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(Day 300 on the road)There is a small street in the centre of La Paz where most of the travel agencies, many backpacker accommodations and a popular cafe are concentrated. As I walked down the steep street looking at the tours and excursions advertised by the travel agencies, I realised that I had done almost all of them. Valle de la Luna? Check. Copacana? Check. Free La Paz city tour? Check. Isla del Sol? Check. Tiwanako? Check. Chacaltaya? Check. Chulita wrestling? Check. Pico Austria? Check. Death Road? Check. Huayna Potosi? Check. Check. Check.
It was time to leave La Paz and move on.
First up were a couple of stops in unremarkable towns like Oruro, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. I had discovered however that the Bolivian cities that are located at a higher altitude (say higher than ~3.000 metres or so) have a well established network of neighbourhood saunas. My reasoning is, that many of the homes (or hotels I stayed in for that matter) don't have any hot water. So a trip to the local sauna is often the only way for the local population to get a hot shower and an escape from the biting evening and
nightime cold. I certainly sampled my fair share of those great places.
The first place on my route that is worth mentioning here is the little hippy village of Samaipata, which had a nice vibe to it. It was also pleasantly free of traffic. Even better however was nearby Vallegrande. The place is famous for being the secret burial site of Che Guevara for over 30 years (he was executed by the Bolivian army about 60km south of Vallegrande). The tour I took was quite informative and took in all the main sites such as the morgue and the mausoleum built by his family after his body was finally discovered by archaeologists.
Getting out of rural Vallegrande was surprisingly difficult. There was only one bus a week to my next destination, the Bolivian capital of Sucre. Although the distance is only about 350km by road, it took me almost two full days on a series of cramped minibuses (and lots and lots of waiting on dusty roads). I was definitely a long way off the Bolivian Gringo Trail at this point.
In Vallegrande I also realized that I had left my ebook reader in my hostel in
Samaipata the previous night. I was gutted; so far I have not left a single thing behind in the countless hostels I stayed in during the last nine months. Quite an accomplishment hen I think about it. I already written it off, but to my big surprise, the hostel told me they had found the reader. And even better, they simply gave it to the driver of a passing minibus the next day, direction Sucre. The reader actually got to Sucre well before me, and I simply picked it up at the bus company's office at the bus terminal. How very efficient - and a great service of the hostel!
But beautiful Sucre made up for a lot. It is by far the nicest city I have seen in Bolivia, with a colonial flair, a vibrant student community, great museums, tons of nice restaurants and cafes. What a change from the typically nondescript, ugly and chaotic Bolivian cities I have seen so far. If only the countless unmuffled motorbikes would not noise-pollute the city so drastically. And on top of the great city itself, about thirty minutes away by bus, is a place called Parque Cal Orck'o, which boasts
the largest number of dinosaur footprints in the world. They are around 69 million years old and incredibly well preserved. It was an unforgettable sight.
It was also in Sucre that I saw Bolivia's famous traffic zebras for the first time (I'd read about them, but hadn't seen them before). These are (typically) students dressed in zebra costumes whose job it is to get the totally selfish drivers to actually stop at a red light and let pedestrians cross the street. It may sound trivial, but here in Bolivia a red light is mostly ignored by drivers, treated more like a stop sign. So the brave zebras have taken it upon themselves to remind drivers that they don't own the city, and are fighting every day for more fairness and understanding on Bolivia's dangerous roads. What a great initiative!
As I walked through the colonial streets of Sucre, I thought the same thing: It may sound harsh - and I am fully aware that the Spanish were responsible for unspeakable atrocities during their colonisation of South America. And it is a shame that they have never really acknowledged much of it. But the reality today is that South
American cities with Spanish influence are infinitely nicer and more pleasant than the ugly, rubbish-strewn mess that is usually the "non-Spanish" cities down here.
Sitting in the lovely Café Mirador in Sucre, perched on top of an old church tower with a stunning view over the city, I realised that my trip would be over in about three months. It hadn't really occurred to me until then - the end of my sabbatical always seemed far away. It was a bit of a downer, to be sure. Somehow the light-heartedness of simply living day to day was lost.
And it meant that I had to start planning a bit: from which city down here was I going to book my flight back home - Buenos Aires? Asuncion? Sao Paulo? Santiago de Chile? This may seem trivial, but the way I travel, I hardly plan at all. Most of the time I don't even know where I'll be two days from now, and suddenly I had to plan three months in advance, guessing where I might be at that point. In the end, I settled for a flight from Sao Paulo to Paris. Note to myself: Email my boss
about the details of my re-entry.
However, I soon had the best possible distraction for my travel blues that I could have wished for: A visit to a (working) silver mine near the town of Potosi. At 4,000 metres, Potosi is one of the highest cities in the world. But more to the point, during Spanish rule, the nearby
Cerro Rico supplied the Spanish Empire with vast quantities of silver, and Potosi became one of the largest cities in South America. In fact, the mountain was the richest source of silver in human history, and between the 16th and 18th centuries, 80%!o(MISSING)f the world's silver supply came from this mine.
The Spanish used both African and indigenous slaves, and working conditions were so bad that an estimated eight million people died in the mines. And no, that is not a typo, Wikipedia seriously puts the death toll at 8,000,000 poor souls.
The mines are still active today, with around 15.000 miners still working in the mountain. And some of these active mines are actually open to visitors, albeit with a guide. Our guide had worked in the mine we visited for 18 years before becoming a tour
guide. And boy, what a tour it was! I have been in a few mines in my life (shout out to my buddy Frank if you are reading this), but I have never seen anything like this.
Picture this: A mine tunnel that is about as wide as the lorries the miners use to transport the rock. The ceilings are mostly too narrow to walk upright. In some places the ceiling was so low that we had to crouch on our stomachs like those poor army recruits in those Hollywood movies. No light. Many of the wooden beams used to support the tunnel ceilings were cracked right through. And, of course, the miners had no safety equipment other than their old helmets.
Two things in particular made the whole tour really scary: Firstly, because there was no light and the tunnels were so narrow, the two-tonne lorries coming up from the front (or back) posed a serious threat to us.
Our guide must have had a sixth sense, because whenever he shouted "Get out of the way, hurry!" we had to run and scramble to find shelter at the side of the narrow tunnel, away from the
lorry tracks. Often it was literally a matter of inches as the heavy lorries rumbled past us, pushed (or tried to be pushed) by two miners who did not seem particularly happy that we were there to obstruct their work. By now we all knew why we had to sign the two-page waiver before we could enter the mine.
Secondly, there was no warning system in place when the miners used their dynamite to blow another hole in the mountain. In fact, one of the explosions - in the tunnel above us - caused countless rocks to rain down on me. One of the rocks, as big as my fist, hit me right on the helmet. I don't even want to think about what could have happened if it had hit me on the shoulder, for example. I was shaking for a few minutes afterwards.
Talking of dynamite: Before the tour we had stopped at a local shop and actually bought some dynamite for ourselves (5€ each). Potosi must be one of the few places in the world where you can buy dynamite in a local corner shop.
There is a
cool video on my Flickr page of our guide preparing the
dynamite, lighting it, throwing it to the side of the tunnel we were sitting in, and shouting at us to run. We all scrambled through the narrow, low tunnels to safety. Luckily nobody fell, although I did hit my helmet on the low ceiling quite hard. The explosion that followed was pretty amazing though. Or to say it with the words of a Bolivian woman I met a week later: "In Bolivia, todo es posible, nada es seguro".
In the end, it was all a bit too much for one British girl in our group, who had a nasty panic attack down there. Luckily it was towards the end of our tour, but we had to keep crouching at the side of the tunnel as the heavy carriages whizzed by. It took the poor girl a long time to calm down and stop crying.
But we were all more than happy to be out of the tunnels after a few hours. My lungs were full of dust, my back was aching, I was sweating and the lack of oxygen at 4,500 metres didn't help. I had the deepest respect for our guide, who had managed to work there
for 18 years. And in case you were wondering how much a miner earns for this dangerous and hard work: €300 in a good month, but usually less. Buying anything made of silver will never be the same after seeing the appalling conditions in which it is mined.
Anyway, to leave this depressing/ exciting/ eye-opening part of today's blog entry behind, my last part of Bolivia was another highlight: The Salar de Uyuni. Like probably 90% of tourists, I booked a 3-day, 2-night jeep tour, starting in the dusty and ugly town of Uyuni and ending in the picturesque and atmospheric San Pedro de Atacama, just over the border in Chile.
And it was certainly an amazing tour! Like many of you, I had seen pictures of the salt flats before. But to drive through them, to take far too many of those famous perspective-defying pictures, to walk across a coral island in the middle of the salt flats, and to witness pink flamingos very close-up in one of the lagunas - well, it was just magical.
Unfortunately, in the dry and dusty salt plans / desert area, I managed to get some dust on my camera's
sensor. The effect is an ugly black spot on every picture, which I know have to remove manually on Lightroom (the software I use to develop the raw photos I shoot). Ah well, luckily it is towards the end my trip, and not near the beginning.
Beautiful Salar de Uyuni seemed a fitting end to my time in Bolivia, which had begun some 50 days earlier with another magical place, Lake Titicaca in the far north of the country. Unfortunately, crossing the border into Chile meant that I would not be able to visit the south-eastern part of Bolivia. This was a bit of a shame, as I usually try to visit all the major parts of the countries I visit, but it is what it is. I just can't have it all.
One thing I will definitely not miss about Bolivia, however, is the music, which I found particularly monotonous and boring. Half the songs are about Corazon this or Corazon that, and the rest are either songs with pan flutes (an instrument I somehow detest) or wild songs where the only lyrics are the guy shouting "las manos - arriba" ("put your hands up") for minutes
on end.
Unfortunately, our jeep driver in the Salar de Uyuni simply loved these songs (the louder the better); it was a constant battle between him and me over the volume of the jeep's radio for three days. I can't wait for more varied and less monotonous music in neighbouring Argentina, my next major country (after a few stint into Chile to see the Atacama desert). Vamos.
My route in Bolivia: Copacabana - La Paz - Copacabana - Isla del Sol - Tiwanako - La Paz - Coroico - La Paz - Huayna Potosi - La Paz – Oruro – Cochabamba – Santa Cruz de la Sierra – Samaipata – Vallegrande – Aiquile – Sucre – Potosi – Uyuni – Salar de Uyuni.
Next stop: San Pedro de Atacama (Chile).
To view my photos, have a look at pictures.beiske.com.
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Dancing Dave
David Hooper
The perfect sunset in Sucre
Just the mention of Sucre brings back wonderful memories, Ben. You got a cracking sunset here. I'll post it in TB's "My Mother in Laws Sunsets" thread in the Photography Forum. Check 'em out.