, the cars are even in better shape then in Argentina. they have a mall with a cinima and everything, all the kids drive wear designer clothes and drive tinted windowed racers. The reason there is so much money here is casue sucre is the [View Full Entry]

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Russ and I left tupiza for the Salar de Uyuni, the bus ride was 6 hours and we didnt see a single house for the first four. all of south western/central Bolivia is part of the rugged altiplano which is extremely dry extremely and extremely high. it rains for 3 months of the year, from now until febuary, and the rest of the year it is completely dry. there are absolutely no paved roads outside cities, the ride to Uyni was a single lane bumpyass dirt road that wound up and down through the most picturesc mountains I have ever seen. [View Full Entry]

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I met up with Russell, my friend from high school who is traveling throughout south america just like me in Salta. We played music for a soop kitchen in a really poor part of town and it was super intense. the kids were constantly grabbing us, but it was fun too, we played soccer and took photos. Yesterday we took a bus up to Tupiza, BOlivia which is a small town surrounded by the same hills of infinate shapes and colors I found south in Argentina. Everything is much cheaper and the people are beautifully indian. all the woman dress in [View Full Entry]

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I finally uploaded some photos, just go to, tobysola.myphotoalbum.com [View Full Entry]

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I went to Cachi, a small town west of salta for a couple of days to do some hiking. I stopped on my way at parque nacional cardones ( cardones are a type of cactus that covers much of the land around here). the park only had 4 km of trail so just left the trail and explored on my own. It was intense cause I was hiking at at least 10,000 feet the whole time and fog would roll in quickly and I couldn´t see anything, but I was really carefull about direction and took simple lines. While I was [View Full Entry]

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Salta is by far my favorite city so far. Incredible colonial architecture backdropped by insane mountain landscapes. I met a friend from luxenburge and another guy from Buenos aires in Salta and the guy from buenos aires has a car so we drove today to cafayate, 3 hours south of salta. the drive was so beautiful. the road winds through the dessert mountains and the mountains are all different colors, green, brown, tan, white, red, orange, and texture is extremely varied. this landscape is of another planet, we stopped at la garganta del diablo (the throat of the devil) which is [View Full Entry]

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