Bonito to Potosi

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Hola from Potosi in Bolivia, the highest city in the world (about 4,100m). We've been quite busy over the last couple of weeks - here's why...

In Bonito we spent our last day visiting the Blue Cave (a cave where the water is deep blue). It was then time to find some more wildlife so our tour headed to the Pantanal for 4 nights in luxury accommodation.

The Pantanal was fantastic with an amazing array of birds and wildlife all over the place (including green parrots in the tree outside our bedroom window).

We explored the dry bits on foot on a guided trek. For the flooded parts we spent a day on horses wading through the metre deep water. Some of the shallower areas we visited on the back of a jeep. And of course, the only way to see the river was by canoe (including fishing with the caiman).

After the Pantanal it was time for Bolivia. Trouble is the roads stopped at the border and we spent 2 days driving on bumpy dirt tracks to get to Santa Cruz, a picturesque little city where we stopped to get the power steering mended!

From Santa Cruz we headed to Samaipata and went trekking in a cloud forest (like a rain forest but at a higher elevation - ie it's in the clouds!)

Another long drive was then undertaken to Sucre, the judicial capital of Bolivia. The city centre is full of whitewashed buildings in a colonial style with a lovely central plaza. So we headed out of the city, first to see the dinosaur footprints at Cretaceous Park (like jurassic park but on a Bolivian budget - the demonstrations were with 6 inch high kiddies plastic models!) We then hired some mountain bikes and cycled up into the hills above the city to see the views, see some of the areas where the very, very poor live, get chased by packs of wild dogs and suffer from cycling at high altitude (we were knackered afterwards!)

Sucre was left behind for Uyuni, officially the centre of nowhere. A strange little town which served fantastic pizza from where we visited the worlds largest salt flats. There are 12,000 sq km of them so we only saw a bit but they were mighty impressive and whiter than white. We stopped at Fish Island, about 60km from the nearest anything (except salt of course) where there were cacti, some of which were 1,200 years old, growing on a former coral reef.

We're now off to find some food at altitude here in Potosi. Not suffered from anything we've eaten yet (touch wood) although 3 of our tour group are still in Uyuni recovering.

As you can probably tell, we're having a fantastic time still.

I'll load some more photos in a few days.

Bye for now.

Viv and Ness

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Photos

Ride 'em cowboy
There's proof we sat on the horses at least

Our friend
This was before he tried to eat my fish

Sucre
The view above the town was beautiful

Jurassic Park
Dinosaur footprints that are even older than Ness

Samaipata
Trekking in the cloud forest

Spot the monkey
Ness and Chica in the Pantanal

Salt Flats
They get their name from two places - there's a lot of salt and it's very flat.