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Published: March 9th 2012
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Our next destination wasn’t necessarily a place that we wanted to go to. The real reason for us visiting Oruro was more of a requirement. Basically, we were heading toward Uyuni in order to see the Salt Flats and there were two main ways of going about it. The first was to take a bus directly from La Paz to Uyuni and the second, to stop off in Oruro and get the train down there instead. Since we had yet to get on a train on this trip, we decided this would be a good alternative to the constant bore and repetitiveness of the ever present bus, and was therefore why Oruro was now on the agenda.
So, on our return from the jungle to La Paz, we quickly made our way to the bus station and snapped up a few tickets bound for Oruro. We were currently still in the same foursome that we had been with for a week or so now consisting of Donna, Helen, Troy and myself (for ease, I have decided to affectionately call this four piece the NRC, standing for Nut Ring Crew – see previous blog) and we had no idea what to
expect of this town we were heading to other than what we had read from the travel guides, and to be honest, it didn’t sound like this was going to be thrill-a-minute kind of place.
The trains only went to Uyuni on a Friday or a Tuesday from Oruro, and therefore since we arrived on a Wednesday night, we had booked our train for the Friday. This left a couple of days to explore Oruro see what they had to offer as well as getting a few essential things done such as laundry, catching up on some emails, banking and other such mundane jobs. Normally, these kind of tasks are easy to complete in a morning, leaving the rest of the day to chill, drink some coffee, or even grab a beer of we are feeling like throwing caution to the wind. However, in Oruro, these simple tasks were proving more than a little difficult to complete. Firstly, we all hit the streets with laundry in hand on our way to the place that we had been recommended to by our friendly Hostel proprietor, it turned out this wasn’t a laundry place, but a dry cleaning business. Not to
worry, we would move onto the next recommendation….. Again, dry cleaners. Now, I have the tendency to exaggerate on the odd occasion (apparently?), but when I say that we went to 6 places all recommended by the previous place, all of which were not laundry, but dry cleaners, I can assure you this is no exaggeration!! Needless to say, by the last place, we were all pretty bored of humping round our heavy, dirty washing.
The next thing on the list of things to do was to find somewhere to eat. Again, this normally simple task was proving difficult, and becoming increasingly frustrating. There were of course places to eat in Oruro, however it seemed unless we wanted a Pizza or some fried chicken for breakfast, we were in for a difficult search! So, after having searched high and low for a laundry and now somewhere to eat, we were all in a bit of a huff, hungry and openly hating this town. Perhaps a little harsh, however this was our current status!
We eventually found a place to eat after aimlessly wandering the streets. That fact that we had ourselves a vegetarian lasagne for breakfast is an
indication about the kind of place this was…
The last thing on the list was just to find a café where we could sit, enjoy a coffee and catch up on our emails etc. Naturally, this was also near impossible too. There were cafes around with no WiFi, or grotty internet shops full of spotty teenagers playing whatever the new war game this week was. So, again, our plan was foiled. By then, we simply gave up. We headed to the nicest looking café we could find, ordered ourselves a shed load of chocolate cake and coffee and moaned about how rubbish this place was like a bunch of spoilt toffs.
It seems that all I have done here is put Oruro down though, so I will try to go out on a positive note. Firstly, the plaza here was actually OK and had a nice feel to it and secondly we had an amazing lamb dinner on our last night here that would have had even the biggest lamb fans wanting for more….so, there it is, Oruro wasn’t all bad after all!
Eventually the time came to leave this strange little town where doing nothing was
harder than it sounded, and so we grabbed our packs and headed towards the train station. Once there, everything went smoothly and after a few ‘amusing’ snaps from the train and the station, we boarded and was on our way to Uyuni where the Salt flats awaited us. Our thoughts immediately turned to what stupid photos we would take whilst on the Salt flat tour, and whether these dirty clothes we were still carrying round would ever get washed whilst in Uyuni!!
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